Having finally escaped Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school, Elwood and Turner glide their bike through the barren Florida landscape, riding a road that seemingly carves out their path to freedom. It’s a fleeting moment of catharsis, in a film that at times evokes claustrophobia.  Yet, at the apex of this emotional arc, as the two boys rejoice in their escape, they are caught and Elwood is shot. What follows can only be described as emotional whiplash. Through a montage, it’s revealed that following his death, Turner changes his name to Elwood in an attempt to honor his friend, and through the use of created stills, archival footage, and home video director RaMell Ross sketches out the next 20 or so years of Turner’s life. Artefacts of his life flash across the screen: drivers license and ID cards bearing Elwood, now Turner’s name, a keen reminder of not only what has happened since the boy’s death, but also what could have been. Evidence of a life that was never lived. 

Most films, due to the sheer brevity of their runtime, fail to capture the grief of death, what it means to be perpetually reminded of the absence of someone who is no longer there. The depiction of grief is difficult, in that it often clashes with narrative momentum, so then how does Ross show death in a medium where death itself is so meaningless?

The camera preserves time. It may not always present us with a clear picture of our existence, but it at the very least alludes to it, providing us with a spark that can help reconjure lived moments, memories and feelings. ID cards, birth certificates and various other government paraphernalia all provided evidence of this. They’re our proof of life per se, evidence that we once lived and tread this Earth. Yet, the tragedy of course is that these artefacts are false. The man in the photograph at the top left corner of Elwood’s ID card is not Elwood all grown up, we’ll never really know who he’ll look like, what kind of man he’ll turn out to be. There are no photos of him as an adult, just polaroids that will never develop. 

Ultimately, there’s very little about Elwood that’s very special. The viewer of the film is made especially aware of this and the fact that there’s nothing particularly unique about Nickel Academy either, as Turner notes “there are thousands of places just like this.” Therefore, the reason these last moments are so special is because they portray loss so intently.  The emotional whiplash, between this fleeting moment of freedom to grief, is the catalyst for what makes this scene so special. Ross, in invoking these mundane, artefacts of our lives: birth certificates, drivers license, and newspapers, captures what it means for a life to not be lived; for a life to be stolen away. 

The first image we see, after Turner witnesses his friend's death, is of him running. Ross breaks the first person perspective of the film, and switches to the third person. The camera, strapped to his back, omnisciently follows Elwood as he runs across the field. His breaths are heavy, he’s both running away from the men who tried to kill him and his past, burying away a trauma that will only begin to be unearthed years later. Day turns into night, he keeps running. Grief and panic perpetually follow him. The camera follows him.  In the flash forwards into Turner’s life we maintain this perspective. The camera is grief and trauma, and it stays with you into adolescence. 

An out of focus POV shot of Elwood turning his head up. Harper, out of focus, inspects his dead body. The lens blurs and distorts as Elwood takes his final breaths. Ross’s use of a unique first person perspective gives us a chance to experience Elwood’s last moments in this world, rather than merely witnessing them.

These images beautifully collide with archival footage of a NASA shuttle blasting off into space, the camera, locked on to the rocket ship, calmingly gently rotates in space, backgrounded by the Earth. There’s a serenity to the image, the transition from the physical world to space as a representation of the transition between life and death. Yet, space travel has never been cheap, each cent spent on space travel is one that is taken away from country’s disenfranchised. Images of grandeur can be blinding, when we look up to the stars we forget about the horror that lies below. The real trauma and abuse suffered by the many victims of the Dozier School, which only closed in 2011, or the victims of police brutality and Jim Crow, whose lives and deaths have been forgotten, for example.

But space is also an escape, perhaps even more so for an optimist like Elwood, whose view of the world has been so specifically molded by the civil rights movement and the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early in the film, he’s entrenched by early efforts to explore the moon. He lies on his floor, head tilted up towards the balloon in his hand, which moves to and away from the ceiling floor (perhaps like the Sun and the Earth?), and angles his head towards the TV screen which broadcasts footage of the lunar crater Copernicus. Space is a boundless expanse, space is hope, but only for those who have been grounded enough to feel hopeless. 

In the background of the image lies Earth, the most recognizable symbol of all. Our home. When contextualized amidst the symbolic gestures towards Turner later on: the ID cards, the birth certificates, the newspaper clippings, Ross seems to juxtapose the Earth, a macro symbol of humankind and of society, with the most microscopic, the individual, the smallest element of our society in a way that motions towards our unique individual value to our home planet and the value of a single human life . 

The dead boys of Nickel and the real-life Dozier School Academy are, of course, anonymous. Their graves are unmarked, their lives mere afterthoughts. Later images in the montage show just as much, unmarked graves, decomposed bodies, and skeletons. In one image, Ross interweaves real news footage of a report which categorizes the remains of the dead bodies, only recognizable by a series of probabilistic likelihoods, likelihoods so vast and general as to say little to nothing about them at all. Their ages lie within broad ranges, 13-18, 14-16, 9-12, and, for many, their bodies have been decomposed to the point where their gender and race are simply labelled as “indeterminate,” their personhood a secret that will forever be unknown. All that remains is the skeletons of boys who have been missing for so long we’ve forgotten about their names. Their lives and bodies only exist somewhere in the boundless, untethered ether of space.

In one archival shot, filmed in grainy 16mm, the camera travels upwards, on a rollercoaster, slowly edging its way up to the top. A few moments later, Turner, shot from above in third person, leans in to hug Elwood’s mom. The camera, shooting from above, leans downwards, like a rollercoaster about to descend down from its peak. For those with relatives who will forever be “missing,” the image represents the uncertainty of grief, for others it gestured towards the constant feeling of always teetering towards the edge. As Elwood’s grandmother hugs Turner, the camera’s tilt reveals the hollow halls of her house, which will now be forever empty. Absence echoes in the spaces our loved ones once filled.