Fruitful Multiplication

"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway

A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.

I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief  that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.