YMMV / Death Becomes Her

• Accidental Aesop: While the movie's main point is about aging, it drops another one in regards to how Madeline and Helen's relationship is handled. The two are driven by a psychotic hatred and jealousy of each other, and they're constantly seeking to one-up each other for any and every perceived slight. Their motivations boil down to a back and forth of the Blame Game, and even when they're forced to live with each other to maintain their bodies they can't overcome their petty hatred. The message? Women hating on other women will just make both of them unable to be happy or live a decent life, especially when they have to depend on each other to survive.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Lisle manipulating Madeline to get Ernest to take the potion from the beginning? She mentions him while offering the potion to Madeline, and her offer to Ernest is much more passionate, with her appealing to his surgical talent and not requiring a price as she does with Helen and Madeline. It's very possible she was simply trying to enslave him for his skills like the other women in his life.
• Angst? What Angst?: Subverted. Madeline and Helen are initially horrified at the prospect of having to paint each other's ass forever, but after 37 years have passed, they act like it's nothing bad to the point where Helen delivers her final line "Do you remember where you parked the car?" even after they've been broken up into pieces.
• Anvilicious: The movie is about as subtle as a bull in a China shop when it comes to its Aesop about aging and its final message about it never being too late to lead a truly fulfilling life.
• Awesome Music: Alan Silvestri's wonderfully bitchy Gothic strings. Also the Stylistic Suck of Songbird!
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Isabella Rossellini's Lisle probably wouldn't be as remembered if she didn't have that scene where she only wears jewels and a sarong covering her modesty. It was even the first video example added to the Diamonds in the Buff page. Due to the Theiss Titillation Theory, it even overshadows her actual nude scene later in the film (although a body double was used).
• Cult Classic: A highly underrated Robert Zemeckis film, which has many fans for its Black Comedy, creative ideas and hammy performances as well as a surprisingly nuanced take on the idea of immortality and it's positive message that getting older is not something to be feared and showing that it's possible to live a happy, fulfilling life after fifty.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The original script had more backstory for Lisle, which some fans would have liked to be incorporated into the film - since her character is ripe for interpretation. One draft had her creating the potion to make the greatest minds of the world immortal, but the likes of William Shakespeare were horrified at the idea of living forever, and only vain Hollywood stars ended up taking it.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Songbird! is based on Sweet Bird of Youth, which is about a White-Dwarf Starlet - just like Madeline.
  • The Egyptian hieroglyphic on the potion box is the symbol "ankh", which symbolises life.
• Ham and Cheese: Everyone does show a tendency to ham it up, and it doesn't hurt the slightest.
  Helen: En Garde, bitch!
  Ernest: Can't you see? IT'S A MIRACLE!
• Harsher in Hindsight: Isabella Rossellini (who plays Lisle, the creator of the youth potion) was later fired from her job as the face of Lacome skincare at 42 (only three years after this film) for looking too old.
• He's Just Hiding: Apparently, Hollywood zombies do this after a while, like Greta Garbo and Jim Morrison.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • Helen in her early scenes, and it takes the potion to make her start looking like Goldie Hawn.
  • Bruce Willis is likewise dressed down with Nerd Glasses, a mustache and unflattering clothes.
• It Was His Sled: Helen isn't revealed to have taken the potion as well until over an hour into the film, but the image of her with a hole in her stomach is so ingrained in pop culture. It's even on the film's poster!
• LGBT Fanbase: The film maintains a significant cult following within the LGBT+ community, to the point where screenings of it are common during Pride Month celebrations. Tom Campbell, the executive producer of RuPaul's Drag Race, states that much of the appeal among LGBT+ audiences lies in the main characters "trying to win a game that's rigged against them" while jumping through the hoops of glamour, something that resonates well with their own plights.
• Magnificent Bastard: Lisle von Rhuman is a sultry witch who seduces the rich and powerful to join her secret society of immortal beings by offering them a youth potion. Running a strict operation where she grants eternal life to those worthy while advising them on how best to maintain their bodies and dodge public scrutiny for their seeming unending youth, Lisle has connections all over the country and uses them to find potential recruits. Lisle manipulates both Helen and Madeline into her society and tries to use them to recruit Ernest for his gifted ability at makeup and restoration, which Lisle wants to better supply her customer's needs. Though Ernest rejects her offer and steals a sample of the youth potion, Lisle chases him until it is destroyed and banishes Helen and Madeline for failing her, resulting in the ruination of the vindictive women while Lisle's organization continues to prosper.
• One-Scene Wonder: Isabella Rossellini as Lisle has some of the most hysterical moments in the film, despite having the least screentime. And Catherine Bell was her nudity body double. Also, Sydney Pollack as the doctor who examines Madeline.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: The sheer amount of tension between Madeline and Helen has the effect of making them seem like bitter exes as opposed to rivals - especially as the two don't seem to have much of an interest in Ernest beyond using him as a tool to hurt the other. The film even ends with the two of them patching things up, living together for eternity and agreeing to paint each other's bodies to preserve them.
• Signature Scene: Madeline, with her twisted neck, confronting Helen who has a gaping hole in her stomach after taking a shotgun blast pointe blank. Afterwards, the women appear normal until the end of the movie, as they rely on Ernest's skills as a mortician to make themselves presentable, but the scene where they compare their mortal injuries—and the impressive CGI involved—is what the film is best known for.
• Theiss Titillation Theory: The giant, elaborate, torso-covering necklace and perilously secured sarong-like skirt that Lisle wears.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Helen comes off miles more sympathetic than Madeline. While she's just as petty and driven by revenge as Madeline is, Madeline actively ruining Helen's love life by stealing every man Helen has does make it easy to see why Helen hates her so much, especially given Helen ends up in a mental ward at one point, and though Madeline claims Helen attacked her first, we never actually see how Helen treated Madeline in the past, we only see Madeline deliberately seducing Ernest. Plus calling someone "cheap" seems a fairly weak reason to go about ruining their life.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • It won an Academy Award. While some of the effects may seem a little hokey and rough now, at the time turning one woman's head backward and putting a hole right through another was a huge leap.
  • Special mention of the shot where Helen sits on the couch so the shovel handle passes right through the hole in her abdomen. Goldie Hawn didn't quite hit her mark properly and had to be digitally shifted to make the effect work, which is totally seamless.

---