JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The common phrase ‘representation matters’ asserts that media has a measurable and important impact on civic society’s perception of self and others. The representation of health in media, in particular, may reflect and perpetuate a society’s disease burden.

Objective:

For the top 10 major causes of death in the United States, we examine how cinematic representation overall and by-gender mortality diverges from reality.

Methods:

Using crowd-sourced data on over 40,000 film deaths from Cinemorgue Wiki, we first employ natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract common causes of mortality for each film in the corpus. We then analyze shifts in representation of deaths in movies versus the 2021 National Vital Statistics Survey (NVSS) top ten mortality causes.

Results:

Overall, movies strongly overrepresent suicide and, to a lesser degree, accidents. In terms of gender, movies overrepresent men and underrepresent women for nearly every major mortality cause, including heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. The two exceptions for which women are overrepresented are suicide and accidents.

Conclusions:

Overall, mortality depicted in films does not reflect causes of death overall and by-gender. Considering current struggles in appropriately managing diagnosis and treatment of disease by gender, highlighting misrepresentation of mortality in film may encourage a more equitable culture surrounding gender and health.