Assignment 10-- Daniel Mendoza Vasquez

Watching Six Feet Under and the entire Final Destination series all in one month proved to be an unwise decision that really brought my fear of death to the forefront. Now, when I say I have a fear of death I don’t mean a fear of not existing, I mean a fear of dying painfully and—as those three series have helped make clear—in a strange or unusual way. Six Feet Under is a dark comedy based around a family that owns a funeral home and so, it revolves around death. Each episode begins with a random person dying, and that person has their funeral at their home. However, the writers were exceedingly creative in writing these pre-episode death scenes. People died in a variety of ways: one was shredded in a giant dough mixer, another was hit on the head with a metal lunchbox that fell from a construction site, and another was sliced in half while trying to help people out of a stuck elevator. Final Destination works much the same way, only without the thoughtfulness and complex storyline that the actual story of Six Feet Under provided. The point is, I am afraid of these bizarre, unexpected ways of dying because they’re so independent of your choices and out of your control. In the time immediately after watching these things I became wary of, well, anything that might malfunction and situations that were even mildly dangerous. It is no longer something that consistently affects life; that sad little phase was only a couple of days, but I am often conscious of things that might go wrong. Either way, the overarching theme here is a fear of dying painfully. Writing about my rather extreme reaction to a TV show and a movie series, though, is far more exciting (if you can call any of this that).