There are multiple explanations I thought of for the narrative of ‘We have decided not to die’, almost all of which revolve around the idea of the circle of life. All of these assumptions, however, revolved around the idea that all three rituals were a continuation of the predecessor, or that the rituals were indeed just that; means to an end. I now believe I was wrong.
See, at first I thought it was the wrong way around (and that the three characters represented 1 protagonist); Transported through a tube of which we see he has no control over (he doesn’t press the elevator button), before being sent crashing into an open world of which he has no explanation. In the 2nd ritual, the character has arrived in a world that makes no sense to him; it’s cold, dark and stormy, yet he has the same habits he learnt from birth (the convulses in the elevator bear incredible similarity to the ones on the tarmac. This character is wiser, and has foresight of dangers ahead (we are shown that he has suffered the storm before, and he clearly seems to have some understanding of the impending collision. He leaps, and we see from multiple angles that he clearly survives. The final ritual (ritual 1) shows her at the end of her life, having accepted her death. She convulses, but is eventually elevated, rising above her troubles into the light.
This is a seriously disjointed explanation, and is special in that it falls apart with the speed and intensity of my sleep patterns whenever I play Minecraft. The second theory was that these characters are in the process of death, and that the method of the death helped convey the religion the soon-to-be departed was from; Ritual one depicts acceptance of death, and how tranquility leads to nirvana, while ritual two shows a man who rose above his adversity through his own devices, and depicts him as a christ figure, crucified against the stormy sky. The third ritual seemed to be a representation of The Myth of Sisyphus, as Camus saw it. The protagonist is given 2 clearly easier routes as he exits the elevator (left and right), yet instead chooses the one that affords him the greatest enjoyment on his terms. As he flies through that window, like sisyphus, we see him lower his arms, and serenely, almost blissfully, take in the horizon before plummeting back to the bottom of his modern mountain. And yet, while this explanation seemed right for the moment, I realised that it wasn’t enough. It was still wrong.
“We have decided not to die” is a story about characters achieving immortality by simply not dying. Unless we explicitly see them do so, they don’t. through their varied presentation and editing, all three characters cheat death by simply not being dead at the end of their respective screen time. We know they die- The swimmer certainly drowns in the pool, the man who jumps above the cars could not survive the debris and lacerations that come from it, and the man who leaps out the window is sure to meet the pavement in a brief but incredibly wet kiss. And yet, each character defies the audience and fate. As much as we don’t want to see their demise, we need to know that they are dead, but without any sign that they are other than our expectations, we can’t, and therefore they aren’t.
Moral of the story; If a character dies, check for a pulse.