Flatliners (1990) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Is today a good day to die? You decide, or Kiefer Sutherland will choose for you.

Flatliners deals with what happens when people decide to play gods. As with many science-horror films, the stakes are high when meddling with the balance of life and death.

First Impressions

The narrator of this trailer lets the viewer know that some lines shouldn’t be crossed. A number of doctors, or med students kill themselves but manage to bring themselves back. It’s the brat pack meets ER in this moody trailer featuring a lot of people running, screaming, panicking, and laughing maniacally. All the hot young stars of the day appear in Flatliners.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At a Chicago medical school, med student Nelson (Kiefer Sutherland) says to himself that “today is a good day to die,” as he attempts to convince four other fellow students to help him in an experiment. Joe Hurley (William Baldwin) and Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) are in, but Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts) wants nothing to do with it. Needing at least one more pair of hands, he approaches top-honors student David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), who has just been expelled for doing surgery on a patient before he’s licensed. Nelson asks David to assist him in dying so he can come back with the answers about death, life. He declines.

That night at an under-construction portion of the campus, the three prepare a makeshift operating theater with devices taken from other parts of the school. Rachel and David both show up late, deciding they too want to be part of this experiment. Nelson is clinically dead for one minute as the others work to bring him back. He experiences visions from his childhood of Billy Mahoney (Joshua Rudoy). Afterwards parts of these visions seep into his waking life, including seeing his injured dog and a young boy attacking him. Joe and Rachel bid for how long the next person should die for. Joe wins.

After coming back, Joe uses his experience to pick up a woman who also had a near-death experience. He stops short of sleeping with her as he begins to have visions of all the women he has slept with, which includes seeing footage on monitors of the secret sex tapes he made of them. On Halloween night David is the next one to go under. Nelson, feeling some anger at David and Rachel’s burgeoning relationship begins to goof around while trying to bring him back. He lays dead for nearly four minutes.

Rachel is the next one to experience death, but David forces the group to bring her back sooner than her allotted time. Unfortunately, a fuse blows, and they must use manual methods of resuscitation to get her breathing again. She experiences a vision of her father shooting himself in his truck. David explains he is pissed at Nelson for not warning them of the consequences of their actions, which David has recently experienced first hand. Each person has experienced an element from their past, manifest in their present. For David, it was a young girl that he teased mercilessly in elementary school. David and Rachel continue getting closer. Joe returns to his apartment, solicited by women using his pick-up lines. Inside he sees his actual fiancée (Hope Davis) who breaks up with him after seeing his collection of sex tapes and realizing what a jerk he really is.

Meanwhile, David feels guilt from his visions and contacts Winnie (Kimberly Scott), the young girl from his past, who is now an adult and a mother. He apologizes for his past actions and seeks her forgiveness, which she happily offers him. David says a weight has been lifted from him and he sees no further visions, while Nelson–thinking David’s touchy-feely approach is a load of bunk, is again attacked by Billy Mahoney. Eventually, Joe and Randy go with Nelson to help find Billy, but they end up in a cemetery, learning that Nelson killed the young boy accidentally when he was nine.

Rachel continues to be haunted by the visions of her father, but after sleeping with David, she manages to see through the veil of guilt, and realizes he was an IV drug user, and his death was not her fault. Also seeing a truth, Nelson calls Rachel to apologize, and she realizes that he plans to flatline without the others there in hopes to atone for his sins. The four friends race to the lab and attempt to revive Nelson, who has been dead for almost 10 minutes. In his afterlife vision, young Nelson is attacked in a tree by Billy, having swapped places. David fights to bring Nelson back, and spirit Billy appears to forgive adult Nelson. He awakens groggily, whispering that “today was not a good day to die.”

