WILD LIFE Meets Love as a Force of Nature

Film Review by September Williams /Bioethics Screen Reflections

Production Still

WILD LIFE is a documentary by Oscar® winning filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. It shows the rigors, pitfalls, and love required to protect and preserve what is the best of nature. A National Geographic Documentary, WILD LIFE opened in the USA  in April of 2023.

WILD LIFE is also a Bioethics Film for many reasons. Among those is the setting, i.e. the geography. Both Chile and neighboring Argentina lay claim to the region of Patagonia. Patagonia holds some of the world’s regions untouched by humans.

The back story of WILD LIFE is, Chile and Argentina are nations’ whose economies are tightly linked to mineral extraction and forest wood exports. As it happens, the same geographical region is also important for providing a significant portion of the earth’s atmospheric oxygen through tree and plant photosynthesis.

How much oxygen is produced by South America? The estimate is a third of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. More mining, means more chopping trees and more toxic mining tailings— destroying the ecology of Patagonia. This result is ill health of the planet and those who live on it. The competing goods in this situation come down to:

1) Trees save the earth and ultimately the species by converting carbon dioxide into Oxygen.

2) Chopping down trees and clearing a way for mining provides for the livelihoods of those who can’t afford altruism for generations to come. This is a catch twenty-two situation. How is this resolved?

True Bioethical Conflicts are hard to resolve as they are rarely between competing bad things. Instead, bioethical conflicts usually deal with “competing goods.” The principle characters in WILD LIFE, beside the environment, are Kris and Doug Tompkins and others of their cohort. Tompkins raison d'être legacy was establishing National Parks. From 1990 to 2015, Doug and Tompkins lead a campaign to preserve more ten million acres of wilderness, including in Patagonia, with a promise of 12 million more. They bought up land, which they donated to the Chilean government. The Tompkins also encouraged others particularly Argentinians to reserve wild space connecting to that of Chile.

The movie, WILD LIFE, is also a coming of age story, not just for a National Park, but of a woman in the last quarter of her life. The star of a film is defined as the character who makes the most change. Here beyond the phenomenal landscape, the star is Kris Tompkins. Kris’s evolution is manifest by her actions related to key principles in Bioethics as tools. It requires her exploring concerns from the views of Beneficence: the moral obligation to do good; Autonomy: the right to act in ones enlightened best self interest; and Justice: the equitable distribution of burdens and benefits. Thinking about all that is hard when you have lost the love of your life.

WILD LIFE is a documentary by Oscar® winning filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. It shows the rigors, pitfalls, and love required to protect and preserve what is the best of nature. A National Geographic Documentary, WILD LIFE opened in the USA  April 2023.

I can’t help wondering if Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin intentionally created a triplet of Bioethics Films or if it was just their instinct? The first two films of the triptych, to my eye, are FREE SOLO and THE RESCUE. The final piece would be WILD LIFE. This is the order that I would share with students or suggest others to view. But, WILD LIFE ties the meaning of the three together.

FREE SOLO is all about the principle of Autonomy. That is, doing what one believes is in one’s own enlightened best interest. The protagonist of FREE SOLO is a, better than well skilled, free climber (i.e.without a rope). The film follows the climber, as he scales El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park. No one had climbed the whole of that route, without a tether, before this film. It is a gripping testament to nerve and determination. The average person may think the climber is a bit insane. But, if that free solo climb was not an exercise in Autonomy, what is?

THE RESCUE, is the second film in this documentary series. Here, the stars are adult rescuers, including a physician and a substantial part of the military and police of Thailand. A children’s soccer team is trapped in a cave, rapidly filling with water, during a monsoon. Their egress is impassable. As the water rises there is ambiguity about if any of the kids can be saved, by whom and by what criteria. Justice is the principle THE RESCUE begs the viewer to consider. In Bioethics, Justice strives for the equitable distribution of burdens and benefits.

Wild Life

Also in terms of Bioethics, THE RESCUE is a classic Life Boat Scenario, no pun intended, but applicable. Yes, it is like the Hitchcock movie LIFEBOAT. Adroit, highly skilled, amateur sport cave divers from the UK arrive in Thailand to assist. There is initially a battling with bureaucracies, and differing cultural approaches. And isn’t that the struggle in any multifaceted work place, understanding and respecting differences in order to get the work done? That is to say, after a rocky start, upholding the principle of Beneficence became the primary operational value of the rescue and drives all the major plot point.

I was fortunate to see THE RESCUE, at the Mill Valley Film Festival, in 2021, during the rising phase of the Covid Pandemic. There, I had a passing exchange with Jimmy Chin. The parallels between the film and the pandemic were startlingly similar, by way of the chaos of uncertainty. Chin and Vasarhelyi’s extraordinary film craft, was on full parade, in the RESCUE.

