Reaction to a remembered scene from a movie

Dear diary,

I cannot understand why a man would use a cold knife to commit suicide, especially if he chooses to thrust the blade into his heart. To commit suicide by overdosing on opium seems much less…

Much less what – needlessly painful? Yet how much pain is needed! So I admit: I don’t know how to end that last statement above. I only meant to remark on a scene that I saw a few years ago in a Japanese film: a man enters a finely decorated room, sits cross-legged on the floor, and then picks up and calmly plunges a sword into his ribcage. He rotates the blade in a circle and falls over dead.

To be accurate, I should have used the word “gut” or “belly,” rather than “ribcage”; although I stand by my blunder. And for the record, this entry’s accompanying image is of a receipt for a film by William Friedkin, not the film that I was talking about above. I like Friedkin’s directing in general, and I like the film that is listed, and I like even more his other film Killer Joe (2011), which happens to share the same screenwriter, Tracy Letts; but these films are not the topic of this entry. Also, I now recall yet another scene (from yet another film) where a Frenchman shoots himself in the chest with a pistol.

The movie that I mentioned before the above clarification was not a horror film or anything made for the purpose of cheaply shocking its audience; in fact, it was a respectable story told with human dignity. However, to level with you, I admit that my memory of the scene in question is sketchy. And if you were to ask me to give the film’s title, I would awkwardly change the subject and hope that you forget to follow up on your query. I’d maybe turn the tables and ask YOU a couple of questions, in order to get you talking about YOURSELF… My goal would be to catch you in a lie of your own.