'On the Count of Three' and Not Killing Yourself

Content warning, obviously.

If you don’t recognize On the Count of Three, that might be because — at the risk of speaking crassly — it was buried alive. Opening in just 19 theatres across the United States and Canada with a same-day VOD release on May 13, 2022, it would go on to gross less than $63k at the box office. Screenwriters Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival for their work here. It was earned.

The film — a brisk, heavy, 86-minute dark dramedy — stars Jerrod Carmichael (also director and producer) and Christopher Abbott as Val and Kevin, two suicidal best friends who make a pact to shoot each other, but not before spending their last day as meaningfully as they can.

First, a few essentials: Val is a mulch factory worker who’s been avoiding his girlfriend Natasha (Tiffany Haddish) for roughly a week now. He’s given a promotion and then quits his job moments later, shortly after which he tries to hang himself in one of the factory’s bathrooms. No dice.

He drives to a psychiatric hospital where his best-friend-since-childhood, Kevin, is being held after trying to kill himself via drug overdose three days earlier. He breaks Kevin out, Val proposes a double suicide, Kevin eventually agrees, but then he makes a game-time decision to “play with house money” on their last day of living. The main event? Kill Dr. Ted Brenner (Henry Winkler), the child psychologist who molested Kevin when he was a boy.

Now, in case this isn’t clear yet, Val is currently experiencing a deep but ultimately temporary bout of depression, whereas Kevin has been living with severe BPD his whole life. It should also be made clear that On the Count of Three has negative interest in being a morality play; a decision that arguably contributes the most to the film’s refreshing, compassionately transgressive attitude on suicide.

As such, today we’re going to talk about suicide, and I specifically am going to talk about suicide, as opposed to stopping it at my usual buck of thinking about it.

For context, I have lost more than one beloved person to suicide, and I’ve come very close to losing more beloved people. I will also not be terribly surprised if I one day lose myself to suicide, as my neurological cocktail dictates that I gladly accept the thought of dying at least twice a week.¹

I’m telling you this to illustrate my proximity to the topic. If I do kill myself, it won’t be for a very, very, very, very long time, because I’m actually quite fond of being alive. That is, I’m fond of it in a theoretical sense.

You see, from my own, non-universal experience being bipolar, I am incapable of remembering what it’s like to flourish when I’m ready to be dead, nor can I remember what it’s like to be ready to be dead when I’m flourishing. As such, I know, in theory, that I’m capable of experiencing joy; I just don’t really have any say over when I can experience it.

What this means on a macro level is that I’m hyper-aware that my emotions aren’t technically mine, which means I never quite have a clear line on how I feel about things. This is beneficial in some respects, debilitating in others, and exhausting in most, particularly in the context of being a professional writer/editor in this late-stage capitalist, post-culture war/neo-fascist tipping point of Western civilization²:

• On the one hand, I’ve been forced to really chisel my beliefs to a point where they’re built upon something a little less gooey than emotion³, and I naturally gravitate towards operating outside of my ego, which is helpful for listening and creating.

• On the other hand, there’s an existential hurdle that I’m constantly leaping over (one that becomes scarier during my downs and reminds me of the time limit on my highs), and being pathologically estranged from my ego can result in some pretty destructive spiralling when I have an angry down.

• And on both hands? In approximately 12 hours, those two points above will probably not at all reflect how I understand my brain anymore.

I think, on some level, my will to live is driven by the potential for discovery inherent to my emotional anarchy. There’s purpose there; something I’m moving towards.

This is mostly useless information when I’m down,⁴ because I cannot emotionally comprehend purpose during those times. But, it remains that I am, objectively, moving towards an instance of emotional comprehension. And so I do.

Perhaps this helps you understand why I approach film criticism the way I do.

So yes, I want to be dead often enough, but never moreso than when someone confronts me with an agenda of preservation, that I have x, y, and z to live for, or that I would be missed.