Particularly impressive, was the modeling of the set and the multi-dimensional mapping of the tunnels of rock and underground waterways. They served to orient the audience watching the screen. The production values are high, despite the need for recreating a complex geography. Visual aids, maps and models, were used brilliantly. They reminded the audience that we are watching a recreation and not observing a real time event. On the other hand, the film is wrapped in the reality of the testimonies and real people who had been present during the actual crisis. The effect is a turmoil in the viewer’s emotions that is palpable.

With WILD LIFE, we as viewers, join the protagonists, Kris and Doug in Chile. Here, Vasarhelyi and Chin capture both exquisite beauty and unbearable sorrow, in the same film. This launches the film into a class of its own. In the third film of this ecological trilogy, the full range of a love story and a struggle, emerges. Here, grief and loss are palpable in multiple ways, yet, the film stays on point reminding us, as it happens, you can’t have grief if you have never loved and lost. Viewing the first two films, in this Vasarhelyi/Chin Trilogy, sends an important but subtle message. It takes courage beyond a rope and a rock to live through grief. On the other hand, a rope and rock can be excellent training to get you half way through profound sorrow.

WILD LIFE is about doing the thing that, with considered contemplation, translates to Beneficence. Beneficence is understood in Bioethics as the principle requiring one, or a people, work toward actions, yielding positive benefits. It’s a moral construct, whose devil is in the details. Those, honestly working beyond a faux best self interest, require an ever deepening capacity to understand themselves and others. Like the Rolling Stone song says, “You can’t always get what you want—but if you try sometimes, you might get what you need.”

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi , Kris Tompkins, Jimmy Chin (Photo Courtesy of National Geographic Documentary

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin logged four-hundred hours of filming, over six years, on WILD LIFE. That was followed by scoring three hundred hours of footage. There is nothing as a reviewer I can say, more relevant than anything the filmmakers might express. Here are a few of their thoughts:

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

“How do you make a film about the people in your life who are most inspirational to you? Can you even translate a modicum of how you feel about them to an audience?” When Jimmy first approached me about chronicling Kris and Doug’s journey, it felt like an impossible task. These are people who have loomed large in his life for as long as he can remember, but they’ve also made significant changes for the good of our world. How do you do those kinds of heroes justice? Like so many of us, I’ve been alarmed by what’s happening to our environment. The importance of telling this story outweighed any potential missteps along the way. And for years, I’ve wanted to make a film about a strong woman. There are few stronger and more determined than Kris, but hers is not an easy story to tell…”

Jimmy Chin

“WILD LIFE is a deeply personal film for me, that is intimately tied to the early days of my life and career as a climber, photographer and filmmaker. I first met the legendary climber, Rick Ridgeway, in 2002, when he led our National Geographic expedition to cross the Chang Tang Plateau, in Northwestern Tibet, on foot and unsupported. On this expedition, Rick taught me the basic elements of shooting scenes. Not long after, I met Kris and Doug Tompkins, down in Chile, while visiting with Rick and Yvon filming on the 2010 film, 180° South. It was during this trip, we climbed one of the unclimbed gems in the southern Andes with Doug, Yvon, Rick, and Jeff Johnson. Doug named the mountain Cerro Kristina after Kris…”

“After Doug’s shocking death in 2015, I think everyone who knew him, myself included, felt a little helpless. What can you do in the face of tremendous loss? I was in awe as I saw Kris, while struggling with her grief, continue fighting for this dream that they had of creating national parks. It dawned on me that what Kris was doing was extraordinary, and what Chai and I could best contribute to the work was to help tell her story and hopefully inspire others…”

Doug Tompkins (Photo Courtesy of National Geographic Documentary)

This is also a film about the passion shared by a woman named Kris, and her outdoorsman, entrepreneur husband, Doug Tompkins. Headed to Chile, they left behind the iconically successful outdoor brands they'd helped pioneer North Face, and Esprit. WILD LIFE is about what the Tompkins did next, and why. Theirs is a love story, catapulting them into the pantheon of Kinari Webb’s Guardians of the Trees. The film is as much about “saving,” as it is about “loss.” WILD LIFE is the sound of both hands clapping.

***

September Williams, MD-Writer/ Bioethics Screen Reflections, acknowledges and thanks Larsen Associates for  the ongoing promotion of quality independent films, my access to filmmakers of Bioethics significant works, and related promotional materials, interviews and screeners—here via National Geographic Documentaries. And particular thanks to Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin for this stunningly beautiful most recent work —WILD LIFE.

