Thirteen Reasons Why and Ben X: Stories of Hope and Suicide

Because I’m me, I kept thinking of an obscure Belgian movie, Ben X, while I was reading/listening to Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why. The novel begins with high schooler Clay Jensen receiving a package with no return address. Inside it is a series of tapes that Hannah Baker recorded shortly before committing suicide. The tapes promise to detail who and what led her to that decision. The “reasons” of the title refer to the thirteen people addressed on Hannah’s tapes, and her instructions are that once you have finished listening, you have to send them on to the next “reason”; if you don’t, a second copy of the tapes will be released publicly.

Thirteen Reasons Why follows Clay around town as he listens and reacts to the tapes. The novel is formatted with Pause and Play buttons in the text to show when the perspective switches from Hannah’s recorded voice to Clay’s first-person narration; the audio book uses separate voice actors for Hannah and Clay, which makes the transitions even easier to follow.

The novel reveals Hannah’s death one the very first page, but as I progressed through the story, I kept having doubts as to whether she was really dead. First, she didn’t have a funeral and it wasn’t clear who or how many people had seen her body. Second, Thirteen Reasons Why is a young adult book, and even with violent series like The Hunger Games and the Maze Runner trilogy out there, having a suicidal protagonist who actually goes through with her plan seemed too dark for a YA publisher to want to touch. The third reason is the obscure Belgian movie Ben X (available on Netflix streaming).

The protagonist of Ben X has Asberger’s Syndrome, which makes it difficult for him to interact with the world around him. The constant bullying he endures at school doesn’t help, either. To help himself cope with the real world, Ben views it through the lens of ArchLord, the online role-playing game he plays at home. He brings up an overworld map to navigate from home to the bus to school; he sees his bullies as monstrous ogres and imagines chopping of their heads.

(Note: Ben X is not related in any way to the similarly-named cartoon series Ben 10. Ben X is the name Ben uses for his ArchLord avatar; it also means “I am nothing” in Dutch gaming slang.) 

The torment from Ben’s bullies and the inability or unwillingness of his family and teachers to do anything to help him pushes Ben to contemplate suicide. Before he can follow through with his plans, though, he receives a message from Scarlite, his frequent partner on ArchLord missions, saying she is worried about him and wants to meet in real life.

(The rest of this post is going to have several major spoilers for both Thirteen Reasons Why and Ben X.)

Instead of merely trying to talk him out of his plans, real-world Scarlite tells Ben his “Endgame” is weak. He needs to find a way to make everyone feel the pain that’s driving him to suicide. And this is where Ben X and Thirteen Reasons Why really converged for me, because Hannah’s goal in recording and distributing her tapes is to see and confront what they did (and didn’t do) to her.

Together with his family, Ben and Scarlite concoct a plan to stage his suicide and record it on video. That video, along with footage of Ben being humiliated at school and interviews with his parents and teachers, are played at Ben’s funeral. Ben is hiding in the balcony, and when Scarlite finally convinces him to stand up and reveals himself, the light from the projector behind him appears to give him angel wings.

To use the language of video games, Ben’s life ended when he died on the screen, and now he can restart with a new life.

I kept waiting for a similar twist in Thirteen Reasons Why. I thought the final instructions on the last tape would lead Clay Jensen to the spot where Hannah has been hiding out while the tapes pass from one of her “reasons” to the next, and she would get to confront the people who have hurt and failed her.

But that doesn’t happen. Unlike Ben, Hannah does not get a triumphant resurrection scene. She is really dead, and has been through the whole novel. Thirteen Reasons Why does not end on a completely dark note, however. In the final scene, Clay notices a girl named Skye whom he knew in middle school but has ignored for years. With Hannah’s voice still fresh in his memory, he decides to talk to Skye and see if she’s okay, because even though it’s too late for him to save Hannah, he might be just in time for Skye.

And while the ending of Ben X is hopeful, the story behind it is tragic. Writer/director Nic Balthazar adapted his novel Nothing Was All He Said for the movie, and in an interview, he explained that he had been inspired by reading a newspaper story about an autistic boy who committed suicide in Balthazar’s hometown of Ghent. In his suicide note, the boy said he had been bullied to death. 

Suicide Club and Noriko's Dinner Table: Big Picture vs. Intimate Characters

Note: This post reveals spoiler-type points about the movies and books it discusses.

