Happy Death Day and Coming to Terms with Death
The moral case for coming to terms with the fact that you're going to die through the movie 'Happy Death Day'.
Everybody dies.
It's the one thing that everybody knows from a fairly early age. You can't escape it, you can't stop it, no matter what you do at some point you will die. How someone reacts to that reality is a fundamental question that everybody deals with. In many ways, somewhat ironically, it can shape your life and give you purpose or it can take that purpose away from people. But everyone comes to terms with it at some point whether they want to or not.
Happy Death Day is very much about the process of coming to terms with death and how to live with it. Tree, the main character of the movie and its sequel, is confronted with the idea that she's going to die in one of the most direct and obvious ways possible. No matter what she does or how she tries to avoid it, she always dies at the end of her birthday. The only thing she can't know is when and how it's going to happen. Unlike the rest of us however, she gets to experience and grapple with the near certainty that it's coming.
This gives her an opportunity that most of us will never understand. If you know you're going to die, what would you do with the time you have left? These questions often get asked in the form of abstract theories. It's asked in questions like, if aliens were to come to Earth and announce that they were going to blow up the planet tomorrow, what would you do with your time? For Tree however, this isn't an abstract concept. It's a reality of her situation. She has to confront directly the question of what to do when you know you're going to die.
And the answer she gives is an interesting one. Over the course of the film, she goes through what are often called the five stages of grief, denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. In the sequel, she goes through a similar pattern although under somewhat different circumstances. But what's most interesting is the way in which going through those stages affects Tree herself. While at the beginning of the first movie she's not the nicest person in the world, she slowly learns the importance of the people around her and what it means to be a good person to them. She starts out rather selfish and ends up being an incredibly selfless person.
This is what makes the movie so interesting to watch. How despite the repetitive nature of her circumstances, Tree doesn't remain the same. She's forced to confront who she is and what she wants in a way that so few of us actually manage to do. Most of us don't deal with the idea of death well. We try to avoid it or not think about it. Doing so can often lead to destructive and counter-productive behaviour for most people.
Tree doesn't have that luxury afforded to most of us. She's forced to confront it head on, and it transforms her and in some ways the people around her as well. Because she's different, she interacts differently with the people around her, and that changes the way they look at her.
Happy Death Day and its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, shows you the power of confronting death and learning to live with it. Do yourself a favour and check it out if you haven't already.
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