Ninety-Five Senses

I saw Ninety-Five Senses as part of the package of this year’s Academy Award-nominated animated short films shown in theaters.

A man is being interviewed. He seems like a more or less normal person, maybe a little more thoughtful, a little more reflective than the average person, maybe a little more judgmental—or at least apt to worry—than the average person about the younger generation and how the world is changing (e.g., what high volume screen time and the modern phone culture in general is doing to people).

He speaks of death; it’s clear that it’s a topic he has thought about a lot. He describes how, as we die, we lose our five senses one by one (no more smell once you stop breathing, etc.). He speculates—says he read it somewhere—that for all we know we really have as many as a hundred senses, but that we can only access and use five of them during our life. Perhaps the afterlife is when the other ninety-five or however many are activated, providing us an unimaginably different and richer experience than we’re used to in life.

Turns out he is a prisoner on death row, scheduled to die in the morning. He’s having his last meal; understandably it’s hard to enjoy it, hard to have much of an appetite, given the circumstances.

He speaks of his crime. He speaks of what life in prison is like. He speaks of how things could have been different if he had gotten onto a different track in life, and how very much he wishes that would have happened.

This film is consistently interesting and thoughtful from start to finish.

In reading briefly about it after the fact, I discovered that it was “inspired by” actual interviews with death row prisoners in Texas.

Though I give this film a clear thumbs up, I think, for my tastes, it would have hit me even harder, would have had even more meaning for me, had it been actual interview transcripts rather than just “inspired by” them. I prefer the real thing.

I wrote an oral history book, for instance, of interviews I did with prisoners at a maximum security prison, a non-fiction book, that is, where I presented the only quite minimally edited transcripts of the interviews. Had I instead written a book of fictional such interviews, or a short story of one fictional interview, that, to me, couldn’t possibly have had the same value.

I mean, if you want to know what prisoners on death row think about themselves and their crimes, how they express themselves, what’s on their mind in their last hours before execution, etc., wouldn’t you rather have the real thing? (Maybe the answer would be that a film (or book or whatever) doesn’t have to have value only as education, as providing information. I could see that. But I still say that knowing that the words I’m hearing came from an actual condemned man facing death would be considerably more powerful for me.)

Again, that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy Ninety-Five Senses, or don’t think it’s a good film. I did and I do.