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ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DEATH
PROS
CONS
Putting an end to the suffering of the elderly
Depriving your children of your wisdom and experience
Finally getting the hell out of this sordid life
The most sordid thing about life is that it ends
Not having to suffer fools and fuglies
Missing the next few thousand seasons of Black Mirror
Refusing to become a vegetable
So many books to read and films to watch
Not being a burden to society
You paid social security and pension contributions, why feel guilty?
Why live if you can’t fuck anymore?
Viagra exists for men and women
Things were better in the past
Things will be better in the future
Free up space on an overpopulated planet
All we need to do is colonize Mars
I don’t understand the world anymore
It would be a pity not to be around to criticize the next few centuries
Suicide is beautiful
You can always kill yourself later
Living to be 300 would be a bore
No one has ever tried
Woody Allen was 80 when he directed Café Society
Not having to endure modern art
So many old masters still to see
It’s the end of the world anyway
It would be a pity to miss the show
PROS
CONS
Screwing the 72 virgins in paradise
What if there are only 71?
Not having to watch your kids get old
It would be a pity to miss the show
I’d have a beautiful funeral
I wouldn’t be there to see it
People would miss me …
… for about three days
You can die with dignity in Lausanne
But it’s a lot less fun than a donation to a sperm bank
After a certain age everyone is pretty much unfuckable
Four words: Clint, Eastwood, Sharon, Stone
Life is exhausting
Which means death is for slackers
No more bills and taxes to pay
Your kids pay death duties
No more lying about your age
No more birthday presents
Four words: Keith, Richards, Michel, Houellebecq
Avoiding family get-togethers (Christmas, New Year)
You’ll still see them on All Saints’ Day
People say nice things about you when you’re dead
You won’t get to read the obituaries
You can finally get some rest
A detox would be rest enough
In death, everyone is equal
Just vote communist
PROS
CONS
I wouldn’t have to put up with reality TV anymore
You can switch off the TV without switching off reality
No one should be obliged to live forever
Just because you don’t like life, don’t put others off
Death offers closure
Life is an opening
Without death, what would be the purpose of literature?
The only function of art is to celebrate beauty
It is death that makes every moment in life so precious
Who’s to say it wouldn’t be more precious if it was longer?
Millais’s painting of “Ophelia”
Mexican death heads
Père-Lachaise Cemetery
… it’s already full
“Death is a final solution” (Hitler)
It would make those who hate us happy
It would make those who love us sad
Without death, Goethe would not have written Faust and Oscar Wilde wouldn’t have written The Picture of Dorian Gray
Without immortality, the Sumerians wouldn’t have written Gilgamesh and Bram Stoker wouldn’t have written Dracula
Without death, what would be the point of the Panthéon?
Without life, what’s the point of the Académie Française?
It’s cool when shit people die
It’s shit when cool people die
Not ending up looking like Jeanne Calment
Not beating Jeanne Calment’s record (122 years, 5 months, 14 days)
It’s the ultimate detox, the apotheosis of rehab
… with a huge side order of FOMO
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SINCE THE DAWN of humanity, there have been approximately a hundred billion deaths. I’m not claiming that attaining immortality would be easy. I envy my daughters their age. They’ll see the twenty-second century. André Choulika, CEO of Cellectis (the leading French biopharmaceutical and genome engineering company) claims that babies born post-2009 will live to be a hundred and forty. I envy Lou. I am a selfish bastard refusing to give up my place. The work I do is ephemeral; I know all too well that what I do on television will be forgotten when I die. The only chance for me to carry on is to cling to life and to the screens, whether big or small. For as long as my image survives, people will remember. My death will sound the death knell of my work. I won’t simply be forgotten—worse, I’ll be replaced. It’s funny to see former TV presenters, feeling their fame threatened, rushing to perform in provincial theatres, hoping for a few last crumbs of glory, recounting their memoirs to half-asleep old biddies with purple rinses. They spend their lives interviewing artists and writers, then, when the merry-go-round stops, they want to be the ones getting standing ovations, but nobody wants to interview them, it’s too late, so they find themselves performing in a village hall in Romorantin, like tribute acts to Johnny Hallyday or Patrick Modiano. They want to shrug off the ephemeral for the permanent, to replace fleeting fame with something for posterity. The most upsetting case is Thierry Ardisson, the man who gave me a start in the industry. Thierry dreamed of being a writer, but nothing that he says is written by him: his comments, his jokes, and his questions are
all written by hacks. All Thierry Ardisson has done for the past thirty years is read words written by other people. It’s hardly surprising that he’s now obsessed with producing box sets of clips from his old shows—the frustrated novelist desperate for a place on your bookshelf. If I want to escape this dismal fate, I have to be immortalized for real. Physically, by which I mean, medically.
In a world where all men are mortal, an optimist is a charlatan.
