In particular, I have heard the catchphrase from Horton Hears a Who - Dr. Seuss’s paen to tolerance and understanding – used as an anti-choice slogan. The story, as I’m sure you recall, involves Horton, an elephant who, with his big ears and profound moral sensitivity, hears tiny noises coming from a small speck of dust he finds one day; listening carefully, he discerns that there is an entire world of microscopic creatures living inside the dust speck. When he reports it, he is declared insane by the moral troglodytes around him, who seek not only to imprison Horton but to commit genocide by boiling the dust speck to put an end to all such nonsense. Horton goes to heroic lengths to save the dust speck until the Whos inside finally succeed – by joining all their voices together equally, including that of the youngest child in the town – in making themselves heard and thus acknowledged as persons in their own right. Horton bountifully concludes: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

As Wikipedia notes, the book was published in 1954, and the roles of the chief villains in the book seem to parallel that of Joseph McCarthy in his witch-hunts against unpopular or dissenting voices. It has been co-opted by anti-choice activists and organizations since then, however.

Which brings me to the point of this post, which is merely to predict and warn against a resurgence of ironically Seuss-based medical McCarthyism in the wake of the upcoming live/animated film version of the book, slated for release on March 14th. Seemingly unnecessary, given the existence of the lovely 1970 Chuck Jones animated version that brightened my childhood so long ago, the movie stars the annoyingly talented Jim Carrey, as well as Steve Carell and a raft of guest stars. It’ll probably be fun, but will probably kick off an incessant clangor of smug, misogynist voices chanting “A person’s a person no matter how small” with absolutely no appreciation of the irony that in doing so they thereby embrace the concept of “personhood” that the anti-choice movement usually tries to avoid or obscure.

I don’t advocate starting a slogan war over a children’s movie, nor do I advocate hanging women’s freedom from slogans and catch-phrases to begin with. But, as with the annual Roe v. Wade Day protests, organized clinic harassment, and the like, it’s as well to be aware of what’s coming.

UPDATE: It’s beginning. From the movie review page of Christianity Today: A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

Seuss’ beloved phrase, “a person’s a person, no matter how small” . . . embodies a principle as simple as it is profound, and speaks to so all areas of our lives and, indeed, our faith. It is a mantra that endows all created things with a sacredness and value found only in their Creator. While Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) never intended his phrase to become a salvo in the abortion debate, many see in its simplicity the totality of the pro-life message.

The film also acts, equally inadvertently, as a model of religious conviction. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” says the writer of Hebrews, “the evidence of things not seen.” Contrasting the words of Hebrews 11:1, Sour Kangaroo tells Horton, “If you can’t hear, see or feel something, it does not exist.” But Horton is persuaded. He knows that the Mayor and the Whos of Who-ville are real, despite not being able to see them. In the same way, Horton’s immensity actually makes him invisible to the microscopic Mayor. When trying to describe Horton to the rest of the Whos, the Mayor frequently employs the sort of language one uses to describe a God who has yet to make himself visible to us.

Here we have a grand Christian missing-the-point Double Stuff.

Of course “a person’s a person” at any size. The question is, are the Whos persons? And the answer, again of course, is that they are. Why do we think so? Because we see that they are – they have houses and villages, a Mayor, a community, thoughts and interests and fears. They’re aware of themselves and care about what happens in their own lives. They have all the moral content of personhood, living lives of interest and value to themselves as persons. Sadly for them, they’re easy to overlook, which decreases the likelihood that their interests will be recognized, let alone valued. But nobody questions that their interests deserve consideration, as soon as it is recognized that they have interests. Which captures in a nutshell the utter boneheadedness of the attempt to analogize their plight to the issue of abortion. The Whos’ problem was that nobody knew they existed; as soon as their existence was demonstrated, their personhood was self-evident. (Once they were heard, they could claim their own interests, which is pretty good evidence of having some.) Not the most evil anti-dust-speck denizen of Seuss’s world denies the moral standing of the Whos, once it is known they exist. But no such question arises at all in regard of the human fetus. The controversy in that case is precisely the opposite of the one facing the Whos. We have always known the fetus exists – but even having seen them, there is no evidence whatsoever that fetuses are persons. It is not merely that they can’t be heard, like the Whos (or, more exactly, can’t speak at all) – it is that they have no thoughts to express, no awareness of themselves to get anxious about, no consciousness of their own existence, no interests, no values, no moral content to the biological processes that make up the sum and total of their lives for at least most of their gestational period if not beyond. The Whos are persons – no matter how small. Fetuses are not persons – no matter how big. That’s the crucial difference that is nowhere acknowledged in anti-choice nattering about tiny little dust-speck lives. And, ironically, that idiocy is actually expressed using the term “person” – but using it in a way utterly oblivious to its meaning, and to the moral difference between entities that are, and that are not, persons. Hilariously, Dr. Seuss uses the term correctly, but his anti-choice followers lack the perception to understand the moral meaning of even a Dr. Seuss story.

The second blunder is just as dumb. Virtually nothing in the second paragraph quoted above is correct. “Faith” may well be as dunderheaded as the Bible describes it to be – certainly it seems to be in common practice. But Sour Kangaroo is exactly right (speaking in somewhat metaphorical terms), and both Horton and Dr. Seuss know it. Horton does not know the Whos are real “despite not being able to see them” – he knows they are real because he perceives them (by hearing them, not by seeing them, but with his physical senses in any case). And it is precisely because the other jungle citizens finally gain physical evidence of the Whos’ existence (supplied by the purely physical process of sound amplification by increased power input) that they finally come to believe as well – and immediately change their minds about the existence of the source of the sensory input that was previously undetectable, after once detecting it. It may be that the Mayor of Whoville “employs the sort of language one uses to describe God”, when referring to the larger world, but if he does so he’s as dumb as a Christian movie reviewer. Why would his constituents believe him when he persists in talking like an idiot? The reason their world shakes and trembles, of course, is that it is subject to large forces imposed from outside – and when the citizens of Whoville gain clear knowledge of the source of those forces, they then change their minds about the existence of the elephant, just as the jungle citizens changed their minds about the existence of the Whos when presented with evidence. And both groups are justified in refusing to believe until they are presented with that evidence – but neither persists in a false belief when the evidence has been supplied. The story is a beautiful illustration of the scientific method. Not only does this reviewer not understand that, but, unlike either the Whos or Horton’s fellow jungle-dwellers, she is incapable of seeing what is put right in front of her. Throughout and throughout the Who story, people insist on physical evidence for claims of the existence of physical objects, and then accept the evidence as soon as it is made perceivable. This reviewer insists on claiming, in sheer defiance of that obvious sequence of events, that they are acting on “faith”. They simply are not – there’s no two ways about it – but you can be sure that fact will in no way stem the flood of false and stupid nonsense we’re going to hear about this – and related – issues.

The article generated a fascinating discussion thread, however (with minimal, but nonzero, trollage) - one that I only stumbled across today by following a visitor link (thanks!). I’m sorry to be so late on this but I encourage everyone to run over there; the discussion is interesting and, collectively, it includes a fascinating list of resources on the history of abortion, abortion and race, and sexual autonomy as seen from a variety of times and places, and presented in a variety of media (the rock-opera version of a 19th-century German play about the link between lack of sex ed and unplanned pregnancy sounds . . . wild – and I had no idea there was a whole list of early silent movies on the same topic!). Now I’ve got a lot more reading to do! So do you.

The 2005 techno-thriller The Island hides a ham-handed anti-biotech message amidst its helicopters, gun battles, and explosions of various kinds. It trots out some of the standard “clone army” cliches, but goes beyond this, in places literally taking its dialog directly from the religious-right’s anti-science talking points. It fills a certain niche in the long line of biotech-nightmare morality plays, but with a particularly preachy, and notably slanted, take.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Plot (such as it is)

If you’ve seen the trailers, or even just the poster, you know the plot of this movie. Story-arc-wise, it’s as obvious and clicheic as you could ask for, one of the worst of its type in that respect. But, just so we’re all on the same page:

The story is set in what at first appears to be a sterile, futuristic society that offers an unusually bland technical Utopia: everyone wears white jump suits, lives in hypermodern concrete cubicles, works absurdly boring and unchallenging jobs, exercises fanatically under supervision, and takes orders without question from computerized monitors that dictate what they must do, what they can eat, and whether they have too high ionic content in their urine. Friendships are discouraged, and when male and female citizens come too close together they are menaced by black-suited guards who gruffly order them to “watch your proximity”. Gradually it is revealed that they live in an isolated compound to avoid contamination from some unspecified holocaust that has ruined virtually the entire surface of the earth. The focus of their lives is “the lottery”, whereby lucky individuals are chosen from time to time to leave the compound and go to “The Island” – a tropical paradise which is the last uncontaminated spot on the planet. Pregnant women are favored – they “go to the island” as soon as they give birth.

One citizen – “Lincoln Six Echo” – hesitantly questions the inconsistencies he observes: how did things get like this?; what exactly is the purpose of their boring and repetitive jobs?; where does his friend, a scruffy tech-support character who moves around the unseen physical plant of the compound and does not wear a white jumpsuit, live, and why is he different?; how did a live moth get in the ventilator shaft, if every living thing on the planet was destroyed?; what is the meaning of his recurrent dream about a boat? He is the first to raise such questions, but he gradually infects the others with curiosity. He arouses the concern of the compound director, who calls him in for “therapy” and begins to monitor him.

Wandering around unauthorized, “Six Echo” stumbles into the medical wing. He witnesses a fully-grown clone being extracted from an amnion-like sac, resuscitated, and then branded and locked into the ID wristband all clones wear; a technician remarks “looks like we’ve got a good product”. He observes a pregnant woman – the most recent lottery victor – in labor. She delivers a healthy baby, but while she is asking to hold it the doctor injects her with a vile green substance. She goes into convulsions and dies as the delivery nurse holds her feet in the exam-table stirrups with a thoughtful expression. Running from this, he stumbles into an operating theater where the previous lottery winner is being systematically cut apart for his organs by surgical robots – he leaps screaming from the operating table and races down the hall, tubes and wires trailing. He is shot down by the black-suited security guards and dragged back down the hall, leaving a trail of blood. Clearly, things are not right.

Six Echo comes to the realization that the island is a sham and the lottery winners are being killed in these medical procedures. He attempts to escape the facility, dragging his doubtful but curvaceous female friend along. They escape to the outside of the facility wall, then through a digital camouflage screen, suddenly seeing the outside world as it is for the first time. They manage to make it up through a ventilation shaft to the surface, where they find themselves in an open desert. Soon enough they find other people, realizing that the surface is not deadly after all.

They contact Six Echo’s tech friend, who reluctantly explains the situation: “you’re not human”. They are clones of wealthy clients of a shady biotech company; grown to adulthood in their sacs and implanted with false childhood memories, they are kept docile in a programmed, safe environment until their bodily organs are needed to save or rejuvenate their “sponsors”. He is told “you’re not like us – real people”.

It’s obvious that the biotech company will go to any lengths to keep its setup secret – Six Echo and his not-quite-girlfriend (they are kept “at the level of a fifteen-year-old” and thus haven’t discovered sex yet; a real-world character is stunned to learn this and tells him “well, I won’t spoil the surprise – you’re in for a treat!”) must flee for their lives. The bulk of the film is taken up with a helicopters/jet motorcycles/machine guns chase sequence that is both unenlightening and unexciting; naturally the two unarmed, completely ignorant clones, on their first day in the real world, manage to destroy a mercenary army and all its hardware while surviving a 50-story plunge off a building.

