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Death by Hanging: From 1968 to 2026

Death by Hanging: From 1968 to 2026

Last updated on: October 4, 2026 at 11:28 am by Chase Padusniak

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Death by Hanging: From 1968 to 2026 2026-10-04T11:28:49-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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Bertolt Brecht by Hans Tombock (1940)
Source: Flickr user Adam Jones
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The state of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike has been all over the headlines. I suspect you, reader, have read about it. If you haven’t, Christa Pike is a convicted murderer on Tennessee’s death row since 1996. Her viciously abusive background makes her, short of an innocent death-row convict, the poster child for anti-death penalty activism. This past week, her lethal injection failed, leaving Christa in intense pain but alive. She now sits on a ventilator in the hospital.

Mostly, I blog about movies. My political and social commentary days are, more-or-less, behind me. At least for now. But this case brought to mind a film I’ve written about in the past: 1968’s Death by Hanging. Ōshima’s avant-garde take on the death penalty also concerns a botched execution, in this case one based on the true story of an ethnic Korean murderer who experienced discrimination growing up in Japan.

The film is unlike Christa Pike’s case in a variety of ways, most notably in that the movie concerns itself with the question of consciousness and guilt. The main character loses his memories (truly or deceptively, we do not know) after his first hanging fails. As a result, the film explores if and how one can be held responsible (and thus executed again) if one does not remember what one has done. Christa Pike does not, in any way, fall into that category.

Death by Hanging, however, captures something I’ve seen little explored in discussions of the recent tragedy: the absurdity of it all. In the film, one of Ōshima’s major interlocutors is Bertolt Brecht, whose theater of the absurd is all over the form of the movie. More than this, Death by Hanging recognizes that those putting its main character to death are themselves criminals, morally speaking. Politicians, executioners, criminal lawyers—these are not, for the most part, the paragons of any society, though especially ours. It’s Augustine’s what is a nation but a band of thieves updated for 20th-century Japan now updated for the 21st-century US.

Further, there is an intrinsic absurdity to the idea that one death equals or somehow cancels another. It’s no mistake, I think, that one of the attempted voices of reason in Ōshima’s film is a Catholic priest (and he was no Christian believer). Revenge solves an emotional need, but it has nothing to do with justice as such. It is a wrathful, deeply human reaction. But hardly the enterprise of an enlightened being or functional state.

I’ve meandered a bit. The real point here is that you ought to watch the film. It’s very funny, very sad, and, alas, extremely timely.

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