My bad —I forgot forgot to mention — WILD LIFE IS SCREENING ALL OVER THE USA currently. It is a National Geographic Documentary - you can check the schedule here: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/wild-life xx September

LIVING: Bioethics, Alienation & Leveling the Playing Field

LIVING is an example of why brick and mortar movie theaters shall not perish from the Earth. South African born director, Oliver Hermanus' LIVING (2022), is an exquisite feature film. It gives us another view of the co-existence of classic bioethical principles in a state of tension.

The reader should know there is no pretense of impartiality by this film reviewer. I don’t have time to review films I dislike, nor those I am disinterested in understanding. That is someone else’s job. My want is that the reader should grab a mask, check you are fully up to date with your Covid and Flu vaccines, and maybe find a babysitter. Next, you should buy tickets for a brick and mortar theater screening with a very high ceiling and good ventilation. All this because LIVING is a film born to be viewed on the biggest, boldest, quality screens, and heard through the best sound systems.

LIVING’s main character is portrayed by Bill Nighy. His performance, in symbiosis with South African born director Hermanus, draws every ounce of blood out of the character that is Mr. Williams. These moments on screen, will be noted as not just outstanding in both of their careers, but perhaps in this century. We learn to see a world through Williams’ psyche as he attempts an escape from one life to another. The setting is England, less than a decade since the Blitz and the mass civilian death tolls of civilians on English soil during World War II. Yet, the trains are running on time again.

The opening images are London, circa 1950. Like the tint of a good set of name brand sunglasses, everything is wrapped in a soft sepia— protecting the beauty of the morning from the disturbance of glare. Its idyllic cinematography releases us from reality. An astounding classical score floats our souls. We want to be with the characters, on that train, leaving a station, en route to London. Perhaps we fantasize riding on the roof, then leaping up to kiss a steeple.

That morning, as many others before, a group of young men board the train together. Sitting in facing seats, they talk, as would a gaggle of goslings. The train platform and cars are a sea of bowler hats, the headwear associated with the British civil service since the nineteenth century. The newly minted young workers banter is playful and gossip riddled.  An older drawn man, in his bowler hat, enters the gosling’s car. He moves deliberately through them down the aisle. A new inductee to the civil service “goslings,” kindly but naively, clears a nearby seat for the elder gentleman senior colleague whom they (and we) may come to know as Mr. Williams. With nary an acknowledgment of the potential kindness, the sallow, past middle age, civil servant that is Williams walks through to the adjacent car. The other members of the gaggle of goslings know that man would never sit with them..

This is how we initially meet Bill Nighy, as Mr. Williams, an aging, worse for the wear civil servant. On that train, we do not yet know that Mr. Williams is in an arena adjacent to ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE (1947) or DARK VICTORY (1939). We certainly do not know that Mr. Williams, born from the mind of Nobel Literary Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, exists in homage to the 1952 Japanese film, Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Though the work might quickly recall a collegiate term paper I wrote inspired by the 1886 Russian novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy, whom writer Ishiguro also acknowledges. It could be easily argued that the main characters in LIVING are more related as third cousins, once removed, than they are literary sibling twins.  Apparently, they live in a house passed down through generations.

We know nothing of Mr. Williams before the day we met him on the train, except— his speech is nearly monosyllabic and his face, inanimate. His character note from first flash on the screen is Alienation, ie. a stunned sense of detachment from his own needs— never mind those of others. Alienation is notably a common phenomenon now recognized in combat veterans and others with post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, the place of LIVING is London, a decade past WWII. Mr. Williams has lived  through. He likely has survived the Blitz —up until now. Yet, his wife has died. His son and daughter in-law live in his house. His son’s wife seems to be waiting for the elderly man to die, as well, though she is oblivious to that actual possibility.

Mr. Williams’ character arc starts with his inability to receive, perceive, or disseminate goodness. He is apparently a dead man walking, insensate and disconnected. So stilted is Williams, that he doesn’t even have a first name. Often, screen works aim at the low hanging fruit of a subset of Bioethics— Clinical Medical Ethics. This subset relies on the trappings of the clinical arena—hospitals, ERs, surgical suites, morgues, even autopsy slabs—think Ben Casey  through the most recent addition to the Good Doctor.

The film, LIVING, dares to go where clinicians are loathe to tread. Instead of staying in the clinical lanes, of beneficence (doing good with medicine) and autonomy (doing what is in a persons own best self interest )—this film wades into the deep muck of justice. It’s a principle that can rarely be actualized in a hospital— but rather in the street. In fact, any clinical medical data in LIVING is dismissed in less than three minutes and two shots in the whole film. None of those minutes occur in a hospital, but only in Mr. Williams’ head.

