I launched this second section of the book with the notion, adapted from Elaine Scarry's work, that dying was both inexpressible and unshareable. The framework which this afforded allowed us to review the problem of representing dying within mainstream film culture where it was expressed, albeit distortedly. In the last two chapters I have shown that there is a cinematic language of dying. It is rich and multifaceted but heavily censored nevertheless. It suppresses, still, the banality and brutality of bodily decline to promote the sociocultural and positivist fantasies of late capitalist culture. Such normative fantasies, which cohere in the ‘triumph, betterment and futurity’ of Hollywood's terminally ill as well as in the not-so-good deaths of others, are hooked, unsurprisingly, on identity politics. As the full ideological weight of these fantasies became clear, their grammar of dying was revealed as fundamentally race bound. Dying is not inexpressible in cinema, then, but the language film forges for it is partial and partisan, and the grammar predetermining it necropolitical.

In this chapter, I move on to the question of the unshareability of dying, of its place as a profoundly personal experience that cannot be communicated to, and shared in by, others.