Rachel Fralick: Blog #2 - Northfork

The movie, Northfork, was a very interesting film in my opinion. It was somewhat depressing at points and I didn't particularly feel uplifted after it was over the way I would have liked to. The movie was about a town that was in a state of evacuation after hearing news of a new dam about to be built. This process could not fully continue because there were a few stragglers who had yet to leave and were being forced out.

There were a few of these people who refused to leave, one of which was Irwin. Irwin was a young boy who was orphaned and very sick. A man stayed behind to take care of him and for this reason they were both being forced out of the town. There was a sense of death that hovered over the entire movie and even though there was talk of angels and such, it was still very depressing to watch. One of the characters in the movie asked what death smells like, to which another character responded, "You know when you've smelled death, cause when you smell it, you say 'something died.'" There was just a constant feeling of death being everywhere. Even with the way the movie was filmed it was very cold and dark. There were more neutral color tones that were prevalent in the movie and I don't remember ever seeing vibrant colors. There were 6 men dressed in black who were responsible for forcing the remaining people out of the town and it was almost like they were the "angels of darkness" preparing to bring death to people. Death is something that almost everyone fears. For me personally, I'm not as much scared of death itself as I am of dying. I know there will be a time that I will no longer be living, but HOW it happens is what is hard for me to swallow. Through a religious lens, death is the vehicle for change because it is only with death that we can truly be freed from life. There were even subtler, comical statements dealing with death in the movie. At one point, one of the characters was in the outhouse and another man said to him, "are you stacking up logs?" This question is comical because of the obvious irony in his word choice, however, when I think about it in further detail, waste is dead. Even the season that they are in shows of the still very evident idea of death being one of the main themes in the movie. The town is experiencing a hard time and they are in winter. Winter is the time of year when things become cold and begin to die off. Plants can no longer sustain in the frigid temperatures and it is not until spring that they can begin to blossom again. It is interesting all of the different ways that the producers of the movie illustrate and discuss death without even having to say the word.

At the end of the movie, the last scene is where the father and son drive off in their car away from the town of Northfork with a coffin on the top of their car. Inside the coffin is the man's wife and son's mother. This is tragic because she has passed on, but it is even more meaningful because of the way that she is being taken away. Most of the time, people are given a proper burial. Because of the situation, however, the family does not have time or money to spend on a burial service and chooses to take the body away. Overall, the movie seems to have a somewhat sad overtone to it, though I did think it was interesting with the main theme being an idea of death.