Death is everywhere in film but suicide is not. As the last chapter showed, the most successful and exportable genre, action cinema, thrives on the self-endangerment of its predominantly male protagonists. While a certain recklessness appends the portraiture of some of Western cinema's best-loved heroes, from The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) to Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) to Jason Bourne (2002, 2004, 2007) – confirming non-conformity, celebrating the maverick and with it both masculinity and Americanness – once recklessness serves this purpose, it must be dispensed with, it must come under control. Self-risk for its own sake, or for unclear, ignoble or unknowable reasons, seems antithetical to the mainstream project, antithetical, that is, to the ideology, iconography and ‘I’ of the stories it trades in.

According to cinema, the most likely way for people to die is through criminal assault. Suicide, which far outstrips murder statistically – responsible for roughly double the number of recorded deaths each year in the United States, and much more in (all other) countries with fewer homicides – is nevertheless rarely represented. There are obvious reasons for this – the financial and psychological benefits of escapist entertainment among them – but it is mainstream cinema's emphasis not just upon happy or uplifting endings but upon the strengthening of certain notions of the self that tends to make it shy away from the more morbid and nihilistic versions of self-endangerment. It is no surprise, then, that where suicide is most often or most fully dealt with is outside, or in reaction to, Hollywood traditions.