Simultaneously, however, expository sequences with the biotech director make it clear what is happening: the clones were originally intended to be kept in a “permanent vegetative state” – which is what the firm’s clients are still told – but for some reason it was necessary to give them full consciousness in order to make the clone procedure work right. Now, the clones’ brains are establishing new neural circuits that correspond not to their own implanted memories but to the real-world memories of their DNA-donor “sponsors”, which is why Six Echo keeps dreaming about boats – his sponsor is a wealthy boat designer. Shocked that his firm’s “product” is developing its own will and independent agency, the director orders all “product lines” “recalled” – the growing clones in their amniotic sacs are killed, and the guards begin rounding up the existing clones on pretense of a mass exodus to the “island”, then stuffing them in gas chambers.

Luckily, Six Echo and his girlfriend Two Delta have nobly volunteered to return to the facility to try to rescue the other clones, and so manage to trick the guards, breach the security wall, and lead the clones on a dangerous climb up the ventilator shaft as the guards cut them down with laser rifles. The final scene shows the clones, in their gleaming jump suits, assembling in waves on the edge of the mesa that hides the facility, facing the sun for the first time and knowing that it is good.

Genre

OK, so so much hokum. The iconography of the film is interesting, however. I detect many quotations from other (mostly better) films, placing The Island in a distinct technical-dystopia tradition.

The obvious similarities to Brave New World and 1984 are unavoidable: vat-grown humans in a rigidly hierarchical system; technical amelioration of all inconvenient emotion; video monitoring of all residents at all times; etc. To some extent these parallels are inevitable in the tech-dystopia genre, and beyond the artificial-womb technology and the jumpsuits I don’t think the tone of The Island quite matches that of Brave New World – b0th are anti-bioengineering, but from different angles. In the end, these parallels are so obvious and so overused that I am inclined to discount them here. Others are more subtle and more interesting.

There is a very brief shot, looking upward from ground level, of near-future LA just as the clones arrive (by maglev train) during their escape bid. The sky is filled with tapering skyscrapers, and the canyons between them buzz with sky trams and flying shuttles moving in every direction. I am almost certain this is a deliberate recreation of an almost identical shot from the classic Metropolis – the prototype for all futuristic technical-dsytopia slave-army parables.

An escape sequence through a tunnel with shafts of bright overhead light, and more broadly the stark-white lighting scheme, alphanumeric character names, jumpsuits, and anti-sex regimentation seem distantly, but distinctly, reminiscent of Lucas’s first and in some ways best film, THX1138.

The general “athletic young male rebel gets hip to his murderous techno-fascist society, goes on the run with his sexy blond girlfriend in tow, gets shot at a lot, escape to a post-apocalypse wilderness” plotline is an unsubtle ripoff of Logan’s Run.

The ventilator-shaft escape with the laser rifles is an all-but-unmistakable quotation of the climactic scene from the first, genre-defining genetic-holocaust movie, The Andromeda Strain.

There is another brief shot, as the two escapees enter the (hypermodern, concrete) home of Six Echo’s sponsor, whom they hope will help them; it shows the building’s open-plan living room with a set of steps slanting up one wall. Again it lasts only seconds and is not emphasized, but it reminds me strongly of a very similar shot in GATTACA, also showing the (hypermodern, concrete and steel) home of the wealthy character who is using another character’s fluids and body parts for his own advantage, in another bioengineering-dystopia, “earn-your-way-offworld” social context.

The “clones in sac wombs” bit seems lifted from the very similarly plotted Scwarzenneger flick The Sixth Day – which would also explain the helicopters, automatic weapons, and explosions.

These references* put The Island at the end of a line of (mostly) biological warning films with similar cultural/scientific assumptions. The greatest crime of the cloners is to deny the humanity of their “product”. Whatever controls or limitations they may put in place (recall the “alcohol in the blood surrogate” that makes the Delta workers docile and complacent in Brave New World), humanity’s true nature will show through; the clones will develop intelligence and initiative, and claim their rightful place among God’s creatures, no matter what. (Recall also the “nature will find a way” theme from Jurassic Park – the dinosaurs mutate into breeding colonies even though there were made genetically sterile.) Naturally, inhuman corporate monsters claim the lives of their biological “products” for profit or personal benefit. (In Sixth Day, the officers of the cloning corporation and their wives were themselves clones; in The Island, the corporation’s clients incorporate the clones’ organs into their own bodies.)

Collectively, the message of the bio-warning films is that there is something essential to “normal” biological humanity that is overlooked or denied in technological intervention. It is inherently evil to assume control over the biological basis of humanity to such a degree that that essential nature can be overlooked. Those who seek such control are inevitably evil and can be relied on to treat the subjects of their technological work as non-human, in defiance of their essence.

What It’s All About

I dunno. This is one of the worst scientific-dystopia films ever made, and that in a genre filled with interesting but grossly dunderheaded schlock.

The criticisms are too easy and too obvious: the “cloning” procedure has nothing to do with real cloning; cloning does not transfer memories or experiences; “true human nature” does not just burst through cognitive blocks. (If it did, presumably every mentally disabled male would eventually “wake up” just like Ewan McGregor and turn into an unstoppable, commando-fighting, conspiracy-defying, good-lovin’ hunka man, and Scarlett Johansson would “wake up” and discover she’s his sexually curious girlfriend. And if that were true, I’d be shoving a knitting needle through my eye socket at this very minute.) But let’s let that nonsense go. This is not a film you bother to criticize on technical grounds.

Conceptually, the film has even deeper issues.

It’s hard, from the perspective of both content and context, not to see the “grow them in the lab then cut them apart for their constituent parts” theme as a metaphor for embryonic stem-cell research. And, in the scene where the sacs gestating the clone bodies are cut open in order to dispose of the inconvenient clones, the metaphor for abortion is as unmistakable as it is heavy-handed (arguably, it’s not even a metaphor). (The birth scene may also be a reversed metaphor for abortion: here the pregnant woman is killed and the fetus is kept alive, by a male doctor and female nurse who carefully mask their indifference to the murder they commit.) This makes that plot device intriguingly complex: it is both a literal (though scientifically false) representation of cloning, and a symbolic representation of stem-cell research and abortion – in all of which aspects it turns out to be grotesque and inhuman. (It’s a right-wing paranoiac trifecta!)

The viewer is meant to be horrified by each distinct aspect of this theme, but more than that, to carry that sense of horror over to their appreciation of the real-world procedure implicated in each of its aspects. The scene in which patients are killed on the operating table is gross butchery – so, presumably, is cutting apart a blastula to harvest its stem cells. The birth/abortion scene may be a (surprisingly subtle) call to see abortion staff as murderers, and the moral neutrality they claim for their acts to be as much a sham as is these workers’ indifference to the woman they murder. The gestation-sac murder scene surely has that intention. And throughout all this is the underlying premise of creating life in order to kill it and use its parts – a commodification, and mechanisation, of human life that, as we see it manifested over and over in each of these different bloody ways, we are asked to view as inherently illicit in and of itself.

We are also told the developing clones are kept in a “vegetative state” – though it turns out they are fully conscious. I take it the message is clear?

There’s more: the African mercenary assigned to track down the clones eventually comes over to their side. He identifies with them because, he tells them, he was once enslaved by an African warlord: “I know what it means to be less than human”. This encapsulates one of the most bizarre and cynical anti-choice slogans: that abortion is like slavery. (This was the reason for George Bush’s nonsensical response, in the 2000 presidential campaign debates, to a question about Roe v. Wade that referenced the Dred Scott case. It was one of his dog-whistle codeword shoutouts to the religious right.) They even manage to make it a black slave, notwithstanding that American slavery has been over for almost 150 years.

But of course the movie cheats. In criticizing stem cell research, we never see stem cells – we see Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Freakin’ Johansson. We appreciate the essential humanity of these biological “products” because they have human personalities and desires – we are emotionally embroiled in their lives, as in any movie character’s life, in ways that we are not, and cannot be, and do not apply to, fetuses or embryos. And the notion that “life will find a way” – that that human essence just will make itself known, is the greatest cheat of all: not because it’s technical nonsense, but because it asserts, as a plot device, the foundational moral belief of the right wing that is at the heart of most debate over these issues – namely, that all biological human “beings” are identical and have the same nature.

The stem-cell debate exists entirely and only because of the absurd religious assertion that embryos are morally indistinguishable from persons – that embryos are moral persons notwithstanding that they lack every possible or plausible desideratum of personhood. In The Island, embryos are persons because they’re Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Freakin’ Johansson! They’re six feet tall at birth, they walk and talk, they have fears and desires, they fight for their lives, they fall in love, and Ewan McGregor gets it on with Scarlett Johansson on the deck of a yacht. (And if that were what it meant to be a stem-cell embryo, I’d be stuffing myself into a test tube at this very minute.) The film makes the religious premise real in an insanely literal way: embryos are not just the moral equivalent of adults, they are adults! And there is no need, here, to argue that the lack of personality, thoughts, feelings, or language ability on the part of embryos does not make them morally distinct from adults who do have these characteristics – these “embryos” have all of those things.

When the former slave tells the clones that he is like them, he’s certainly right: he, like them, is a thinking, feeling, independent adult. The movie feeds us the “embryos” = “slaves” line by making the “embryos” fully adult persons, without asking us or them whether there would be anything strange in this intelligent, proud, full-grown black man saying the same thing to a blastula in a culture flask – exactly the actual equivalency the religious right unblushingly asserts every day.

When the two runaways confront their tech-service friend and force him to tell them the truth, the film makes him a caricature of the pro-choice position – using anti-choice language to do so. “You’re not human” is a pro-choice-style expression of personhood theory: embryos and fetuses are not persons because they have not developed the traits necessary for personhood. But in this case, the statement is obviously false: it makes no sense to say that to walking, talking adults, who clearly are members of the human species. Also, the language here refers to “human beings”, not “persons”; when he later makes a distinction between the two clones and “real people”, he introduces personhood but implicitly equates it with being “human”. This is standard right-wing rhetoric – to use the phrase “human being” in reference to moral persons, and then attempt to establish their moral bona fides by citing biological facts about species membership. The movie primes us to ignore the false equivalence between adults and embryos, and to accept the false equivalence between “human beings” and “people”. By rejecting, as the viewer does, the obviously false evaluation of the two adult humans in the film (they are human and they are persons; the techie denies both these facts), we are invited to assume the same statements about embryos or stem cells are similarly false. By accepting, unconsciously, his unremarked statement of identity between “human beings” and “people”, we are encouraged subconsciously to accept the anti-choicers’ similar misuse of those terms. The film stacks the deck by so clearly telegraphing the falsehood of the “non-human” and “non-person” claims in the case of adults, while downplaying or hiding entirely the false equivalence of terms, and the false equivalence of adults and embryos, that it evokes.

The film does more than cheat, however; more even than ratify uncritically the most extreme right-wing positions. It adopts and magnifies the misogyny of the anti-choice right to a monstrous degree. The birth scene, it was noted, is an abortion metaphor (a woman and her fetus undergo a “procedure”: one dies, one lives). By killing a sympathetic female character in a chilling, literally clinical way, during a metaphorical abortion procedure, we are subconsciously invited to view real abortions the same way. But the scene also incorporates, non-metaphorically, one of the particular ideological grotesqueries of the right wing: that abortion is somehow an assault on the woman having the procedure; that women are “victims” of their own abortions. In this instance, the metaphorical abortion becomes literally such an assault. The claim that abortion clinic staff are tricking women into harmful procedures for profit here is again made literal. The claim that abortion is more dangerous than childbirth – a reversal of the facts – is also made literally true. Seeing these parallels requires seeing the literal and metaphorical aspects of the birth scene at the same time – seemingly a contradiction – but the idea that one scene can have different levels of meaning is not a new one, and this scene, understood at both levels, is nothing more than an explicit and visual instantiation of almost every major talking point of the anti-abortion propaganda machine.

