Abstract
Since Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the field of suicide prevention has explored the social and cultural influences leading to the act of suicide. However, recently the emphasis seems to be shifting to neuroscience and psychiatry, turning the searchlights towards genetic markers, individual predispositions and environmental risks. Using films to explore various factors, Suicide movies: Social patterns 1900–2009, by Steven Stack and Barbara Bowman, broadens once more the viewpoint in suicidology of emphasizing the way the most popular form of visual culture portrays the act of taking one’s own life.
An awarded social science author and professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Criminology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, Dr Stack is a world expert on suicidology. Along with Ms Bowman, lawyer and researcher, he has produced an extensive analysis of patterns of motives for suicide in American movies, totalling 1,158 movies from 1900 to 2009, and containing 1,377 suicides.
As stated in the first chapter, ‘art, herein specifically film, represents a neglected source of knowledge on the causes of suicide’. The authors briefly refer to the work of the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), founder of Harvard University’s Sociology Department, in his defence of intuition and humanities as a source of scientific information. They also emphasize the importance given to art as a way to understand human behaviour in the writings of Sigmund Freud. A mandatory reference is made to Durkheim, whose concepts of integration and regulation are expanded by Stack and Bowman in pursuit of the social causes of suicide. As shown in the first section, the neglect of social causes of suicide seems to endure, as the number of published sociology works on suicide is surpassed by those in the fields of molecular biology, genetics and even law.
The book is divided into four parts. Chapters 1 and 2, in Part I, discuss the neglect of social patterns in suicide and the methods adopted to find and categorize the suicide movies. The latter explains that the authors decided to focus only on American movies (with the exception of the British films discussed in chapter 10), in order to make the project more manageable. This might frustrate those expecting some mention of important non-American movies where suicide plays a central role, such as the films Harakiri (Japan, 1962) and The Sea Inside (2004), but that sort of narrowing in the subject’s scope is unavoidable in any sociological study (although the title of the book could have made this distinction clear). This selection also takes away an international comparative perspective. It is helpful to note the criteria for the chosen movies: to be American made; to contain at least one completed suicide; to concern ‘real-life’ suicides of humans – excluding animation movies and fictional creatures; to be feature length (60 minutes or more); and to have been shown in American theatres – excluding films made for television. It might sound strange to consider Armageddon (1998) or The Shawshank Redemption (1994) as ‘suicide movies’, but once you think about it, suicides are always highly regarded as integral to the plots of various films (unlike ordinary gunfights). They cannot be taken lightly, and they always offer a discussion about the reasons behind the act itself.
The next two sections group films according to what the authors consider the ‘main’ cause for the portrayed suicide(s): Part II, ‘Individual Causes of Suicide in the Cinema’; and Part III, ‘The Social Causes of Suicide in the Cinema’. The authors do not state that the depicted suicides (or any other, for that matter) are exclusively motivated by ‘inner’ or ‘external’ forces. The point of the book is precisely to show the multifaceted nature of suicide: the personal and social drives, and the way that movies can help us to understand how somebody comes to kill him/herself. With that in mind, it becomes easier to understand the authors’ categories, considering, for instance, that a person who commits suicide due to bankruptcy might have an underlying major depression.
Part IV compares British and American portraits of suicide in cinema, in order to verify what is called ‘the globalization hypothesis’: are the patterns in American film found in other nations as well? According to the provided data, the answer is yes, with a small exception made for an American preference for ‘heroic’ suicides, especially those framed in war settings. As noted above, those expecting a little more ‘global’ comparison (other than between two English-speaking, traditionally and culturally related countries) might lament the absence of movies from other European countries, not to mention from the East, Africa or South America. Then again, it is understandable that such a broad sampling would turn the study into an encyclopaedic treatise on film, which is not its purpose.
As an original and comprehensive analysis on the portrayal of suicide in American film, this book serves as a marvelous resource for those working with suicide prevention, cultural researches or anyone who loves film. The limits of the study are clearly recognized by the authors, as they point out suggestions for future works - like the portrayal of suicide attempts, genre issues and suicide methods. Suicide is an incredibly complex subject, and the insights provided by this careful work are definitely welcome.