Departures: Death is but a gateway.

Wanna be a professional makeup artist for the dead? Be an encoffiner! In funeral services there is a profession called an encoffiner who prepares the corpse to be put into the coffin. He will clean it, embalm it, and give it makeup to beautify it. While you may have the risk of being socially ostracized due to the fact that your profession involves interacting with dead bodies, the pay is great with flexible working hours! 

Today's movie review is on Departures (2008), a Japanese film depicting the story of Daigo the encoffiner and the challenges society and himself had given him that he must face head on, which includes social prejudice and various cognitive dissonances. This film was one I would consider as a masterpiece, and it was the first Japanese film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign language film in 2009, and had various adaptations which include a manga and a stage play.   



The hardest part of life is death, nobody wanted it, yet it's the ultimate goal of all life. This film not only portrayed how encoffiners do their job, it also showed the coping process of people when they experience loss in the funeral scenes.







According to Kübler-Ross (1969), grief are experienced in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Denial occurs at the moment of knowing the fact of the loss, usually along with shock. When one begins to accept the fact of the death, the denial stage diminishes, albeit painfully. Not much of this stage of grief had been shown on the film, as the people in the film might had already cope with this stage before planning the funeral ceremonies.








The emotion of anger will also surface during times of grief, and is crucial to the coping process of grief . Most people act out this emotion through blaming people associated with the death, which is portrayed in the film in two scenes: the wife blaming her husband for the implied suicide of their cross-dresser son in the first funeral scene and the enraged father beating up the boyfriend of his deceased daughter during another funeral scene for causing the accident that caused her death. Both cannot change the fact that their loved ones had left them, so they proceed to blame the cause of the loss and feelings of anger inevitably rise. As one slowly understands the anger and perceives it fully, the feeling will eventually diminish and the person will be healed.







Bargaining is another stage of grief that involves the attempt of bargaining (usually involving religion or the belief that fate can change) for the life of their loved ones back. At this stage people will change their behavior (usually for the better) thinking that maybe being a better person will convince the powers that be to bring back the dead. This stage isn't portrayed in the film.







As anger is a necessary emotion to heal the pain of loss, so is sadness. After the bargaining stage, the grief and sadness intensifies to the point of depression, beginning the depression stage of grief. This stage is portrayed in most of the funeral scenes in the film. The tears, cries and apologies the family members directed to their dead (especially the part where Daigo's friend cried out of anguish when he witness the cremation of his late mother) not only dampened the overall mood of the film, it also reminded the audience the pain that will inevitably come should their own loved ones depart from this world.



After going through the above four stages, the final stage comes, which is acceptance. Acceptance doesn't necessarily mean that the pain of loss had been completely erased, but rather the full acceptance of the fact that the one you cared for is gone and can never return. Usually recovery follows as the individual learns to live with the loss, and at times even joke about it, which is shown in one of the funeral scenes in the film where the family members kissed their late grandfather's corpse, creating lipstick marks on its face and laughed as if it's an inside joke the family had shared, showing not only acceptance of the death but optimism and a happier side of funerals, where the family chose to honor the death of their loved ones with a smile instead with sadness.



Now, let's avert our focus to another important aspect of the film: the main character Daigo's cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the state where one's attitudes differ from their behavior, causing the unpleasant experience of dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Daigo's dissonance occurs a lot throughout the film's plot, albeit in different ways. His first dissonance is about his new job as an encoffiner. Formerly a cello player for a recently disbanded orchestra, Daigo was extremely reluctant to do the job because being an encoffiner involves working with dead bodies, and the interaction with dead bodies is considered unclean and sacrilegious due to the association between death and impurity in Japanese religion and culture (Miyata, 2006).



Later on, as Daigo learnt more about being an encoffiner, his respect for the job increased. The dissonance however steams from another place: his family and social life. While he had accepted his job, his wife and friend didn't. Both of them actively tried to convince him to quit the job, going so far to ostracize and stop interacting with him until he can find a new job. However, he swallowed his pain and perseveres with the belief that what he's doing is an honest work. He eventually convinced both his wife and his friend to accept his work as an encoffiner through the encoffining ceremony of his friend's dead mother, where he prepared the corpse with compassion and respect before putting it in the coffin.



Daigo's final dissonance occured when he was requested to encoffin his neglecting father whom he hated. During the encoffinment, he claimed that he can't recognize his father's face. While he treated his father's corpse with respect, it was only after seeing the stone in his father's hand, which Daigo himself exchanged with his father when they were little as tokens of endearment. The childhood memories flowed back to Daigo, and he finally remembered his father's face and provided the proper makeup to make the corpse look exactly like when it was alive and young. Daigo cleared his final dissonance in the film and cried for his father, and more importantly, resolved the hatred and formed a closure as he placed the stone on his wife's pregnant belly, symbolizing his bright future as a father. 



In conclusion, this movie is yet another masterpiece that deserves a watch. It's not a tragedy nor a comedy, but rather it's a philosophical film regarding life, death, grief, acceptance and family. It also serves a reminder for us to cherish the good times we had with our family, friends and loved ones, for we don't know when they will be taken away from us or when we ourselves will be taken away from them forever.

Thank you for reading.




References:

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Miyata. (2006) Reikon to Tabi no Fōkuroa (Folklore of Souls and Journeys)