That is not the worst, however. Recall that the gestating clone-bodies are embryo metaphors: the destruction of the gestation sacs is the other major metaphor for abortion in the film. But in this case, the embryos gestate entirely alone – their development, and their “abortion”, takes place entirely in the absence of any representation of a pregnant woman. In the sac-destruction scene, abortion literally has nothing to do with a pregnant woman at all. There is no woman present. No woman is affected. The abortions are not justified by the needs of any woman – they are simple murder with no offsetting benefit of any kind. (In fact, they are murders undertaken to hide the sins of the one ordering the murders, the one who created the clone “embryos”. This is another metaphor – for the idea that slutty women have abortions to avoid the consequences of their reproductive irresponsibility)

This is the anti-choice position in its most vicious form, made absolutely literal. Anti-choicers are often accused of ignoring the women who have abortions, of seeing abortion as a procedure affecting only the fetus, of not caring about or noticing that a woman’s body, life, health, and interests are at stake. Well, it doesn’t get any clearer than this: abortion is really not about women’s health if women do not even exist as part of a pregnancy or abortion procedure. This as much as anything tells us where this movie is coming from.

Finis

I don’t have any long-reaching lesson to draw from this film, other than that confused and resentful right-wingers can make bad sci-fi too. It was startling, in a way, to become aware of the flood of reactionism buried in the modern-looking production values of this film, but I suppose it shouldn’t be. Right-wingers can hire CGI programmers just like everybody else. The film is certainly a product of its reactionary times – yet oddly old-fashioned-looking even when it was first made. (That it takes so many of its cues from 70s-era apocalyptics and panicky post-WWII literature is partly the reason, but then we must ask why, exactly, did its makers do so?) What prompted Warner Brothers to think an extended, preachy metaphor for stem-cell research and abortion, from a conservative perspective, in a sci-fi format, was just the ticket for late 2005 I don’t know, but they were clearly reading the political tea leaves.

Apparently, in the Bush years, everything new is old again.

*Wikipedia has a good article on the film in which they note further references to a number of obscure sci-fi movies I mostly hadn’t heard of. In particular, it notes that the plot closely parallels that of the super-low-budget 1979 horror film Parts: The Clonus Horror.

What happens, f’rinstance, if your doctor’s a mobbed-up, drug-using, drug-pushing, fairly psychotic lowlife with sybaritic sexual tastes who doesn’t really mind seeing you die?

Turns out that may not be such a bad thing. 

The first, and better, film was Shadowboxer, a psychological study of a mixed-generation pair of lovers who happen to be hired assassins, and of how far love takes you (Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Helen Mirren, with Mirren’s twins playing their usual supporting role). The doc is Joseph Gordon-Levitt (superb as the lead in Brick). The second, and frankly bad, film was Crank, whose premise is that this thug killer has been shot up with “the Chinese cocktail”, an irreversibly-binding (WTF?) adrenergic antagonist that blocks all the adrenaline in the victim’s body, letting him slowly run down until he dies unless he engages in non-stop pointless activity to jazz himself up enough to keep his heart beating; it’s basically a plotless premise for 83 very tedious minutes of “action” stunts that aren’t even all that exciting to people who haven’t taken the Chinese cocktail – I wanted to stab myself, not to get an adrenaline rush but just to restore my dignity by doing penance for seeing this crap. But I digress. The doctor in Crank is played by an amazingly good Dwight Yoakum; it was his performance that suggested this post to me.

See, the thing is, when you’re a hired thug killer, you tend to run into awkward medical situations that can’t easily be explained in a regular ER. So you cultivate associations with doctors who take cash and don’t ask questions.

[MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

In Shadowboxer, the young resident internist realizes the killers are double-crossing their boss, but he stays mum for the sake of the baby they’re protecting. This includes showing up at a motel in the middle of the night to deliver that baby, accompanied by some illegal and unreported bullet-removal (two treatments you rarely find on the same charge sheet), as well as regular stitch-jobs for the assassin, under-the-counter meds of various kinds, and similar illicit jobs for the boss they’re all double-crossing - all this while stashing away gym bags full of greenbacks, banging his heavyset, trash-talking black* skank-ho nurse and going down on his GYN patients while they’re in the stirrups. All in all, probably the coolest guy in his med-school class.

In Crank, the aging, balding, pony-tailed and love-beaded doc gets a frantic phone call from the cocktail dude, as he (the doc) is in Vegas in the middle of an erotic oil massage from several naked Vietnamese women. He advises the guy to steal some epi from an ER (which he bungles in hilarious-hitman fashion), then takes a plane home to try and help the guy out. The laid-back doc drawlingly quizzes his patient on his symptoms over the in-flight phone on the plane (“You’ve probably got blurred vision?” “Check!” “You feel cold?” “Check!” “You have a steel hard-on?” “Check!”. . . ), then treats him as well as possible in his office when he finally arrives back in LA (“So now I’m all right, huh?” “Fuck no, you’re not all right. You’re in such shit shape it’s a wonder you’re still here!”). All this while banging his heavyset, trash-talking, black* junk-food guzzling receptionist. Probably the coolest guy in his med-school class . . . back in 1972.

Eventually, the big boss in Shadowboxer catches on that he’s being played for a fool; he tortures and kills the doctor trying to find out where his renegade killers and ex-girlfriend are hiding. The doctor regains some dignity at the end by defying the boss.

The doctor in Crank is much more interesting. He has to explain to the main character that the “cocktail” is untreatable. (Never mind – it’s not the dumbest part of the movie.) The guy has few options.

You’re fucked. . . . I can put you on life support, drag it out for a couple of days. But you wouldn’t like that. Why don’t you let me give you something? – go out on a beautiful dream? . . . Do you want me to do that for ya?

The patient decides to use his last hour on earth seeking revenge on those who shot him up, and asks the doctor for help. The doc fixes him up with a transcutaneous insulin pump loaded with epinephrine, and away he goes, both of them knowing his clock is going to stop during the process.

So, neither of these guys fits the Dr. Kildaire mold. They’re both strung out, self-indulgent, crude, and way over on the wrong side of the law. They cater to criminals, hush it up, and condone or commit drug offenses as both unorthodox medication pathways and recreationally. Both know their patients kill in cold blood, and they serve as enablers. Both are ready to see (or help) their patients die. And I like them both.

I like the fact that they see their patients’ needs clearly. Neither looks like much of a humanitarian, but how many doctors – however committed they are to value-neutral caregiving – will turn out in the rain, or catch a plane on short notice for one patient? How many patients feel they could call their doctors in a personal emergency? (The power company used to advise elderly customers to list their doctors’ phone numbers on an emergency-contact form in case they fell behind in their bills and were in danger of having their power cut off – the idea being that the doctor was the one person who could be counted on to have the patient’s welfare firmly in mind, and would naturally take steps to intervene. I once worked with a doctor who actually got such a call from the power company and was completely non-plussed: she couldn’t pay her bill? – what the hell was he supposed to do about it? – why was it his problem? I don’t think the utility companies do that anymore.)

I like the fact that they have human needs and human lives. How many doctors know the human heart – by personal experience, still less – well enough to know its yearnings and strange excursions? Most doctors do get pretty jaded about the kinds of trouble people get themselves into, but do they really appreciate it? I’d be impressed if I knew my doctor spent his weekends getting Fire and Ice from lithe, naked specialists in a casino hotel. And providing sexual services to patients on-duty? – OK, bad scene, for all the well-known reasons, but let’s allow some leeway for fictional license here and admit that this doctor’s a pretty well-rounded character.

I like the fact that they don’t let what’s legal get in the way of what’s right. OK – they don’t let it get in the way of what’s wrong, either, which is maybe a bit of an issue, but both will do whatever it takes to help their patients do whatever they need. As the right wing cranks ever further down on people’s lives and choices, more and more your doctor becomes the person who will turn you in for having the wrong wounds, taking the wrong drugs, asserting the wrong rights, or, as one recurrent Republican Congressional bill has it, having the wrong immigration status while you’re fighting for your life in an emergency room. Your doctor, and now your jackass hourly-wage strip-mall chain pharmacy droid, is more and more the person who prevents you from getting the medication you need. A doctor who encourages his patient to snort coke and steal prescription stimulants from a hospital is a refreshing alternative, no?

What I really like about Dwight Yoakum’s doctor is his lacerating honesty. If I’m ever so fucked there’s no hope in any way, what I want to hear from my doctor is: “You’re fucked.” All right, all right, few would employ that choice of words, but it’s OK to meet patients where you find them: that probably is the right way to talk to an LA hitman, and it works for me, too, even if not for everybody. A doctor who has the class to modify their language for uptight or prudish patients is fine; a doctor who doesn’t have the nads not to do so for someone more down-to-earth is not fine. (Recall the scene in Kinsey in which the title character tells his assistant: “No. No. No euphemisms. If you’re talking to a college graduate, use ‘masturbation,’ ‘testicles,’ ‘penis’ . . . With the lower-level male, it’s ‘jacking off,’ ‘balls,’ ‘prick’ . . . . I don’t know, Gebhard. Maybe your Harvard degree is too ivory tower for our purposes” - elitism aside, he’s right on the mark.) This doctor is deeply empathetic, but never pulls his punch and never sinks to any evasion or mealy-mouthedness. What I like most is his caring. He cares in the way that matters: by doing what he can. He flies back, treats the patient, tells him what he needs to know, offers him the relief that’s available, without fear or hesitation, then gives the patient what the patient wants, again without judgment. He respects his patient with the truth, and by offering him every available choice, and again by acceding to the choice he makes. He never makes the mistake of thinking it’s what he – the doctor – prefers that matters, and I think he does that because he hasn’t got a God-complex about himself or his profession.

In short, I like these doctors who are so busy being people they can’t even aspire to being “Doctors“. Doctors who aren’t so far above their patients they don’t know what it’s like to be human, to be fucked up, to be strung out, to be in need, to have no good choices, and to need no pity through it all. Doctors who live like the people they serve, not in the sense of class (though that would be a welcome and much-needed change) but of the content of the ugly lives most people lead.

To be more serious, I don’t really want doctors to consort with organized crime or promote contract killings. I don’t want them to ignore the moral constraints on their practice. But I felt a kind of admiration for these fictional doctors who understood their patients because they shared the same planet with them. Would a few flaws in your doctor really be that bad?

* I mention race in both cases here because the trashy foul-mouthed black woman is a long-standing “low-life” stereotype, as is the “exotic” sexuality that black stereotypes drags in with them. Aside from the criminality, drug-taking, and all the rest, it’s a sign of these presumptively upper-class white men’s perversity that they persistently have sex with non-white, working-class women. (Interestingly, the assassin couple in Shadowboxer is inter-racial as well as cross-generational and quasi-incestuous, but only the latter two are explored in the script. Apparently, Gooding’s role was not written as black, and was originally offered to a white actor before Gooding.) That’s a separate issue from the theme of this post – one that speaks to the film-making, not the doctors’ roles – but it shouldn’t go unremarked.