“I did not come to medical school to murder my classmates, no matter how deranged they might be.” – Randy Steckle

History in the Making

Flatliners is neither a true science-fiction film or a pure horror film, yet falls somewhere in between on the spectrum. It was directed by Joel Schumacher who had visited both genres previously. First with the comedic sci-fi film The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and later the scary teenage vampire flick The Lost Boys. It reunites him with Kiefer Sutherland, who played lead vampire David in The Lost Boys, and brings together a host of the hottest young actors of the time. Julia Roberts was just coming off her successful breakout role in Pretty Woman. Kevin Bacon already had a string of hits including Footloose, and the cult-classic Tremors. Oliver Platt and William Baldwin were both up and coming actors, with William being brother to Hollywood star Alec Baldwin. It wasn’t quite the Brat Pack of films like St. Elmo’s Fire or The Breakfast Club, but it was definitely a draw for audiences to see so many popular, young stars together.

It also seems to have some relation to the first short story published by Jack London, called “A Thousand Deaths.” The writer is listed as Peter Filardi, who also wrote the horror film, The Craft, and London is not credited in any way. But the basic similarities of the two stories is pretty unmistakable. In London’s story a sailor is brought back to life by his father via an apparatus to stimulate life. This story was turned into a film in 1939 called Torture Ship, which retold that London story closely. Of course, the reanimation of dead bodies is nothing new to the realms of either sci-fi or horror, being the basis for the classic Frankenstein story, as well as many others. And in this case, the roots of this particular film seem to lie in much more recent tales.

Genre-fication

Flatliners has more in common with at least two recent sci-fi/horror films than 90-plus year old stories. 1980s Altered States and 1983s Brainstorm both serve as thematic inspirations for the elements within this story. In the first film, Altered States, William Hurt’s scientist character is attempting to unlock the secrets of genetic memory through the use of drugs and sensory deprivation. He meddles with some of the elementary building blocks of life and ends up paying a high price. Flatliners uses some of the same fast and loose mad science that is common in these types of films. Characters choose to experiment on themselves rather than going down the proper and ethical avenue of experimentation and clinical trials. Brainstorm, on the other hand, is more of a science-fiction story, where the researchers are creating a way to record the actual inputs to the brain and play them back. This process, like virtual reality, would create a real experience of whatever the original person experienced. When one of the scientists dies while hooked up to the apparatus, the playback induces any other person to also experience near-death symptoms, and potentially die. This flirtation with death and the state of being after death was potentially the biggest influence on the themes and plot of Flatliners.

The film was one of three films released in 1990 that dealt with death, and the experiences surrounding it. Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost were the other two. All three of these movies show either the deceased, or elements of the afterlife being able to affect the people in the real world. Ghost takes a little more romantic version of this premise, with Patrick Swayze’s character returning to his girlfriend to help her move on with her life, as well as find his killer. While Jacob’s Ladder is a scarier afterlife story with similar elements to Flatliners. In that film, the horrors of the afterlife intrude on a man’s life who is not yet ready to die. He too must figure out what these visions mean in order to get some peace in his (after) life. And while Flatliners is not as scary as Jacob’s Ladder, in terms of tone or shocking moments, both films address the need for understanding one’s life in order to be at peace with one’s death.

Societal Commentary

Death. It’s the one thing that we all have in common. At some point, it comes for everyone. Flatliners presents the 20-something characters flippantly courting that eternal rest, believing that because they are young and have training in medicine, they can avoid dying for real. The hubris, especially of Nelson, is one of the more scary aspects in the film. Sutherland plays him with such self-assured cockiness that audiences wonder exactly how far he is willing to go. During David’s turn at flatlining, Nelson shows that he is ethically unsound as both a doctor and a friend as he jokes around, delaying returning David to the land of the living. In the end, his last decision is to still ignore his friends and attempt to fix his mistakes by himself. But his friends show more compassion, racing to his side, and saving him from yet another even more costly mistake.