Why? Because it reflects two truths that remain agonizingly absent from the discourse surrounding suicide; truths that On the Count of Three makes a point to recognize in its own conversation about suicide, the first of which I’ve already somewhat addressed in the preceding paragraphs.

Truth #1: Dissuading suicide with an emotional appeal to life is both hypocritical, and ignorant to why suicide is being considered at all

When we meet Kevin, he’s in the middle of a session with an in-house therapist, to whom he insists that he feels good, and that it’s “time to get back out there.” The therapist, of course, is preoccupied with the seriousness of his suicide attempt three days earlier.

KEVIN: I feel bad for even taking up a room here. I’m sure there’s someone out there who actually needs it.

THERAPIST: You don’t need to worry about other people, Kevin; it’s my job to assess who should be here and who shouldn’t. Trust that you’re in good hands, and that you won’t be kept here any longer than necessary to ensure you’re not a risk to yourself.

KEVIN: Oh fuck off! Fuck off! Why are you guys so obsessed with keeping everyone alive? What? You think all life is precious? All life? Because if you lived in my head for one minute, you would know that it fucking isn’t.

Kevin’s outburst and the clinical demeanour of the therapist are important here, as it highlights the institutional preservation of the body over the more esoteric human element that occupies said body. The obsession with keeping everybody alive, so says Kevin, spares little thought to the things we stay alive for. It’s no wonder Kevin is so virulently pessimistic here.

Human beings seek purpose, and we find purpose in creating and sharing. It’s why we make art and consume the art of others, why we cook meals and eat together, why we build treehouses and bookshelves, why we go swimming and make love.

And I’m not being gratuitously romantic here; if you aggregate the subtext there, it all speaks to the truth of why we live — we anticipate experience, we work towards having it, and we recognize/share that experience in/with others. Put it all together, and you have actualization on your hands.

A young Kevin is told by an insidiously manipulative Dr. Brenner that his unhappiness is a gift; that people like Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel because he was happy.

What Brenner fails to account for is that people like Michelangelo paint things like the Sistine Chapel out of purpose; something inside the human that must be expressed and explored through creation. That must be actualized.

Hell, it’s why I write.

So what happens when you’re dropped into a society that rewards useless work that’s untethered to your sphere or community, and where just about every avenue of creation is not only locked behind a financial barrier, but is preceded by the struggle for survival, itself financially-dependent?

Well, if you’re mentally ill like me or Kevin, maybe you’re in a position to more soberly recognize how severely we’ve been ripped away from our purpose when we didn’t have to be, while everyone else seems content with the purpose that said society fed to them in its place — faux purposes that we’re too spiky to fulfill in the way that others want us to.

In the case of Kevin’s childhood bully — who taunts Kevin remorselessly in full view of his child and wife (the latter of whom even laughs with him) — that faux purpose would be the military.

Being in that position would be — nay, it is — lonely as hell, and Kevin, who was brought up in and then spat out by the foster care system, doesn’t even have a family to fall back on like I do.

But he does have Val, whose arc in relation to Kevin spells out the second truth:

Truth #2: Loving somebody is not the same as being with them

If you’ll recall, Val is a mulch factory worker. This is a place where your superior expects you to get excited about overseeing mulch, sand, and gravel operations. Val hates his job, because of course he does; he isn’t personally fulfilled by overseeing mulch, sand, and fucking gravel operations, and the work isn’t conducive to himself or his loved ones so much as it’s conducive to the financial permission we all need to survive in this society.

It’s Val who picks up Kevin and devises the double-suicide plan, and it’s Kevin who insists that Val is just depressed.⁵ Still, Val holds fast that suicide is the most beautiful thought he’s had in a long time, and that the thought of dying brings him comfort.

Val doesn’t realize what he’s done here. The brotherly love he’s shown to Kevin throughout their whole lives was appreciated for all that it was, but now? Now, Val is right there with Kevin, plagued by a vast despair and wanting to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

For what’s very likely once in his life, Kevin is not alone.

