thedashingfellows

The Last Days: When Knowledge Isn’t Power

By Alex Jenkins

This week Angelina Jolie made headlines after she penned a New York Times article discussing her decision to undergo a pre-emptive double mastectomy.  Jolie’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 46 and died a decade later.  Jolie had also tested positive for the BRCA1 gene, a result that, when combined with her family history, meant that she had an 87% of developing breast cancer if she lived to old age.  By having the mastectomy, she reduced that likelihood from 87% to 5%.  In Jolie’s case, getting screened for the BRCA1 gene was a rational choice (although not necessarily the only rational choice), because she knew she would have recourse in the event of a positive result.  But what about those diseases that are incurable and unpreventable?  In that case, the decision to get tested is much more complicated. 

There are some obvious benefits to knowing ones fate in this way.  For one thing, if the person is planning on having children in the future, this knowledge could be used to prevent passing the defective genes on to their kids, either by using in vitro fertilization or by adopting.  For those who already have children, the knowledge of ones impending death would allow them to plan and to put things in place to ensure that their children will be taken care of.  But the drawback, of course, is knowing that you’re going to die.  Soon.  For some people, myself included, this would be a torturous burden to bear.  In fact, this is one of the less-frequently invoked (yet very sound) arguments against the death penalty.  Telling someone how and when they are going to dies can be seen as a form of psychic torture.  For this reason, death row inmates in Japan aren’t told their execution date until the morning of the execution.  At first glance, this seems just as bad, if not worse than knowing the date months, and possibly years, in advance.  But at the same time, one can see the logic in reducing the length of time the prisoners must spend with the ominous fact of their execution date looming over them.

The fact is we all know we’re going to die. But for the vast majority of people, our knowledge of this fact is very abstract.  Until we are confronted with explicit reminders of our mortality (such as a diagnosis of an incurable disease), our own death isn’t something that we’re fully conscious of.  In his 2004 book The End of Faith, Sam Harris laid out an interesting thought experiment.  The passage reads as follows.

IMAGINE that you have gone to your doctor for a routine checkup, and he gives you terrible news: you have contracted a virus that kills 100 percent of those it infects. The virus mutates so often that its course is totally unpredictable. It can lie dormant for many years, even decades, or it can kill you outright in an hour. It can lead to heart attack, stroke, myriad forms of cancer, dementia, even suicide; in fact, there seems to be no constraints upon what its terminal stages might be. As for strategies of avoidance—diet and health regimes, sequestration to one’s bed—nothing avails. You can be certain that even if you live with no other purpose than to keep the progress of this virus in check, you will die, for there is no cure for it in sight, and the corruption of your body has already begun.

 

Surely, most people would consider this report to be terrible news indeed—but would it be news, in fact? Isn’t the inevitability of death just such a prognosis? Doesn’t life itself have all the properties of our hypothetical virus? (pp 36-37)

 

Harris uses this example to illuminate the horror that knowledge of our mortality engenders in each of us.  As he points out in a later quote, it’s not only the termination of life that concerns us (although that’s also a big concern), but also the fact that the finite nature of our presence is a reminder of our “creaturely insignificance” as he puts it.  In light of Harris’ hypothetical virus, screening for genetic diseases seems only to up the ante, while the potential payout is still the same in the end.

My Medical Choice

24 Returns

By Colin Ellis

Fox announced this week that it’s bringing Jack back - Bauer that is.

Yes, 24 is returning for a 12-episode run entitled 24: Live Another Day. No word on what the plot is, but presumably it will take place over the course of a day, within a condensed framework.

This is both good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news.

First, 24’s whole gimmick relied on a very straight-forward formula - 24 hours = 24 episodes. Knocking out 12 of those hours sort of kills the ticking clock idea when you think about it.

Secondly, by its sixth season, the series was showing clear signs of strain, and with the exception of a few strong episodes here and there, it had lost its charm.

Now the good news.

A 12-episode run might actually be a good thing when you consider how often a full season of 24 could start to carry on way too long. By trimming some of the fat, the show might actually feel like it did in those first 12 episodes of season one. My suggestion would be to dispense with the whole 24-hour thing and just do the first 12 hours instead in real-time. 24 is really just a name-brand at this point.

I’m curious to find out what the story will be this time. Jack Bauer has fought basically every terrorist threat there is from every nation both real and imagined, not to mention the U.S. government. There’s only one enemy left for him to go up against and that’s North Korea, although it might get a little too Red Dawn if they don’t handle the material right.

24 also likes to be as current as possibly, so there will no doubt be references to drone strikes, homegrown terror (been there, done that), and Guantanamo Bay (or some variation of it).

I Watched This: Room 237

By Max Arambulo

The Shining has a lot of dissolve shots, I learned from Room 237. Usually, dissolves signify a lot of passing narrative-time, but they work different in The Shining. They do some Freudian work. Here, it’s as if shots, the one fading out and the one fading in, are interacting with each other. When they overlap, they create a de facto Rorschach blotch. For example, early in the movie, when Jack and his family get their first tour of the Overlook Hotel, there’s a shot of a pile of luggage in the lobby that dissolves to a shot of a few tourists in the lower level. For a moment, the luggage is interposed on the tourists. Room 237 then shows us some black and white World War II footage of another pile of luggage, the last remnants of some temporary residents at an unnamed concentration camp. The Shining also famously ends with another dissolve. In the hotel lobby, there’s a black and white framed photo of a long-ago New Year’s Eve party at the Overlook, Jack somehow among the several dozen guests. The dissolve into a close-up of his youthful face overlays, for a moment, his hairline is on to his lip. It looks like he has one of them Hitler moustaches.

