
“Do death and dying ever haunt your thoughts,” inquires the central doll in the screenplay for the blockbuster ‘Barbie’ which was created by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
In their story, the character of a Mattel employee, Gloria, who is daydreaming at the workplace contemplates creating a doll that is randomly designed as Thoughts of Impending Death Barbie, and introduces the virus of fear of death to Barbie World. This doll ultimately becomes the starting point of the legendary doll’s evolution from a plastic prop to a powerful independent woman.
I’m not a dreamer but the first is something I wrote while in a low state of excitation for an X post, the other day I was thinking of how the film Barbie contains noticeable similarities to the book I read 50 years ago. This book is the one that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Biography Non-Fiction, “The Denial of Death” in 1974 by Ernest Becker.
People who are not familiar with Becker’s work should appreciate it: his main idea can be summarized as focused on the fear of death “Death” which for every human being is the most troubling thought paired with the fact that death is final. Many people obtain various trends and lifestyles which are pushed onto society and serve the purpose of avoiding ever coming to the conclusion that death awaits us all.
Dunn not only drew the direct line between “Barbie” and Becker, but also wished to share with me that together with her life and co-director, Jef Sewell, she has recently completed a feature documentary titled: “All Illusions Must Be Broken” which will receive its world premiere in the True Stories section in the Palm Springs Film Festival on the 10th of January. Illusions, by Becker is all about his life and the strength of his message about the oppression and anger that drives our kind.
Before long I found myself in a phone call with Dunn and Sewell who are known filmmakers, and currently live in eastern Tennessee with their seven children.
Sewell was delighted to inform us that the Becker’s connection to “Barbie” is real: “You. Have to know that Noah Baumbach’s last cut, ‘White Noise,’ was also about Becker, am I right?”
Becker’s Production, Inc. has a devoted student in Sewell who seems to have done his work and yes, “Noise” author Don DeLillo has given due credit to Becker’s “Death” work which was out a decade before this novel of about a Strong Woman Movement was out, which Baumbach took to cinema in 2022 starring Gerwig and Adam Driver.
Having already established how the leap from the flamboyant depiction of Barbie to Becker’s compulsively violent and deeply disturbing human creeps pictured in “Death” just requires a few seconds, we then began pondering what the couple’s intentions for shooting a documentary around Becker’s practice were and how today’s viewers would react to his probably controversial ideas.
The couple\’s third feature documentary for executive producers Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, is “All Illusions Must Be Broken”, they have so far won the SXSW and Nashville Fest awards for 2016\’ poetic portrait “Look & See: Wendell Berry” about well-known poet Wendell Berry story, as well as the Indie Spirit Award for their earlier documentary regards environment: “The Unforeseen” (2007).
In hindsight, for those who appreciate the provocativeness aimed in working with ideas and concepts in ‘Illusions’ that push for change rather than acceptance, it is as if this global social order that is riddled with perpetual violence, abominable wars and unimaginable slippery violence against our kind is without reproach.
The couple elaborated on how their initial aim of a documentary based on “the denaturing of children”, according to Dunn, evolved into a major work where Becker’s work synthesized several social and environmental problems that they thought deserved investigation.
Both Dunn and Sewell began to understand quite rapidly that there was a larger, more nuanced aspects that needed to be covered within humanity’s narrative and that people can only understand through Becker’s work that provided the basis of so many problems that are emerging as existential threats toward humankind.
In the film, Dunn and Sewell place considerable emphasis on the conversation that Becker held with a young Psychology Today reporter Sam Keen, almost fifty years ago. This event in history – a visit by 49 year-old Becker on his death bed in 1973 – is crucial to ‘Illusions’.
How, Kin explains Becker, looking at the bleakness of his picture of man: “If I emphasize the horror, it’s only because I face the happy robots.”
This is only a small impression of Becker’s rather messianic pursuits. Dunn and Sewell have similar respect for Becker’s message and the words spokespersons of cold truths.
Sewell considers these “Illusions” as “a conversation,” albeit a rather engaging one that calls for some cognitive stress. He elaborates “It’s just a humble little handmade movie which attempts to interpret and modernize Becker’s controversial ideas. Which are not simple,” the filmmaker acknowledges. “At the beginning of the film when Laura asks sam ‘Why would you recommend Becker?,’ he answers ‘I probably wouldn’t.’ One cannot read Becker and not confront her dark self! Are you prepared for that or not?”
Dunn brings back nostalgia and recollects about her childhood dreams causing this present career – she talking about her self ‘falling’ for a documentary form very early, even at the tender age: “As young as I am, old, I’d be fighting to attain the truth. I thought ‘I will take role of an eye-witness, and speak about injustice – my photographs will compel people to take action’. With age, that perspective changes.”
Now, as an adult, Dunn however became interested in Becker as more than a topic of a surface level and she later on recalls, “Becker accompanied me through such darkness. Becker provides fantastic solace. It is true that the stating the truth is painful, however the joy that follows is overwhelming.”
Dunn seconds sewells point of view that ‘Illusions’ should be viewed as an attempt to present Becker’s ideas gently and more personally as the film, with which Dunn, as she says “started out quite modestly.
For a considerable period, we were contemplating the concept of nature being overshadowed by culture.
“Initially, it was a case of standing back and considering one’s own children, how children view screens on a daily basis, and the consequences of exposing them to such devices. We were greatly touched by Richard Louv’s book ‘Last Child in the Woods,’ which laments about the ‘nature deficit disorder’. This is the first generation that is so completely out of sync with the natural order.”
Malik and Redford enrolled in very much for their film project from the perspective of the denaturing of childhood, while Dunn owes Becker to Malick’s hunches that the couple should extend their search for the “ideas” behind the film towards thematically traversing Becker. “Terry always says, ‘It is not about the facts only. Visualize the fact making forces.’ And when you begin to ask, ‘What is the purpose of humanity in these social structures, which makes them constantly try to escape outward reality?’ – that’s where Becker comes in the picture.”
For him, of the present, there is a concern that Becker had anticipated all these trends about which there are so many – perspectives of human nature. “I have been quite startled by Becker’s view of Sam Keen since the tragic developments in Gaza,” says Sewell, “who said: ‘We all need somebody to give us a sense of specialness, of special purity.’
To those who view an enemy as simply an ‘animal’, such actions are imaginable. According to this rationale, every act of human debauchery is justifiable destruction of a certain individual’s dissident’s humanity. Of course, scapegoating has that particular mechanism in action. This is in relation to what Miller said, ‘Each man has his Jew….’ Everybody needs someone for whom this particular someone is a creature whose head he is able to use for beating others behind.
As Sewell states, “Illusions” “helps create a fresh audience for Becker,” convincing us that last December witnessed the 50th birthday of the book Denial of Death and 50 years since its author became the recipient of the Pulitzer Lion Prize.
And just in case any one had any doubts as to that individual’s complete surrender, Sewell reinforces, “About half in a distance of this movie, Laura was noticed to be pregnant at 45 and our youngest was 5 already. It was absolutely light. We called the baby Becker.”
“Illusions Must Be Broken,” yet life continues.
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