Everyone has a different way of grieving, but how do we know when someone's way of grieving is just wrong? "Be Right Back" gives us an excellent example.
The way that Martha dealt with Ash's death is just wrong from the beginning. Grieving a person's death by talking to that person through generated technology based on all of their social networking is just wrong. First of all, doesn't it violate that person's privacy? How do we truly know that a person who is dead and gone would have been totally fine with giving all of their private information to an electronic program that would attempt to bring that person consciously back to life? Second, wouldn't going through all of that just defeat the whole purpose of getting over that person's death? When you grieve someone's death, you don't do so by completely getting over them, but you don't do so by trying to bring them back to life either! Martha took the program as far as she could go with it. She got overly attached to a system that would only make her feel good. Ash 1 obviously said things that were sarcastic and rude the whole time he was alive. The system was able to do that to an extent, but once she got a man made person to try to imitate Ash 1, she became frustrated and disappointed that he couldn't imitate Ash 1's emotions and normal actions in a surreal way. Another way that we can tell that the way Martha grieved Ash's death is wrong is by the way she got attached. After using this program for a while, she became obsessed with it. When she went to the doctor and dropped her phone while talking to Ash 2, she got very emotional and said "I dropped you" like she had ruined her most prized possession. Obviously it wasn't that serious. The Ash that Martha was talking to was a program that used his social media to sound like him. Martha wasn't actually talking to him, but she felt like she was, so she thought it was important to spend a great deal of her time talking to a computer version of her dead boyfriend. In what way is that grieving? Overall, the program that Martha used made the grieving process worse for her. This is because she got attached to the program, and it made her madly insane. Maybe if she had used it one time and then moved on to something such as focusing on her work or preparing herself to have a child, then the program wouldn't have such a negative vibe when it's discussed, but Martha went to the extreme and tried to get over her boyfriend's death in a way that was just wrong.
2 comments:
Jasmine, I totally agree with you! The program really disrupted Martha's grieving process and prevented her from learning to live without Ash in her life. She shouldn't have gotten so attached to Ash 2 to where it can alter her level of sanity. I believe that one last call with a loved one is acceptable, but taking it so far as to make a somewhat clone of Ash is a completely unhealthy way to grieve.
Jasmine, I mostly agree with the part where you said she got too attached. It really is a sense of irony that when Ash 1 was alive, Martha hated the fact that he devoted so much of his time to his phone and electronics, but when he died she became the very thing she detested. She began spending her whole day on her phone or computer or with a man-bot version of Ash. None of these were healthy when she became so attached that she developed intimate emotions for machinery as if it was actually Ash.
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