OBIT

OBIT

          A documentary on the obituary department of the New York Times hardly seems the sort of thing that would shake the walls of the multiplexes, but the new movie Obit deserves some of the same attention and praise lavished on the latest computer assisted adventures of the latest comic book superhero.  Despite its ostensibly unpromising subject, the movie provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily workings of the department, its people, and their conception of their job.

          Proceeding in the tried and true technique of contemporary documentary (though here generally justified by the subject), the director employs a series of talking head interviews with the several writers in the department, who describe the challenges of the job, their methods, and their attitudes toward dealing with death.  The director, Vanessa Gould, also interrupts the narrative with old newspaper headlines and articles—the Times morgue keeper, incidentally, deserves his own film—photographs, and film clips showing moments from the lives of the people the writers memorialize.  The ongoing montage enlivens the story, but also suggests some of the meaning and importance of those lives, in short, the reasons for their deaths receiving a full article in that section of the revered New York Times.

She also follows the day-long progress of one writer, Bruce Weber, on the obituary of someone most people probably never heard of, William Wilson, the first person to serve as the television consultant for a presidential campaign.  After calling the widow for the essential information that the Times demands—cause of death, age, survivors, etc.—he starts the process of research and writing, not all that different from any scholar’s work.  The investigation opens up a window on the past, showing clips of the first presidential debate, the historic confrontation of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, orchestrated largely by Wilson; that debate, Kennedy claimed, won him the election. 

Weber begins the day on the telephone, proceeds through research on his subject, and finishes a long and satisfactory essay just in time to meet his deadline in the late afternoon.  Like any writer, he stalls and stumbles, tries several beginnings, overcomes an array of familiar obstacles, and ends with a work he happily regards as successful.  As he and his colleagues point out, they write a kind of history in uncovering the lives of people who achieved enough to earn an obituary in the newspaper.  They not only record the lives of the famous and distinguished, however, they also often remember the forgotten, those who have slipped away from fame, dropped out of the public gaze, reminding us all that for both the celebrated and the obscure the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Inevitably, the writers also find that their work brings them into a consideration of death, of their own ends, intimations of their own mortality.  In the process of recording the lives of so many so often, they inevitably confront the notion of the obituary that awaits each of them.  Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest they realize that “every third thought shall be (their) grave.”  Obit may remind us all of that reality.