OBIT. (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Vanessa Gould
A documentary look at the people who write obituaries for the New York Times. A few things you notice about them right away. They're all white. They're mostly men. And they're all veteran journalists who love their uniquely demanding work. On the day the film zeroes in on them, one is researching and writing the obit of the political adviser who made sure JFK looked better than Richard Nixon in their crucial first debate. Another's trying to come up with a catchy way to capture the life of an ad man whose main claim to immortality is a famous Alka-Seltzer commercial. They talk about the rewards and pitfalls and tricks of the trade, and how important it is to verify that the subject is actually dead (which seems obvious, but get it wrong and you're in serious trouble). There's even a tour of the newspaper's morgue, a vast labyrinth of file cabinets and aging clips, presided over by a guy who would probably know where the bodies are buried, if bodies were buried there. You'd expect some morbidity in this, but surprisingly, there's almost none. As one writer explains it, every obit is the chance to tell somebody's story at the exact moment their story becomes history. They aren't writing about death nearly as much as they're writing about life.
