Streaming Pick - 4/10/14

A Certain Kind of Death (2003)

What happens when we die?

What happens when we die alone?

The 2003 documentary A Certain Kind of Death attempts to address the second question by following the handling of several bodies of recently deceased people in Los Angeles that have no next of kin. This haunting documentary allows everything to unfold without hyperbole or over-dramatization. It's purely procedural. And yet it breaks your heart as well as any tragedy and scares you as well as any horror.

The documentary is unflinching - there are truly grotesque moments that the filmmakers do not shy from. It follows members of the Los Angeles Coroner's Department from the moment of discovery of decaying bodies, through investigation to see if they can identify next of kin, to cleaning of the dead's apartments, piecing together of a biography of the deceased, all the way through to cremation and burial in a mass grave with no marker other than the year of death.

We learn of a man who drifted away from his family. When someone in the Coroner's office finally tracks down a relative, we hear that the family barely cares - they figured he had already died years ago.

We learn of a man who lost his partner to AIDs in the 1980s and has no remaining family. We discover that he surely knew that he was in trouble and dying, but that he deliberately avoided calling for help and left papers showing a burial site he had purchased years earlier on his kitchen table for the people that would later discover him. Alone, he wanted to die.

The film could have been morbid or sensationalist. But it is respectful and neutral. By maintaining that neutrality, it allows the audience to bring their own baggage to the film. Anyone who has ever been alone, and certainly anyone that has ever worried about dying alone, will find it difficult to take to see how tragic this anonymity can be. It's a reminder that identity is as much about human relations as anything else. To die alone is to be tossed out of a metal box into a mass grave, with a little metal plaque speared into the ground with nothing more than the year printed on it. It might as well be as if you never existed at all.

This documentary is well worth watching. It's streaming on Youtube as seen below.