Though it is a long journey in LIVING, our protagonist Mr. Williams is able to recognize that others are playing their game of life on an uneven field. It is a field scarred by ruts and war debris, much as is his character. He is handicapped by emotional and physical circumstances. Escaping the monster of a life of hard earned alienation leaves Williams’ trying to level the playing field through justice. That would be justice for himself and others for whom he has learned to care. In that turn, this film eschews the pedantic medical ethics storylines, set in medical environments with attendant props and costumes.

Mr. Williams’ character arc recognizes his need to act beneficently by doing good for those in need. Finally, he embraces, autonomy by defining what his own interests actually are. LIVING is a candidate for the pantheon of Bioethics Films, but it deals with the field’s common themes and principles in an entirely new way.

Director Oliver Hermanus' handling of the pivotal relationship between actor Bill Nighy, Mr. Williams, and the character Miss Margret Aimee Lou Wood, is significant. It breaks away from any cliches and introduces a unique relationship between a young woman and an older man than seen on film of recent. In the end, Ishiguro’s script, and the Hermanus have made a truly unique film. That is, the climax of the effort lay in Ms. Margret and the mothers of children become the primary turnkeys for change in the main character. They made Mr. Williams a star.

As with any film, LIVING’s life blood is the matching of extraordinary actors and their director, with engaged film professionals working as a team. Living has very rich blood.

***

Bioethics Screen Reflections and September Williams, MD-Writer, acknowledges and thanks Larsen Associates for their continuing access to Independent Films, filmmaker interviews, screenings and background materials, including permission to use photographs of films including LIVING.

FOR SAMA: Bioethics, Conflict Journalism, Concerned Photographers & Humanitarian Law

As I write, I have just finished screening FOR SALMA the second time since this summer. Today is the broadcast premiere of the film on PBS-Frontline USA and Channel 4 internationally.  My film review: FOR  SAMA  Bioethics, Humanitarian Law and Withdrawal of Medical was was first published on November 18, 2019,  by Bioethics.net  "Where the World Finds Bioethics" and I ask you to read it at that site. But after today's viewing, I had additional thoughts.

With her co-director Edward Watts, Filmmaker, journalist, and mother, Waad Al-Kateab has created an enduring document of war--particularly the World War, referred to as the Syrian Civil War--currently being fought at the expense of the regular people of Syria and it's adjacent regions. Waad Al-Kateab has distinguished herself as a cinematographer, director, and journalist. She has told a uniquely womanistic, family-centered story wrapped in a sublime but hard-hitting war documentary. Her work moves the viewer to compassion--followed quickly by anger and responsibility which may yield a change in the depicted circumstances. 

Director Waad Al-Kateab and her husband featured in FOR SAMA Hamza Al-Kateab

With the film FOR SAMA, Waad Al-Kateab brings the twenty-first century to a cannon of conflict photographers/journalists the perspective of a woman, and one raised in Islamic culture at that. She joins the ranks of the best of  Concerned Photographers and Journalists. I list them here to urge readers to seek out their works.  Among Waad Al-Kateab's ilk are: Nick Ut, Margaret Bourke-White, Philip Jones-Griffiths, Henri Cartier Bresson, Moises Saman, João Silva, Tim Hetherington,  Don McCullin, Robert Capa and the one who inspired me to write the novel, Chasing Mercury, learn photography and film -- and honestly even to practice medicine, William Eugene Smith. Concerned photographers and journalists not only document but move the observer to compassion and action. 

Your viewership can determine the breadth and depth of FOR SAMA’s influence. FOR SAMA’s WORLD BROADCAST PREMIERE was Tuesday. November 19, 2019. However, you may see it in rebroadcast and help expand the film through. Check your local PBS Station to view the FRONTLINE EPISODE: HERE

ALSO SEE Campaign: ACTION FOR SAMA:  HERE 

THE LURE OF THIS LAND: Bioethics, Autonomy and Liberty of Movement Narrative Power

This article was first published on October 13, 2019, by Bioethics.net "Where the World Finds Bioethics." 

THE LURE OF THIS LAND is a feature-length documentary by Alexandra Lexton.  Lexton is a consummate film professional, writer, and narrative educator now stepping into the director’s chair. This work expresses a gentle passion for extracting primary motivating forces driving atypical protagonists.  THE LURE OF THIS LAND (LOTL) is a filmic exploration of individual autonomy manifested by self-determination through the liberty of movement. 

