Existential Death Anxiety: Love Liza, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Spectator

I recently submitted this abstract to UCUR (Utah Conference of Undergraduate Research) and it was accepted! Let me know what you think.

Symbolic representations of death pervade every visual medium of art. Humankind continually seeks to convey emotions and perceptions of death, using art as a catalyst to remove them from the incomprehensible reality of an end. Despite the unfathomable nature of death, human beings nevertheless continue to use symbols to visually explore and imitate death. These mimetic images provoke a temporary cathartic ‘purging’ of death anxiety for both the creator and the spectator. The spectator, in essence, projects their fear of death onto the fictional characters. The creator is provided an opportunity to construct symbols that grasp at immortality. In this presentation, two contemporary films will be discussed to highlight this reciprocal exchange between creator and spectator: Love Liza and The Royal Tenenbaums. Film clips and other multimedia will further assist in illustrating existential themes throughout these two films and how these themes operate to motivate the purging of death anxiety for the spectator.