All Illusions Must Be Broken Documentary Probes Mankinds Capacity for Violence

Publish date: 2024-08-01

Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell’s doc, produced by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, bows at Palm Springs

“Do you guys ever think about dying?” asks the titular toy at the center of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s inventive and ambitious screenplay for the mega-hit comedy “Barbie.” 

In their yarn, the virus of death awareness is planted in Barbie World by a daydreaming Mattel employee named Gloria, who randomly sketches Thoughts of Impending Death Barbie at work one day, thus triggering the tale of the famed doll’s journey from plastic prop to self-empowered woman.

I wasn’t daydreaming, but I was casually musing out loud on X, formerly known as Twitter, after my first viewing of “Barbie” about how the film seemed heavily influenced by a book I first read 50 years ago: Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Denial of Death.”

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For the uninitiated, Becker’s central thesis is summarized in “Death” as “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

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I quickly got a private message from documentary filmmaker Laura Dunn.

Dunn not only saw the straight line from “Barbie” to Becker, but also wanted me to know that along with her life and directing partner, Jef Sewell, she had just made a feature documentary, “All Illusions Must Be Broken,” which will have its world premiere in the True Stories section of the Palm Springs Film Festival Jan. 10. “Illusions” is all about Becker, his life and his potent message of human liberation from fear, anger and the violence that all but defines our species. 

Soon, I was on the phone with Dunn and Sewell from their east Tennessee home where they’re raising their seven sons. 

Sewell gleefully pointed out that the Becker connection to “Barbie” wasn’t just in our minds: “You know that Noah Baumbach’s last film, ‘White Noise,’ was influenced by Becker, right?” 

Sewell, a devotee of Becker’s ideas, has done his homework and yes, “Noise” author Don DeLillo has publicly credited Becker’s “Death” as a major influence on the novel, which was published a decade after “Death” and turned by Baumbach into the 2022 feature starring Gerwig and Adam Driver.

Once we established that the path from the Day-Glo exuberance of “Barbie” to the pitch-black vision of the compulsively violent human animal found in Becker’s “Death” is just a short hop, skip and a jump into the void, we dug into the couple’s motives for making a documentary about Becker’s work and how audiences today might respond to his challenging theses.

“All Illusions Must Be Broken” is the third feature documentary the couple has made for executive producers Robert Redford and Terrence Malick; they picked up SXSW and Nashville Fest awards for the 2016 portrait of celebrated poet Wendell Berry, “Look & See,” and the Indie Spirit Award for their 2007 environmental doc, “The Unforeseen.”

For those who love documentaries filled with provocative ideas that demand engagement, “Illusions” packs a walloping punch in the face of complacency and acceptance of a global social order that remains plagued with horrific, ceaseless environmental destruction as well as unrelenting warfare and grinding degradation of our own species.

The duo explained how their original plan to make a documentary about what Dunn calls “the denaturing of children” quickly grew into an opus where Becker’s work connected the dots on several social and environmental ills which they felt needed examining.

It soon became clear to both Dunn and Sewell that there was a bigger story to tell — a larger, more expansive view of humanity — and they saw the work of Becker as essential to explaining the roots of so many vexations that loom ever larger as mortal threats to the human species.

Sewell and Dunn focused their film on a powerful conversation that occurred a half century ago between Becker and a young Psychology Today reporter named Sam Keen. That encounter, which took place on the 49-year-old Becker’s deathbed in 1973, features prominently in “Illusions.” 

Challenged by Keen about the darkness of his vision of humanity, Becker asserts: “If I stress the terror, it is only because I am talking to the cheerful robots.”

Shades of “Barbie!”

If Becker sounds slightly messianic, Dunn and Sewell are clearly in sync with his passion for rigorous, discomforting honesty.

Sewell sees “Illusions” as “a conversation,” albeit one that requires some heavy intellectual lifting. He elaborates: “It’s just a humble little handmade movie that tries to explore and contemporize Becker’s provocative ideas. Which aren’t easy,” the filmmaker acknowledges. “At the beginning of the film when Laura asks Sam, ‘Why would you recommend Becker?,’ he says, ‘I probably wouldn’t.’ You can’t read Becker without dealing with your own darkness! Are you up for that or not?”

Dunn recounts the childhood roots of her current career, describing her early affinity for the doc form: “Since I was a little girl, I was on a quest for the truth. I thought, ‘I’m going to document injustice, because if people see it, they’ll fix it.’ As you grow older, that lens becomes more complex.” 

To that point, as an adult Dunn found herself drawn into reading Becker more deeply, and soon, she recalls, “Becker was my companion through a very dark time. Becker is a wonderful comfort. If you look squarely at the truth, as painful as that moment is, on the other side is deep joy.”  

Dunn agrees with Sewell that “Illusions” should be seen as an intimate, casual introduction to Becker, since it was a film that Dunn recalls “started pretty small. We had been working on the idea of nature eclipsed by culture for quite a while.

“We started by looking at our own kids, at the presence of screens in childhood, and what it meant to be immersing them in the virtual world. We were very influenced by Richard Louv’s book ‘Last Child in the Woods,’ which talks about a ‘nature deficit disorder.’ This is the first generation so totally disconnected from the natural world.”

Malick and Redford got on board for their documentary about the denaturing of childhood, and Dunn cites Malick’s instincts to dig deeper into the ideas behind the documentary for the couple’s ultimate excursion into Becker. “Terry always says, ‘It’s not just the facts. Imagine the forces behind the facts.’ And when you start to ask, ‘Why do humans always seek to escape from reality?’— that’s where Becker enters the story.”

For Sewell, current events are a grim reminder of how clearly Becker saw the patterns of human behavior. “Since the terrible events in Gaza,” says Sewell, “I’ve been struck by Becker’s quote to Sam Keen: ‘We all need somebody to give us a sense of specialness, of special purity. Someone says, ‘Well, the enemy is just dirt, just an animal.’ All human degradation is based on the fact that a person tries to show that he whom he is degrading is less than human. Scapegoating, of course, has that as a mechanism. This is what is meant by Arthur Miller’s phrase, ‘Each man has his Jew…’ Everyone needs somebody to help him see that he is not a creature, someone he can pick on, someone he can humiliate.”

Sewell hopes that “Illusions” “helps develop a new interest in Becker” and points out that last December was the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Denial of Death” and this March marks the 50th anniversary of the tome’s Pulitzer win.

And lest one wonder about the couple’s truly total immersion in their work, Sewell helpfully notes that, “halfway through this film, we discovered Laura was pregnant at 45. Our youngest was already five. It was a complete shock. We named the boy Becker.” 

“Illusions Must Be Broken,” but life goes on. 

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