This is an especially strong intuition for progressives for whom “helping the needy” is both a natural inclination and an inherent good (implicitly requiring that “being needy” is less good than not having a need, whereby one is “helping” by removing the need). Yet many people with disabilities would deny both that disability is necessarily an objective harm and that it necessarily makes them unhappy. Simultaneously, they are accutely aware of what is difficult for them that is not for those who do not have their disability, and many seek whatever aid is available – including medical treatment – to lessen that difficulty. Grasping this dichotomy is an important part of bringing disability into the range of human norm, and “the disabled” into the community of caring that progressives seek to build.

It’s very hard to explicate, in a coherent way, the feelings and values that drive this complex of perspectives, but it is striking how often you hear sentiments such as the above from people with disabilities – and not just the more radical ones. Anyone who needs disabusing on this score should waste not a moment renting the film “Murderball” for a hard slap upside the head. Here’s one athlete (“murderball” is a viciously intense form of rugby played – yes – by quadriplegics in wheelchairs) – an intense, angry man – reflecting on his disability:

Consider Mark Zupan, probably the best player in the sport today. He was paralyzed when he was 18. He fell asleep in the bed of a pickup driven by his friend, Christopher Igoe, who drove away not realizing Mark was aboard. The truck crashed, Mark was thrown into a canal, and wasn’t found for 13 hours. It took them a long time, but he and Christopher are friendly again.

During a discussion after a festival screening of the movie, he was asked, “If you could, would you turn back the clock on that day?” You could have heard a pin drop as he answered: “No, I don’t think so. My injury has led me to opportunities and experiences and friendships I would never have had before. And it has taught me about myself.” He paused. “In some ways, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

This is hard to believe, but from him, I believe it.

Believing that – not that accidents or disabilities are likely to be the best thing that ever happens to anyone, but that people can accept them as parts of life, with the good and bad that come with every major part of one’s life – believing what disabled people tell you about their own disabilities, believing their acceptance of themselves, is a necessary step for anyone who wants to understand what disability really is, and leave behind their insistence that the disabled see themselves through non-disabled eyes. A second step – one that still challenges me – is understanding what it means to want to ameliorate disability without denying oneself as disabled. “Imfunnytoo” at “Did I Miss Something” has this first-hand take on “living with disability” while also “wanting effective treatment”. It’s a nuanced, difficult, and expressive piece of work: 

Those with disabilites often loathe Telethons and empty promises of “cures” whether by big pharma, NIH,faith healers, herbalists, etc etc.

Why? Because we’re busy with relationships, jobs, volunteer opportunities just as the able are. Many in the disability community don’t spend a bunch of time waiting for a cure We’re doing instead….Pining by the phone waiting for a cure, or foccussing soley on cure rather than quality of life does a disservice to the doctors, the scientists, potential patients and caregivers. Also, many of us figure we’re just fine the way we are thanks. (The most recent X-Men movie is a good illustration of the “different is fine” idea.)

That doesn’t mean that if solid science says that there are some promising leads in Stem Cell Research, that solid science shouldn’t be allowed to run its course and perhaps find things that will dramatically change many Americans lives for the better. In other words, we’re not going to sit at the side of the road and beg for alms, but if medical advances can and do eventually help many of us, that’s a great thing.

The President has said no. That was a mind blowingly dismissive move towards science and towards advancement. His base loves it, but it’s just plain nuts. Far be it from our President to use some common sense. About anything.

But, the people that write and report on the Stem Cell Debate who are for the research have also made a mistake. And I dunno about others with impairments, but this disabled person would please ask those who support Stem Cell research to stop intensifying and reinforcing the “poor tragic people” stereotype. The mother heartbroken because her child won’t be “cured” will still love them as they are. The awfulness of being in a wheelchair and what a “tragedy” that is. (Ask the guys in the movie “Murderball” if they are feeling “tragic” today. ) Before the potential benefits for Stem Cells were discovered we were going about business as usual and we will continue to do so.

Please oppose Mr. Bush on the clear merits of the science involved and the specific condtions we hope it might help. Don’t use stereotypical images of the disabled to make your point, images that make it harder for us to be judged on “who we are” not our impairments. The “tragic” frame tells us we’re victims first. We’re not.

[I copied both quotes above before realizing that the latter one references the former - I swear! Hmmm . . . maybe it's time for a second good documentary about scary-looking, un-self-pitying quadriplegic asskickers.]

“Imfunny” says it as clearly as I have ever seen it: removing the hassles caused by “disability” conditions would improve the quality of people’s lives - just as removing hassles would improve the quality of any of our lives. But that’s not to say that a life with disability-caused hassles is a bad life, any more than any normal human life is bad simply because it could be better. Seeing disability as inconvenience – serious inconvenience, often, but, importantly, defined as an interference with life plans and projects, not some inherent quality of the person themselves – puts the focus where it should be, on the issues people face in their lives, and not on categorizing people (“normal”, “not normal”) in order to decide how to feel about them. The latter is not merely condescending and insulting, it’s counterproductive to working on the real issue – making life easier, not “curing” the “disability”. And, again, realizing that those two are not synonymous is the first step.

Hat tip: Ampersand at Alas, a Blog

Most of the discussion centered on the phenomenon of reporters seeking quotes from ethicists – which then are distorted, reduced to sound-bite meaninglessness, or, worst of all, used as “balance” in the kind of he said/she said articles that present the most outrageous or false statements on an equal footing with informed or rational commentary. Many session participants complained of their bad experiences in that regard, and there was talk of how to get reasoned approaches to ethical issues better represented in the news media.

There was also some discussion of whether ethicists should take “educational” or “advocacy” roles in dealing with the media – whether they should speak in a neutral, explanatory voice, or take a clear position on controversies and use their knowledge and insight to advocate for that position. There are good arguments on both sides. (The most compelling one for the “advocacy” position, to me, is that the enemies of reasoned discourse have no compunction about explicit advocacy in the guise of “expert opinion” – meaning that only one side of the argument is being presented in a forceful way, while real ethicists are constrained to a neutral role that leaves intellectually dishonest advocacy unopposed.)

These are important issues, but I think the matter has broader significance. My concern is that there is very little effective public discourse on ethical issues at all. Many at the conference session bemoaned the low level of public knowledge about controversial topics of all kinds, but there was no consensus on what scholars or professionals should do about that. The public simply does not seem to have a taste for knowledge on those subjects. In a conversation after the session, I and some other members agreed we were confounded by the lack of active public-level publishing on bioethical topics. There is a very active popular-science publishing genre – good authors regularly have best-sellers on very abstruse scientific topics, and the last few years have been a golden age for science writing. There seems to me no reason the same phenomenon can’t take place in bioethics, but where is our Natalie Angiers, our Matt Ridley, our Stephen Jay Gould? The closest thing seems to me to be execrably argued – or simply dishonest – tomes of complaint by the likes of Leon Kass, or freakin’ Dinesh D’Souza. (That’s not entirely true. For one thing, virtually the entire President’s Council have published tomes of complaint, not just Kass, and it’s also true that there has been some good work on cloning, genetic engineering, and life extension. But that’s the tip of the iceberg to what could and should be done.)

That is the kind of thing I would like to see bioethics doing in the media – and not just the print publication media, either. Where is our Cosmos, our Ascent of Man, our E.R. or Medical Investigation? (Actually, that’s an intriguing thought! What kind of medical-ethics-based dramas could we create for TV? Many of the popular medical shows introduce controversial issues in some episodes, but what about one that centered on them as a theme? We could have, say, I.R.B., in which intrepid and remarkably good-looking research-safety committee members forcefully cite the Belmont Report in committee hearings, and then race into laboratories in slow motion just in time to fling themselves between evil researchers and subjects who didn’t read the fine print on their consent forms. Or, say, House, Ph.D., in which a grumpy and iconoclastic ethicist antagonizes the academic establishment with his cynicism, while simultaneously enlightening them with his brilliant displays of symbolic logic. And, of course, there’s an obvious opening for Medical Forensics, in which bioethicists engage in formal debates over clinical cases while working around the clock on dazzling, cutting-edge position papers with really hard-hitting footnotes.) At any rate, there’s room for effective public education, and for engaging the public in the excitement and intellectual reality of the controversies they are currently being misled on. A public that snaps up intellligent popularizations on relativity theory, black holes, or evolution science will, I keep thinking, read equally accessible, but uncompromising, books on social and ethical controversies.

Who will write them, and how should they be written? What would good work of this kind look like, and why is what is already available so bad?

It’s a juicy subject for a worthwhile discussion, and a welcome sign in these days of otherwise unbridled bigotry and repression.

You all know the basic story, I’m sure: the Earth is populated with “mutants” who have supernatural powers, including not merely such mundane stuff as mind-reading or telekinesis, but the ability to create fire or ice out of nothing, to control the weather, to shoot laser beams from the eyes, or, in one case, to do “anything she wants”. Some mutants merely have unusual bodies, including one with angel wings and another with rather startling retractable hedgehog spikes that perform as easily the most risible special weapon in the history of the superhero movie genre. There is also the character “Wolverine”, who has a hardened skeleton and steel blades that shoot out from between his knuckles, as the result of a hideous military experiment in creating the ultimate soldier (for service in the many battalions engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with steel knuckle blades); he apparently is an honorary mutant or something.

At any rate, the mutants appear spontaneously from non-mutant parents. The science is pretty sketchy throughout. The movie makes reference to a “mutant X chromosome”, which unnecessarily complicates things because it makes it sound like a sex chromosome, though I suspect the scriptwriters were merely trying to play off the “X-men” phrase. No explanation is given for how you mutate an entire new chromosome, or why it expresses as such bizarrely different paranormal phenotypes in different people. Why chromosomal mutations should grant control of the weather is also a mystifying blank field, and the law of conservation of energy seems to mean little to these people. But never mind.

Finding mutants in the family causes consternation among squares and reactionaries, who regard them as abominations. This viewpoint is strangely mirrored by the mutants themselves, who consistently refer to non-mutants as “humans”, implicitly accepting their own categorization as a different species. In fact, there is virtually no overlap of community between mutants and “humans” in any of the movies. It is a given that they are distinct and separate groups. Nobody in the film, as I recall, ever advances the view that mutancy is merely part of the spectrum of human “species normal” phenotypy. I think this is a telling point.

Some “humans” want to eradicate the mutants; others want them controlled, removed, or somehow “dealt with”. Among the mutants, there are two factions: those who advocate peaceful coexistence, with the mutants using their powers for the good of all, and those who are angered by the hostility of the humans, and advocate separatism or even an attack on human society and the eventual rule of the mutants. The “X-Men” are among the former group; they operate a boarding school for mutant children who have been rejected by their parents, teaching them tolerance and self-love, and they also act as some sort of private paramilitary force, intervening in disasters, especially those caused by hostile mutants whipping up violence between humans and mutants.

This scenario creates a raft of political and biological parallels with contemporary society, and these parallels give the “X-Men” movies much of their cultural salience. To start with the most obvious, mutant status as an unexplained deviance from the norm, resulting in a feeling of confusion and lostness among mutant children, with rejection by their parents, legal and de facto oppression by the rest of society, and the relief of discovering others like themselves, is an obvious and much-remarked on metaphor for homosexuality. Earlier X-Men movies made this clear with scenes of children being turned away by their families and embraced by the synthetic family of the mutant community, and with attempts to outlaw the use of mutant powers, or to prevent mutants from teaching in public schools; apparently the mutant/gay trope is widely embraced by the comic-book culture that spawned these movies, as well.

