Balls and Walnuts
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You Don’t Know Jack
Believe it or not, in med school we did receive instruction in medical ethics. Our teacher was a minister, if I remember correctly, but he usually did not have much of a judaeochristian bias — at least, none that I could detect at the time. One day, he talked to us about euthanasia, and while sympathetic to the cause of euthanasia’s proponents, he felt certain that doctors had no business practicing euthanasia. “We need another professional specialty altogether,” he said. “Call them thanatologists.”
The two things I remember from that moment: the uncannily bright grin of one of my classmates, a fellow we’d nicknamed Mickie Mouse for his uncannily bright grins, and who would eventually go into psychiatry; it was as if the clouds had parted and he had looked upon the face of God. Like he had found his home. Sometimes I wonder what he’s up to*.
The other thing I recall: a loud and persistent thought. Why isn’t this our domain? It’s all a matter of how you view doctors. If our role is to keep people alive, then yes, euthanasia is a clear conflict of interest. But if our role is to relieve pain and suffering, then euthanasia should be part of the job.
About this time, the late 1980s, Jack Kevorkian was just getting started in his role as “death counselor,” soon to be death facilitator, eventually to be known to the media as Dr. Death. The media loved to portray the man as a ghoul. Sometimes I suspect that he reveled in this caricature; his artwork, which could best be described as “fitting for the Night Gallery,” would do nothing to destroy this image.
Knowing Time Magazine, I wouldn't be surprised if they had picked murderer.
While Kevorkian initially acted as a facilitator, he ceaselessly pushed the envelope. As long as he served as facilitator and not prime actor, he was judicially unscathed, thanks to the craft of lawyer Geoffrey Fieger and the sympathies of the juries. (When people are forced to confront the prospect of their own deaths, few would not want the option of a painless passing.) But when he himself administered the euthanasia drug to an ALS patient and then arranged for the videotape to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, the D.A. went after him. Kevorkian unfortunately represented himself in this case, and was ultimately convicted of second degree murder. He was ultimately paroled in 2007 after a little over 8 years in prison.
You Don’t Know Jack (HBO) is a wonderful bit of docudrama, not to be missed. Susan Sarandon stars as Hemlock Society member Janet Good, John Goodman as Kevorkian’s friend and assistant Neal Nicol, and Al Pacino plays Kevorkian himself. And while I like Pacino in just about anything he does, I have to admit that lately, Pacino plays Pacino and it’s rare to see him play anyone else. But in You Don’t Know Jack, Pacino lives and breathes Kevorkian. If you’ve ever watched Kevorkian on TV (and if you haven’t, I’d be surprised if he isn’t well represented on YouTube), you’ll find the resemblance striking. Also remarkable casting: Danny Huston as lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. I had to google “Geoffrey Fieger” to make sure he wasn’t playing himself.
I can’t praise this one enough, people. It’s a thoughtful, albeit biased analysis of the issue of doctor-assisted suicide. If you’re looking for a character in this film who can provide a cogent argument against euthanasia, keep looking**. Much like its subject, the movie has an agenda. But it was entertaining, too — funny, poignant, and above all a showcase of terrific acting.
D.
*Ach, what a disappointment. Just googled the man. He’s a successful molecular biologist at U of Chicago . . . not a thanatologist.
**Really, the only argument that comes close to being persuasive is the possibility for abuse by next of kin; but abuse to the point of death can occur in many and varied ways, from neglect to outright physical harm, and the law is there, ready to punish the offender. Euthanasia, since it is such a public act — it must ultimately pass muster with a coroner, I would think — could be easily regulated to greatly reduce the possibility of such misuse.
Let this be a lesson for you
One of the teacher’s at Jake’s high school got fired, ostensibly for posting a photo to his Facebook page in which he was grabbing his crotch. Not sure why that would get a teacher fired, unless of course he’s only wearing his hand in that photo. Such things are usually the tip of a grimy iceberg, but not necessarily. Maybe someone on the board really couldn’t handle something as minimally sexual as a crotch-grab. Maybe that same someone still, to this day, can’t watch a Prince or Michael Jackson video.
Speculation among the student body is rampant, of course. I can imagine what we would have done with something like this back in the 70s. (Not that we had Facebook, of course. Would have had to be a crotch-grabbing photo accidentally submitted to the Yearbook Committee.) Students would have declared the teacher gay, of course, which was the absolute worst thing you could say about someone back then. Everyone was in their own sort of closet back then. For example, even after Betty Ford, you could still scarcely say the word cancer.
If it was something more than a crotch-grab, why not tell the students? Wouldn’t the truth be far less damaging than the inevitable shit storm of speculation?
