There is a scene which has stuck with me from
childhood. I can’t remember what show it
was from or how old I was when I saw it but it has played over in my head
thousands of times. I suspect it was one of the
Hasbro sponsored Japanese anime shows which I grew up on (dating me for anyone
who cares to do a little research).
The woman has been injured or infected with something fatal
(can’t remember, isn’t important). She’s
lying on a hospital bed with one of her teammates by her side, the one who has
been the romantic interest, at least to my keen eyes. He’s holding her hand between his as the
steady beeping of the machine begins to slow.
He doesn’t say anything, just stares at her with hard, wild, heartbroken
eyes. His hands tighten on hers. The beeping stops and her hand goes limp.
Doctors start to flurry around the bedside (and I am sitting
on my couch with my hand in front of my mouth telling myself that she can’t
have really died! It wouldn’t be fair!). He puts her hand down gently on the bed,
stands up and walks out of the room. One
of the other teammates reaches out to comfort him but he shrugs off the gesture
and keeps walking. We only saw his back
but his steps were steady and purposeful.
He walks out of their headquarters out into a rainstorm,
completely ignoring the rain pounding down.
I remember flashes showing his boots and clothes with water pouring down
them, still walking at that same deliberate pace.
Then he stops.
He looks up at the sky, his face still hard except for his
eyes, which are screaming pain. For a
moment, he stands there, rain streaming down his face. Then he collapses onto his knees, still
staring up at the sky, and begins to bellow out his rage and pain. I can’t describe the noise but it lives in my
head as the sound of ultimate torment, of a soul deprived of everything which
ever gave life meaning and robbed of all hope and joy.
I haven’t gone back to try and watch it again. It probably isn’t nearly as good as my memory
paints it. But the raw emotion of it
struck me and I’ve carried it with me ever since. When I read the Wolverine comics where he has
to kill the love of his life, Mariko, because she’s been poisoned with
something incredibly painful and lingering, and they describe him as howling to
the heavens, that’s the sound I imagined he made.
Other scenes have impinged themselves into my memory, some
from the most surprising sources. There
was a sequence in Justice League
where Wonder Woman is trying to stop a rocket and it buries itself into the
earth with her underneath it. Batman
jumps up and begins frantically digging at the earth, knocking Superman back on
his butt when the Man of Steel tries to tell him there’s no hope. It takes three of them of them to haul him
back. His face sets into this stone mask
and you just know he’s being ripped apart inside. Then the rocket begins to move and Wonder
Woman comes out. Everyone is
congratulating her except Batman. He’s
still standing off to one side. She
looks at him and he very deliberately hides his muddy gloves behind his cape.
Another favourite of mine was the season finale of Castle from last year when Beckett gets
shot by the sniper. Castle’s face goes
blank with shock and then he leaps forward to get to her before anyone
else. You can tell he’s panicking and
desperate, his voice cracking and wavering.
He tells her he loves her, the first time he’s admitted it.
And I have a new addition, from the Fringe season finale. The
team is confronting William Bell, who is using Olivia as an unwilling and
unconscious energy source. To save the
world, Walter shoots her in the head.
The blank shock followed by sheer panic on Peter’s face struck right to
my heart. Nothing else matters to him at
that point. He doesn’t care about the
world, he doesn’t care about catching the bad guy, nothing matters except that
she’s gone. His face is crumpling and
he’s crying as he alternately tries to wake her up and cradle her close to him.
I was savouring the memory of these scenes when I started to
ask myself why I enjoyed them so much.
After all, I’m a romance fan. I
love a happy ending. So why are these
death scenes my favourites?
The easy answer is because no one actually stays dead in
these examples. In the first one, it
turns out that the woman’s death is a trick by the villains who made her appear
dead in order to kidnap her. The team
figures it out, she’s rescued and the story continues. Beckett survives her shooting in Castle and Walter does some very rough
brain surgery to save Olivia’s life in Fringe
(along with an awesome line: Peter is
crying and repeating “She’s dead” over and over and Walter shoots back “You
should know that’s never stopped me before.”)
But I think that answer is too simplistic. The “happy ending” part isn’t the part I go
over in my head again and again. So I
think it goes a little deeper. I enjoy
tough, strong, stoic warrior males for the most part. Aside from Castle, all of the men involved
fit the description of a strong, get-it-done kind of guy. The flaw with such men is that they rarely
show the depths of their emotion. Even
Castle hides his true feelings behind jokes and pranks. It’s the breaking of character which makes it
special. The shell is cracked and the
true feelings come pouring out. There’s
no disguising how much they love their partners. The thought of losing these women is enough
to destroy them utterly.
I think every woman would like to be that important to
someone. No one likes the idea of
someone she cares about in pain. But we
all like the idea of being capable of it.
Of being so intrinsic to someone’s life that their world falls apart
without us.
That’s romance.
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