The Shining as meditation on the Holocaust is one expert’s reading that we get in Room 237. We get a few more including a theory that the film is about the extermination of the American Indians and another that theorizes that the film is Kubrick’s apology for his participation in the creation of the fake moon-landing footage. The film delivers these readings via voice over explanations by a half-dozen The Shining experts (or obsessives, if you prefer) coupled with footage from Kubrick’s masterpiece: slowed-down scenes so we can see each frame; arrows pointing at posters in the games-room in the Overlook; a zoom-in to the shelves in the storage room, to the cans of Calumet baking soda with the Native American logo. Most of the readings are cogent and are the result of meticulous viewings and re-viewings of the film. Even though each reading is built pretty consistently from images and symbols and dialogue, there’s a spectrum of outlandishness, the moon-landing theory on the very farthest end. I’ll buy the Holocaust one a bit more because that reading doesn’t necessarily need any Kubrick authorial-intention. I’ll buy the moon-landing thing way less since it’s assuming a lot much about what’s was going on in Kubrick’s mind and therefore has a lot more intentional fallacy going for it. Also, it depends on the idea that the moon-landing footage was faked which is a not just a little bit crackpot to begin with.

But, convincingness isn’t the point, really, of Room 237. The experts aren’t really didactic and argumentative. They don’t yell or speak with single-minded force like Adolf did at the Berlin Sports Palace. The experts just sound like they’re having fun sharing their ideas. One of the experts, for example, shares his favorite visual-joke in The Shining. It’s in the scene where Jack walks into the hotel-manager’s office. Room 237 slows down the clip so we can watch frame-by-frame and pauses when the manager has walked around to the front of his desk to shake Jack’s hand. Look at the paper-tray inbox, the expert tells us through giggles. It’s lined up perfectly with the manager’s crotch as if it’s a giant erection. “Ok, I’ll give you another one,” the expert says and takes us back to the famous opening credits sequence, footage shot from high up as Jack’s VW Beetle glides along the curved mountain road. As the camera pans up to the sky, the expert says, you can recognize a cloud in the shape of Kubrick’s face. Just for a moment. There are no arrows pointing at the spot he means and I didn’t see it. But I think it’s a fun thing that I didn’t. Yeah, ok, close-watching of The Shining can be like looking for shapes in the clouds and finding a giant boner. It’s an individual and idiosyncratic and even silly, in the best way, activity.

The Shining has a dreamy, nightmarish feel. As you watch, your mind’s working harder than usual, subliminally. In addition to the Rorschach-y dissolves, there are tricks going on with the continuity. Kubrick is so deliberate with his mise en scene, the hallway’s brown carpeting, the tall floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows in the lobby, the shelves of dry goods in the storage room. But he’s also deliberate in messing with all that, too, the documentary explains. For example, there are all the cartoon-characters stickers on Danny’s bedroom door. The camera zooms past them, most prominently past the Dopey sticker, to Danny staring at his washroom mirror as he has his first vision of the waves of blood coming through the closed elevator-doors. Later, when a doctor visits to check on the shell-shocked Danny, the Dopey sticker is gone. “He’s no longer a dope,” one of the experts explains. After the image of blood, he’s no longer just an innocent kid. Sure, sounds about right. Then there’s the Overlook’s weirdo layout. The Shining deliberately walks us through the place to establish a certain high-level of veracity. There’s the scene when the hotel handyman takes Jack’s wife on a tour and stops in on the storeroom where she’ll eventually imprison her husband. There’s also the early scene as the janitorial staff cleans the lobby, mops the floors, and lugs chairs through the huge room to storage.

The place seems like it makes sense, but there are all the subconscious ways that makes us feel that it doesn’t. Like when Nicholson goes to that first meeting with the manager and there’s this huge window behind the desk, the white sunlight working through the tree-branches outside. There’s something wrong about the window, something menacing. “It’s an impossible window,” one of the experts says (quite the beautiful phrase, impossible-window). We’ve seen the lobby adjacent to this office and know that a hallway snakes behind. The window should only look into that hall. The view of the branches and the sky is an anomaly, a hitch in the film’s logic. There’s also Danny’s big-wheel ride through the halls. The first lap he makes, around the perimeter of the lobby, is normal. But the second lap is also a glitch. He takes a certain right and all of a sudden, without going up a ramp or using the elevator, he’s on the second floor of the hotel. There’s the peak of one of the lobby’s stain-glass windows in the lower left corner of the frame. The place is haunted and the experts in Room 237 show us that it’s less a supernatural thing, and more a continuity thing.

Even though a couple of the readings are about mass death, none of the experts sound particularly dour. It’s all fun, pointing out how the movie operates, how it plays tricks on us. I’m nervous that the next time I watch The Shining, though, that I’ll be too busy noticing the artifice to feel scared. I’ll notice more the jokes, like how the magazine that Jack is reading in the hotel lobby the first time he meets his boss is glossy in a particular way, how it’s, in fact, a copy of Playgirl. But, Room 237 does make me want to re-watch The Shining and delight in all the experts’, and Kubrick’s, meticulous play. After all, all work and no play makes Jack something-something.