Why do people put pistols in their mouth to kill themselves?
I’m remembering a scene from Fight Club and Possessor where the main characters put pistols in their mouth in an attempt to “kill themselves” (plus other movies I’ve seen).
In Fight Club, Tyler misses (I guess on purpose), and in Possessor, the main character needs to do it after completing a contract (to leave the body she possessed).
In Possessor, the angle suggests she might miss her brain entirely.
I can understand something like a shotgun; it’s not exactly something you can hold to your temple, but why put a pistol in your mouth?
Is it more effective somehow? Does it hit a part of your brain where firing from the side might otherwise leave you alive, yet disabled?
I’m sure you could argue it’s just more dramatic from a movie critic perspective, but I’m sure people have really done this, and it maybe be a case of art imitating life, but I believe it would be the other way around.
There was an occasional reddit repost that I remember seeing a few times about a guy who invented a “suicide helmet” specifically to avoid the prospect of botching his own planned attempt. It basically was a bunch of shotgun shells wired up to a detonator and fused into a hardhat. The level of planning and makeshift engineering that went into it was astounding, and the dude explained it all in his suicide note. It worked. On one hand I can see how someone who is determined to die but afraid of pain would want to make sure the process was instantaneous and extremely lethal, on the other hand, it’s fucked up to think about how much the guy must have dwelt on the idea of killing himself, knowing it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment opportunity where he shoved a gun in his mouth like most people would have done.