There are other themes invoking social outcast groups, however. The main hostile, separatist mutant is a Nazi concentration-camp survivor, who makes explicit parallels between the drive to wipe out mutants and Nazism. The X-Men father figure uses a wheelchair, creating an explicit link between mutant status and disability; the debates over “genocide” by removal of the “mutant gene”, and calls by mutants to be seen as normal, evoke the disability rights movement and its rejection of “ablism”. There are also echoes of the US civil rights movement (with its pacifist and confrontationist camps), including rather pointed references to a “dream”, and to progress “by any means necessary”. One character’s mutation is so deadly she is unable to prevent it from killing anyone she touches, and so she must avoid direct physical contact with others; the AIDS metaphor here is obvious. Other parallels have been identified, and apparently are made much more explicit in the comic books.

There is no room here to pursue all these references. The content of the third movie, by itself, is more than can be dealt with adequately in this space.

SPOILER WARNING (Plot Points Revealed Below)

In this movie, a shadowy pharmaceutical company operating on Alcatraz (why? – who knows?) has developed a “cure” for the “mutant X chromosome” – inject one ampule of this stuff and, within seconds, your whole body reverts to “human”-normal and you lose your mutant powers. The drug is derived from the body of a young mutant whose mutant power is to reverse the mutant powers of anybody who gets within 10 feet of him; the drug company kidnaps him, holds him prisoner in their lab, and somehow extracts the stuff from him – without him, they can’t make any more of the drug. They offer the cure to the public, which sets off a howling social conflict: between those who want it made mandatory for all mutants and those who want it banned as a form of genocide against mutants, and between those mutants who accept it as a way of escaping from their social isolation and those who reject it as an attack on who they are as individuals. The hostile mutant group heats up the controversy by attacking the lab to kill the source of the drug and thus prevent it being used against them; the government responds by turning the drug into a biological weapon and mowing down mutants with tranquilizer-dart guns. Chaos ensues.

Here we need to pause again to note the social parallels. First and always, there’s the mutant/gay identity: the controversial “cure”, the conflict between self-hating mutants who will do anything to assimilate into mainstream society and those who insist on their right to be accepted as they are, the larger social tension between assimilation and ostracism, and the delicious irony that the drug company’s CEO has a son who is himself a mutant (he is shown mutilating himself in the bathroom in an early scene, to try to keep his father from seeing his mutant wings), and who refuses to accept the treatment when his father tries to force him into it. (Shades of Alan Keyes!) The mutants who accept the treatment in order to end their ostracism parallel self-hating gays who attend “ex-gay” indoctrination in search of acceptance from the right wing. (Given the “mutants as Nazi victims” theme, there may also be a parallel with self-hating Jews who attempt to over-assimilate, or who have plastic surgery to erase any distinctive ethnic appearance.)

The debate over “cure vs. accomodation” again invokes the disability-rights struggle and the debate over the definition of “normal health”. An interesting twist is the fact that the drug is taken from the body of a young child (without killing him) without his consent: this seems to be an indirect reference to stem-cell research, with a (clumsy?, or perhaps ironic?) twist: here it is the reactionaries who want this research done to assist in their attempts to stamp out a group of people they despise, while one group of mutants seeks to kill the “embryo” to prevent the development of cures for “diseases” they don’t think should be cured, and another seeks to protect him for the same reason. That throws a weird kind of monkeywrench into the right/left politics of the plot.

So too does the notion of separate species, which both embraces and rejects biological essentialism: if having a mutation makes you a separate species, then there really is something to the notion of ineradicable differences; at the same time, the fact that you can be changed into a “human” by eradicating those differences suggests that one’s “essence” is maleable. In this way, the movie is ambiguous about where it stands on the possibility of change at all, though it does seem to endose the right-wing perspective on both issues (a seemingly impossible feat).

Finally, we shouldn’t overlook the role of the pharmaceutical company, both in kidnapping “embryo boy” and in developing a medication aimed at genocide. At any rate, there are certainly many parallels between plot points in this movie and contemporary controversies in bioethics and medical research or treatment standards.

In view, particularly, of the sex-obsessive nature of contemporary bio-politics, it is important to note the sexual politics of the movie as well. I have said that the choice by mutants whether or not to take the “cure” parallels debates within the gay, Jewish, and disabled communities; it also plays as a metaphor for abortion-clinic confrontation as well. There are lines of angry activists from both sides outside the clinics where the treatment medication is being given out, waving signs and shouting slogans; the mutants lined up for the treatment are nervous and self-conscious, and some feel ambivalent about their choices. When one main character takes the treatment so that she can finally touch her boyfriend without killing him, he tells her “This isn’t what I wanted”, and she asserts her autonomy by saying “It’s what I wanted.”, simultaneously invoking the “woman’s body/woman’s freedom” aspect of abortion, and positioning the anti-mutant treatment as an exercise of autonomy. (This parallel also brings in the “sex kills” meme of the right wing, but again with a perverse twist: in this case, she’s making a fateful choice, and undergoing a controversial medical procedure in a besieged public clinic, so that she can have sex, while it was her sexual-outcast mutant status that kept her from doing so.)

Another female mutant – one of the “hostiles” – appears most often completely nude, her spectacularly stereotypically attractive body covered in blue scales (and a body suit) that make her just-barely legal for the screen; when she is shot with the treatment dart, her scales and blue skin evaporate, leaving her a perfectly ordinary, spectacular, completed naked white woman (who for some reason chooses exactly that moment to cover her body with her arms). At that moment, the other hostile mutants turn their backs on her, saying “She isn’t one of us anymore”; the leader glances at her pale-skinned, voluptuos naked body and remarks “It’s a pity. She was so beautiful.” Here we revisit the “two species” concept, and also half-heartedly reinforce the idea that there is a range of bodily normality standards – but again with a perverse twist: the hostile leader is not saying that mutants should also be considered beautiful, since that would be too expansive for his partisan viewpoint; he is saying that only mutants are beautiful, and she becomes ugly when she becomes merely a conventionally attractive human woman.

On another note, it is never established whether mutancy breeds true, or whether mutants are interfertile with either group, mutants or “humans”, which may be a significant point in respect of their plan for world domination. The implications of the “two species” view are never really addressed, and it seems as if that is mere shoddy science on the part of the scriptwriters, rather than an overt attempt to assert an ideological point.

As with the identity politics that is brought out by the various oppressed-minority metaphors of the movie, the sexual politics is confused here and somewhat inverted. Using a controversial medical treatment is rightly portrayed as a free choice available as an exercise of autonomy (in this way it matters very much that it is a female character who goes to the treatment clinic); however, this treatment is inherently a rejection of one’s nature in the face of (mostly) outside pressures. The openly sexual presentation of the pre-change blue-skin mutant is positive (even if she is a hostile character), as compared with her huddled, covered-up, and traumatized post-treatment self, but the statement that she can only be beautiful as a mutant echoes some of the more extreme fringes of separatist activism, which seems as off-putting as the parallel real-life statements by lesbian, minority, or disability separatists often are. The choice to take treatment in order to pursue an active sex life is likewise positive, but the refusal to find a sexual identity as she already is seems to offer a defeatist approach to AIDS.

And, finally, there is a deep contradiction in the transformative treatment itself: the fact that one can, and perhaps would want to, change one’s essence in this way is a kind of backhand affirmation of the transsexual community – but the fact that it works only one way, to transform “gene queers” into “normals”, seems to cut in exactly the opposite direction. Similarly, there is a brief scene with two threatening femme-y transgender hostile mutants – again a nod to the trans community, but put in a negative light. On the sexual level, then, there’s at least as much going on in this movie as in other respects, but it seems even more confused than otherwise.

The political stances these tensions and conflicts force on the movie’s characters are as complicated as the biological and social metaphors they are burdened with. The strangest of these seems to be the position of the X-Men themselves. They are unquestionably the heroes of the X-Men universe of stories: they embody a vision of mutual tolerance between humans and mutants, they reject violence and seek to stop it (their own powers are used almost exclusively against other mutants, those from the “hostile” camp), they embrace “working within the system” to effect legal equality for mutants, and they teach mutant children to accept themselves without becoming bitter toward the outside world. They represent the values that tolerant, liberal, centrist Americans are told to uphold. In this, they stand in direct contrast to the angry, hostile mutants who embrace violent dissent and seek to overthrow the system by force. This makes the X-Men the Martin Luther King faction to the hostile force’s Malcolm X (and each is explicitly associated with phrases or codewords from the two men in the movies).

On the other hand, given the Jew/Nazi parallel also evident, the X-Men appear to be assimilationist Jews who didn’t see the terror in time, opposing the violent resistance of those few who actually fought back, even, literally (in this movie), as the uniformed troops undertake a genocidal assault in the open streets.

And, in keeping with the gay theme, the X-Men break with the accepted liberal history of the gay-rights movement by taking a go-slow approach, eschewing direct confrontation (no mutant Stonewall for them), and working with the political powers to quietly advocate for less legal restriction. One of the X-Men is even a Cabinet member in the movie White House – who is kept in the dark about the development of the anti-mutant weapon and treated as a diversity figurehead for the administration. (Tellingly, he has non-white [OK . . . blue] skin, and is recycled as Secretary of State later – making his humbling by the deceitful President an even more pointed jab at a certain person.) This makes the X-Men essentially the Log Cabin Republicans of their world – which is not the kind of heroes we are hoping they would be.
This leaves us with quite a mess of a movie. It offers a broad message of tolerance for the biologically or sexually non-typical, which has got to be great news for the gay, transgender, and minority communities. At the same time, it eschews rejectionism, separatism, and even direct confrontation on issues, which may be good news for middle-of-the-roaders but slows progress in some ways, and plays off tensions in the activist community in what may be unhelpful ways. It introduces but consistently fails to interrogate seriously such claims as that non-typicals have the moral authority to stand in judgment of other nontypicals, or that mutations place one in a distinct biologically essentialist category aside from the rest of “humanity”. More than anything, it insists that the most important thing is to maintain the peace and trust the government – exactly what the Civil Rights Movement taught us was not the case in many circumstances.

In the end, the parallels and anti-parallels between the movie mutants and the bio-deviants of the real world – and the tensions that afflict both of them – are too inconsistent to sort out. At times it seems as if the movie is making a clear statement about contemporary bio-political issues, particularly gay rights. (In fact, both the director of the second X-Men movie, and the co-star of all three – Ian McClellan – are openly gay and spoke of their desire to make pro-gay themes more visible in the movies. McClellan states he only took the role in the latest film for that reason.) At other times, though, the film seems to endorse contrasting statements on the same issues, and in many places it seems as if familiar elements from these cultural conflicts are visible in the movies, but not in consistent patterns that make a coherent argument. It’s a fascinating melange, however, and a provocative one. I was intrigued enough to be willing to see it again to try and tease out all the elements. I’m not sure that it will ever unravel to a clear-headed and strong position statement on any such issue, but there are hints a-plenty in various places. Worth a look, if only to get the conversation going.

UPDATE: The Women’s Bioethics Project also notes the bioethics themes visible in the movie. They are sponsoring group discussions on X-Men III. Read here for interesting commentary and more information.

Critics cite a long list of albinos cast as heavies by Hollywood: The dreadlocked twins in “The Matrix Reloaded,” a powder-haired hit man in the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn crime romp “Foul Play,” the pasty zombies in “The Omega Man,” a sadistic killer in “Cold Mountain,” even the wicked executioner in the fairy-tale comedy “The Princess Bride.”

Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, said “The Da Vinci Code” will be the 68th movie since 1960 to feature an evil albino.

