A Birthday Inspired by a 1996 Movie About Death
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Kaitlyn: According to the 2016 book Love in the Afterlife: Underground Religion at the Movies, the late 1980s brought the beginning of “a surge of new supernatural romances” to movie theaters. You know—Beetlejuice (1988), a movie about a young couple who die and become ghosts; Ghost (1990), a movie about Patrick Swayze getting murdered mere days after moving into an amazing apartment. There were lots of others.
And by 1996, there was a movie called , which was based on a play and by as “one very sad Gap ad indeed.” I don’t want to get too deep into it, but the movie is about a man (Peter Gallagher) whose wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) dies on her 35th birthday by falling off the mast of a sailboat, which she was climbing while taunting him about how, as her “fun-loving husband,” he should encourage her to risk her life in cool and photogenic ways. (She also rode her bike with no handlebars.) Two years later, the couple’s teenage daughter (Claire Danes) is suffering because her father is grieving in a normal manner. He has quit his job at Boston University, and he has moved permanently into the family’s Nantucket beach house, from which he plans elaborate birthday parties for his dead wife, with whom he also speaks constantly. At the risk of splitting hairs,
