J. T. Seaton | Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? / 2020

a witness who is not even allowed to watch

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. T. Seaton (screenwriter and director) Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? / 2020 [11 minutes]

 

The problem of making movies about a phenomenon which most of us are encountering for the first time in our lives and in experiencing it in the very moment of creation is that it is difficult to know how to be objective about the very issues we know and hear to be happening, and is impossible to provide perspective to our presentation of those issues.

     Some of these related problems clearly exist in almost all of the short films produced in 2020 about the pandemic of COVID-19, which every day resulted in thousands and thousands of new deaths.

      In J. T. Seaton’s film Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? the writer and director, just as in Leon Lopez’s Hey Google, tackles the subject head on, creating a gay character whose lover has just died of the disease.

      In both instances, the directors sought to know how survivors would react to such a situation when not only they have been torn away from their lovers at the very moment when their companions needed them most, but were unable to even fully know of their conditions and were themselves cocooned off into a world which took them even further from their loves than even space could. It was as if time and space had both come to a stop. Communication was impossible, doctors and nurses themselves were unsure of how to fully communicate and help their own patients without endangering their own lives as well. The levels of distancing were so numerous that there appeared no possible way not only to help but to know of even how to share their own fears and find ways to allay them. The world seemed to have moved into a kind of mass hysteria where, as in war, people were separated with virtually no way to know how they doing, whether or not they are surviving or dead. In some sense similar to the Holocaust and AIDS, the COVID pandemic pulled people away from one another to further assure their silent and unexplained deaths.

      The intensity of that experience, in both films, is conveyed through a first-hand report from the victim himself, permitted only after the fact. If the survivor, accordingly, has the apparent solace of the dead man’s love, is also is presented with the living guilt of not having been able to be there (without even a “there” to go to) at the very moment in his companion expresses his love and recognition of death. Any catharsis, accordingly, comes long after the fact.

      There is an intense melodrama played out as the two actors must convey love, guilt, suffering, worry for the survivor, and sorrow for the dead all at the very same moment. So we watch Seaton’s character Ryan (Noah Brown) listening to a recording made days or even hours before the death of his lover Jacob (Jamal Douglas). As in Lopez’s work, it is the dying individual who is the position of strength, since he has had to face his death alone, has had to come to terms with his death, and even is charged with the act of communicating with the other, sharing his love and warning him to remain safe, to isolate himself even further than he already has. Ryan, on the other hand, cannot even properly mourn his loved one’s death. 

     It puts the central actor, in short, in the position of being a tearful individual without any words to speak, a witness whose very role has been stolen from him. He has not been able to witness, only hear of what he might have witnessed after the fact. It puts the central character in the most insignificant of spots, and the film accordingly attempts to create a narrative about a man who can do nothing but listen to their previous love for one another by the one who cannot even leave his bed or ventilator except for a few moments to speak these words of consolation.

      In short, these COVID films are some of the most frustrating and passive of narratives possible, putting their viewers, furthermore, in the position of voyeurs with nothing to watch or really learn about either of the two men who loved. Any brief moments of joy, sex, or pleasures are in the past and represented through snapshots or portrayed in hallmark card-like cinematic moments.

     In this instance, unlike Lopez’s film, the character has dared to move back into nature, returning to the beach where they had recently gotten engaged to be married. But in moving out of the cave of isolation Ryan is placed by the director in an even stranger world, as the coughing lover’s voice suddenly turns into that of a trapped beast, threatening figures we also hear on the tape as if Jamal had suddenly been turned into a kind zombie who needed quickly to be shot. Vague figures also begin the wander in the background of the beach where Ryan sits.

     The final few moments, accordingly, hint at the way society is treating anyone infected or, for that matter, anyone who dares to leave the private world into which the doctors and other officials have demanded they retreat for their own safety and protection.

      The ending, accordingly, is jarring without really being logical. Doctors and nurses (the nurse Dale, for example, who Jamal even describes as being so beautiful) obviously didn’t shoot him at the moment he recognized Jamal was near death. Zombies did not suddenly begin to roam the beach where Ryan has escaped to listen to Jamal’s last words. It’s only a metaphor for a situation that cannot otherwise be logically explained.

      Creating a film as Seaton and the others have done during the pandemic allows for no narrative, no perspective, and no true evaluation of what is happening. The daily numbers of the death, the silence of a room, a Wi-Fi or zoom call from others, is all we really have of the intense drama going on underneath. As the title of this film hints, the characters cannot really say goodbye since they were forced to do so before they even knew they were saying it and why.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).