“I’m not afraid of death…I am afraid of murder.” Watching this scene this morning, hearing those two sentences this morning, made me cry. Not because we’ve lost Gene Hackman, sad though that is, especially given the loss of his wife, musician Betsy Arakawa. I cried because I feel the same way, especially now.

We live in a time when people like the Director, Mark, and Amy — vicious, unscrupulous, driven by the will to power — are engineering death on a colossal scale. Ending vital healthcare programs at home and abroad. Tormenting trans people with the end goal of their erasure from public life, and life itself. Targeting immigrants, documented and undocumented, with deportation either to countries that will kill them or American concentration camps where no one knows what is happening. Pardoning traitors, insurrectionists, fascist militiamen, pedophiles. Ushering open Nazis into the highest levels of government. Aiding genocidal authoritarians around the globe with the goal of copying their playbook here at home. 

I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder. I am afraid of murderers. I am afraid of their minds, which aren’t minds as you and I know them at all, which are masses of gray sludge in which there is no joy or beauty to be found but in the suffering of others. I am afraid of their powers of surveillance and their willingness to use illegal and lethal methods to enforce the conclusions they draw from what they hear. They’d kill us if they got the chance.

In honor of Gene Hackman, I wrote about his performance in the dream sequence from The Conversation and why it haunts me for Decider.

Tags: gene hackman, movie reviews, movies, real life, the conversation

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