Ben Broomfield

Representations of Suicide: A Conversation Beyond the Script

University of Lincoln, UK

When an audience experiences a film, they are invited to suspend their disbelief and surrender their judgements to actively “participate […] in telling the story” (Truby 2007, p. 76) – and to see the main character’s journey as their own (Mamet 1998, p. 40). If, then, the main character ends their own life, to what extent is the story – inadvertently yet actively – offering a rationale for the act of suicide?

Conversations concerning suicide representation in film have generally covered suicide method and how it relates to culture and gender. My paper seeks to explore the nature of suicide’s narrative function and the potential effects of its use in a script.

By analysing several key representations of suicide in film, such as Le Feu Follet (1963), The Killers (1964), and The Virgin Suicides (1999), my paper argues that a fictional story, as a communication framework, is limited in its capacity to explore suicide from a philosophical, psychological, and social perspective. Therefore, a representation of suicide in a story – even when adapted from true events – will deviate from a real-life suicide in an indeterminable number of ways and be – at best – a distorted, performative suicide.

Presenting this artificially conceived image of suicide – complete with faux-motivations and pseudo-complexities, the narrative may unwittingly participate in the conversation of suicide that goes beyond the boundaries of the story and shape the audience’s processing of the suicide.

Ben Broomfield is a lecturer in screenwriting at the University of Lincoln. He is currently writing a PhD proposal on the representation of suicide in the narrative feature film, which will draw upon his experience as a practicing screenwriter and passion for telling ethically sustainable stories.