Article

Creed

Death & life

Easter

Film & TV

3 March 2025

4 min read

Don’t die: the relentless pursuit of life

If there was a way beyond death, shouldn't we give up everything to find it?

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

A man stands in his home wearing a black t-shirt that reads 'DON'T DIE'.

Ryan Johnson at home.

Netflix.

In the days before my daughter's birth, I was reading about the fear of death. Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his book The Denial of Death. In it, he argues that our lives are structured around the fear of death. In the posthumously published follow-up, Escape from Evil, Becker writes:

"Man wants to persevere as does any animal…but man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable."

For Becker, human culture is really a series of attempts to avoid or transcend the reality of death. We follow charismatic leaders in the hope of becoming part of something greater. We have children in the hope that something of us will last beyond the span of one lifetime. We collude to marginalise pensioners and prisoners and any other reminders of our frailty, hiding them away so we can briefly pretend at immortality.

Last week I thought of Becker when I watched Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever on Netflix. The documentary follows Bryan Johnson, who made his millions in tech and is now going to extremes to undo the impact of ageing on his body. An exacting routine of dieting, sleep, fitness and medication is augmented by riskier interventions, such as experimental gene therapies.

As Johnson tells it, his past struggles with mental ill health and suicidal ideation led him to pursue a life less reliant on his mind. He seeks instead to listen to what his organs tell him they need via algorithms and diagnostics: fallible humanity corrected by data.

Johnson is resolute that it is not fear of death that drives the enterprise but a desire to live, particularly to live as long as possible with his son. One of the documentary’s strangest and most touching scenes is an inter-generational plasma transfer. There is evidence that plasma from a younger donor can have a de-ageing effect on a recipients' organs. So, Bryan decides to give his dad some of his plasma and his son gives him some plasma. Each of the three men, we learn, have experienced isolation after leaving Mormonism. The transfer becomes a kind of founding of a family outside the faith they have each rejected and been rejected by.

Johnson’s pursuit of longevity now plays an equivalent role in his life to that faith– not just as a source of belief and human purpose, but of human connection. The documentary ends with a montage of "Don't Die" communities around the world hiking and dancing and celebrating life together.

In the months after my daughter's birth, I recognised something of what Becker names. Here is someone who will outlast me, something of me will transcend the limits of my life. And here is someone who reminds me of those limits. Here is this great gift and joy who will sit in the front row at my funeral: the embodiment of life’s goodness a witness to its end.

Are we wrong to fear death? If there was a way beyond it, shouldn't we give up everything to find it?

There is more going on in Bryan Johnson and the wider de-ageing movement than Becker's analysis would perhaps allow. Fear of death is not the only story here. When is it ever, really? Fear only makes sense alongside—and in light of— goodness, life, gift. To fear loss, you must have something to lose.

And yet, the story Becker tells about culture does seem to ring truer in the years since his death. As technology improves, death's denial becomes more convenient. As the natural world degrades, it becomes more compelling. And as wealthy men become wealthier still, their denial on behalf of us all becomes ever more creative.

And who can blame us—any of us? Are we wrong to fear death? If there was a way beyond it, shouldn't we give up everything to find it?

This Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, marks the beginning of Lent, the Christian season of reflection and self-denial. On Wednesday, I will receive an ash cross, and as I draw that same cross on forehead after forehead, I will repeat these words:

"Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,
turn away from Sin and be faithful to Christ."

I will hear the invitation, in my voice and not my own, to give up the futile theatrics of a deathless life. I will pray for the strength to live what I have spoken. I will say goodbye to those who I marked, each of us now a signpost to our shared mortality. And then I will go home to yoghurty hands, bathtime songs and giggles at the funny smudge on my face.

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Review

Belief

Culture

Film & TV

20 September 2024

4 min read

Kate Winslett delivers the performance of her life, in a film that doesn’t look away

The true quality of witness shines in Lee Miller’s biopic.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Two war photographers creep along a shadowy corridor.

