Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020) (Patreon)

At one point, during the final third of Dick Johnson Is Dead, the film's subject says something jarringly poignant to his daughter, the filmmaker. "I used to be your dad," he laments. "Now I'm your little brother." Dick is worried because Kirsten has to leave the country for work, and he's worried that he will get into trouble in her absence. This is one of several moments of painful lucidity we witness as Dick comes to grips with the encroachment of dementia, the same condition that robbed him of his beloved wife, and Kirsten of her mother.

Given that Johnson's previous documentary Cameraperson is, I think, one of the signal achievements of nonfiction cinema so far this century, I was quite excited to see how she tackled a far more personal, circumscribed project. And I must admit, Dick Johnson Is Dead was not at all what I expected. Considering how Cameraperson contained fragments of people and events all over the world, in order to produce a kind of film mosaic of shared humanity, I figured that Dick Johnson would, inversely, locate the universal within the deeply particular. After all, what could be more universal than death?

While that may be what Johnson intended, the film becomes something else, and while this is interesting and not without substantial value, it also felt rather alienating at times. Dick Johnson Is Dead is as much about Kirsten Johnson using the resources of cinema to create an elaborate semiotic scaffolding to avoid facing the mortality of her father as it is a coming-to-terms. This probably has to do with the particular issue of dementia as a slow, grueling death, one in which the loved one is physically present but increasingly absent.

So the film includes a number of darkly comic stagings of possible deaths of Dick Johnson -- death by falling air conditioner, jugular punctured by a nail on a construction site, etc. And there is a fair amount of talk about a heart attack Dick suffered and survived in the nineties. But while Johnson may intend for these segments to seem irreverent, like devilish rehearsals for the Big One, they are also forms of wish fulfillment. Dick Johnson is most likely not going to die in an instant, and she knows this.

So while all of this is theoretically compelling, I could not help but feel as if the film suggests that it will interrogate a broad human concern, only to retreat into very private territory. This is certainly no crime, since I think first-person cinema often displays the artform at its best. But I think that perhaps Johnson set out to make a particular kind of film, found herself drifting into another expressive zone, and was not ultimately able to reconcile these competing impulses. 

Or maybe I'm the problem. As I watched Dick Johnson Is Dead, I found myself continually thinking about how I would make a cinematic portrait of my own father, what I would want to highlight and downplay, and how I might use set design and art direction to fashion for him his own little heaven. And as a result, I kept watching the film Johnson actually made and thinking, "no, you're doing it wrong." So it's entirely possible that Dick Johnson Is Dead does in fact touch upon the universal fact of death: that it is unavoidably private, something each person experiences in a radically singular way.