Here, autonomy is defined as the right of individuals to define and act in their own best-enlightened self-interest. Competent people are allowed to knowingly take risks with which many would not dare nor agree. In fact, some of this film's risk-takers might be considered less than competent and certainly quirky by virtue of their devil may care attitude. Shifting geographies is the essential mechanism through which those featured in The Lure of This Land have sought self-actualization. Their journeys reflect the principles set forth in The Freedom of Movement amendment adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1999. The amendment states that, “Liberty of movement is an indispensable condition for the free development of a person.”

Director-Producer Alexandra Lexton 

Cultures are groups of people who draw a circle around themselves encompassing specific characteristics. Lexton’s protagonists have come from a broad range of backgrounds, most are first or second-generation ex-patriots making homes in Belize. Many of those interviewed hail from far-flung places but also some from nearer neighbors. Those asked but who chose not to be interviewed did so for reasons so complex as to warrant a separate film. Above all else, THE LURE OF THIS LAND is about people who move…  SPOILER ALERT: You do not always get a storybook ending in the documentary. Exercising rights is not a panacea but more often a struggle. They chose to move to Belize.

Belize’s GDP ranks among the lowest in the world. The nation no longer has natural economic resources to harvest. The mahogany is gone with the British and the wealthier American neighbors to the North. Lexton’s Belizean expatriates appear to be those heeding the call of the better angels. Bordered by Guatemala, the Great Barrier Reef,  jungle, rain forests, and Mayan World Heritages sites—the nation is hemmed in to the Northern Triangle of Central America from which many strive to escape. Each of the film’s characters operates from different religious, socioeconomic, and cultural bases. But, there is an overarching theme between the protagonists. Their need for freedom of movement, Human Rights and protection of the environment are interdependent—and they know it. 

As LOTL rolls, savvy public health, scientific, and politically astute viewers want to ask, “What about Belize’s high rates of… HIV/AIDS, deaths of youths by a car wreck, rampant cardiovascular disease, persistent malaria, risks to the great barrier reef, or conflicts with Guatemala?” “This is not that film,” Lexton clarifies during her interview. She proudly states “You make the film you get.” Lexton commands viewers to attend to what you can learn from the narrative not what you don’t—though she recognizes an alert audience stimulated to know more is always an honor. 

In clinical practice, other helping professions, and research, workers are obligated to intersect with people about whom they have little understanding. Catchwords like ‘diversity’ and ‘disparity’ abound in professions as shortcuts. But they are almost always euphemisms for race and class. There are characteristics of people who are not dependent on socio-economic indicators but something of a more innate human condition than the man-made. THE LURE OF THIS LAND defies the use of simple reductionist paradigms for how its characters simultaneously alike and different.

The power of documentary film applied to bioethical thought is in the demands made on the listener to engage in hearing complex narratives well enough to explore their meanings. Initially, the verbal expressions of those people in the LURE OF THIS LAND seem as foreign as Klingon. Lexton lets us see how different these wanderers are from linear thinkers. The magic of Lexton’s integration of the unique environs and these people forces us to practice not just listening but truly hearing. 

The film’s process digs a berth into the audience’s way of seeing things. LOTL provides an alternative narrative structure to the dominant ones on expatriation. Surprisingly this screen work changed the writer of this review’s biases. Those biases were generally negative towards expatriates from wealthy nations—assuming that they all were taking up digs and living above the standard of their new home’s majority peoples. Changing points of view is a good thing for bioethicists and are, in fact, a part of our jobs.

Another secret weapon of THE LURE OF THIS LAND is that the film turns the popular “migration under duress” paradigm on its head. How self-determination, not self collapse, manifests as liberty of movement clarifies that ‘migration’ is not running away but toward. ‘Migration’ may be on a continuum with, but is not the same as, being a refugee or seeking asylum. This film posits that the intuition sparking migration derives from the well-spring of self-realization, not terror. The liberty of movement is the visible sine qua non of autonomy whether it be switching home geographies or choosing how one saunters down a street. 

In this little movie, Alexander Lexton forces viewers to pass through the looking glass into a world were people consciously attempt to escape arrested development. THE LURE OF THIS LAND is a gift that can help bioethics expand the understanding of autonomy.

Screening Contact Information  HERE

ASK DR RUTH

This article was original Published  on Bioethics.net "Where the World finds Bioethics"  September 9, 2019 and is copied here with that publications peremission. 

ASK DR. RUTH  by director Ryan White shows the personal lifestyle of the 90-year-old sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. That lifestyle is simple—work, family, home, friends, and the familiarity of happy spaces. It’s a life most people, particularly elders, want to enjoy. White’s film intertwines that norm with the doctor’s unfathomably complex personal, professional and psychological underpinnings. At a height of 4 foot 7 inches, hormones and the assaultive stresses of world history have denied Dr. Ruth a body size reflecting her true stature. What Dr. Ruth lacks in height is more than compensated by a giant intellect and humanitarian zeal.

