“The Morgue Twins” Finds Empathy in Death
Marvin and Melvin Morgan worked in a morgue. It sounds like the set-up for a nursery rhyme, but it’s the real-life experience of twin brothers who spent twenty-three years working as mortuary technicians in New York City. Marvin began his career in 1999 and Melvin joined two years later, which means the twin brothers saw many of New York’s toughest days from inside a hospital. Director Rebecca Blandón’s documentary short film, The Morgue Twins, follows the brothers as they reflect on their lives, and death itself.
The brothers’ work in the field of mortuary sciences took place in New York City, but the film finds them in North Carolina. They’re looking for their great-grandmother’s grave. She was buried without a headstone or marking of any kind, and that’s what inspired the brothers to pursue their career. They believe in having compassion for the deceased as they assist with autopsies and burying a person. Melvin and Marvin speak with reverence and respect, despite two decades of seeing death daily. Marvin worked for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner before he retired and was present for 9/11, the crash of Flight 587, the Staten Island Ferry crash, and New York City’s COVID response. Melvin began in patient transport for NYC Health and Hospitals before moving to a job as a city morgue technician at Elmhurst Hospital. They have seen things that still linger with them, losses of coworkers that hit them hard long after the fact, but the guiding principle of honoring their grandmother with a burial marker is what kept them going for twenty years.
Black Public Media
In the world of documentaries, more filmmakers are turning their attention to what’s being deemed the “death care” industry. With the world ever-changing, the industry of death care is no longer limited to funeral homes and burial services. It has expanded to include companies that want to use AI to bring deceased people back from the dead in a digital format and businesses that want to aid individuals with euthanasia. It’s something that’s coming for all of us, but Americans are so bad at talking about death. It’s not about trying to beat the inevitable, but about making peace with it and respecting those who have passed.
The Morgan brothers are asked early on in The Morgue Twins to share their thoughts about what happens before we’re born and after we die. They both agree that, regardless of religion, there’s no way of knowing where we came from or where we’re going. They emphasize that the only thing we can control is the life we’re experiencing now. It’s a moment of reflection of their own mortality. They’re no strangers to death, can discuss it in a truly clinical sense, but they also know that loss will always have a profound effect on the living.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, TikTok, YouTube, & Facebook. Check out Movies with My Dad, a podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.
support your local film critic!
~
support your local film critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.