Bringing Back the Dead: Human's Biggest Fear and Fascination

         When watching "Be Right Back" I immediately thought about the movie Practical Magic and the famous story of Frankenstein as well as a popular subplot in Buffy the Vampire Slayer People often think about the notion of being able to create life, or bring someone back to life; it is natural to consider the possibility, especially when we lose someone we love. However, it has never been done before and we worry about the consequences that could come with it. We see that in the portrayal of negative consequences and lack of control of the new 'created being' and the fear of what someone would be like if they came back to life, could they be normal? It is the ultimate unknown and thus an ultimate fear. These images show just a few different portrayals of death.

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'Be Right Back' theoretically looks at death from a different perspective, Ash-1 gains nothing from the existence of Ash-2, he is dead. The entire being of Ash-2 is made to exist for and by the grieving widow as a coping mechanism. In this way he has no relation to Ash-1, they never exist in the world at the same time. However, the problem with Ash-2 is that his creator has too much control over him-where he would jump off a cliff at her very word. She is angry when she realizes he has no memories or substance to him, but when she created him she knew it was a computer program. She pretended he was real (like when she was freaked out by his instant googling knowledge and told him not to do it). It only made it hurt more later on when the slight differences became enough that she could no longer pretend. 
          I understand where the people in class were coming from saying they would love to chat or have a phone call with a deceased loved one. However, it is not a phone call with the loved one, it's fake. There is no one real on the other line, just a 'voice' that sounds familiar. In the end I can see how it was too hard to tell something with your husbands face and voice to jump off a cliff, and so I get why she kept him. I also get why she kept him hidden. She was still pretending, but this time she pretended Ash-1 was the only Ash there ever was. Even his living arrangements-alone in the attic only visited on the weekends- are a reminder he is not human. Though it was a temporary fix to her grief, it ultimately made it even harder. I do not think I would take advantage of a program like this, even in its smallest form. It is not real and only encourages a state of delusion/denial. We may fear death, and wish it did not take our loved ones, but the truth is people die. Once they are gone they are gone, and trying to pretend anything else is true is exactly that-pretending. 

      Post writing discussion question/final thoughts: Does Be right back perfectly demonstrate the end of the Uncanny Valley? In the first ~12 hours she gets drunk and convinces herself he is the real Ash. Then when they get ready to go to sleep she tells him to close his eyes and breathe and then gets mad when she can tell he is faking sleep. At first she perceived him as being near the *healthy person* point on the graph, but soon she cannot ignore his inhuman qualities, and he falls lower, somewhere lower than the corpse on the humanoid robot line.