Suicide By Employment !!!

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."-J Cocteau

Erik Poppe's !,000 Times Good Night is a very good film in the storytelling tradition of Cinematic Art. And what a story it tells, the story of a intrepid war zone photo-journalist, whose dangerous assignments begin to cause severe discord in her marriage, and then with her older daughter Steph. But below the surface level of this effective dramatic production, lies submerged a tragic tale indeed.

That is because for me, this film is about a person with latent suicidal tendencies, a person with a "death wish". Because she can't admit this death wish to herself, much less to those around her, it is an unconscious death wish that she obscures, and indirectly satisfies by choosing a professional that places her in a position of getting killed, of allowing her to commit "suicide by employment", if you will. All her pronouncements about her "professional dedication", and her "commitment to expose the horrors of war to the world" are just further attempts to obscure her death wish not only from herself, but from the people around her. Plus, if she does get killed in the course of being a war zone photo-journalist, her legacy for her family will be of her memory draped in the glorious flag of the intrepid photo-journalist, rather than leaving her family stigmatized if she were to commit suicide by more traditional means. Yet, her latent wish to commit "suicide by employment" keeps getting frustrated because, alas, she keeps coming home alive and well, which only frustrates her latent death wish even more, causing her to return to war zones again and again, thereby converting an obsessive wish to die into a "passion for her work". However, her husband, although he's no more consciously aware of his wife's death wish than she is, starts to "sense" it on an intuitive, "gut" level. He's "catching her vibes". So his outward rejection of his wife's chosen profession is really, on a subtle, emotional, and intuitive level, his rejection of a woman with an insatiable desire to die, his rejection of the "stink of death" that exudes from within her. The older daughter, Steph also begins to intuitively recognize her mother's latent death wish at the Kenyan refugee camp when, although the job her mother was sent to do was essentially accomplished, her mother essentially abandoned her by unadvisedly running back to a shootout by the rebels, by her mother's obsession with placing herself in a position to get killed. The film ends with this person's latent death wish still unresolved, and still submerged in her unconsciousness, although, by this time, her obsessive, latent desire to kill herself has led her to lose her family.