Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Death Be Not Proud: Review of Tuesday
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
There is no greater mystery than death. Its inevitability, its ubiquitousness, its power, and the question of life afterwards are awe-inspiring and fearsome questions. It is the last great unknown, and conversely, the one final certainty.
The depiction of Death in film and literature has ranged from figures as familiar—and as scary—as the Grim Reaper, Mexican Catrinas, disembodied shadows, plague skeletons to surprisingly—and more pleasantly, hunky and sophisticated Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt (Meet Joe Black) or Robert Redford (The Twilight Zone). The need to create a concrete representation not of death itself (we know what that looks like), but its carrier, its being, addresses the need for us to identify, understand, and demystify it. And Death is not always a strictly evil entity.
Some of these depictions have presented Death as a mindless reaper, a ruthless harvester of souls while others have depicted the entity as a somewhat sympathetic being caught inside a strictly ruthless existence—a guy stuck with a horrible job—as in Meet Joe Black or Death Takes a Holiday. After all, who wants to travel the Earth taking lives? And Death is sometimes seen in these incarnations as a sort of anti-hero bringing mercy and a relief to the afflicted—the good guy in the black hat.
In Daina O. Pusic’s film Tuesday, Death comes as a bird, an orange macaw whose head is constantly filled with distorted cries of pain and suffering. At the beginning of the film, the camera pulls out of a shot of the cosmos, wheels past the Earth and then pulls away from it, revealing it to be in the pupil of the macaw’s eye. It is nestled in the corner of a dying man’s eye. Growing to normal size and then beyond, to become a gigantic entity, it then flies away to a woman dying of stab wounds and, with a flip of its wing, takes her. It stops at an old Polish woman’s home and—after being spit on by her—takes her, too. All the while, disembodied voices seem to be filling the bird’s head, voices begging him to take them.
The film then cuts to the room of Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a fifteen-year-old paraplegic girl suffering from a serious illness. When her somewhat clueless companion, Nurse Billie (Leah Harvey) leaves to prepare Tuesday’s bath, she suffers a coughing fit heard by Death. He flies to her, preparing to take her, until Tuesday tells him a joke about a policeman and a dozen penguins. Unexpectedly, the macaw cracks up. He speaks, telling Tuesday it has been a long time since he talked, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.
Tuesday takes Death up to her room where she treats him to a bath in her sink and they enjoy smoking a little pot together. The scene in which they page through a history book with Death talking about famous figures like Stalin (“a gigantic prick”) and Jesus (“very sarcastic”) he has taken, is hilarious. She asks Death not to take her, but she persuades him to wait until her mom Zora (Julia Louise-Dreyfuss) comes home so they can say goodbye. Death agrees. Zora, who has slowly been secretly selling off her possessions to support herself and Tuesday because she has lost her job, comes home.
Tuesday tells her she must die that night. Zora does not accept the fact until Death comes out to tell her. She attacks the bird, beating it with a nurse’s manual, setting it afire, and then finally eating it in an effort to save her daughter’s life.
Afterwards, the outside world becomes an apocalyptic bedlam. Since no one has been able to die, chaos reigns. Zora begins to experience strange gagging and then inexplicably, like the macaw, begins to change size arbitrarily. She then discovers she has the power of death, to relieve suffering, and packs up Tuesday to go and restore balance in the world. When Death regurgitates itself from Zora, the two of them must reach an agreement as to Tuesday’s fate—and do.
In Tuesday, Pusic has revisited the “death takes a holiday” theme, investing it with fresh doses of magical realism, fantasy, and a solid dose of black humor. Pusic also, in depicting Zora’s struggle between her maternal drive to save her daughter and recognizing her inevitable demise, focuses not only on the immediate implications of death but on its peripheral effects on the living.
Zora has centered her life around the existence of her sick daughter, subsuming herself to her every need. When Tuesday is finally taken, Zora must reinvent herself to survive. In one of the many twists in this tale, Death returns to visit Zora, just to see how she’s doing. Zora, at first suspicious, sits down for a drink with Death, asking him about the afterlife and God. His reply, for such a sarcastic being living a harrowing existence, is refreshingly optimistic.
Films depicting Death as a sentient being are nothing new. Plots where Death takes a break are nothing new either. The difference between these predecessors and Tuesday is that this latest film addresses Death—and our relationship with it—as a process. Zora tricks Death (for a time), reasons with it, becomes Death, and finally reconciles with it.
One brilliant iteration of this particular death story is its representation as a giant macaw. At once beautiful, exotic, elegant, and grotesque—and a being which parrots the human condition—this version is refreshing. After meeting Tuesday, it laughs, jokes, talks, and learns. In short, Tuesday’s Death is familiar but exotic, new but old, ruthless and merciful. It is, as it must be, different for everyone.
This is a funny and touching film. The vibrant chemistry between Julia Louise-Dreyfuss and Petticrew almost leaps off the screen. The scenes where they read their tabloids or when Dreyfuss bathes her daughter are beautifully done. The macaw is a perfect combination of humor, bitterness, exhaustion, and pain. He suffers almost as much—or more—than his victims. Depicting Death as a bird brought one of Emily Dickinson’s poems to mind:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –“….
–Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”
Death, in this case, also, for Zora, and for her daughter, carries hope. Tuesday is a wonderfully wrought fable of love, death, life, change, and hope. It is by no means a perfect film, but it is well worth watching. Death is not only embodied and humanized, but is, at the end, transformative for the living.