If I link to a blog set up a week ago by a woman who claims she’s going to kill herself after 90 days of posting, and in focusing on a post about movies, I gloss over the ethical issues––is she really going to kill herself, or will the whole thing will end with a romantic “choose life” reversal worthy of a romantic comedy because all along she was just trying to get a book and/or movie deal, or is it just a conceptual piece to prove the point that once you’re dead to the internet, you might as well be dead in life?––am I then a horrible person, or am I just doing my job as a movie blogger? Or both?

I shouldn’t have even touched this, I’m sure. But here goes…

90 Day Jane is a blog with the tagline “I’m going to kill myself in 90 days.” The titular “Jane” says her blog “is not a cry for help or even to get attention. It’s simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence.” It seems like some of her commenters are taking this literally, and are even egging her on. I’m choosing to see90 Day Jane as more of a dramatic narrative about our conception of suicide as an event, and less about whether or not a real girl is really going to die.

So on the first day, Jane explained that she planned to live her life for the next three months as she lived it before, “and then I’ll check out.” On the second day, Jane offered up kind of a standard blogging-as-stand-up comedy take on a micro trend in cinema: movie characters shaving their heads before a suicide attempt. Luke Wilson did it in The Royal Tenenbaums; Robin Tunney did it in Empire Records. But will Jane do it? She says:

I mean, is getting rid of your hair supposed to be a cleansing experience? Are you entering The Matrix or something? Let’s face it, if one does succeed in suicide they’re just going to put a stupid looking wig on you for the funeral. No thanks, I will not be shaving my head for the blessed event.

This post points to the idea that those looking for a guidebook for different ways in which they could prepare themselves for that event not only need to look no further than films, but there may not even be another obvious place to look at all. This character of 90 Day Jane has made a conscious choice to “check out” of our shared pop cultural experience, and yet she still defines even the details of that checking out process in relation to filmed imagery.

90 Day Jane might be a brilliant piece of performance on the idea of death as a mediated event, or it could be the cry for help that its author insists it isn’t (I’m assuming it’s more of the former). But the commenters on the movie post seem to have found the blog via Google search for “shaved”, so either way, it’ll probably all fall on deaf ears with the porn-hungry masses.

Via Gawker.

UPDATE: Steve Bryant at ReelPop says: “Real suicides are so much less elegant. A fiver says this is promo marketing for a new video series. Color me suckered. And annoyed.”