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‘Don’t Die’ and How Bryan Johnson Became the Real-Life Elisabeth Sparkle

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 13, 2025 |

Dont Die Netflix.jpg
Header Image Source: Netflix

Bryan Johnson is the founder of Braintree, a company specializing in e-commerce payment systems. After the company was acquired by PayPal for $800 million in 2013, Johnson founded Kernel, a neuroimaging startup. He’s largely become known in recent years, by his own volition, for his anti-aging life extension project. Project Blueprint is Johnson’s way of hoping to live forever at peak physical performance. He’s poured millions of his own money into experimental pseudoscience, including using his son as a blood donor for regular transfusions, in the hopes of staving off the cold hand of death.

Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, the documentary about his project, hopes to paint Johnson as a maverick going against the grain to push forward the status of homo sapiens beyond what mere biology dictates. The end result, however, is one of the saddest films I’ve seen in a while, and a curious flipside to one of 2024’s most acclaimed horrors.

In The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s balls-to-the-wall body horror satire, fading leading lady Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is offered a chance to ‘better’ herself. The substance of the title allows her to create a younger, hotter doppelganger, Sue (played by Margaret Qualley). To maintain this new life/lives, they must live in harmony. One week on, one week off, no exceptions. It doesn’t take long for Elisabeth and Sue to fall into an all-out war that has devastating consequences for them both.

Watching Don’t Die was a weird experience. I’ve been intrigued by Johnson’s PR battle to sell himself as something ground-breaking, like the fleshy version of a Silicon Valley unicorn. Yet every attempt he’s made to promote his vanity project has made both it and him look ridiculous and depressing as all hell. No matter how much he tries to pretend he’s in on the joke, he looks clueless. Don’t Die doesn’t exactly help his case either. Not even the most softball promo of his sketchy dream can make it look aspirational. In the end, he looks more like Elisabeth Sparkle than the Six Million Dollar Man.

‘Genius can hit a target no one else can see,’ says Johnson in the documentary’s opening. Said genius can be put towards beating aging, so goes his philosophy. Why should we accept our decay and death? What if we can create a new algorithm? From the onset, Johnson wants everyone to know that he’s breaking new ground (and of course it’s for sale on his website). We plebs just don’t understand it. Except we totally do, and we’ve been fighting that fight for centuries. If we weren’t then the wellness industry wouldn’t exist. The American healthcare system wouldn’t be a for-profit scam that explicitly benefits the rich.

Watching Johnson do crunches and talk in tech-bro terms about basic gym rhetoric like he’s cracked the fountain of youth is akin to investor weirdos who reinvented vending machines and called them bodega boxes. You didn’t get there first, and you’re just doing it stupider. He says he’s doing what his body tells him to do, as though this is a new concept and not the core phrase for decades’ worth of fad diets. He feigns ignorance at all the products he’s shilling via Amazon affiliate links are selling out after he publicized his ‘mission’, as though he’s somehow more than a pale-faced version of the Sham-wow guy. Unsurprisingly, Don’t Die doesn’t interrogate how the anti-aging and eugenics-adjacent field has become a hotbed of tech-bro investment from the likes of Peter Thiel. It’s all taken dishearteningly at face value, but even that can’t make Johnson look happy with his supposed achievements.

Viewers of The Substance seem divided on whether or not Elisabeth and Sue share a consciousness. They are repeatedly told ‘you are one’ and that the balance must be respected, but it seems ambiguous if the two halves of a whole are mentally connected. One friend told me that they believed they were sympatico but were driven by such mutual self-loathing that they drove one another to total annihilation rather than accept the truths of aging. For me, I think the matter is irrelevant. What matters is how Elisabeth cannot take satisfaction in her decision. Sue gets to live out the dream while she stays at home and stews in her own bitterness. The version of herself the world wants is a bastardized version of Elisabeth born of an impossible standard maintained by barbaric methods. She could feel free with this newfound liberation, but instead she waits around, alone and bitter, to become the fluid bag for Sue for another week.

