Summary
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever takes a dangerously uncritical approach to an obviously mad science experiment.
I hate Bryan Johnson. Not that I’ve ever met him, obviously. Never spoken to him either. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t know much about him beyond what is presented in the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. But that seems like enough for me. The title alone gives it away – anyone who wants to live forever simply cannot be trusted. But perhaps it’d be more accurate — and a little fairer — to say I hate everything Bryan Johnson stands for and promotes.
It seems like a bit of a joke that this feature-length documentary from Chris Smith aired on New Year’s Day, since it’s capitalizing on the annual influx of people wanting to better themselves and their health but also showing them the posterchild for how obsession with one’s health isn’t all that healthy. Bryan Johnson is essentially an android, a boring Ken doll-looking maniac whose entire existence is devoted to living longer – but not actually doing much living.
I should explain. Johnson’s whole thing is that he wants to live forever, or at least much longer than seems reasonable. And his means of achieving immortality is being a multimillionaire entrepreneur who is quite happy to spend his fortune on high-tech wellness gizmos, supplements, experimental trials and therapies, and treat himself like a guinea pig for the betterment of… well, I’m not sure, really.
I say that because nothing Johnson does is applicable to a normal person. He’s rich. And this is part of the reason why he annoys me so much when he’s smugly looking to camera and explaining how important it is to get to sleep at precisely the same minute of the same hour every day. I’d love to get more sleep, Bryan, but I have two kids, a wife, four cats, and I ate half a block of cheese like half an hour ago. None of this is useful.
And if it isn’t useful, what is it for? This is the key question of Don’t Die, the one I kept rubbing up against every time I tried to give the film a fair shake without letting a seemingly irrational dislike of its subject throw me off. But Smith never seems like he wants to interrogate Johnson about this. He’s allowed to drone on and on about his “biological age”, various health markers that are apparently “optimal”, his 18-year-old rectum and his low-intensity penis shockwave regimen, without anyone stopping him and asking him why anyone would want to live this way.
And I’m sure that nobody – except extreme narcissists – would want to live this way. The Man Who Wants to Live Forever is deliberately peppered with Johnson’s critics, and I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with all of them. No, he doesn’t look that healthy. No, it doesn’t make much self to endlessly extend a life you’re not living in the first place. I found myself wondering whether these snippets were inserted as a counterpoint or as a sneaky way to make fun of Johnson, to let the audience in on the joke that we know he’s a sad, lonely dude who has more millions than people in his life to tell him to rein it in a bit. Maybe we’re not supposed to be on his side.
Bryan Johnson in Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever | Image via Netflix
Again, though – if that’s the case, then what’s the point? It’s clear from the movie that Bryan has some degree of emotional trauma; unhealthy relationships with religion and food and all kinds of excess trailing back through his past like his pristine 18-year-old innards. The unfeasibility of his “Blueprint” algorithm for anyone other than lonely millionaires is acknowledged, as is his unwillingness to fund wide-scale clinical trials that would produce unequivocal, widely applicable results about which of his innumerable supplements and protocols is of any use to anyone other than him.
With all this in mind, it’s difficult to surmise anything other than this being a very sophisticated money-spinning operation to sell snake oil for $60 a bottle to people who are scared to die – which is almost everyone. Johnson’s a very successful businessman, and you can see why. But Smith’s documentary should be held to account for not pushing this angle harder. The whole thing’s much too accommodating of what is quite obviously an entirely self-serving endeavor.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Johnson believes in it. I just think he believes in it to a degree that is absolutely batshit. The way he looks at and talks about his son, Talmage – Talmage! – is particularly telling. He describes him as “the perfect specimen”, and is clearly aiming to biologically become him on some level. He checks in on what he’s eating to see if his plasma is okay. The whole thing’s deranged, and Talmage is morphing into him at an alarming rate. Watching the two of them converse is like watching two slot machines trying to ring cherries.
I’m just not buying it. On some level, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever is fascinating, which a documentary should be, but I don’t think it’s for the reasons that were intended. The movie’s refusal to really interrogate or criticize Johnson’s approach, or to caution viewers against trying to emulate his promotion of very extreme approaches to diet, exercise, and general life, is egregious. We could all stand to eat better, sleep longer, put our phones down, and exercise more. But what Johnson is promoting is sacrificing your life on the altar of his health, buying overpriced supplements to line his pockets, and buying into an ideology that is self-serving, detrimental, and entirely misses the point of not dying, which is to be alive.
Give me death, any day.
