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Black White

Death in Hollywood can end in two ways it can be glorified or it can be stigmatized, it can be "white" or "black". Richard Dyer includes an observation of the "White Death" as pure and simply memento with glorification of its creators. On the other hand, Arthur Jafa's My Black Death encompasses how black art, culture, and its stigmatized creators are abstract and taboo despite it radically changing art in its truest form. If I had the option to choose my death, then I would want to depart being admired, well loved and individual (which we all are); so I guess all that equates to a "white death". On a larger scale, I think everyone would choose a "white" death because no one wants to die as a lonely outcast. In movies filled with cinematic death, there is the dimming lights, sappy music, and the victim or actor's final action. The final action usually reads how they truly "died"; some looked shocked and others look at peace. Death is a tragedy regardless of the context, but the victim can represent either a hero's lost or a villain's cost, one death is honored as indignant and the other is viewed as senseless as its act. There is no doubt that a white person can suffer a "black death" with the conflict-filled movies of John Singleton's Four Brothers and Tony Scott's Man on Fire shows a black man suffering a "white death". These films show that in the twenty-first century we can observe the interrelationships between the characters and how each victim's death is justified.
According to Dyer, " The theme of whiteness and death takes many forms. Whites often seem to have a relation with death, to yearn for it but also to bring it to others"(208). I agree that the utter virgin essence of a young white girl is tempting to resist and flirting with death. Dyer continues to emphasize that in "In Victorian times, death- especially that of children, above all girls, - was seen as a fit subject for a painting…far more to do with beauty than tragedy…a pure...