Photo courtesy of  ASK DR. RUTH, courtesy Hulu Originals film

Six months before I ever saw the famous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report hailing the beginning of what would soon be called the AIDS epidemic, I heard Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s unique voice over the radio, foreshadowing a dangerous future. I knew about it already, having lost a friend who was among the index cases. Dr. Ruth talked about a new deadly, maybe sexually-transmitted, blood-borne disease on her radio show, Sexually Speaking (WYNY-FM, New York) that I could sometimes hear at medical school in Omaha, Nebraska when atmospheric conditions were just right. Dr. Ruth’s message was a clarion call for more research, compassion and care for the victims of this mysterious illness. Until then, I had never heard a direct command on any FCC-controlled airway to “use condoms,” never mind the implication that such use is an act of love in itself.

Seeing Ryan White’s ASK DR. RUTH clarified for me why this particular sex therapist might have chosen to take the ethically dicey move of ‘outing’ AIDS prior to the CDCdeclaring the epidemic. Buried somewhere between beneficence and justice is always the protection of innocent parties. White’s film helped me understand how Dr. Ruth might be among the best equipped to recognize the difference between moral ambiguities and moral imperatives.

As important as the historical backdrop of Dr. Ruth’s career as a sex therapist, her story is also the tale of a woman who is now in the ‘Old, Old’ phase of life. Aging may be even more universal than sex itself since it starts from the moment of birth, and on Ruth it looks darn good. Throughout the film, the director depicts the doctor gathering and summarizing information that helps her make sense of her life. She’s a therapist by training and nature, and hard-wired for the task.

Born Karola Ruth Siegel, she became Dr. Westheimer after marrying her dearly beloved late husband, Fred. Ruth is a tightly packed powerhouse of a woman, who throughout ASK DR. RUTH is often depicted giggling. In one scene, our hero asks Amazon’s Alexa,’“Who is Dr. Ruth Westheimer?”. Alexa responds straight from Wikipedia,”Ruth Westheimer (born June 4, 1928), better known as Dr. Ruth, is a German-American sex therapist, media personality, and author…”

The simplicity of the response also makes Ruth giggle. This is most likely because the doctor is more inclined to state what she is not,than what she is.Ruth claims that she is not ‘a feminist’ and that she is not ‘political’. She is not ‘a person who will ever touch a gun again’—despite having been a trained sniper by the predecessor of the Israeli Defense Forces in British Mandated Palestine. Dr. Ruth explains that she is not a “Holocaust Survivor”. She believes calling herself such demeans those who died or lived through unspeakable horrors of Auschwitzand other venues of atrocities.

The language that Ruth uses to identify herself (in any of her four languages) is “Holocaust Orphan.” In her life she has been a mother, a grandmother, a sex therapist, author, educator, and friend. Trained in psychology, sociology and holding an Ed.D., Dr. Ruth’s light bubbly nature does not hide the precision of her choice of words.

Photo courtesy of ASK DR. RUTH through 
Hulu Originals film

The film takes the viewer on a tour of the most sustaining places of her life. White allows the protagonist to guide the camera in the present tense. Dr. Ruth’s youth is depicted through animation—the go-to approach of the current documentary film era. Though memoirs are generally as much an invention of memory as truth, this film had great luck: Ruth was always a writer, one who kept and held onto journals . Those writings and a handful of photograph were used to create the animated sequences in ASK DR. RUTH. 

The process of creating a film is as important as is the final product. Good filmmakers, crew and stars blend to make more than something to be seen on the screen. White’s ASKS DR RUTH comes from a place that is weary of just documenting despair, opting to show how one triumphs over it. Dr. Ruth’s story is not exactly a Horatio Alger tale. Under her own steam and given a chance to not die in the Holocaust, she became a single working mother and student. Late in her life she found the strength to face the specific documentation of the murders of her parents during the Holocaust, a task she had previously avoided for most of her adulthood.

ASK DR. RUTH helps us makes sense of the remarkable resilience of Karola Ruth Siegel—a girl who was given refuge during the Holocaust. There are other unaccompanied children like Karola sitting on borders around the world and in the country of this writing. ASK DR. RUTH is a gift from Ryan White to us. But what do you think Karola wants from us? I would bet it is the chance for other children to live long lives dedicated to acts of love.  