D.
Some good, some bad, some ugly
From Vimeo, the Independent Film Noir and Dystopic Science Fiction website, one of the good ones:
Amazon Doomsday Commercial from Maladaahn on Vimeo.
Looking for another? Zigurate (on the homepage of the Vimeo site, as of this writing) was provocative, a bit eye-candyish in the Michael Mann sense, and borderline pornographic. And I have no idea what the ending means.
D.
Wealthy as Croesus
Just got done watching The Family Man, a 2000 film from Nicholas Cage’s production company, Saturn Films. Cage is (for me, anyway) mesmerizing as usual, so an otherwise bland and predictable plot didn’t manage to drag down the movie. The Family Man is basically a latter day It’s A Wonderful Life, with Cage in the George Bailey role, Don Cheadle as the angel Clarence. Granted, it’s an inverse Wonderful Life, since Jack Campbell’s (the Cage character’s) real life is sucky, and the imaginary one is divine.
The movie is a paean to the simple pleasures. What good is wealth if you’re alone, and aren’t the joys of a loving wife and two great kids ample recompense for a top job on Wall Street, a hot car, and a high-rent Manhattan condo?
Is it possible to give spoilers on a ten-year-old movie? If so, you’ve been warned. Once Jack gets enough of a taste of life with Kate & the kids to know this life is superior to the real one, Don Cheadle (another actor with riveting stage presence, btw) reappears and Jack knows the jig is up, he’s been given his “glimpse” of an alternate life, and now it’s back to Wall Street for him. But the old life is empty and he wants Kate, who in this universe he left over a decade ago, dumped really, and she’s long since gotten over him and moved on. No husband or boyfriend conveniently enough, but she does have a box of old boyfriend Jack’s stuff which she wants to unload on him before moving to Paris.
He tries to make headway with her, but she is over him, I mean really OVER him, and all the soulful looks in the world won’t penetrate. Paraphrasing here, “Yeah, you broke my heart once, Jack, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve moved on.” He begs her not to get on the plane but she blows him off. It’s all very moving, and if she had gotten on the plane, and if perhaps we could then see Jack striking up a conversation with someone new, this would have been a great movie. Think about it: there’s the tragedy of what he has lost, but at least he’s learned enough that maybe there’s hope for him yet. Not a Happily Ever After, but honest, because in real life you can’t go home again, but you can make a new home elsewhere.
This movie? Nuh-uh, not honest. Kate’s in the boarding line and Jack starts yelling about how they have a house in Jersey, and two kids, and how they still love each other after all these years, and how she won’t even let him touch her unless he tells her he loves her, and how their daughter can’t play violin very well but is precocious nonetheless, yatta yatta yatta . . .
Bad turn by the screenwriter, because I don’t care past relationship together or no, this woman who hasn’t heard from this guy in what, 15 years, she’s gonna be thinking, Crazy. Stalkerish crazy. And she’s gonna be calling security if he takes one more step towards her. Instead, she has coffee with him. Role credits.
The irony here is that Nicholas Cage the real life dude makes Jack Campbell look like a burger-slinger. He owns his own production company, Saturn Films, which has been turning out some big movies since 2000, including National Treasure. Cage is on his third marriage, and at one point owned 15 homes (including an island near Nassau and a 24,000 square foot home in Rhode Island), a “flotilla of yachts . . . [and] a squadron of Rolls Royces,” as well as lots of odd purchases of jewelry, art, and a big fossilized dinosaur head, for which he overbid Leo DiCaprio.
No one can accuse Cage of making nothing but HEA movies (Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing, to name two, had downbeat endings), so perhaps he can be forgiven for making one film with a sentimental ending. But it seems to me that if anyone understood how The Family Man should have ended, it would have been Nicholas Cage.
D.
What a guy
From Judy Mandelbaum’s corker of an article at Salon, Bishop blames Jews for child molestation scandal:
Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through… I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”
Read the whole thing; Babini’s apologia for the Holocaust brought mirthful tears to my eyes. I mean, just when this guy brings down the house by grouping Teh Jews and Teh Freemasons and I’m thinking he can’t possibly one-up himself, he blames the Jews for their own Shoah. Give the guy a little more rope and he’ll surely resuscitate the blood libel. Speaking of which, excuse me a moment while I go down to the local day care center to bait me some toddler traps.
He looks angry about something
Well, to quote Angel Heart, “They say there’s enough religion in the world to make men hate each other, but not enough to make them love.” Or perhaps it would be better to paraphrase P. T. Barnum: There’s an asshole born every minute.
