Michele Aaron makes intriguing pragmatic and theoretical choices in cataloging the on-screen presence of death. She breaks her work into three sections, each of which deals with a separate temporal aspect of on-screen death: before, during, and after. Doing so underscores the ways in which narrative attention and power shift from the individual who sits on the cusp of death or is wrapped in dread of it to those who observe the death of another – and live to speak of and respond to it. This turn to surviving characters and the cinematic audience gestures toward Aaron's earlier work on spectatorship while building on the collection of essays she edited, Envisaging Death: Dying and Visual Culture, that was published last year.

In Death and the Moving Image, Aaron is interested not in gory or spectacular cinematic deaths, but rather in the more ordinary deaths that might seduce viewers into thinking them accurate representations of death in everyday life. Ordinary deaths are “far more potent as indicators of the distancing devices that surround death's place in mainstream cinema and of the wider cultural needs such devices serve or betray” (4). Ordinary cinematic deaths make clear, through their valuation of one life over another, the cultural hierarchies that are still in play. The pretense of verisimilitude masks how narrow and Western-centric a view is offered – though one might argue that the same could be said of love or autonomy as well as death – and makes it easier for those producing the movie to shape the audience's expectations about what death can and should be like in real life. To make her case, Aaron weaves together Hollywood films and global cinema; her range of titles speaks, importantly, to the relation of the Hollywood machine to a much larger world of cinematic production and consumption. In attempting to point toward ways in which cinema can “do death differently,” however, she is reluctant to lose sight of the influence of mass media and popular forms, so her work points to the reinvention of Hollywood rather than offering a damning critique of mainstream film (12).

Aaron does well to move away from trauma studies and psychoanalysis to lay claim to cinema's particular advantage in studies of death: its interaction with society, both psychological and aesthetic, and “their codependence” (3). She draws on historical work by Philippe Ariès and others that traces how modern mourning practices engender the displacement of loss, and she argues that such displacements make clear the role of cinema, “which trades more than most on the diversionary promises of lavish fantasy” (2). Particularly strong are her juxtapositions of chapters in order to reassess and refine earlier territory and to place Hollywood and global cinema in conversation with one another. After establishing in her opening chapter the prominence of self-endangerment in action films, a study of portrayals of suicide enables her to argue that “dutiful self-endangerment always slips into suicidal or gratuitous recklessness” before returning by the end of the film to professional self-endangerment: “Heroic self-risk, it would seem, cannot exist without reference to its shadow” (31, original emphasis).

The theoretically oriented sixth chapter, “Watching Others Die: Spectatorship, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Being Moved,” is both astute in its own right and a launching pad for the final part of the study, which has the most promise and yet is given the least attention. In Part Three, “After: Responding to Death,” Aaron begins to make good on her bid to show how cinema can “do something different” with death (182). Her determination to leave behind “sensationalism, sentimentality, and the status quo” (182) in her final section, on the effects of death, is hampered by her wariness of entering into the terrain of trauma studies. Her consideration of Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is an eloquent investigation of representations of the voices of the dead and the mourners, but it serves as a coda, whereas a more robust investigation of speaking after death would have made this work an even more formidable challenge to contemporary critical modes of interpreting death.