AT THE MOVIES
A Myopic and Melodramatic Vision of Disease
Cancer, Hollywood style, avoids the increasingly optimistic truth
Julia Cecelia Smith
Sunday, September 28, 2003
©2003 San
Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/09/28/IN45822.DTL
"The Life of David Gale" is a film I kept meaning to see in the theater, but didn't get around to until it came out on DVD. Even so, it took me a week or two to bring it home. I knew it was virulently anti-death penalty but, as I occasionally prefer films that stimulate some conversation afterward besides "Where should we go for coffee?" I waited until the children were out of the house and sat down to watch it.
Slowly, its shadow message began to take shape. I first sensed it about two- thirds of the way through, when one of the key characters is revealed to be suffering from leukemia. And, sure as taxes, the subtext rose up like a Titan in the final reel: The cancer patient's life is over.
In the movies, the cancer patient's life is always over. As a long-term breast cancer patient, I resent the hell out of that. I resent it deeply, profoundly, and profanely.
Did it start with "Terms of Endearment," this romanticized, soft-core Hollywood vision of certain death once the word "cancer" is introduced into the script?
Some might say "Love Story," although, innocents that we were, the disease that claimed the young life of its heroine was never even given a name. The inevitable deaths portrayed in these films belie the very real medical advances that are, more and more, snatching jeopardized lives from the jaws of the cancer beast.
Moreover, what of the impact these leaden dramas have on people struggling to overcome their disease? Are the filmmakers so deaf that they can't hear what they are telling us? Let go, they say. Give up. Find a really close friend who will slip you that fatal dose and play your favorite CD while you wander the glowing path to where the woodbine twineth.
All these years later, and we're being spoon-fed "Soylent Green" philosophy in the dark along with our popcorn. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy!
Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a groundswell of films in which those diagnosed with various and sundry cancers wallow in the life-enhancing experience of suffering. Their very souls, and those around them, are redeemed by their agony.
Apparently, so should ours be, admiring the stoicism with which these martyrs sustain -- even enhance -- their humanity the closer comes their date with the Grim Reaper.
Among the flock of onscreen sacrificial lambs are Susan Sarandon as a doomed but noble mother handing over the reins of her children's lives in "Stepmom," Meryl Streep as another doomed but noble mother reconciling with her estranged daughter in "One True Thing," Diane Keaton as the doomed but noble wallflower facing the inevitable in "Marvin's Room," Kevin Kline as the doomed but noble has-been pulling it together in "Life as a House," Elizabeth Perkins as the doomed but noble patient showing William Hurt the high road to empathy in "The Doctor," Emma Thompson as the doomed but noble scholar wasting away in "Wit," Whoopi Goldberg as the doomed but noble best pal in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," Campbell Scott as the doomed but noble patient finding love on his way out the door in "Dying Young" and Tommy Lee Jones as the doomed but noble astronaut volunteering his all for the good of mankind in "Space Cowboys."
And, lucky us, there are two more in the bullpen before the year is out: "Pieces of April," wherein a family with a mother dying of cancer gathers for Thanksgiving dinner, and "My Life Without Me," in which a young woman dying of cancer lays plans for her family once she's gone. These newcomers to the Death Derby trace the silhouettes of their predecessors with astonishing precision. Does anyone else see a pattern here? How about this one? The diagnosis: cancer.
The prognosis: Oscar gold!
Why should you care? Aren't these good, solid dramas dealing with profound
issues, given a sympathetic treatment . . . except that these films are not
sympathetic, they are cruel. The big fantasy factory
in
I have never seen or heard of a film (other than the occasional biopic) in which someone is diagnosed with cancer, submits to the ordeal of treatment -- Western, Eastern, adjuvant, whatever -- and emerges with his or her life.
I suppose that's not dramatic enough. I suppose surfing cancer treatments for seven solid years has no merit. I suppose living long enough to laugh in the face of the doctor who told you to pick out your own shroud isn't as compelling as smiling through your tears as you slip into your final coma. And yet it should be. Because, more and more, that's the way it really is.
But
For the hundreds of thousands of us who live with cancer every day, and for the thousands who have walked away from a prognosis of death and regained full health, this self-congratulatory, morbid propaganda is more than an insult; it's an emotional assault. From the perspective of someone who has managed to live with, rather than die from, breast cancer for seven consecutive years, it takes an enormous amount of personal resolve to remind myself, "It's only a movie."
Julia Cecelia Smith lives in Alameda and has been treated for breast
cancer for the past seven years, five of them with metastatic
disease. She is a patient of Dr. Alan Newman's at