Thematically the film externalizes some psychological aspects of humanity to show how guilt can poison our lives and atonement can save us. For those students that experienced their own deaths, a past guilt comes back to haunt them in very real, and dangerous ways. Rachel is only haunted by her father, due to the shorter amount of time she was under. But David, Joe, and especially Nelson all experienced physical manifestations of their past guilt. Nelson was literally beating himself up over the death of Billy Mahoney. With David hypothesizing that talking to the actual person behind his manifestation, he realizes that asking for forgiveness, and owning up to his sin, can be the first step in completing the healing process. David’s process was the easiest since he could talk to the person he had injured. Rachel had to understand that she did not know her father as well as she thought, believing she was at fault for his suicide. Joe didn’t necessarily process his issues on his own. He was forced to confront his past when his fiancée dumped him, citing his lack of respect for women. For Joe, this seems to have the same effect overall as confronting the past transgression. It’s just that he was forced to confront the problem, rather than choosing to. Nelson too was forced to confront his own failings, even though he wanted to sacrifice himself for his guilt, rather than work through it. As mentioned above, his friends come to his rescue to pull him back from the brink, which coincidentally synchronizes with Billy forgiving him.

The Science in The Fiction

The one thing that becomes evident from this film is that the American medical institution that trained these students failed them. Perhaps that’s why no actual University is named in the production. These med students have obviously never heard of the hippocratic oath and must have failed their ethics classes. The cockiness and disregard for the rules (that apply to others, but not them) is on display from the beginning of the film. David, a resident, begins to operate on a woman brought into the hospital even though he is not yet a doctor. He saves her life, but that is beside the point, and he is suspended. He believes he is better than others, as does Nelson. The group leader thinks that it’s okay to kill yourself (and your fellow students) and bring them back to life, as long as you can get famous by discovering something amazing about the afterlife. This is the “mad science” characterization at peak power.

Like Victor Frankenstein, Henry Jekyll, or Jack Griffin from The Invisible Man, the mania from Nelson, particularly, forces the others to make choices that they might not normally make. The morbid business with bidding on the amount of time that they die and risk brain damage seems like a game to them, even though they are risking serious repercussions. Those repercussions are not just physical. They risk expulsion from the school as well as having any license they may have revoked. But in most cases they would not ever graduate to even have a medical degree.

The Final Frontier

One of the more interesting and cinematic aspects of the film is its lighting scheme. Flatliners was shot by Jan de Bont, noted Dutch cinematographer from films like Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. This was one of last gigs before he became a director for noted action films like Speed and Twister. His design included the use of blue, red, and orange lighting gels to create a series of settings reminiscent of heaven and hell. Scenes like Nelson descending stairs into the subway from a blue to red lighting schema created his metaphorical descent into hell. Or Rachel being lit with a strong red light every time her father ”visits” her. That is until they are able to reconcile when she learns the truth about his drug addiction. The lighting changes to a warm, orange sunset indicating the acceptance and embrace of her father.

Schumacher also uses visual motifs of gods and other Greek mythological elements. Giant statuary and paintings adorn the workspace where the students set up their operating theater, linking their experiments with the mythological Gods of old, who played fast and loose with human life. To be even more blunt, the final shot of the film focuses on a painting of Prometheus stealing fire from the heavens. Literally stealing the creation of the Gods for use by humans. A pretty blatant image to drive home the point that these kids were messing around with things that they shouldn’t.

Flatliners was one of the “old” films that was tapped to be remade recently, in 2017. The 2010s featured a lot of remakes of films from the 80s and 90s that may or may not have needed it. These remakes mostly suffered from not needing to be remade and not adding much to the film that wasn’t already in the original. Be that as it may, a newer version exists with new actors and a guest appearance from Kiefer Sutherland as well. Overall, the original version of Flatliners is a tense film that keeps audiences guessing as to what is going on and who might survive. It doesn’t have the graphic gore of other horror films from its time, or the overt jump scares. But it provides a moderately good element of suspense and uneasiness that will keep audiences on edge.

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