The 2017 horror Gerald’s Game, based on the Stephen King novel, follows a married couple on some kind of getaway, holidaying in an isolated house deep in the woods. The eponymous husband dies suddenly of a heart attack, leaving his wife, Jessie, in a compromising position – chained to the bed by a pair of handcuffs, seemingly condemned to slowly starve to death.
While she attempts to free herself, Jessie experiences hallucinations and confronts her past traumas, including a long-suppressed memory of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Her hallucinations manifest as the gargantuan Joubert, a serial killer suffering from acromegaly who functions as a manifestation of her innermost fears. Jessie, tortured by her inability to escape while Joubert steadfastly approaches her, screams
YOU’RE NOT REAL! YOU’RE ONLY MADE OF MOON-LIGHT!
And unbeknownst to her, she was right.
In the final scene of the movie, Joubert turns to Jessie and chillingly repeats her words of self-comfort, forcing Jessie to confront the reality of her situation; that while Joubert might not be real, the traumas which he represents are. Through this realization, Jessie is propelled to take ownership of her situation and her history.
For the majority of the movie, Jessie is unaware that Joubert doesn’t really exist. He presents a legitimate threat to her, an actual danger which Jessie believes could cause her physical harm. Without meaning to, she’s made Joubert up. And yet she fears him, even though there’s no ‘him’ to fear.
And what does it mean to fear something? The internet says:
Psychologists define fear as a protective, primal emotion that evokes a biochemical and emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological.
Whereas the biochemical changes that fear produces are universal, emotional responses are highly individual.
So fear alerts us to the presence of danger. We’re scared of things which can harm us. But what about those fears we have, often rooted more deeply than those physical concerns, which we know can’t hurt us, at least in the physical sense? What about our fear of death? As far back as the Stoics, we’ve tried to make sense of our fear of death:
“About death: Whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.” —Marcus Aurelius
The basic problem seems to be that we won’t be around to experience it. The process of dying seems like a reasonable issue – it could be excruciatingly painful, could be drawn-out and messy. But death, the state? Traumatic for your loved ones, sure, but you’re not going to experience it. And so, why should you care?
One possible response is known as the deprivation hypothesis. Supposedly, death is bad because it deprives individuals of the potential for future goods and experiences they would otherwise have had access to – ‘it frustrates certain forward-looking desires’. But does it? You don’t know what you’re missing out on. Is Shakespeare worse off than Oscar Wilde? They’re both dead, but Shakespeare’s missed out on more stuff than Wilde – more has happened since his death. Yet, it feels strange in some sense to say that Shakespeare’s death (his being dead, the state, not the moment or action of his death) is worse than Wilde’s. The deprivation hypothesis again needs a conscious observer, and we have no reason to think that we should fear our deaths because of what we might miss out on – you’ll never know anyway.
Much like Jessie forges Joubert out of her deepest anxieties and traumas, so too do we use our fear of death as a stand-in for our greater fears. We fear our own inadequacy, perhaps the smallness of our individual existence on a grander scale. We fear we won’t achieve our goals, that we lack the skills or talent to do so. We worry that we’re wasting precious days, of which we have an ever-decreasing amount, rotting away. And ultimately, we bind these fears, together with the knowledge that our time here is fleeting, into a phobia of death. But we don’t really fear death, because it can’t hurt us. What we fear the most is not making anything of the time that we do have.
I have led a toothless life. I have never bit into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on and I have just now noticed that my teeth have gone.- Sarte.
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