That’s pretty startling. I can’t think of any “good” albino characters though I’m not sure there haven’t been any. But either way, that’s a lot of bad guys stemming from one rare condition. And it puts people with albinism in a peculiar category. Certainly many minority groups have been ill-served in movies, and women also have usually been portrayed in limited and stereotyped ways. Sometimes this takes the form of ridicule, as with minstrelized depictions of blacks, or “hysterical” women; sometimes it is a degrading cultural stereotype, such as the countless shiftless or criminal black and Hispanic characters. Sometimes it is simply the reinforcement of pervasive myths or stereotypes, as with Italian-American characters always being associated with the Mafia, or fat people shown as jolly and dimwitted. But with all these groups, there is typically some range of depiction. Little people (dwarfs and midgets) were often forced into ludicrous roles intended for humor, but, over time, several such actors asserted themselves and earned respect and more substantive portrayals; even when type-cast, they were found in a variety of roles, not always as villains or comic-relief characters. Women as a whole have been subject to extreme sexism in movies and TV, but have also chalked up many outstanding performances in challenging roles; the same is true of people of color, overcoming racist casting, and with many other groups as well. But people with albinism always seem to be cast in a negative light. That’s offensive, certainly, but somewhat odd as well.

It raises questions about the way we respond to biological abnormality – why it is that there is such a pervasive, and broad, tendency to react badly to individuals whose body image departs from the species-typical norm. There is a growing body of sociobiological research indicating that humans are pre-wired to respond positively to species-normal body images, particularly in infants, and to react subtly to images with abnormalities even when the subject cannot consciously articulate what is unusual about them. People simply seem to react strongly to the unusual or abnormal – and it is easy enough to whip up one of the usual sociobiological Just-So Stories to explain why (“identifying sickly individuals is important in order to avoid reducing your reproductive potential by investing resources in, or mating with, them”). Whether we really do have an innate ability to recognize subtle abnormalities, and whether we have an innate drive to reject them, are still open questions, but it’s not impossible to imagine either one.

That doesn’t explain why albinism, especially, should come in for such universal damnation. One can go off on flights of projective fantasy: perhaps the “eerie” appearance of people with complete albinism – red eyes, translucent pink skin, shockingly pale coloring – or their habits – avoiding sun, frequent blinking, dark glasses – make them spooky or off-putting in a way mere racial minorities are not. Perhaps there is an invoked fear of the alien or the ghost – someone not quite like us, but close enough almost to be mistaken for one of us, and thus dangerous. Perhaps they’re just one of the last unchampioned minorities. And, very likely, any such speculations reveal more about the speaker than the subject. (For the record, I’m not afraid of ghosts, though I am afraid of the dark. But not because it has ghosts in it.)

“Normativism”, like racism or sexism, may in the end turn out to be an overdetermined phenomenon – there are likely many reasons for it, most learned, some perhaps inherited, but all of them overlapping in each individual in complex ways. Rejection of the deviant would then be the default expectation, with increasing acceptance of non-dominant-group characteristics as normal moving those groups, a bit at a time and one at a time, into the mainstream while others remain “exotic”. On this hypothesis, anti-albinism should gradually become logically (I did not say emotionally) untenable if the public relinquishes its academic pre-conceptions under the influence of religious and public. But again there is that unbroken string of almost 50 years’ worth of albino movie villains as a counterexample.

The issue touches, as you knew it would, on the issue of patient values and the possibility of patient-autonomy-directed healthcare professions. Increasingly, the goals and expectations of treatment have become more and more available to the empowered, autonomy-wielding patient. Patients are demanding more control over their treatment,dictating their own expected treatment goals, and more-aggressively choosing both treatments and outcomes that deviate from “medical need” as defined in some essentialist physical sense.

This trend drags in with it a looser sense of medical necessity or medical essentialism. If patients can choose what outcomes they want and , in fact, what they regard as good health, then we can only accomodate patient autonomy within a broadly-defined healthcare system that either dispenses with the notion of health, or asserts that there is no defensible objective notion of health.  We must accomodate ourselves to seeking health with the understanding that that term may operate very differently for different patients, that one may choose one’s definition of “health” as a prerequisite to choosing the treatments that lead to that preferred end state – no matter what end state that is.

I think some conceptual shift of this kind is a necessity as an adjunct to robust patient autonomy and an autonomy-centered ethics of healthcare. Some patient-advocacy groups have already been contributing to that shift, especially gay, deaf, and disability activists, who have all mounted fundamental, and successful, challenges to narrow definitions of “species-normal” or “healthy” function. Perhaps albinism is poised to join that list. If it does, it will, I think, make a necessary contribution to the general acceptance of the idea that no unilateral and “objective” definition of what does or does not comprise “health” is possible. We need to re-conceptualize health to make it fit the complicated lives of those who see health as one good among many. Accustoming ourselves to those among us who do not fit existing norms has moved us far in that direction, and I believe usefully so. It has liberated the practice of healthcare from a definitional straitjacket at the same time it liberated so many patients from their diagnostic straitjackets. And now another step on that path looms.

Teaching ourselves not to see people with albinism as “spooky”, “alien”, or murderously evil movie villains – to see albinism as one of the many ways of being human – will also create space for those who choose non-standard body images to situate themselves within the expanded conceptual boundaries of “normality”. That is a much-hoped for state.
Hat tip: Bioethics.net

Contrary to her assertions, it’s not her lifestyle liberals object to. (Contrary to her delusions of grandeur, nobody really cares how she lives her life – they just wish she would stop telling them how to live theirs.) It’s her enthusiasm for “little-helpmeet” misogyny that drives them to consider her an enemy. See if you can tell why:

[P]ity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

Ahhhh . . . . So, if all that is what is wrong with women, what would it take for them to be right?

• Providing sexual ”comfort” to her husband at day’s end (no mention of reciprocation – or the idea that sex is something other than a service provided for others’ gratification).
• Being “the wife”. (Do people really still talk this way? Republican people do.)
• Being “seduced” (no having actual autonomous sex drives, now).
• Being economically dependent.
• Not being tired (working so hard that she is “bone tired” is a crime against her husband).
• Being “philosophically inclined” to have sex whether or not she wants to.
• Being unfamiliar with her husband’s sexual “maneuvers” (uh . . . I have no idea).
• Doing all the family-care work and not expecting “the husband” to participate in raising his own children, taking care of his own house, or clean up his own mess.

Aside from the familiar, dreary 50s drudgery of it and the cheerfully creepy rape-positivism (she can’t initiate sex, she can’t refuse it, and she must not have sexual desires of her own – but she is obligated to satisfy her man on his whim no matter what), what’s inescapable is that women of the Flanagan mold must not have any self-directed lives of any kind, nor any “philosophical inclinations” to think their own interests and values matter; they exist for the sexual gratification of, and personal service to, their husbands, and are judged (by Flanagan) on how well they perform those functions.

Where have I seen this before . . .?

Oh, yeah. Now I remember.

I wrote this movie review almost two years ago, on the blog Lean Left (where I got my start before launching Sufficient Scruples; thanks again, guys!). (Note that on the original blog, it is attributed to Dawn; that’s an error due to an archiving glitch – the post was mine. Dawn writes great stuff of her own, but sadly not often enough.) It seems strangely relevant again now that Flanagan is back in the news.

 

Everything Old is New Again        

I dunno what to think about the current [June 2004] remake of The Stepford Wives.We’re living in weird and ugly times. Sometimes the strangeness comes too fast and furiously to keep up with; I think this movie is a case in point. Given some very weird plotting, and the fact that Stepford is not actually a very good movie (though Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, and Roger Bannister [not the running guy] have some great sequences, and Glenn Close, Jon Lovitz, and especially Christopher Walken are also good), it’s hard to tell just what this one’s trying to say. It’s trying to say something, though, and we probably ought to listen just so we don’t get clubbed over the head and stuffed into the Stepfordizer while we’re not paying attention.

The premise is well-known: dipstick men who are resentful of their wives’ independence move to a creepy town in Connecticut, where the wives are secretly replaced with technological droid-women who become submissive slaves to the men’s gratification, and the men (plan to) live happily ever after. The movie has been updated from the classic 1975 original, and the script has a few anti-reactionary zingers (”You can’t be a gay Republican! It’s like being a gay man with a bad haircut!” “Where could we create a town full of robots without being noticed? . . . Connecticut!”) that seem to give it a more modern sensibility, but basically the story is an almost exact remake of the original – with one major exception. Between the similarities and the exceptions, I can’t figure out if it’s an anti-feminist backlash daydream, a pro-feminist satire, a neo-conservative fantasy, or an anti-reactionary call to arms.

Some weird shit goin’ on, though, any way you slice it.

MINOR SPOILERS:

As I said, this version of the story follows the plot of the original almost exactly: a dynamic and independent woman is dragged by her husband to a bizarrely sterile Connecticut burb, where all the women are absurdly domestic and spend their lives in thrall to idiotic household chores and catering to their husbands’ whims. The men all join the vaguely sinister “Men’s Association” (its symbol: a crowing cock), where the lead woman’s husband slowly starts to appreciate the fine thing all the other men have going. The woman’s only friends are a smart-ass New York Jewish woman (the only Jew in town, a source of confusion to the other women) and the stereotypically swishy half of the town’s one gay male couple. They wisecrack their revulsion at the town’s weirdo 50s aesthetic, but can’t figure out why the other women (get it? – the swishy gay guy is the “woman,” while his conservative gay partner is “the man” in their relationship) are the way they are. Slowly they realize that something strange is going on. By the time the main character figures out what it is, her two loudmouth friends have been robotized into a chirpy domestic goddess and a starch-haired, conservative, gay Republican. Then the men start coming for her, carefully taking time out to explain the entire plot before stuffing her into the roboting machine.

One important difference is that, this time, the women aren’t killed and replaced by robots, but instead have microchips implanted in their brains that wipe out their independent thoughts while leaving their biological bodies intact. (A few other features are installed: breasts that inflate at the touch of a button on the husbands’ remote-control devices, and ATM cash dispensers that spit money out of their mouths.)

OK – so, same old, same old: reactionary men kill women’s independence and turn their wives into domestic and sexual slaves. What’s the confusion?

MAJOR SPOILERS:

The biggest difference between this movie and the original is that, this time, the main male character changes his mind at the last minute and decides not to turn his wife into a zombie. (In the original, the movie ends with the main character – the woman fighting for her independence – finally getting killed and replaced.) Instead, he and she cooperate to undo the brain programming on all the other women, so that, in the end, all the women return to their normal, hard-charging, dynamic, professional selves – in a high state of pissed-offedness. When he sees his work undone, the head male scientist character rants at the holdout “I thought you were ready! You’re a coward!”, to which his wife replies “He’s a man!”

Other major twists include a play on the final scene of the original movie (in which all the robot women, including the main character, are seen mindlessly pushing shopping carts around the supermarket). In this new version, the men of the town are forced (apparently under threat of legal action for roboting their wives) to take over the domestic chores, and are seen pushing carts around the supermarket with no clue how to do the shopping. And, lastly, it turns out in this case that there is only one actual non-human robot in the town, and it’s the male scientist who supposedly created the fembots! His wife is the brains behind the zombie brigade. She bursts into tears as all the women return to normal, and explains that she just wanted everything to be “beautiful” – she wanted a society where men wore tuxedos and women wore party gowns, and everything was “perfect”, but there would never be one if all the women were pursuing careers in addition to family. So she turned the women into perfect robots, and, she says, later on she was going to get around to the men. Nicole Kidman replies proudly that “we don’t have to be perfect.”

