Michelle Sok I HE considers how Maite Alberdi’s film The Eternal Memory challenges dominant cultural representations of dementia and terminal illness.
“What would you like to remember?”
This deceptively simple question, asked in the documentary The Eternal Memory (2023), cuts to the heart of what it means to live, to love, ands to hold onto who we are. In psychological and medical discourse, memory is often reduced to ‘cognitive information’ like recalling names, streets, or phone numbers. The Eternal Memory resists this narrow framing by showing how memory also resides in gestures and routines. l like the way the protagonist dances with his partner, the way they read aloud to each other, the way their hands find each other without looking. The Eternal Memory invites us, as viewers, to linger in these ordinary, co-created moments––emotional, embodied, relational––that unfold between Augusto and Paulina.
Directed by Maite Alberdi, The Eternal Memory follows Augusto Góngora, a former journalist and cultural icon, and Paulina Urrutia, a Chilean actress and former Minister of Culture and Arts, as they navigate the transformations brought by dementia. Rather than framing dementia as what film scholar Sadie Wearing critiques as a form of “living death” ––a dominant cultural imaginary where, when diagnosed as having a ‘disease’, persons who are physically alive are nevertheless treated as if they were already dead––this film depict dementia as a space of care, vulnerability, and enduring love (Wearing, 2023, p. 100).
I argue that the film also challenges the dominant aesthetics of what Michael Hvid Jacobsen refers to as ‘spectacular death’ (Jacobsen, 2016) – where dying is more visible than ever before through media and public rituals- through its unsettling of familiar conventions by slowing the pace, softening the frame, and centring the mutual work of care. Yet this does not escape the fact that it is still a mediated, public representation of death.
Spectacular Death and the Aesthetics of Dying
Building on earlier histories of how societies have approached dying, Jacobsen uses the term ‘spectacular death’ to describe our current era where dying is no longer hidden but increasingly exposed to the public, particularly through media (Jacobsen, 2016, p. 1). News outlets, social media, and film often turn death into something we watch—sometimes to provoke grief, sometimes to sell a story. It is mediated, commercialised, re-ritualised, humanised, and academically specialised. This visibility is often brought through dramatised or emotionally curated spectacles for public consumption, such as televised celebrity funerals, viral images of grief on social media, and documentaries that frame dying for a global audience. Jacobsen’s theory revives how contemporary death and dying is culturally perceived, and provides a lens for analysing how media representations navigate this terrain of visibility, ritual, and affect. For example, the death of Pope Francis was transformed into a global media event. Television shows, crime movies and documentaries, frame deaths as entertainment, while mourning becomes performance through curated social media memorials.
The Eternal Memory is part of this same cultural moment: it is, after all, a film about the intimate, daily life of a man with Alzheimer’s, made for audiences around the world. However, instead of chasing drama, it lingers on the daily and quiet persistence of life as it is experienced, and lived, in the process of dying. In doing so, it shifts the spotlight away from dying as spectacle and towards the small rituals, such as bathing, singing, and dancing, and the deeper continuity of personhood that keep love and identity alive. Unlike the re-ritualisations of spectacular death—strong storylines with closeups and dramatic goodbyes––the rituals here are calm, quiet, and persistent.
Memory Held Between People
If The Eternal Memory challenges dominant spectacles of death through aesthetic intimacy, it also challenges how media frames the person with dementia—emotionally, ethically, and socially.
In addition to critiquing the narrative of dementia as ‘living death’ (portraying those diagnosed as if they were already ‘gone’), Sadie Wearing challenges the trope of ‘grieving for the living’ which, she argues, invalidates the dignity of persons with dementia (Wearing, 2023, p. 100). Similarly, anthropologist Janelle Taylor shifts a conventional question asked to relatives of those with dementia from “Does she recognise you?” to “Do we recognise her?” (Taylor, 2006, p. 315). This reversal matters because recognition is central to sustaining dignity and personhood in dementia. The conventional question (does she recognise you?) places the burden solely on the person with dementia, implying that if they cannot remember, they are already ‘lost.’ Taylor’s reframing reminds us that identity is co-constructed in and through relationships: it is our ongoing recognition of the person as our loved one, family member, and important companion, that sustains connection. This reflects that care is not a one-way service but a mutual relation: there is always a caregiver and a care recipient. When, in the documentary film, Augusto says, “I’m not myself anymore,” Paulina replies, “I think you are.” This simple dialogue resists reducing personhood to cognitive performance– checkbox measures of recall that form clinical assessment– but affirms the dynamics of mutual recognition and the shared identity within their relationship.
