Of the many phantasmagorical scenes in Kirsten Johnson’s new documentary, Dick Johnson is Dead, perhaps the most surreal occurs towards the beginning of the film.
Kirsten’s father, retired psychiatrist C. Richard “Dick” Johnson, lies in an open casket in the front of a church, his eyes shut. “I think he looks really dead,” Kirsten comments, adjusting his hand positions.
“Good night, sweet world,” Dick murmurs.
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“It is so weird to see your buddy in a coffin. This is not good for me,” says Dick’s best friend Ray, clearly unnerved. “I keep reminding myself that this is a movie.”
To confront her fears about her father’s mortality, Kirsten set out to make a film that would blur the boundary between fiction and real life: she would repeatedly stage his death in imagined scenes as a form of “pre-traumatic” stress therapy. She kills him off in both unlikely and banal ways: we see Dick getting hit with an air conditioning unit, falling down the stairs, getting struck by a construction beam.
The film moves fluidly between Dick’s fictionalised deaths and real life, following him as he moves from his Seattle home into Kirsten’s one-bedroom New York apartment, spends time with his grandchildren, and attends doctors’ appointments.
By the time filming began, Dick was starting to show signs of dementia. When still practising as a psychiatrist, he made errors prescribing medications and began to double-book patients. While older memories held fast, more recent ones, such as the news of a colleague’s recent bereavement, didn’t stick.
“I think a part of me knew, even when I started the project, that loss was coming,” Kirsten tells New Scientist. “I just wasn’t yet fully brave enough emotionally to admit it consciously to myself when I had the idea.”
Interspersed throughout the film are joyous, absurdist heaven sequences, in which Dick is reunited with his late wife Katie Jo. Despite her initial worries that she had begun the project too late to capture the entirety of her father’s personhood – the film is a moving document of Dick’s later years, brimming with his clear joie de vivre and sense of humour.
“We really wanted to make something funny together,” says Kirsten. “We knew the extremity of dementia is so powerfully sad and painful and upsetting, there just had to be a counterpunch that was as strong.”
“I was definitely concerned about the ethics of it: at what point might he not have agency and not be able to participate as a collaborator,” she says. “I made really clear rules for myself that if he didn’t want to do something, we wouldn’t do it.”
Kirsten was already familiar with the gradual deterioration of neurodegenerative disease: her mother Katie Jo, had died with Alzheimer’s disease a decade earlier. The experience left both father and daughter with an acute awareness about what Dick might have in store, which gives rise to the film’s most poignant moments.
“His moments of forgetfulness are going to spread,” says Kirsten at one point in the documentary. “He’ll ask the same questions over and over again. His eyes will get that distant look. And his personality will begin to fade away… And the whole time we’ll just be trying to get by.”
The film leans into the uncomfortable truth of grief as a by-product of love. It confronts the reality of dementia with tenderness and frames death as both an inevitability and creative opportunity. The real Dick Johnson is still alive, and so long as film lives on, so will he too.
Dick Johnson Is Dead is available on Netflix
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