FOR MORE on Ask Dr. Ruth go to Information and Screening HERE

BIOETHICS meets A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN—Conversation on Moral Intuition with Director Marshall Curry

This article was first published by Bioethics.net the online arm of the American Journal of Bioethics 

http://www.bioethics.net/2019/04/a-film-review-a-night-at-the-garden-conversation-on-moral-intuition-with-director-marshall-curry/

Posted on April 28, 2019, at 6:02 PM

Boarding my flight from Burbank, I flicked through my phone emails, finding that director Marshall Curry was available for interviews. It was a few weeks before the Academy of Film Arts and Science 2019 shindig. I had not seen Curry’s most recent film nor had I realized it was now also nominated for an OSCAR® in the Best Documentary – Short Subject category. This new work is added to his eight films since 2005 with their 38 awards and nominations. The new film is A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN — The title references New York’s iconic venue, Madison Square Garden. 

Courtesy of photographer Bill Johnston: Marshall Curry in Conversation with September Williams

I clicked on the email link. The run time was 7 minutes. A bit longer than the usual for a trailer, I thought. But what do I know, nobody ever nominated me for an ACADEMY AWARD®. Seeing the first few frames of Curry’s film, everything around me seemed to grind to a halt. Seven minutes wasn’t the length of a trailer but the whole film. It had been culled from hundreds of hours of 1939, black & white, newsreel camera footage. A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN shows twenty-thousand Americans at a gathering of the German-American Bund. The event was billed as a “Pro American Rally.” They lifted their arms in Nazi salutes, toward American Flags and a portrait of George Washington. This gathering took place a historical breath before the USA would enter WWII against the Nazis. Given the linkage between the development of bioethics to the atrocities of fascism associated with that war, it was clear that on my arrival in San Francisco I would head straight to interview Marshall Curry. 

Curry’s film enhances the understanding of fascism while illuminating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25:

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control; (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

The Nuremberg Doctors Trials circumscribed the need for Article 25 which is operationalized by the Nuremberg Code, The Declaration of Helsinki, and the Belmont Report. These are the roots of the policy basis and the discipline of biomedical ethics. Article 25 makes the prima-facie argument for the protection of vulnerable third parties at risk to be preyed on by societies, professions, and individuals. 

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN’s seven minutes adheres to the Aristotelian plot curve (the narrative Holy Grail) with near metronomic precision. People seem to absorb stories best when the narrative establishes characters, setting, plot turning points, and the climax of conflict for the main characters, in that order. The final point in the plot curve is the resolution of the conflict in the story. Notably, there is no resolution in Marshall Curry’s film— leaving the viewer uncomfortable—as the director and history wants us to be. 

The film climaxes when Khun (the head of the American Nazi Bund) has his fascist rant interrupted by a 26-year-old plumber’s helper from Brooklyn—Isadore Greenbaum. Greenbaum yells, “Down with Hitler!” This results in Bund Guards dragging the protestor around the stage, beating him, tearing off his clothes, particularly his pants, maximizing the victim’s humiliation. Khun at the podium, flanked by young boys in brown shirts, laughs. Greenbaum is subsequently arrested by New York City Police. The plight of Mr. Greenbaum is the film’s climax though it is not the cinematic origin of the documentary.

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN’s website is filled with archival material and director interviews in part because of Marshall’s collaboration with Field of Vision. Field of Vision is a filmmaker-driven documentary unit which resources works of universal importance. Historically, bigotry is a tool of fascist ideology worldwide, including in the USA. In a given setting, fascism exploits the differences between people rather than promote similarities. The exploitation is usually in the service of the benefit of some group perceiving an economic threat to themselves. Anti-Semitism, racism, and heightened nationalism lead to fascists hallmarks of scapegoating and murdering of visible minorities in a given region.

Devaluation of groups, including German Americans, over time in the USA likely, left a hole to be filled by (German) Nationalism and its path to fascism. But all of that is the low hanging fruit of purpose for A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN. I searched for the film’s website but did not see the answer to my key question. So, I asked Marshall Curry, “What was the moment when you knew you had to make this film?”

The director paused, then explained. A cameraman had caught one of the brown-shirted pre-adolescent Bund boys flanking the stage behind Khun. The child was hopping up and down with glee, air punching, trying to get closer to the frenzy of Khun’s guards and policemen ripping apart Mr. Greenbaum’s dignity. The kid was spoiling for a fight, giddy and enthralled with the power of attacking a single man with many. During the early review of the newsreels, that child triggered Curry’s moral intuition.

