Our friends at the Masters of None Podcast ask:
Why did Bernie (from Weekend at Bernie’s) never rot or start to smell?
Let’s take a look at the stages of death, shall we…
Decomposition begins the second the heart stops beating, but actual rotting—as in falling off the bone tenderness—shouldn’t happen for about a week. Dead body smells happen pretty fast and in that warm weather Hampton environment, probably even faster. Still a dead body takes around 24 hours to get a nice beefy rotting smell going. Unless they refrigerated Bernie or embalmed him at some point, he would be working up quite a stink by day 2. The trick of the movie though is the title of the film, a weekend with Bernie suggests two, maybe, even three days with Bernie, or a 72 hour period. The reality of the film, however, is they only spend 24 hours with a dead Bernie corpse. Bernie died late Saturday afternoon/evening (lethal injection), they spend the night with the corpse sitting at the party, then the next day running away from the mob, until Bernie died again the following evening (shot). The title should be “One Day at Bernie’s.”
So, we can say emphatically that the film Weekend at Bernie’s does not stink (from his corpse rotting, at least). Meaning the movie could have theoretically missed the smell window, or did not go on long enough for the smell to be noticed. However, there are still some minor issues with hauling around a dead body. Rigor mortis would have been at full stiff tilt within 12 hours, making madcap hijinks the next day highly unlikely. And after 4 hours, blood would pool giving him purplish skin, in fact, his hands would turn blue after 30 minutes, making it hard to pass Bernie off as a tan and happening party goer. Plus Bernie was submerged in water twice throughout the film, which would have made him a bloated, purple mess by the final scene.
And perhaps most importantly, Bernie would have released his bowels mere minutes after death. And remember Bernie was wearing the same outfit the entire time, the same soiled pants for an entire day. So, Bernie does smell, but like shit, not like death. There really needed to be a scene of Andrew McCarthy wiping Bernie’s ass with a wet nap, doing a load of laundry, or scrubbing away brown trails through the entire summer home.
In passing a stiff, bloated, purple, poo covered corpse off as being alive, the rotting smell is the least of Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman’s problems.
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God I need some sleep. But great stuff as always!
Your analysis of this movie brings a smile to my face because I have a love hate relationship with Weekend at Bernie’s but in noticing the links between Kotcheff’s films you notice it all starts with Wake in Fright – then he hits it big with First Blood (also adapted from a novel like Wake in Fright was) and finally Weekend at Bernie’s which I noticed is eerily similar to Wake in Fright in the apathy the partygoers have towards the fact that Bernie is dead.
The point of Bernie being dead is more plausible as a stylistic choice in this context – Kotcheff already did a “drunk and disorderly men with nothing but gambling and beer to revel in” film, so in actual fact if you look at both Wake in Fright and Weekend at Bernie’s – you’ll notice very similar stylistic choices about why the director made both films.
Wow. One week boning up on cinema turned me into a real nerd, didn’t it?