Is Dick Johnson Still Alive? (Spoiler Alert for the Doc and for Real Life)
The Documentary Is Called ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ — however Is He Really?
By Abi TravisOct. 2 2020, Updated 9:12 p.m. ET
Well, it kind of feels like the people in the film business truly want to make us all cry about older men who are shedding their recollections. Between the trailers for Supernova and The Father, we had been already bawling, however now add the documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead to the checklist and we’re sure to be an absolute mess.
We had been questioning, given the premise of the doc, whether Dick Johnson is actually still alive. Here’s what we know.
Is Dick Johnson still alive?
Yes, the documentary is known as Dick Johnson Is Dead, however Dick Johnson additionally seems in the trailer for it, so he is clearly alive (or a minimum of was once while filming the documentary). If you’re now not accustomed to the premise of the movie, we’ll start with a temporary synopsis.
Award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has decided to make a documentary not like the rest you’ve more than likely ever seen sooner than. It’s all about her dad, Dick Johnson. Dick is a retired scientific psychiatrist who has dementia. Throughout the documentary, Kirsten levels imaginative and fantastical eventualities wherein her dad may just die — and her dad performs alongside and acts in them. “She kills me. Multiple times,” Dick says in the movie’s trailer. And, yeah. That just about sums it up.
The movie acts as an exploration of lifestyles, death, humor, and our talent to from time to time procedure all of these items with the help of equipment we get entry to via movie itself. It’s a mix of truth and fiction and, in the end, a love letter from a daughter to her dad. And sure, it’s going to make you cry. A lot.
OK. So. It seems weird to incorporate a spoiler alert about anyone’s actual, real lifestyles, but when there’s a film surrounding the very idea of their demise … well, it sort of feels like the factor we should do. So this is that. If you want to understand whether Dick Johnson is still — at this very minute — alive, keep reading. If you’d quite find out by watching a lovely and sad and touching documentary, prevent reading and watch Dick Johnson Is Dead on Netflix (it’s streaming there now).
At the end of the film, audiences see Dick’s funeral. It’s a staged funeral because Dick used to be still alive whilst it was filmed, but the feelings we see on the display screen are very much real. The staged funeral gives Dick’s pals (as well as Kirsten herself) a technique to mourn a man who is technically still alive, although who is slowly disappearing sooner than their eyes.
Kirsten’s original plan used to be to film two funerals for the documentary. "I thought that the funeral we had filmed would be the first funeral, and then we would film his real funeral when he really died," she advised EW. "But as soon as we had done that funeral, I was like, 'Oh, this is done, this is real, and they are mourning him.'" Ultimately, Kirsten made up our minds to incorporate simplest the staged funeral in the film.
At the time of this writing, Dick Johnson is still alive, though his family made the very tough decision to move him into a dementia care facility. But as arduous as it has been for Kirsten and her circle of relatives, she says that her dad is doing OK, considering. “Dad's loving it there, and he's taking part in the rollout of the film by the use of Zoom. So it is much the similar. He is himself regardless of the stumbling blocks of this second in time, I'd say."
Hopefully that satisfies your interest about Dick’s current state, but really, you should simply pass ahead and watch the film. It’s an hour and a half lengthy, and it's streaming on Netflix now.
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