So: what the hell’s going on here? I honestly can’t figure it out.

The icky retro version of domesticity (the movie opens with a pseudo-50s montage of Donna Reed-type women swooning over kitchen appliances) is sick enough: stay-at-home wives and mothers baking cupcakes and catering to their husbands; cigar-chomping men in leather club chairs making jokes about the little women; women as cash- cleavage- and sex-dispensers. That’s an evil society – but what does the movie have to say about it?

That society (literally) explodes in the final scene, as opposed to the original movie where that society was finally triumphant. So maybe the film is telling us that we’re supposed to reject the neo-retro trend the conservative mouthbreathers keep pushing on us. That’s the lifestyle, after all, that the cool characters in the movie can’t stand, and finally succeed in destroying; we’re not supposed to want it to succeed.

But . . . but . . . the movie doesn’t seem to have the courage of its own convictions. Even the spunky main character refers to that domestic wasteland as “perfect.” She doesn’t say that nobody but a lobotomized Eagle Forum drone would ever live that way – she just says she should be forgiven if she’s not “perfect” enough to do so. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of women’s independence. And her character is an obnoxious bitch – she’s a jittery TV exec whose latest reality show destroys its players’ lives and results in several shootings, but whose only concern afterwards is for the effect on ratings. Her husband finally decides (momentarily) to have her zombieized because she can’t commit any emotional energy to their relationship – which, in fact, is a justified complaint. The Jewish and gay-male characters are annoying stereotypes as well.

The movie rejects the sterility of the empty lives of its “perfect” domestic couples, but makes its normal couples in some ways even worse. As for what is actually being done to these women, the movie seems to take the anti-feminist sting out of putting computerized brain-locks on all the women, making them slaves of the male characters, and putting pleasure-devices in their bodies for the men to use by having all this result from a female character. You see, there’s nothing about all this that’s, you know, anti-woman in any way. In fact, jailing women in domestic and sexual slavery with their husbands as masters is just another woman’s way of making them “perfect”. The most dynamic and independent woman in the town says explicitly that a real man wants an independent woman, but also that a “perfect” woman is the airhead domestic drudge the movie makes her out to be and her own independence is a sign of her failure to be perfect. Add to that that the women then make their husbands domestic slaves as soon as they get the upper hand, and the fact that the robot program as originally conceived was aimed at both women and men (as opposed to the original Stepford Wives, where the anti-feminist message was up-front and unapologetic) and the movie seems to suggest that the entire program has nothing to do with male/female relations or women’s social roles – it’s just a kind of social engineering for the post-debutante crowd. Men oppress women, women oppress men . . . there’s no actual gender inequality, it’s just a question of who’s holding the robot-remote-control device. We’re apparently supposed to reject social slavery for women, but not take the radical leap of imagining that this reflects on women’s rights or independence in any way.

Given the mixed messages in the plot, I’m led to wonder what, exactly, got this movie made at just this time. The movie would be a lot easier to accept as satire if we weren’t living in an age when the same messages are being promulgated – in no small part by highly-placed government officials, as well as swaths of the punditocracy – without irony to a public frighteningly willing to listen to them without guffawing. Maybe it’s a hipster thing: the movie can play to red-state yokels as a timely and relevant thriller, while the coastal cognoscenti will pick up the nods and the winks that give away the joke. Maybe it truly doesn’t have the courage of its convictions: the anti-reactionary theme is real, but the makers couldn’t bring themselves to give it an honestly feminist flavor. Maybe it’s just clueless. After watching it, I know I am.

The movie is somewhat unevenly paced – the first half hour is a tour-de-force of acting from both main characters, as they alternately engage in an exploratory flirtation and then each retreat to more age-appropriate demeanors; the moment when the plot takes its definitive twist and goes off in a new direction is also the moment when the director seemingly forgot what the movie was about, however. The second half is less a psychological intrigue than a straightforward vengeance tale. The result is a weird mashup of Lolita and Death and the Maiden, as directed by David Cronenberg. However, leaving aside the inconsistency, there are some provocative things in it, and some questions raised about how we are to understand young sexuality, our revulsion by pedophilia (and our protective impulses toward young girls especially), and our common impulses toward destructive retribution in response.

The castration scene was notable, too.

In order to discuss the moral/philosophical issues raised by the film, it is necessary to discuss the plot content. The material below the jump contains plot spoilers. Please come back after you’ve seen the film, if you prefer not to have the plot revealed.

The movie opens with an online chat session, with obviously suggestive and flirtatious exchanges leading to an agreement to meet in person for the first time. It’s understood that one party is a 14-year-old girl and the other is an older man. They meet at a cafe, and the first thing the man does is wipe chocolate icing from a pastry off the girl’s lips with his fingers and suck his fingers clean. That sets the tone for their relationship. The girl proves to be smart and mature, a typical precocious teen in certain ways. Ellen Page does an amazing job moving back and forth from little-girl to sophisticated adult, sometimes with nothing more than a smile; it’s an absolutely great piece of acting. The conversation proceeds, the older man playing it cool but making clear overtures for the girl’s affection, the girl becoming more and more impressed with him and more aggressively flirtatious – at one point raising her shirt in the doorway to the women’s restroom and momentarily flashing him in her bra. Eventually he offers to give her a live MP3 recording he happens to have of her favorite band, but unfortunately only has available back at his house; she insists on going there over his apparent objections, and off they go to his home, just the two of them. At his house, she continues aggressively winding him up, and he puts up less and less resistance. She invades his bedroom, snoops through his stuff, and gets him to reveal his ongoing obsession with an old girlfriend. She finds he’s a widely-published fashion photographer who specializes in teenage girls, and insists that he photograph her in his home studio. She also makes herself a drink – coyly refusing the OJ he poured for her because “they teach us young things not to drink anything we haven’t mixed for ourselves” – and tops hers up with vodka from his freezer; she makes him one too and teases him to “keep up” as she gulps her drink down. He chugs his and almost immediately begins swaying and slurring, then passes out. That ends the psychological dance, and the most engaging and effective piece of the film.

When he wakes up, he finds he’s tied to his own chair; the girl explains she slipped him a Mickey from her doctor-father’s drug supply, and taunts him: “Didn’t they ever tell you not to drink anything you hadn’t mixed yourself?”. She accuses him of being a pedophile. He denies it, and offers plausible explanations for the evidence she gives (he takes photos of young girls because it’s his job; he also takes photos of other things; he hasn’t tried to do anything to her; his interest in her in the chat room was just friendliness). She knows more about him than he realizes: that he has pursued several young girls in other chat rooms, that she contacted him using aliases and he always broke off the relationship if she claimed to be any older than 14; he has explanations for this too (“I was lonely”). She accuses him of being responsible for the death of a girl who disappeared; again he denies it, and when she searches his entire house she can find no evidence of wrongdoing of any kind. That, of course, seems suspicous in itself (“You don’t have any porn. Don’t all men have porn?”); she assumes he must keep the really bad stuff somewhere secret, but still can’t find it. Finally she stumbles across his hidden safe, and guesses the combination using psychological insights straight out of the Hardy Boys Book of Detecting (his ex-girlfriend’s photo is marked with the date he first slept with her; his online screen name contains the same numbers: guess what the safe combination turns out to be?). Opening the safe, she pulls out some photos we are not allowed to see, and remarks “This is what they have those federal laws for”. There is also a CD-ROM, apparently containing more child porn, and a snapshot of the missing girl. She now knows he was connected to her, though he insists he just happened to meet her once and knows nothing about how she disappeared. At this juncture, he panics and tries to escape by knocking her unconscious with his chair (to which he is still tied) and threatening her with a gun she pulled out from under the bed. He almost succeeds, but then she pulls a plastic bag over his head and suffocates him into unconsciousness. When he wakes up for the second time, things are worse: he’s tied hand and foot to his stainless-steel kitchen table, and has a big ice pack on his crotch. The girl is wearing surgical scrubs, holding a scalpel, and consulting a fat book of surgical procedure borrowed again from her father. She explains that she’s convinced he’s guilty of killing the other girl, and she’s going to castrate him for it. (“It’s one of the easiest surgical procedures there are. I mean, farm boys all over the country geld their own pigs, so how hard could it be?”) There follows a very lengthy sequence in which she menaces him with potential castration, he alternately begs, wheedles, and screams his head off, and she finally gets on with it and cuts him, then holds up the severed pair in shot glasses. (She tosses them down the garbage disposal – there is a brief grinding noice, and she remarks “I guess they weren’t brass.”) This is the emotional crux of the movie, and it’s an effective sequence, but not as effective as you might think – in part because you never see what she’s actually doing, so the scariest part of the castration scene is the dialog, which is not actually the scariest part of castration. At any rate, she tosses off a few “eunuch” jokes (including a lame “eunuchs/unix” pun that I’m sure was missed by virtually all the audience and possibly the director) and then leaves him alone to take a shower and clean up. He escapes from the bindings, trepidatiously reaches down . . . and finds he’s not really castrated! (This catharsis scene also was not very effective, because it was so obvious that the supposed castration was not going to be the denouement of the movie.) He sobs “I’m all there. I’m all there.” for a few minutes, then picks up the scalpel and heads for the bathroom to get his own revenge on the girl. (We can forgive him for this, I think.) He bursts into the bathroom, rips back the shower curtain Tony Perkins-style, and . . . gets jumped from behind by the girl, who was waiting for him behind the door. She knocks him into the shower and repeatedly stuns him with a Tazer device, then drags him down the hall. When he awakens this time, things are worse still: he’s balanced on a chair; a noose, attached to the ceiling beams, is around his neck and his hands are tied. (This makes the third time this guy’s gotten clocked by a 14-year-old girl, in this case when he had every chance to escape but didn’t do it. It’s easy to lose sympathy at this point.) From here the movie stumbles to its conclusion: the girl methodically wipes the house of every trace of her presence, and washes every surface to remove fingerprints. She uploads the incriminating digital photos into an e-mail to the photographer’s ex-girlfriend, and threatens to reveal his porn secret to everyone, ruining his life and career. She then makes a pretext phone call to the girlfriend, urging her to come to the house immediately because of an unspecified emergency. She also writes a fake suicide note. There are now several options open, but none of them are good for the man: she can hang him and leave the suicide note, letting the police find his kiddie-porn stash and ruining his name posthumously. Or she can send the incriminating photos to the girlfriend, destroying him with the one person he cares most about and also ruining his career. Or she can show them to the girlfriend when she shows up, forcing him to confront the girlfriend in person just as he’s been ruined. Or, she offers him: he can kill himself voluntarily, and she will promise to wipe out the evidence of his crimes so at least no one will know what he did. He continues to plead his innocence: he insists he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the other girl, and he has done nothing wrong except collect some photos. He offers to confess the photos to the police if she’ll just let him go. The acting from both characters is good enough that his pose seems plausible even as she amasses evidence against him, while her mania seems just enough over-the-edge to make her seem questionable even though she’s ostensibly the “good” one of the two. Finally he escapes – again – and doesn’t try to get away from the girl – again. He chases her around the house waving a knife, trying somehow to bring the whole thing to a conclusion that will not require revealing his kid-porn collection. They both wind up on the roof of the house – the girl with the gun and, conveniently, yet another noose tied to the base of the chimney – just as his ex-girlfriend shows up and starts ringing the doorbell. The man tries to threaten his way out, insisting that if the girl causes trouble for him he’ll track her down somehow – she points out he still doesn’t know her real name and has no way to prove that what she told him about herself online was true. Now he’s trapped: his ex-girlfriend is moments away from discovering the real truth about him, and if he tries anything preciptate the girl on the roof will blurt out everything. She offers him her deal again: if he puts the noose around his neck and jumps off the roof, she’ll arrange everything so the whole story never comes out. He once more insists he had nothing to do with the other girl’s death. She knows he’s lying. Finally he admits that he was present when the girl was killed, taking pictures, but it was another guy who actually did everything, and he offers to give her his name if she lets him go. She says “I already know his name. Aaron told me you did it, right before he killed himself.” He sees she knows everything. He has no other options. He puts the noose around his neck, then hesitates on the edge of the roof. She assures him again “I’ll take care of everything” . . . and he steps off the edge . . . just as she muses: “. . . or not.”

