Do you remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid charging out into a hail of bullets? It was, I’m told, the most memorable use of a “freeze frame” to end a movie. The camera caught the two outlaws, racing forward into certain death -- vibrantly alive, but already gone.
The freeze frame technique had its day in the sun. Alfred Hitchcock first used it in 1928. Other famous freeze frame endings appeared in Gallipoli, The 400 Blows, and Rocky 3.
I must have seen too many freeze frame endings when I was younger. Because I just realized that I have thought of death as a freeze frame.
Many years ago, my father-in-law told me about a trucker who drove off a cliff on the road from the Kootenay Lake Ferry down to Creston. The road is -- or was, back then -- 40 miles of more twists and turns than a garter snake with constipation. You barely got out of one turn in time to lurch into the next one.
And of course, after the enforced delay while crossing the lake on the ferry, everyone rushed to make up lost time.
I suppose the trucker was pushing his limits too. Or else he got distracted for an instant. Whatever the reason, he failed to make a sharp turn. He drove through a barrier, over a cliff, straight down 200 feet to the water.
What a terrible way to die, I thought. To have your very last thought -- perhaps something like “Oh, shit!” -- attached to you forever and ever. (In those days, I had no doubts about some kind of eternal life following after death.)
The accident did have one good outcome -- it made me more cautious about my own driving along that road. I didn’t want to have my own freeze frame ending be an expletive of despair.
Because as I saw it back then, that final moment is the beginning of eternity. You cannot shake it off; you cannot change it. Whatever it is, it echoes down through the endless halls of forever.
I’m not alone in having this perception, although others might not visualize it quite the same way. At a funeral, a eulogist boasted of persuading someone’s grandmother, in her final moments of life, to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Saviour.
He clearly believed he had done her a favour. In that freeze frame, she had been saved.
Although I rather suspect that the real freeze frame the old woman took with her was more like anger: “I’ll say anything to get rid of you, you insensitive clod!”
Although the eulogist’s behaviour offends me, he had tradition behind him. Catholic priests offer forgiveness for deathbed confessions. Evangelical churches preach that deathbed conversions will get you a ticket into heaven, no matter how hellish your life.
I don’t buy that thinking anymore. Now that I recognize my freeze frame thinking, I also recognize that the final frame doesn’t define the movie. A great freeze frame can’t redeem a lousy movie.
Likewise, a deathbed conversion won’t redeem a wasted life. It’s the life one lived that matters.
So the motion stops. So what? Let the credits roll.