Every woman in Hollywood is expected to be the younger and hotter version of herself, regardless of their age of accomplishments. Anyone over 50 is demanded to have the svelte and cellulite-free body they may not even have had in their 20s. Heaven forbid they have wrinkles or laugh lines or signs that they’ve lived. You have to get the fillers, the facelifts, and the Ozempic injections. Whatever the new trend is, you have to follow it, because there will always be a surgeon or magazine around to let you know that your body is wrong, whether it’s buccal fat or saggy knees. In the real world, it’s not much better when all those celebrities are shilling you the ‘magical’ skincare brands that are totally the reason why their faces are pore-less and as smooth as porcelain. Don’t get wrinkly, don’t put on weight, don’t get old, and don’t become a burden to society. Spend every penny and waking moment optimizing.

Like Elisabeth, you put yourself through hell to be perfect then get to experience none of the joy from it. With Johnson, it’s the most tech-bro-friendly, faux-intelligent, overpriced version of that conundrum. He spends his days on a tedious routine with the same flavorless diet, no real friends, and an assembly line of experimental treatments that reek of quackery and often leave him worse for wear. He swallows pill after pill (almost a hundred in the morning alone) and eats mulch because it might make a questionable number go down. He’s doing all that he can to not become infirm but this mission has left him, like Elisabeth, with the life of one already. When all of your time is dedicated to early nights, medication, and blood transfusions, what differentiates you from someone stuck in hospital with a laundry list of ailments?

When I last wrote about Johnson, I noted how we hope for the best version of something we desperately try to avoid. We’re all going to die, but we plead with the universe to give us a long, healthy, and fulfilled life so that we can meet death as a friend in our dotage with no unfinished business left behind. As someone who is currently dealing with grief, it is an undeniable comfort to know that the ones we mourn leave behind such love and memories, and some satisfaction that they got to complete certain dreams or offer some kind of legacy to their family and friends. They got to be happy, not all the time but at least enough. Watching Bryan Johnson look so miserable and lost as he spends obscene amounts of money trying to find purpose in delaying the inevitable feels like such a waste of the precious few decades we get on this planet.

The Substance has a more riotous approach to this torment, with Elisabeth and Sue falling into a blood-soaked war that would make Cronenberg blush. It’s hagsploitation for the influencer age, with all the ghoulish voyeurism that entails. There’s a visceral reality to Fargeat’s vision, one where subtlety is for cowards and there’s no such thing as being too on-the-nose. It’s a reminder of the absurdity of such impossible standards, and of how shoddy these theatricalities truly are. We’re all sacks of meat in the end. Maybe what matters more is what we do with them while we have the chance.

Don’t Die is fascinating as a piece of failed propaganda. No matter what Johnson does or how hard he works to sell what he’s doing as some act of biological disruption, he can’t conceal the sheer sadness on his puffy face over what his life was and has become. It’s hard to imagine even the most devoted gym bunny wanting to replicate what he’s offering. What makes Johnson’s mission all the sadder is how he’s clearly still troubled by his past. He’s a divorced former Mormon who’s no longer in contact with a huge chunk of his family (he also dumped his girlfriend after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, so he’s a special piece of sh*t.) One of his kids, Talmage, got back in touch with him and then became infamous for being his dad’s blood bag (he also keeps talking longingly about wanting a body like his son.) Johnson is candid about his depression and how hollow his life felt even at the peak of his success. As Talmage prepares to go to college, you can sense how truly lonely Johnson is. It’s the closest the documentary comes to pathos. He tries to spin the harder parts of his regime as positive, or makes self-aware jokes about how he’s always hungry, but all you see is the deadness in his eyes. You see Elisabeth Sparkle looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but hatred for herself.

The Substance doesn’t end well for Elisabeth. Don’t Die and Bryan Johnson try to sell an optimistic future where age is meaningless and death is optional. Nobody believes that. I question if Johnson himself even does. He seems like a man in search of answers that family, faith, and work couldn’t provide for him. “Removing my mind has been the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” he asserts, like a cult member looking for a new leader. Recently, Johnson announced that he had stopped taking the immunosuppressant rapamycin, which he’s featured using in the film, because it might have done more harm than good to his body. The side effects included occasional skin and soft tissue infections. Like Elisabeth, there’s a balance he’s not respecting. And we know that it will end the same way. We just hope it won’t be so bloody.

Don’t Die is available to watch on Netflix.