‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ shows the limits of meta-storytelling

By Jake Skubish

The premise of Dick Johnson Is Dead, the new Netflix documentary from filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, is laid out simply enough by Johnson at the beginning of the film. “I suggested we make a movie about [my dad] dying,” Johnson narrates. “He said yes.” Her father is then shown walking down the street, carrying a package, when an air conditioning unit falls on his head and leaves him bleeding in the street. This will not be a normal documentary.

Johnson’s father, Dick, is slowly losing his memory, just as her mother did before him. In order to grapple with the inevitable, the pair agree to make a film about his final years, complete with enactments of potential scenarios in which he might go. They are absurd, violent, and often funny. We see Dick arriving in heaven, reuniting with his wife and showered in popcorn.

These flourishes, unfortunately, are shown to be a narcissistic endeavor. There doesn’t appear to be much catharsis for Johnson’s father in these spectacles. Dick, an amiable and engaging documentary subject, never seems to be actively interested in what the film purports to be exploring; he passively goes along with Johnson’s film. Johnson, meanwhile, focuses less on her dad’s journey toward death than the movie she is making about it.

Throughout the film, Johnson is actively deconstructing the documentary genre. We see visions of Dick in heaven, and then the set made to create that vision. We spend less time with hypothetical scenarios of Dick’s death than we do with Johnson’s behind-the-scenes decisions to design them. At one point, Johnson is delivering a heartfelt monologue about family and loss, only to cut to herself recording the monologue on an iPhone in her closet. These, stories, she seems to be reminding us, are always manufactured. It’s an interesting premise, but it puts Johnson as a filmmaker at the fore of the movie. No matter what the title says, this movie is about her.

This self-awareness also intellectualizes the meaning of the movie against itself: if this is an act of artifice, then what are we doing here at all? The film makes its own case that watching it was a waste of time. Dick remarks during the film that he doesn’t think about death too often; he’s an open, happy, loving man. By the end of Dick Johnson Is Dead, this in-the-moment acceptance feels like a superior approach to ver-examining it all with an experimental film.