The few real friends I had are dead now. Christophe Lambert, the CEO of EuropaCorp, killed by cancer at fifty-one. Jean-Luc Delarue, President of Reservoir Prod and my neighbour on the Rue Bonaparte, dead at forty-eight. Philippe Vecchi, his roommate, at fifty-three. Maurice G. Dantec, cyberpunk writer, dead at fifty-seven. Richard Descoings, Director of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, died from a heart attack at fifty-three. Frédéric Badré, founder of the literary magazine Ligne de Risque, dead from a neurodegenerative illness at fifty. Mix & Remix—real name Philip Becquelin—who illustrated my column in Lire, dead from pancreatic cancer at fifty-eight. They were all guests on my TV shows: they were great television, always ready to put themselves out there, never waffling. I remember Dantec lighting a firework with a page torn from the Bible and intoning: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”; Jean-Luc tearing his shirt off and throwing himself on the floor for a breakdancing lesson; Christophe miming a bullfight with Luc Besson, fingers pressed to his temples as horns, playing the bull; Philippe pogoing to “Should I Stay or Should I Go”; Richard winning an air-guitar competition; Frédéric imitating animal noises; the other Philippe drawing vagina dentata. They felt as though they had nothing to lose. A few months later, they lost everything. After fifty, death is no longer an abstract concept. I hate the insidious way it creeps closer with every medical check-up. It reminds me of the rain of arrows in The Revenant: you have to run, to zigzag like Leonardo DiCaprio to avoid the hissing downpour, burning and poisonous. I am zigzagging faster and faster. I long to stop, to rest for a while, but in order to rest, I need a new life, like in Call of Duty, where it only takes two clicks to come back to life after a shootout. Give me another few decades and I promise I’ll make better use of them. I’m still hungry. I want seconds, okay? Just a handful of seconds. A second life.
I’m in no hurry to become an orphan. I didn’t like the spectacle of my parents, the people who gave me life, lying in hospital beds, it felt somehow vulgar, predictable, like a bad reality-TV scene. Something told me I had to save them. I didn’t want to lose them; they were my human shields. Giving me life is not a crime that warrants the death penalty.
My father on crutches in a physiotherapy clinic at the Buttes-Chaumont, my mother lying in Cochin hospital, shattered after a fall: neither suspecting that they might end up alone. My parents’ brutal ends were twin advertisements for divorce and cardiovascular disease. They had lived apart for years, yet I foolishly imagined they would die together. For months, on the set of my TV shows, I pasted on a hideous smile—the grinning rictus of a bad actor off his face on coke—whenever the camera light turned red. It was around then that I started presenting charity phone-ins: Téléthon, Sidaction, the Concert against Cancer … I was offended to find myself grieving over an event as banal as my parents’ illnesses, to discover I had a heart capable of such a statistically conventional emotion. Over lunch at the Ritz, the cartoonist comic artist Sfar had warned me, “If you lose your parents when you’re ten, everyone comforts you, you’re suddenly an interesting person; if you lose them at fifty, no one pities you, that’s when you’re truly the loneliest orphan in the world.”
If I lost my parents, I knew that no one would ever take as much interest in me as they did. So my grief was just more narcissism. Grieving for one’s parents is grieving for one’s own fragility. I pleaded with the woman in make-up to hide my grief with concealer as I roared at the floor manager to drown out the applause for the warm-up man: “Good evening and welcome, mortal friends: this is not a programme, it’s a prescription!”
A threat looms over the populace of Europe; our peace of mind is transitory; we have learned to behave as though the chaos that exists between the Big Bang and the Apocalypse can be organized on our smartphones between two suicide attacks livestreamed on Periscope and a Snapchat of the plat du jour. Since birth, we’ve been repeatedly told we’ll come to a bad end. Before I started this investigation, I knew that a human being was a physical body, but not an agglomeration of a billion reprogrammable cells. I’d heard of stem cells, of genetic engineering, of regenerative medicine, but if science could not save my parents, what was the point of it? To save us, my wife, my daughters and me—the next names on the death list.
The epiphany came while I was doing a New Year show. As always, the show was pre-recorded, so that I could spend the holidays on Harbour Island. Surrounded by the Pink Paradise dancers and professional comedians, I pretended it was December 31, that I was waiting for midnight and the countdown—“Five! Four! Three! Two! One! HAAPPY NEW YEAAAARRRR FRANCE!”—when in fact we were celebrating at 7:00 p.m. on November 15 in an icy studio in Boulogne-Billancourt. We had to restart the countdown three times because the fucking balloons didn’t fall. As it turned out, that year, two of my guests died between recording and transmission. A singer with a drug problem and a gay comedian didn’t make it to New Year. Because of them, four hours of fake-live video had to be ditched: my producer lost two million euros (less my commission); viewing the rushes, it was clear the show couldn’t be broadcast, even if it was reedited—the dead comedian was camping it up in all the wide shots. All my guests were pissed off; the poor bastards had had to spend a bleak winter afternoon pretending to celebrate New Year’s Eve, in black tie and evening dresses, in return for zero Media Impact Score. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back: I was sick and tired of death ruining my life. This was the moment that I started to look more closely at advances in genetics.