Public Health Professor Pia Kontos proposes a notion of ’embodied selfhood’ that understands identity not as grounded in cognitive agency, i.e. what you remember, but rather as experienced through the body (Kontos, 2005, p. 553). The Eternal Memory shows what remains when cognitive memory fades: the ability to be recognised, to share laughter, to hold memory and dynamics between a relationship rather than inside a single mind. By shifting the frame from loss to what endures, the film unsettles one of the most persistent cultural narratives around dementia, illustrating a continuum of identity and memory that moves beyond memory loss, the experience instead becoming shifting, shared, and sometimes held by the other.
“Another Way of Being Together”
The Eternal Memory, though mediated as a documentary, challenges the dominant aesthetics of spectacular death by replacing dramatic closure with relational duration, and reframing ritual as intimate routine (Jacobsen, 2016). Rather than stylised decay or structured climax, it unfolds as a collage of slow, ordinary moments: Augusto and Paulina walking together, dancing, bathing, reading aloud, or simply sitting side by side. Prolonged shots and natural light fosters a sense of intimacy. There is no swelling music or sudden cuts to close ups of faces displaying emotion (Aaron, 2014). Instead, we are invited into Augusto and Paulina’s daily rhythm.
While The Eternal Memory is clearly mediated, it resists the emotional curation and stylisation often associated with spectacular death (Jacobsen, 2016). It avoids monumentalising decline or crafting an entertainment-driven narrative climax (McIlwain, 2005). Rather, it invites the audience alongside Paulina to witness, not merely ‘consume’, the ordinary presence of love in the relational life (Jacobsen, 2016, p. 12). This is most evident in its use of real-time, relational moments where presence, care, and intimacy hold more weight than the linear progression of dementia or of the visual drama of the life to death chronology.
The Everyday Sacred
The challenge to the spectacle of death in the film extends to quieter scenes of relational continuity. An example of this is when Augusto accompanies Paulina to her theatre rehearsal. He is not depicted as dependent or victim, but as a companion quietly present in her world (Fox, 2011). Again, this reflects the documentary’s refusal to isolate Augusto within the frame of suffering. Paulin and Augusto are codependent and the latter’s presence in Paulina’s professional life affirms their shared, ongoing relationship, a form of living with—not in spite of—dementia.
One of the clearest moments of refusing traditional narratives of death and decline is Paulina and Augusto’s decision to marry after two decades together. Paulina explains that it is “only a gesture to all of you of how much we love each other” (Alberdi, 2023). This act, while modest, becomes a powerful symbol of re-ritualisation. While Jacobsen describes such rituals in the context of post-death mourning and commemoration, the film extends the concept to pre-commemorative rituals that help construct meaning, continuity, and emotional identity amid slow decline. These are not just traditional ceremonies, but rituals of care that sustain personhood in the face of anticipated loss.
The documentary challenges the concept of spectacular death by offering a gentler, relational and ordinary variant. Visibility of terminal illness here fosters emotional witnessing and shows how memory and identity can surpass what one remembers cognitively. This aligns with what Sarah Eastwood (2016) calls the interval of dying: a durational time in which death is not a fixed event but a process of change, co-presence, and continuity.
With these, The Eternal Memory reimagines how dementia and dying can be lived and made visible: not through rupture, but through enduring love, small gestures, and the quiet resilience of life still being lived.
Conclusion: Living with, not in spite of, Dementia
Through gentle aesthetics and ordinary rituals, The Eternal Memory challenges the dominant spectacle of dying, insisting on memory, care, and co-presence as enduring forms of life and personhood. Drawing on Jacobsen’s theory of Spectacular Death and Wearing’s critique of ‘grieving for the living’, the film challenges traditional medical-biological and psychological framings of dementia and invites us to witness life beyond cognition. In other words, to still honour the life beyond psycho-medical framing of cognitive memory as the sole measure of personhood and identity. Yet, as Jacobsen reminds us, contemporary death is paradoxical—simultaneously visible and hidden, personal and institutional, liberating and commodified. Here I echo the notion that death is not static but culturally and historically situated. The Eternal Memory embraces this ambiguity, offering not resolution, but a shared, durational space of meaning when it comes to living and remembering. Memory and identity are co-constructed, sustained, and lived in the face of dementia.
About the author
Michelle Sok I HE is a master’s student in End-of-Life Studies at the University of Glasgow and holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Hong Kong. She currently works as a medical social worker in Singapore.
References
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