Being a comedy, “Scoop” nevertheless abounds in references to death — almost every non-cameo character is in some way related to it: they either are dead, die, made a murderous attempt at in the course of the film, or murder someone else.
The concept of death is thus about as central to the film as the same concept is to the human idea of existence. Death, unfathomable and unascertainable as it is, has always been and still is surrounded by myth. On the one hand, nobody is indifferent to the issue, because death is what awaits us all in the end; on the other hand, we have no way of knowing, that’s why the palette of beliefs about death is so rich and diverse.
This uncertainty is stressed recurrently in “Scoop” through the following phrase pronounced by different characters with regard to various persons: “Joe/Sid/etc., wherever you are now…” — as far as nobody knows what actually happens after death, there is no reason for preferring one kind of myth to another (e.g. Christian beliefs to pagan versions).
“Scoop” starts with a Christian funeral service held in a church in memory of a recently deceased journalist. Very soon the same journalist is depicted as sitting on a boat crossing some river or lake on a foggy night. On the one hand, crossing waters on one’s way to the afterworld is clearly a reference to ancient mythologies: for example, Styx, Sanzu River, Gjella; similarly, water is what separates the world of the living from the world of the dead in Celtic legends, so examples are numerous. On the other hand, instead of Charon or Morgan le Fay we find the Grim Reaper at the helm (with a hood, a scythe and a black robe, although we never get to see what’s hidden underneath — is there the traditional skeleton, after all?).
In the 5th century in Greece the deceased were buried with a small coin supposedly needed to pay Charon for his chauffeur’s services; the journalist in “Scoop”, too, has money with him on the boat, only he uses it in order to bribe the silent psychopomp to get information out of him rather than to pay the passenger’s fee; the Reaper, however, wouldn’t answer, so any information the journalist can get comes from his fellow-passengers.
Another indirect reference to mythological thought is the ability of the dead to leave the afterworld and return to the world of the living either temporarily or for good. Such examples are found, for instance, in Mesopotamian beliefs, where etimmu — creatures into which humans were transformed after death — had the power to torture the living if the latter neglected them, also in Greek myths (one of Hercules’s heroic deeds was a visit to Hades to fetch Cerberus — upon completion of the mission Hercules is safely back on the earth’s surface) and in Arthurian legends (Arthur’s journey to and from Annwn, the Otherworld). In Celtic myths the boundaries between the two worlds were, in general, crossable, and became even more so on certain dates or at certain places. The dead journalist in “Scoop”, too, jumps off the boat and swims back to the human realm to find someone who could use his last big post-mortem scoop.
The scythe in the hands of the boat’s captain traditionally stands for the reaping of life; a scythe is a later development from a sickle — an attribute of Cronus, who is considered to have been a god of fertility in the pre-Hellenic period and who carries a sickle or a scythe as an indication of the inexorably flowing time. Another curious coincidence here is that death — a skeleton dressed in a black robe with a hood and a scythe — is depicted on the XIII card of the tarot “Great Arcane” deck, and tarot cards occupy a considerable place in the plot of the film — it is them that the mysterious murderer leaves near the bodies of his victims (the murderer is, of course, called “a tarot card killer”).
The fog that surrounds the boat is a general symbol of the unknown, the grey area between the real and the unreal. In Celtic mythology fog covers the northwestern part of the land — the borderline between the world of humans and the afterworld’s islanders. In Scandinavian myths it is an attribute of the polar area enveloped in deathly darkness and coldness.