Word: doctor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After centuries of bad p.r., Death has a media strategy. And its chief spin doctor is named Kevorkian. He's too demonic to be an ideal pitchman. When he bent over Youk with a syringe and asked, "Sleepy, Tom?," the image was bloodcurdling. But he has an unerring sense of what excites journalists--and incites prosecutors. Three days after the 60 Minutes story aired on CBS, Kevorkian got what he had explicitly wished for: he was charged with first-degree murder. Though he has been acquitted three times of helping patients end their life, this time he crossed a significant...
...dirty little secret about euthanasia is that it's common in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes even in the 49 states where it's illegal. It just isn't talked about. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year found that 1 in 21 doctors surveyed had administered a lethal injection to end suffering. A doctor in the anonymous survey reported having done it 150 times...
...Kevorkian is acquitted, it will be a major p.r. victory for the right to die. If he loses, he has vowed to starve himself to death in jail. Either way, Death will get plenty of headlines--but his spin doctor will probably get even more...
...sister Cathleen calls me back from this mordant line of thinking. A boomer herself, she is a doctor in Maine. She delivered three babies on Thanksgiving Day. She attends old people all the time, watches them die and anguishes over their endgame suffering. I tell her, "The law must never be an accessory to murder." She replies, "Be careful there. Be careful. We are not talking about murder in these cases, but about compassionate care in terminal cases in which the life has already been lived and is, in fact, now over...
There are, thankfully, some notable exceptions in Gods and Monsters, namely Whale's dreams and flashbacks. The former have him in his own movies, playing the Doctor Frankenstein to Boone's Monster and vice versa. Shot in retrospective monochrome, the film here manages to capture the beauty of Whale's movies without distracting the viewer from the matter at hand--Whale and Boone's increasingly complex relationship. Similarly, the flashbacks to the war, and to Whale's wistful memories of "love in the foxholes," are masterfully done. Alas, these all have the ulterior motive of emphasizing the film's already...