And sure enough, it’s Kevin who bats the gun away from Val at the last second and insists upon living just one more day, after which they’ll shoot each other.

But then, at some point during their escapades, Val reveals that Natasha is pregnant, and so he spends part of his last day getting together as much money as possible so that she and the baby are at least somewhat taken care of.

It’s in Natasha that the imbalance between Val and Kevin is made clear. The first scene with Val is him ignoring Natasha’s repeated phone calls while a song called “Love You” plays in the background. It’s Natasha who Val knows intimately enough to know that she’s not going to have an abortion, and so takes it upon himself to scrounge up what money he can for her before he kills himself. It’s Natasha that speaks to Val bluntly and sternly about getting help and showing up for their unborn daughter, and who calls him a “scared little boy” because she can see right through Val.

And it’s Val who ultimately decides that he wants to live for his girlfriend and his unborn child — a decision that Kevin doesn’t grasp until they’re holding each other at gunpoint, just like they said they would.

But the moment Kevin realizes that Val doesn’t want to die anymore, the hurt on his face is unmistakeable. After believing the whole day that someone was levelling with him — that someone was really there with him, embodying an eye-to-eye understanding with him — he’s struck by the realization that he’s alone after all.

Five years later, Val is in prison, enjoying a Father’s Day visitation with Natasha and his daughter, as the camera zooms out to reveal all the other men who — despite their literal and metaphorical shackles — have the privilege of having people to live for, and of people who are living for them.

The kind of people — who see you and know you — that Kevin never got to have. Not really.

I am acutely aware that I have people in my life — friends and family — who love me, and vice versa. Very few of them see and know who I am, though. Almost always, it feels more accurate to say they love the space or the role I occupy, rather than who I am on a more fundamental level. I’ve shown that self to some, often to totally benign rejection or sidestepping. I blame nobody.

And I’m okay with this. I am fulfilled by my writing, by the films I experience, the storytelling goals I’m working towards, and the emotional/metaphysical nutrition I seek to build with all of these things, and then share.⁶

But my brain can’t always comprehend the feeling of fulfillment. I can’t always love the things I love, I sometimes come close to snapping at sub-elementary grievances, and I’m not always okay with the things I said I’m okay with just a paragraph ago.

And so, on principle as well as for my own good, I cannot accept a reality where most of my time isn’t spent on this work, because in many ways, it’s all I have,⁷ and all I can count on in terms of realizing purpose. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I have no cost of living, and so I can pursue this possible writing future with a focused fervour that isn’t afforded to others like me. In that way, I’m much more like Val than Kevin.

If I didn’t have this lifeline of my mother’s house? Of course I’d want to be dead all the time. I’d have to earn financial permission to live in this world, probably in the form of work that takes over my life and is entirely unfulfilling and incompatible with what we actually live for as human beings. Even now, this limbo period of post-old life and pre-new life taunts me, trying to gaslight me into worrying that I’ll never experience anything beyond my mother’s roof again. So, by chasing that which makes life meaningful, I am effectively risking the killing of myself.

And frankly? It drives me nuts that the state of life is insisted upon while the infrastructure of living remains so inaccessible to so little protest. This culture of ownership and independence puffs up the egos of the fortunate while igniting class wars and meaningless hustle, meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of people living in starvation alongside 1.3 billion pounds of annual food waste.

Wanting to kill yourself is not normal, but we threw normal out the window long ago, so anyone who pearl-clutches over suicide needs to come up with something better than that.

Don’t fucking tell me that life is precious if you’re just going to regard it as a battery for the human body that the system needs for labour. Call me again when you’re recognizing life, investing in it, and are angry that nothing we’re doing is conducive to life.

So, should I kill myself?

No, absolutely not.