D.
Nine scary (and clueless) old (and not so old) men (and women)
Our Supreme Court Justices are living in the 1950s.
“What’s the difference between email and a pager?”
Read the article — this was not the only question indicating a mind-vacuum. Scalia and Kennedy tripped over each other’s boners*, and of course Thomas never asks questions.
I could understand if it was one or two of the older Justices who were ignorant, but no — Chief Justice Roberts asked the email v. pager question. And he’s only 55!
It’s frightening that the highest court in the land is making decisions on matters they understand as well as I understand quantum chromodynamics. I told Karen they should recuse themselves from the case; Karen thinks they should recuse themselves from the human race.
D.
*Obligatory apology for that image.
Here’s one for your Netflix queue
Quick: name five real science fiction movies. Real ones, not monster movies, nor pseudo-Westerns or pseudo-Samurai or pseudo-whatever with a thin overlay of SF . . . I’m talking a movie that could not exist without the science at its core, and moreover, a movie that focuses on the themes that SF deals with best.
What does it mean to be human, for example.
So toss out Terminator and its sequels (pursuit by crazed killer, feh), Alien and its sequels (monster movie), Star Wars and its prequels (fairy tale) and what are you left with? Karen and I came up with 2001, THX 1138, and Blade Runner. Maybe Planet of the Apes, for all its flaws.
And then there’s Moon (2009).
Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole flesh-and-blood operator of the helium-3 mining station Sarang, on the Moon’s far side. He’s accompanied by GERTY, the soft-spoken AI (voiced by Kevin Spacey) who will instantly conjure memories of HAL 9000. Sam’s nearing the end of his three-year term, with only two weeks to go before shipping back to Earth to be reunited with his wife and the nearly three-year-old child he’s never met. But all is not well with Sam; he’s having headaches and hallucinations of increasing intensity, and when he crashes his rover into one of the station’s four harvesters, things really start going to hell.
This is one of those films that cannot be reviewed. Either you screw up the next viewer’s experience with spoilers, or you provide such sketchy details that the reader draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there’s a ruthless corporation (anyone with any sense of irony whatsoever will see right through the movie’s opening, wherein we are treated to a Lunar Industries Limited commercial — aren’t they wonderful?) and Kevin Spacey’s GERTY seems more than a little likely to win the AI Most Likely to Go Nuts Award, so isn’t this more of the same-old same-old?
Um, no.
Instead, this is a movie that confounds its viewers’ expectations, that provides a richness of detail that can keep people arguing for days (check out the discussion boards on IMDB — after you’ve seen the movie, of course), that packs a huge dramatic punch, and that tackles one of the big SF themes in a fresh and provocative way. There’s even a sly bit of social commentary here, snuck in on us with the film’s last line. It’s subtle and damn near everyone watching the movie will pass it off as a joke. And no, it’s not the oh so tired “Aren’t big corporations eeeeevil?” trope.
Good stuff, my friends.
D.
Like I should hold a grudge?
Tweet #2 for the day:
National Public Radio reports on CatholicTV going 3D.
The funny part comes at the end, when interviewer Art Silverman asks ShalomTV’s Rabbi Mark Golub if he minds being one-upped by CatholicTV.
Says Rebbe Golub, “The Catholics have always beat the Jews.”
I’ll bet he has a pet rat named Torquemada.
D.
Fooling the muse
I’ve been researching an idea — yeah, research, that’s a good name for it. Sounds so much better than procrastination. I’m just tickled that my muse has found something to wake her from her long slumber, since I had begun to think that portion of my psyche had suffocated in mothballs. Still, researching ain’t the same as writing, and I don’t know how some writers spend a year or more at this, especially since they do it full time, while I dabble. Full time research? Blech.
One interesting wrinkle has presented itself. In the beginning, this idea had presented itself as an alternate history. The more I study the era, however, the more I see that reality is of more than sufficient interest, with an ample share of villains and heroes, and no shortage of background color. The only reason to pursue an alternate history is that the romantic in me wishes there had been a different outcome. But I could easily stay within the bounds of fact and still write a ripping good yarn.
Main trouble is, this history is new territory for me. Hence the research. And it’s not like I haven’t tried something new before — I finished that romance, after all.
And I shouldn’t let the fact that I’m neither black nor Native American slow me down. No sirree. Write the thing first, then worry about the screams of “How dare you!” I’ve already decided to make my protagonist a Jew (don’t ask me how a Jew will find his way onto a Florida sugar cane plantation — that’s a big part of the fun & surprise right there), so I won’t be completely lacking in credibility.
Just mostly.
D.