Death Masquerading as Art:
Remember how I’ve said that movies really are like real life, because if they weren’t nobody would understand them? The same goes for death. In a realistic, believable, well-written, well-directed, well-acted movie, anything that a character does, he does in the attempt to preserve the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable. That’s true whether he’s living his daily life, he’s achieving his objectives, or he knows that he’s about to die.
A few good movies full of gruesome carnage that spring to mind are American History X, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List. All of those movies are haunting and heart wrenching because people in them give very credible performances of people struggling with every fiber of their being to survive in completely hopeless situations. Whether you talk about Jews stripping naked and marching into gas chambers at gunpoint just so they can stay alive a few minutes longer than they could if they refused and were shot where they stood, or you talk about soldiers packed aboard landing barges trying to dive for cover even though there is nowhere to take cover when they get strafed by German fighter planes, or you talk about a Black guy getting beaten up by a White supremacist with a gun and then laying down in the street on his stomach, opening his mouth and putting his teeth on the curb so that the White supremacist can stomp on the back of his head, break his jaw, and knock out all his teeth because his only other alternative is to get his brains blown out right then and there, or you talk about… well, I think you get the idea. In all of those movies, people do what people do in real life, which is to keep on trying to make the best of their situation, no matter how hopeless it gets, right up to their very last dying breath.
A less obvious example came from a Swedish film I saw called Songs from the Second Floor. The movie was creepy because it followed the basic structure of any zombies-taking-over-the-world movie, but it made the leap from reality as we know it to inescapable horror in a lot fewer steps. Basically, this movie was about an ordinary city full of ordinary people with ordinary problems who were being driven completely insane because no matter what they did their problems just kept getting worse, and nobody had any idea what to do anymore. Or, to put it another way, it followed the same basic structure as a Spike Lee movie about inner city gangstas being stomped down no matter what they did to try to get ahead in the world, except this movie was about the exact same things happening to older middle-class White people who all finally realized they were losing at the rat race but couldn’t think of anything else to do.
One of the main characters burns down his business because it’s failing and there’s noting left he can do to save it. Earlier he defaulted on a loan that his friend Ole had given him because Ole died and had no relatives to inherit his estate. But then Ole’s ghost comes back to haunt him, and just follows him around wherever he goes. The guy keeps apologizing to Ole and begging him to leave him alone, but he never does. The movie ends with the guy standing out in a field outside of town, shouting, “Ole, I’m sorry! You work so hard to put a bit of food on the table and have a little enjoyment… I didn’t know what else to do!”
Like so many other characters in the movie, this guy tried everything he could think of, but he lost everything that he used to define himself as a human being. He was only living in the biological sense anymore, just a walking empty shell that used to be a man. Kind of like somebody turned into a zombie by a mysterious comet passing overhead. Or like somebody turning into a zombie by freebasing a whole bunch of coke…
Another movie I saw that illustrated how many ways the slender thread of life can be woven to make it endure as long as possible, was Sick, the autobiographical documentary about Robert Flannigan, the longest surviving cystic fibrosis patient. Cystic fibrosis is an incurable terminal disease caused by inherited genes. It causes patients’ lungs to produce waaaaaay too much mucous, so that their lungs keep filling up with more and more of it, until they finally drown in it. Cystic fibrosis patients live in constant pain, and very few of them live past the age of 25. This guy lived to be 44.
Bob Flannigan fought against the constant pain he lived in by masochistically inflicting even more pain on himself. He even pounded nails through his dick with a hammer—without anesthetics, perhaps I should add. The logic behind it was quite straightforward, although hard to grasp by anyone who didn’t live in so much constant pain. By inflicting more pain on himself he built up his resistance to pain, and he gave himself the ability to reduce the pain he lived in by ceasing to inflict it on himself.
Bob counseled a lot of cystic fibrosis patients about living with the disease, including a bunch of kids who went to a summer camp and a young lady who requested to meet him through the Make a Wish Foundation. One question that people—especially cystic fibrosis patients—kept asking him was: “What’s the point of spending your whole life living in constant pain that just keeps getting worse until it finally kills you?” So this one’s for him, his fellow CF patients, and everyone else with a terminal disease:
In Nazi Germany, you would all be dead by now, because in order to try to make their society as energy efficient as possible, they executed people with disabilities. Those people couldn’t produce as much work as everyone else, so the Nazis eliminated them to keep them from consuming resources and to save everyone else from having to carry their weight. In hunter-gatherer society where everyone had to be able to provide for themselves, things weren’t terribly different, except that very often disabled people would either execute themselves or else their health would deteriorate rapidly and they wouldn’t live very long. Luckily, we don’t live in either of those conditions.
Those laws of energy efficiency and economics remain, however, whether you suffer from a terminal illness or not: If you don’t contribute anything to your community and expect everyone else to carry your weight, you are nothing but a parasite. If you want to live—and this applies to everyone—you have to earn it.
Do we have to measure productivity in the same material terms the Nazis did? Of course not. Remember my hypothetical “Don’t Dream It, Be It” improvisational community theatre company? That worked by everyone contributing whatever they had to create something. Whatever that thing was going to be, nobody could tell, but whatever it became would be whatever they created.
So it goes with the rest of the world. If you want to live, you better work for it, and if you don’t work for it, don’t expect everyone else to carry your weight. So figure out whatever you do have to offer the world and contribute that. Whatever civilization we will build as a result, no one can tell, but whatever it becomes will be what everyone helped to create.
To answer the question, the point of living in constant pain that just keeps getting worse until it finally kills you is: If you have a terminal illness, it means you have the ability to produce something extremely important that nobody else can produce. You produce an example of how much is possible for one person to endure, and how much one person can accomplish in life in spite of the obstacles they face. Out of everyone, you have to do the most work at adapting your life to fit your living conditions, which means you develop the most strength of character, or the most spirit, or whatever you want to call it. Compared to you, most people in the world are wusses, but without you, those people could never realize that they were wusses, because they would have nothing to compare their wussy lives to. By making the best life you can for yourself, you help the people around you make the best lives for themselves they can, because you prove to them how much is possible in life. By developing so much spirit, you will make a strong impression on the people around you, and as a result, you can have as much affect on the world in 25 years as other people have on the world in 75 years. For all of those reasons, your life is just as important as everyone else’s—if you decide to make it that important.
Thanks, Bob.