So much for the plot. (I have finally realized there’s no way to review this movie without sounding like that whacko CAPAlert guy. Hmmmm . . .)

The movie dwells so much on the mechanics of the vigilante/revenge motif that we miss almost entirely the psychology of it, unlike the deeply engaging first half of the movie. (We never find out exactly why the girl is so hell-bent against this guy, or how she identified him in the first place. Does she have a personal history that motivates her? Is she just cleaning up the community? No idea.) There is an tenuous moral balance to the scenes, however: unlike with the castration sequence (which you always suspect is going to turn out to be a put-on), the director manages to keep the male character’s moral ambiguity, and thus the tension between the two characters as they alternately appeal to the audience’s sympathy, intact until the final scene. It was easy to believe, throughout the movie, that the character is not so much a grossly perverted sicko as a relatively decent guy who knows he has somewhat warped tastes, but keeps them under control. (He offers a tear-jerking story about his own early abuse to explain why.) Until he finally confesses to photographing the sex murder, or snuff killing, there was no evidence he had done anything untoward other than download forbidden pictures and do some inappropriate flirting. In the end he dies a manipulative, devious monster, but until that point he is someone who could have been, and appeared to be, relatively harmless and in many ways sympathetic. Similarly, the girl, by killing the confessed monster (as well, apparently, as his partner), becomes a kind of heroine or savior of oppressed innocence – Buffy the Pedophile Slayer – but before that, she appeared to be reckless, impetuous, and not a little crazy. (Honestly, it’s hard not to be seen as a castrating bitch when you invade a guy’s home, toy with his love for his ex-girlfriend, mock his porn collection, drug him, suffocate him, threaten him, and cut his balls off.)

I prefer to think of the movie with the last scene deleted – with the moral equipoise of the two characters still intact. That puts the audience, and possibly the female character, in the same position we are usually in in real life, when we suspect the worst about someone who may in fact be innocent, or at least not terribly bad. How are we to respond to people like this photographer? There is an increasing mood of vigilantism in the country that has grown in parallel with the wave of attention to, and stiffer penalties for, pedophilia and child porn. Already we have gun-toting range riders out along the Southern border, intimidating and sometimes fighting with illegal immigrants in the desert. Since 9/11, there have been repeated complaints of suspicion, harassment, and occasionally violence directed at anyone who “looks Muslim” – including Sikhs, Indians, Turks, and others; the common opinion seems to be that it’s too bad they sometimes get “the wrong person”. Regarding pedophilia, it has always commanded a titillated and shocked reaction, and the legal climate regarding not just pedophilia but even ordinary teenage sex is becoming more repressive almost as fast as it can be made so. Legislatures are in a race to increase penalties for cross-age sex to all-time highs, and to make them permanent, and sometimes extra-judicial: not merely to impose lifelong sex-offender registration, but in some cases mandatory lifetime psychiatric incarceration in addition to prison sentences, and without legal finding of mental incompetence or overt danger. Many states maintain registration of anyone accused of underage sex, with or without conviction. In this environment of diminishing due-process rights and increasing sexual repression, it is hard to propose a penalty for suspected pedophiles that would not be regarded as too harsh: actual castration has been proposed many times, and “voluntary” chemical castration has been imposed in many states. If someone were to take the matter into her own hands, as it were, I suspect there would be considerable support for that action.

But these are legal speculations. There are medical-ethical issues to be addressed as well.

One has to do with the nature of sexual attraction. It is interesting that those who support the harshest treatment of pedophile sex offenders – arguing for psychiatric incarceration on grounds that anyone with a sexual urge toward young partners is incurably dangerous – are often the same people who argue that adult homosexual attraction is voluntarily chosen and can be both resisted and changed at will (with a boost from Jesus, of course). But leaving that aside, it is a very delicate thing deciding what attractions are or are not beyond the pale. “Underage” is an entirely culturally determined concept, of course – a look at the range of ages considered acceptable for both intra-cohort and cross-age sexual activity in various countries, and at various times, proves that beyond question. But today there are attempts to raise the age of sexual consent in many states, and to penalize relationships with “underage” partners even where both partners are youths within a few years of one another’s age. The range of combinations of ages and relationships that meet the test of legality is decreasing, and the “access” young people have to sexual expression is diminishing.

In other words, the increasing attention paid to pedophilia is part of the general hostile trend toward sexuality in all forms, and especially to the sexuality of the young. Age-of-consent laws originally served the purpose of legalizing relationships between adult men and young girls (the age of consent to sex was almost always lower than the age of legal adulthood for all other purposes). As the average age at marriage has grown, and inter-generational marriages become much less common, they now serve to criminalize sex even between teenagers near to one another’s ages. Increasingly, too, they are being used against women in sexual relationships with teenage boys – once considered a rite of passage for a young man, and now a felony. In such a climate, cross-age sex is not merely taboo but, in some sense, “ultra-taboo” – it violates the law, it violates the prohibition on “taking advantage” of youths (especially, but not only, girls), and it violates the current de-facto prohibition on intergenerational relationships. As this hostility extends to more and more forms of sexual relationships, and further across the age range for such relationships, the sexuality of youth becomes increasingly prohibited and also pathologized.

It is not merely wrong, but sick, we are told, for adults to be sexually attracted to teens or children – and therefore for young people to engage in sexual behavior with adults. From there it is a short step to seeing the sexual behavior of children as itself sick. There is a common perception on the political right that Freud has been “refuted”, and that therefore anything that smacks of “Freudianism” – especially of the power of sex and its ubiquity at all stages of human life – is false. The vision of children as sexless, and thus of their “exposure” to sexuality as being somehow “corrupting” or invasive, has returned, particularly within the politically-motivated wing of cultural/medical criticism. (This partly explains the feverish resistance to sex education, particularly for young children. There are those on the right who truly believe that if you just never mention sex to children, they’ll not only never learn about it but will never have any sexual feelings or be “recruited” to any forbidden sexual desires.) Pedophilia is thus not merely harmful, by way of betrayal of trust or of actual physical injury, but it is an intrusion of demon sex into a field in which it was not previously present, and is thus corruptive. (This again explains the fear on the right for “impurity” or “loss of innocence”: it’s not just your hymen you can’t get back if you make the fateful mistake, but your previous condition of sexlessness. Once corrupted, youth are permanently sexed up: like a drop of ink in a milk bottle, the stain remains, and spreads to everything it touches.) But it is not merely pedophilia that is the problem. Since sex is corruptive, any indulgence in sex – by children at play, by teens with teens, by older teens with younger adults – breeds corruption. Ordinary sex play, and teenage sexual relations, are as corruptive as pedophilia (though the latter may bring other dangers as well).

The fear of pedophilia – a widespread, and probably somewhat reasonable, cultural taboo that is by no means universal today or in history – in today’s climate makes it hard to see what a healthy sexual life could be for a young person. The range of relative ages is narrowing for teens (there are repeated stories of high-school seniors arrested for their relationships with their high-school junior partners), and the “floor” of minimal acceptable age is rising, while more and more relationships now qualify as “pedophilia” that would not have been seen as such in the past. What’s a healthy, horny teenager to do these days?

Considering the pair in this movie, there’s certainly something very off-putting about a 32-year-old pursuing a 14-year-old, however flirtatious she is. (As she herself points out in the movie, when a kid does things that are inappropriate, the adult is supposed to say “No”. But then again, her merely saying so proves she is aware of the inappropriateness of the behavior she has been flaunting outrageously throughout the movie. Does she bear no responsibility – and no autonomy – in that context?) But the same relationship they exhibit – which never becomes in any way intimate (until she fakes a castration on him) – would be perfectly appropriate between two teens close to the same age. And I wonder at what age, of the younger girl, this creepy adult becomes non-creepy for pursuing her? Given the intelligence and maturity of the character in the film (somewhat overdone, I think, but nevermind), an 18-year-old who behaved similarly to this 14-year-old might be not a transgression, but simply a hell of a catch, for a 32-year-old with an eye for youth and beauty. What if she was 16 years old (the age of consent in many states), and a bit precocious, and right on the cusp of legal maturity? Creepy, or sexy? What if she’s 16 and he’s 25, not 32? What if she’s a somewhat immature 18, and he’s 25 and on the make? I’m not sure the numbers tell us anything (but I realize, too, that that is in large part the voice of my long-dead teenage-boy-self, who would have been delighted to meet an 18- or 25- or 32-year-old woman with transgression on her mind, but sadly never did).

I’m not arguing for a relaxation of the concept of pedophilia, or even of the restrictions on legal age combinations (though there may be something to be said for a more realistic view of the latter). But I want to know how to develop a clear, and accurate, and healthy, and accepting view of teen sexuality – of its growth and maturation, of the experimentation and play that makes that possible, of the variations in opportunity, experience, and desire that impinge on teens and adults alike and make each one’s process of sexual growth different and unique, of the necessary risk-taking (and necessary boundary transgressions) that are part of that process, and especially how to do so in an environment in which all teen sexuality is now under siege, and more and more of it is construed as “pedophilia”. This movies gives a picture of a sexually knowing – even if inexperienced – young woman who can only view her own sexual response to an older man through the lens of corruption, and feels she must take a stand on that ground because it’s the right thing to do. (I’m reminded of the female columnist – I can’t remember who – who wrote years ago about hugging her grammar-school-aged son to her chest and being pushed away by the boy, who said “that’s child sexual abuse!”. He’d been taught in school that that was the name for any touching of “private parts”, and he must be sure never to let anyone do that to him.) Since the girl in this movie initiates all the sexual moves, and is firmly in control throughout (would it be too much to say she had him by the balls?), she could have protected herself from any true sexual threat simply by not pursuing the contact, or breaking it off at her choosing. She knows this. (In saying this I’m not making the pedophile’s plea that “she invited it” – simply pointing out that the girl in this movie was not, in fact, in danger from the man she eventually killed for being dangerous to girls like her.) But she cannot accept this relationship as part of the territory open to her for exploration – it has to be part of the danger zone, even though she, at least, is not naive, vulnerable, or even necessarily a target of this ambiguous pedophile. (I’m again ignoring the last-moment confessional scene.) For a girl who is mature, intelligent, and widely-read, and has a commendable sexual knowledge base, she seems curiously sexually incurious – her come-ons to the older man were a sham, and there’s no hint she has a boyfriend or a dating life of her own (though we know she has several female friends). She has been taught to see her own sexuality like the columnist’s little boy saw all “private parts” – as a source of danger.

I think more and more we are being marched unwittingly into seeing all aspects of sex that way, and especially youth sexuality. Pedophilia has become a tool of fear for the further pathologizing of youth sex, and of the de-sexing of childhood psychology. That has to be a mistake, however much repulsed we are by sexual violation, or how protecting we want to be of our children.

Any thoughts on those issues, or this movie – or should I just step off the roof?