Nothing is sacred in ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’
Filmmaker’s father inspires Netflix documentary that takes a jarring look at dementia.
Ways to kill Grandpa isn’t your typical dinner conversation. Then again, “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is by no means a typical film.
In the morbidly funny and thoughtprovoking new documentary (streaming Friday on Netflix), filmmaker Kirsten Johnson (“Cameraperson”) asks her 86-year-old psychiatrist father, Richard “Dick” Johnson, to enact his own death in a series of surreal and sometimes shocking ways. In one moment, he’s pretending to be hit by a falling air conditioner; the next, fake blood is gushing out of his neck after a construction accident.
“He and I both had very grandiose fantasies. At one point, he wanted to drive an oil tanker aground,” Johnson says. “I also included my children, who were very young at the time. We’d have these hilarious dinners where we’d sit around and talk about the ways we’re going to kill Grandpa or what was the most epic death someone could have.”
Dying is an uncomfortable conversation for most, but one that was vital for Johnson after her dad was diagnosed with dementia in 2016. She lost her mom years earlier to Alzheimer’s and always regretted not filming her more when she was alive.
Johnson got the idea for the film shortly after his diagnosis, and her father was “game from the get-go,” she says. For her, the fact that her dad could get back up after every outrageous death scene was cathartic and comforting in its own strange way.
“It was like, ‘OK, well we could kill him and then he could come back to life,’ ” Johnson says. “So it was as much about the coming back to life as it was about the deaths themselves. But it was also about, ‘I just can’t be in this only sacred space – I need some absurdity because this situation is so painful.’ ”
“Dementia just stays ahead of you.” Kirsten Johnson Director
Eye-popping fantasy sequences of Dick in heaven are also sprinkled throughout the documentary, where he drinks from a chocolate fountain, dines with Farrah Fawcett and Bruce Lee, and has his feet healed by Jesus. (He was born with misshapen toes.)
But the whimsical make-believe becomes less frequent when Dick’s dementia progresses and he moves from Seattle to New York to live in his daughter’s apartment building. The film’s emotional second half centers on Johnson caring for her dad and coming to terms with losing him. He sleeps often and wanders off on one occasion, which Johnson captures from a distance.
“Dementia just stays ahead of you,” she says. “Just when you get used to the current phase of it, then it shifts form again.”
One of the film’s most tear-jerking scenes was shot just before Dick left Seattle, at the Seventh-day Adventist
Church he devoutly attended. Johnson gathered his closest friends and family members for a mock funeral, where they eulogized him as he observed from the
back of the church. There were many laughs and tears throughout the ceremony, which culminated in Dick being showered with hugs and applause.
“He ate it up and was very playful with it, but as a psychiatrist, I think he also felt people’s pain and that’s the amazing thing he does with me,” Johnson says.
“He’s often said to me, ‘I am sorry that you have to see me disappearing into dementia.’ That’s because he knows what it is because we went through it with my mom, but it’s also just his capacity for human empathy.”
Dick attended the movie’s Sundance Film Festival premiere in Park City, Utah, in January, where it won the special jury award for innovation in nonfiction storytelling. He lived with Johnson’s brother throughout most of the lockdown but was moved into a dementia care facility in August when his condition became more difficult to manage. He still plans to watch the film again on Netflix with his church friends over Zoom.
“He’s himself, he’s hanging in there,” Johnson says. “He’s ready for the premiere but really wants to come home and live with me, so it’s hard. It’s really hard to be separated from him in this time.”