This chapter explores fiction film's limited but highly symbolic representation of suicide, of, that is, an individual's witting or self-willed self-killing. It is split into two unequal parts. The chapter begins with a survey of the use of suicide in mainstream film and distinguishes the various forms and functions it takes and the key tropes of its representation. In its bulk, the chapter
... [Show full abstract] focuses on a small group of films that are about suicide, that are preoccupied with and foretell it. Concentrating on two examples, one revealing the male imaginary's necromantic construction of the exquisite ‘to-be-dead’ woman, and the other revealing the imperial imaginary's construction of ‘dead-already-ness’, the discussion identifies and defines mainstream cinema's mortal economies. These, the death-dealing visual and narrative logic of film itself, depend upon the interplay of identity and power, of, more immediately, gender, nation and race. This complex interplay is animated through the two examples, The Virgin Suicides (1999) and the Palestinian film Paradise Now (2005), and determines the distinction of mainstream cinema as necropolitical.