Noriko’s Dinner Table has been on my Netflix radar for a while now, and I even started watching it once before, but I gave up after I figured out it’s the sequel to a movie I hadn’t yet seen (Suicide Club). I was browsing through my Netflix Instant queue (I don't get DVDs from the right now) the other day, saw that Noriko was going to disappear at the end of June, and decided I wanted to give it another try.

Luckily, Suicide Club was available for a cheap online rental on Amazon, so I watched it last night and Noriko this afternoon. One thing that struck me is that, even though both movies look similar visually and fit together nicely, they are very different in several ways. The first is in tone: Suicide Club is a horror movie, quite gory in a few scenes and genuinely disturbing in several more; Noriko mostly sidesteps the horror tropes, and ends up feeling like more of a dysfunctional family drama.

Another major difference is how each movie tells its story: Suicide Club is much more image- and event-driven, while Noriko relies (too much, in some places) on voiceover narration. At times, it feels more like an illustrated novel than a movie.

Along with that, there’s a marked difference in how characters are used in each movie, and as a result, the scope that they try to cover. Suicide Club’s opening scene (and the sequence at the center of both movies) shows numerous Japanese high school girls lining up along the tracks at a train station. As a train pulls in, the girls (54 of them) jump onto the tracks and are killed, with accompanying explosions of blood. 

In contrast, Noriko begins in a similar location, but instead of a grisly tableau, we listen to the teenaged title character explain that she has run away to Tokyo.

As Suicide Club continues, the original mass train suicide seems to set off an epidemic, with several scenes of Japanese people (mostly young people) killing themselves, sometimes with a group, other times individually. Each soon-to-be dead character only gets a scene or two before they die, making it difficult, first, to understand why they want to die, and second, to identify with the characters on a personal level. Thus, the focus of these scenes focuses more on the phenomenon of suicide than with the characters who are dying.

Noriko, on the other hand, indulges in extended backstory sequences explaining where Noriko and her family live, and how and why she decides to leave her hometown and run away to Tokyo. She has connected with a group of girls on an online message board, and all of these girls live in the big city; thus, Noriko believes she will not be lonely if she can meet them in real life. If you pay attention, you’ll recognize that the website Noriko frequents also plays an important role in Suicide Club, but other than that, the two movies don’t feel very closely connected early on.

(SPOILERS in the next paragraph)

Gradually, we come to learn that the Noriko’s message board friends are also responsible for the mass suicide at the train station (and other events before and after it), and we see how the characters we have come to know are part of a larger movement. Suicide Club does the opposite, focusing on the events of the movement without revealing who is behind them until late in the film, and even then, it’s really hard to figure out why they are committing these acts of destruction.

The only other example I can think of where the same creator (Shion Sono wrote and directed Suicide Club and Noriko’s Dinner Table) used such different storytelling modes in the same overall work is Jose Saramago’s novels Blindness and Seeing. In Blindness, we follow a small group of individuals struggling to survive after an epidemic of blindness has left everyone (except for one character) unable to see. Seeing picks up the story after (SPOILER) humanity has regained its sight, and is working to put society back together. Most of its scenes are set in boardrooms and offices where high-powered archetypes discuss everything that has happened.

The Noriko/Blindness approach to a story is more common these days (The Hunger Games novels are another example, as are most YA novels), I think because it’s much harder to get readers and viewers to invest in a story if they don’t care about the people in it. Action movies tend to focus more on events than characters, but even then, audiences are usually given an identifiable protagonist (like Sam Witwicky in the Transformers movies).

I’m not sure which mode I prefer. I tend to fall more on the character side, but in the case of Suicide Club and Noriko’s Dinner Table, I think Suicide Club is a better movie. Not having a central character gives each scene a palpable sense of danger, because you’re never sure if a given character is going to survive his or her next scene. And in a horror movie, that’s a major asset. At the same time, though, the emotional payoff in Noriko is more immediate, first because it’s much easier to understand what’s going on, and second because we have invested a significant amount of time with the central characters.

Personally, though, I found myself more in the grip of the anything-could-happen existential crazypants of Suicide Club. It was more than the challenge of trying to piece together a coherent narrative, too; the central character void allowed me to enter the psychological space of the story in a way that I could not have if a traditional protagonist were embodying those feelings and showing me how they react to them.