Kirsten Johnson’s film Cameraperson, which finished #5 in the 2016 Skandies, is the only Skandies movie from 1996 to 2020 that I watched any part of but didn’t give a score.  I’ll watch documen­taries if they have a narrative through line, but Cameraperson didn’t⁠—it was a compendium of outtakes from an assortment of documentaries for which Kirsten Johnson served as cinemato­grapher.  I couldn’t make heads or tails of it and shut it off after half an hour.  And I will confess that her follow-up, Dick Johnson Is Dead, did have sequences that tried my patience.  But most of the movie was accessible enough that when I encountered these sequences, I hit fast forward instead of stop.

The Dick Johnson of the title is Kirsten Johnson’s father; when the movie starts, he’s eighty-five.  His wife, Kirsten’s mother, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2000 and died in 2007, though both Johnsons agree that they lost her long before her vital signs gave out.  Now Dick has started to show signs of de­mentia himself.  He and his daughter have a close relationship, and so not only does she move him out from Seattle, where he was still a practicing psychiatrist, to her one-bedroom apartment in New York, but being a filmmaker, she decides to eulogize him with this film⁠—and since he still has most of his marbles at this stage, he can actively participate in the making of it.  Dick John­son is a good-humored fellow and is generally happy to go along with the premise: Kirsten will film him meeting his demise in all sorts of different ways (an air conditioner falls on him, he takes a lethal tumble down the stairs, he gets stabbed in the neck, he gets raptured, etc.), and then to be doubly meta, the film will also show how all the very basic special effects involved worked (hey, that was just a stuntman! the blood came from a pack taped to his body!).  There are also a bunch of “masque in heaven” se­quences and these featured heavily among the ones I skipped.  The real life scenes were worth the time investment, though.

Probably the bit that most hit home for me was the revelation that Dick Johnson had had a heart attack at age fifty-five, but got to enjoy an extra thirty years after a double bypass.  As it hap­pens, I hit one of those life milestones you don’t want to hit just a few days ago.  As I have mentioned in the occasional minutiae post as far back as 2007, one of the reasons I have tried to keep my weight down is that every time it creeps even into the upper half of the normal range, my blood tests come back flagged for high cholesterol.  So I’ve fallen into a pattern of getting a high LDL number, losing ten pounds, retesting, getting a normal LDL number, regaining the ten pounds over the course of a few years, getting a high LDL number, repeat.  But it seems that I have reached the age at which diet isn’t cutting it anymore, and I got an LDL reading that came in above the “Very High” range.  Ap­parently genetics play a role here⁠—I have enough South Asian ancestry for it to count as a risk factor, and the numbers just don’t match what would be expected given my lifestyle (having spent my entire adult life as a vegetarian non-smoker and all that).  According to the formula my health care provider uses, without medical intervention, my chance of a fatal heart attack or stroke in the next ten years (which would include age fifty-five, when Dick Johnson had his heart attack) was 5.3%.  And so I am now on a statin and apparently will be for the rest of my life.  In the future, when doctors ask whether I’m on any medication, I will no longer be able to say “no” with that tone of cheerful dis­belief that you’d even feel the need to ask.

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