Kate Winslett and Andy Samberg in Lee.

Sky Cinema.

If we might indulge an absurd anachronism, I wonder what the American photojournalist Lee Miller would have done, had she been one of the women at the foot of the cross. To my mind, she would have held her nerve to record – on her German-made Rolleiflex camera held at her abdomen – not only the horror of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the criminals beside him, but also the suffering of his mother and the other women who looked on.

I’ve had these ruminations since I watched Miller’s biopic, Lee, on its UK premiere. In passing, I should record that Kate Winslet delivers the performance of her life in the title role, because it’s in the quality of her interpretation that I’m led to consider the nature of what it means to witness, which is an act at the heart of humanity as well as central to the Christian faith.

Witnessing is what reporters, at their best, do if they are to honour their vocation. Especially war reporters. But the act of witnessing isn’t confined to journalists. The case for professional witness can be made for other jobs – police officers, aid workers, medics, lawyers all come to mind.

It’s just that this movie shows witness at its sharpest end. “Even when I wanted to look away, I knew I couldn’t,” says Lee Miller. That imperative, not to look away, is central to our human story and I would argue that this is because it’s central to my faith, which has at its centre a God who doesn’t look away.

That’s why Lee Miller made me think of the historical event of the crucifixion. The Church down the ages has been inclined to turn the cross into the Christ’s great victory – rather as reportage of the Second World War has concentrated on its conclusive victory rather than the horrors that Miller recorded.

Her magazine employer, Vogue, at first declined to publish her photos of the liberation of concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald, in part because it detracted from the joy of that victory (though they were subsequently published in the US). If you will, Vogue looked away.

I’ve found that to go down this path with Miller, accompanied by faith, a kind of terrible road to Emmaus, delivers some unexpected reactions.

We’re called to refuse to look away from the grotesque horrors of the cross, to resist it becoming simply a jewellery symbol on a pendant, to acknowledge its centrality in man’s inhumanity to man and, ultimately, our God’s choice to share that experience. “Jesus Christ,” mutters Miller at the door of a room, possibly a gas chamber, stacked with skeletal corpses, before entering to take her photographs. Jesus Christ, indeed.

This is not to make a claim for Miller as a figure of faith. It is rather to make the claim that those of us of faith should be highly alert to where we might find the witness to it. Over the past week, I have to say I’ve found it in the work of Miller, not only in the hell of the camps, but in the shaven heads of collaborator women, the frightened children and even in that bath in Hitler’s Munich apartment.

In the last of those, there she is, naked, washing herself clean from the dirt of Dachau, which stains the bathmat from her boots in the foreground. Here is a witness to a spiritual defiance, the portrait of Hitler propped on the bath edge as she is cleansed. It’s not just that he hasn’t won, it’s that death itself hasn’t won.

I’ve found that to go down this path with Miller, accompanied by faith, a kind of terrible road to Emmaus, delivers some unexpected reactions. And they’re not the kind of reactions normally associated with faith.

The first is anger. It clearly accompanied Miller throughout her work: Anger at military discrimination against her womanhood; rage that Vogue censored her work. We could all do with being more angry at injustice, especially those of us of religious faith. Note that when American Vogue published her photos, they headlined them “Believe It!” True belief, arguably, is angry.

My second takeaway is the danger of real witness. Miller described her work as "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you". Discipleship can, maybe should, be like that.

The third is the cost of witness. Miller’s war left her with depression and what today would be called PTSD. Not looking away has its price. The cost of witness to disciples may not be as extreme as it was in the first century of its practice, but we should also be aware that it’s not a cosy lifestyle choice either.

For Miller, part of the price of her witness was alienation from her son, Antony. In the movie, though (spoiler alert), he discovers after her death how devoted to him she was. At a stretch I would say he was a son in whom she was well pleased.

That’s not to imbue her with something messianic. It is perhaps to say, with the poet Philip Larkin, that what will survive of us, especially those who have witnessed the worst of humanity and come through, is love.