How else is anything advertised to us?
But when emergency hotlines exist for those on the same edge, how do we differentiate between rescuing someone from the depths and "respecting their decision"?
Take the real story of Luke, a fresh-faced, 19-year-old man with a full life ahead of him. Luke was depressed for four years and tried to kill himself by crashing his car at 60 miles an hour. He survived. He wants to live now. And what he said about the assisted suicide movement was stark: if someone was on a bridge and wanted to jump, we'd try to save them, right?
Right?
Perhaps it's the violence that makes us shudder. Putting a gun to your head, throwing yourself off a building, slitting your wrists – what if Claflin's character or Maynard chose one of these methods? What would the narrative be then?
But no, taking a lethal dose of barbiturates and passing "in peace" as your vital organs shut down one-by-one makes all the difference. And yet, there is no difference. All we've done is put lipstick on something which, despite our glamorizing attempts, is the same awful, isolated despair.
What's arguably most insidious about the character's decision to kill himself is the tired but re-dressed "quality of life" argument: that existence isn't worth it if it's not on our ideal terms. Never mind that this logic justifies ethicists such as Peter Singer making the case for selective infanticide.
The most important thing is that we actualize ourselves the way we see fit – and that anything less renders us the right to shut it down, to call it all off.
Let's be clear: suffering is real, suffering is hard. Suffering makes us not want to live. But when did we determine that life could be without it? It simply can't. And it's the ones who've chosen to keep existing through great adversity that ironically show us how much life is worth living.
When we make reality our enemy, anything is justifiable if it threatens what we've imagined for ourselves. And so we don't flinch at anyone – a fictional hero, a beautiful brunette, a victim of horrific sexual abuse – pulling the trigger.