Grieving the suicide of a friend, L. Frances Henderson heads to Las Vegas, the suicide capitol of the nation, to seek answers. There she learns about the shocking death of a local teenager who leaped from the roof of the city’s tallest casino. While investigating the suicide epidemic further, she finds that the city is also burdened by a national problem scrambling to bury decades of nuclear excess in a nearby mountain. Artfully maneuvering between two stories burgeoning with existential questions, This Much We Know masterfully links these seemingly disparate subjects of self-annihilation and environmental issues into something supernatural, unforgettable, and transcendent.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - Since the awakening of human knowledge,
00:07 we've come to understand things
00:08 through the answers to six basic questions.
00:12 Who, what, where, when, why, and how.
00:16 These questions, if pursued with dedication and competence,
00:19 promise to lead to the truth.
00:21 - So I had a friend who committed suicide.
00:23 - But when my own friend took her life,
00:25 so much of what I thought to be true no longer made sense.
00:28 I knew that if she had been given a second chance,
00:31 she wouldn't have done it.
00:32 That it was an accident in some ways.
00:35 - Yeah, I would disagree with you.
00:36 - Well, you'd have to examine it.
00:38 (door creaking)
00:40 - I can tell you there's always signs.
00:42 There's always clues.
00:44 Always, always, always.
00:46 - At the time of my friend's death,
00:47 Las Vegas had the highest suicide rate in the entire country.
00:50 - Just check out this fucking view here.
00:53 - Shit.
00:54 - Levi Presley killed himself by jumping
00:56 from the observation deck of the stratosphere.
00:59 - There were 295 suicides in Clark County.
01:02 Levi was one of those.
01:03 - Just three days before Levi died,
01:05 the United States Senate supported a bill
01:07 that would move the nation's nuclear waste
01:09 to a mountain just outside of Las Vegas
01:12 with unknown unknowns.
01:14 - The ones we don't know, we don't know.
01:16 (woman grunting)
01:18 - You belong to the generation
01:20 that will manage high-level nuclear waste.
01:23 - Wow.
01:25 - 70,000 tons of the most lethal atomic weapon.
01:28 - 70,000 tons of death.
01:29 (guns firing)
01:32 - I love America.
01:35 (explosion booms)
01:38 - If the truth came out, they'd all be screwed.
01:43 - You'll regret what we're running up against.
01:47 It's the limitation of human knowledge.
01:50 We don't wanna hear this.
01:54 - There's been some philosophers who committed suicide
01:57 thinking about questions like that.
01:59 - The who, what, where, and how,
02:02 there are answers to those, not the why.
02:04 (woman screaming)
02:07 - Let me ask you this, what will you do if you do find out?
02:10 - This much we know.
02:17 (music)
02:19 [music]