Paul Newman Immortalized in Film

Today was one of the worst days. Fist, the Gators lost, but worse was that one of my heroes, actor Paul Newman, died today. Cool Hand Luke is my favorite movie and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is also pretty high on my list. I highly recommend any movie with Newman: The Sting, Color of Money, The Hustler all good too. Newman's characters and persona has had a lasting influence on me. Newman always played these cool, smart allecky, nonchalant, hero type characters that I always wanted to be like. So, while it's a shame that he's gone and that I won't get to see another movie of his, I'm not too depressed because as lame and cliche as it sounds Newman will forever be immortalized in film.

In Family Secrets, Kuhn states that:

"In the process of using- producing, selecting, ordering, displaying-
photographs, the family is actuall in the process of making itself." (17)

This statement lead me to another idea that photographs themselves are a proof of our existence. For example, if there were no pictures of you, or no living person that had the memory of you; or you never published any public documents or if there were no public records of you, did you actually exist? If when you die, if there is no after life, your death is then just the death of your conscious mind. So if there are no other conscious mind (another person) that remembered you or if there were no lasting evidence of your existence (pictures, movies, books published) for a conscious mind to see, it would be as if you never existed.

***Following Contains Spoilers to endings of Butch Cassidy and Cool Hand Luke***

In the final scene in Butch Cassidy, (can watch here) Butch and Sundance are completely outnumbered by a mexican army that are after them for robbing a bank. They then rush out of their hiding and take them all head on, and the movie ends with the picture below on screen for several seconds and several shots are heard being ordered fired.




Either they ran out to their deaths or they managed to take them all on (I like to think the second even though their death is obvious). But either way they are immortalized as two guys went down fighting and became legends. So just as Butch and Sundance were immortalized in the final frame of the movie, so is Newman immortalized in his movies, for they provide proof of his existence.

Also, just as In the end of Cool Hand Luke (found here) the characters sit around remembering Luke the way he was, "with that Luke-Smile of His", I will remember Newman in the same way.