Look, your life is your life, and what you do with the human you’ve been assigned is your business alone. You’ll be missed if you kill yourself, yes, but can you imagine if we factored that in to any other life decision? If you never leave for college because you’ll be missed? If you never take that trip because you’d be missed? Don’t worry about how you’ll make others feel if you killed yourself; their feelings aren’t your responsibility.

But you do have a responsibility to your life — not the fact of being alive, but the source that you draw upon to create your experience here on Earth. Even if our systems were defined by the nourishment of human communities and enabled us to create as much genuine beauty as humanly possible, it would still ultimately fall to us to create that beauty. The circumstances of life are always changing, but our role in it is always the same.

In this aforementioned ideal scenario, I would still experience bouts of anti-emotion that keep me blocked off from joy and contentment, and Kevin’s demons would still have a tight hold on him. But I can take the L and go to bed, and Kevin can ride dirt bikes with Val. At the end of the day, we’re still creating life out of this very small opportunity we have to do so.

When we’re alive, we are always moving towards a possibility of joy, and it’s only when we’re alive that we’re capable of recognizing joy and creating something out of it.

This is what everyone digs their heels in and keeps the faith for. It’s what I keep the faith for when I want to be dead.

And if you find yourself in a position where creating life is at odds with your survival in this system? Well, you have a choice to make. Decide if the life you’re creating alongside your job is worth the push-and-pull, or throw the cards up and commit to a full-body creation of life before the elements take you.⁸

Either way, you’re going to die eventually, so you might as well bring the most evocative experiential tapestry back with you to whatever the afterlife looks like. You, if not your body, have everything to gain from doing that, and at least then we couldn’t be leveraged as a statistic by those annoying mental health awareness campaigns.⁹

Imagine having died a premature but natural death, fully honouring the life you were capable of creating with respect to this debilitating system we’re living in, only for those orgs to not lift the “life is precious” finger in your direction because you didn’t commit suicide. If nothing else, live for the posthumous vindication that unearths the hypocrisy of empty messaging.

Because at the end of it all, we bring back what we learned from our time on Earth, and the Earth remembers that life happened here. We owe it to both of those homes — the hazy, amorphous one we came from, and the round, blue one we’re bunking on — to stay alive so that more life can be experienced. That’s our one purpose — our responsibility — as human beings.

And all you really have to do to fulfill that responsibility is not kill yourself. If you can genuinely, honestly, objectively confirm that you don’t want to be alive anymore, then quit your job, sell all your belongings, and use the money to fly to another country and go out in an exotic hush of glory. At least then, you create as much possible living out of the life that you were given; eat some fruit, befriend a lion, squeeze that motherfucking life for all of its worth.¹⁰

But killing yourself? That is, mathematically, the worst possible thing you can do with said life, and no amount of neurospicy-sourced emotional warping can change that truth. Your emotions are fake, and you are counting on you. Get over yourself. Stay alive.

---

1. I don’t mean that colloquially. I mean I literally, actively welcome the thought of dying.

2. Also I’m transgender.

3. To be clear, emotion is very different from fiery compassion. I’m not one for irresponsible stoicism.

4. When I’m down, my inability to create emotion is to the point where I can barely read; the words mean nothing to me.

5. One of the big rules of depression is to not make any major life decisions when you’re depressed (suicide, of course, being the biggest possible life decision you can make).

6. Most all of these things having been buoyed significantly by being a part of the FilmStack community here. My gratitude is boundless.

7. I want to be very clear on what I mean when I say “all I have.” I am extremely lucky to have the physiological and financial security that I do, and that has come in the form of my family. I am in no way downplaying the wealth inherent to that security. But survival is different from living, and when you feel like you can’t rely on other people to see you or know you, you rely fully on the things that allow you to be seen and known by yourself, and therefore flourish. For me, that’s film writing and storytelling.

8. I’m doing the latter, sans the actual risk of said elements. Like I said, I’m one of the lucky ones.

9. Good mental health orgs won’t be offended by that statement.

10. And it is, objectively, worth everything.