Curry’s perspective is reflective of his being both a father and educated in the field of Comparative Religion. He saw the misplaced zeal in the indoctrination of the children in the film. He was appalled by the absence of special provisions to avoid the abuse of young spirit captured by the camera lens. One wonders what level of loss of dignity does it take to foster fascism? No one’s self-worth should be conditional on destroying that of others—particularly not children’s. To make it so is tantamount to firing bullets through those young heads. We see it in child soldiers—domestic, foreign, current and historical—leaving ramifications running deep in our emergency rooms and clinics.

As a parent whose children’s ages mirror those in his film, Curry expressed the icky feeling that recognizes moral violations. Children are “vulnerable third parties,” and there is a special ethical obligation to their well being and protection. The young, old, sick and infirm are historically defenseless and abused. Dr. Abraham Maslow’s motivational theory of behavior is another related approach to maximizing the best potential of individuals. That night in 1939 at The Garden, there was no respect for health, peace or the special consideration due to children by Article 25 of the UDHR. In fact, the UDHR represents a leap in human consciousness not documented until 1946 with the inception of the United Nations.

Where did they go—those twenty-thousand fascists who were present that night at The Garden? They became invisible as the USA entered WWII on the side of the Allies—invisible but not absent. Daily the news reminds us fascism is uncloaking. Curry joked that as the youngest of many siblings, he came to support the underdog—which by birth position was usually himself. But he is more complex than that. In our century’s mayhem, Marshall Curry’s exquisite documentary short film, A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN, uniquely beckons us to resist crimes against conscience, humanity, and children.

Director Marshall Curry requests A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN, be shared ubiquitously by all means possible including online. See Curry’s other credits and upload A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN here. 

I AM MARIS: Portrait of a Young Yogi Managing Anorexia Nervosa by Her Own Hand

This article was originally published on April 21, 2019, by Bioethics.net  Where the World finds Bioethics

“You are only as sick as the secrets you keep.” It’s a saying used in a wide variety of mental health self-help communities. The phrase is also the apt tag line for Laura VanZee Taylor’s profoundly emotive feature length 2018 documentary film, I AM MARIS (IAM). Taylor along with producer Ariana Garfinkel and— most importantly— the film’s artist-writer-protagonist Maris Degener, document the perpetual state of recovery required to quell manifestations of mental illness. The story copes with the myriad incognito fluctuations of minds burdened with the disease anorexia nervosa. This is a heartwarming optimistic story looking through the tunnel back toward mental health from a position of calm possibility. 

In Maris’ case, allopathy could keep the adolescent anorexic alive but could not help her live a life truly worth living. The latter was the task of a broader approach. Before she started college—and after bouts of anorexic mortal danger—Maris was fortunate enough to find a Yoga practice and community. Compulsions for order were channeled to a healthy affinity allowing the young woman to reclaim her alienated self. She became proficient enough to teach, to become a Yogi, before she was seventeen. 

Yoga has been shown helpful in other liminal spaces of mind-body transition like palliative and end of life care.  Self-expression through art and movement is a tried and true approach to self-reflection, with or without, mental health concerns.  The full therapeutic scope of art and movement therapy has not been fully explored, clinically documented or rationalized across diseases. It’s as if Art Therapy is considered a “no brainer category,” leaving it, like many other complementary therapies, underfunded, antidotally studied and often inaccessible.

I AM MARIS stands out in large part because it is created in Maris’ voice. Director Taylor has the capacity to let “the talent” take the lead.  The protagonist's writings and drawings inform the process of documenting her illness and recovery. Art and writing often appear as self-expression but also as self-medication for those with mental illnesses. Maris’ artwork screamed alienation for years before her diagnosis was clarified. Her images and poetry reflect dire internal realities which caused others to look away from— or rationalize—the artist’s suffering. Good psychotherapy, occupational therapy, art, music, dance, and other movement therapists—given access and time—aid stability in many persons with mental trauma and other mind-body illnesses. 

The viewer hears Maris read from her journals and sees the drawings which had been created during periods of crisis gone by. This is a past tense sensation. In a stroke of filmic genius, director Taylor also chose to animate aspects of Maris' inner thoughts gleaned from her writing and her on-camera interviews. Maris’ words and surrealistic artistic style are adapted for the animation sequences created by illustrator-animator Brandon Eversole. This unique collaboration results in a kind of participatory effect for the viewer— not hearing a flashback—but feeling it in real-time—particularly as the young woman blooms beyond her illness. 

Maris’ mother’s on-screen interviews are an essential through-line in the film. Her mother knows things about her daughter that Maris herself does not know. These segments are profound for their honesty. The mother shares that subtle insidious signs of illness might have been apparent well before her daughter’s adolescence. The turmoil and fears of the girl’s parents are laid bare as well as the joy of this one kid to have found ‘a way’ . Like most thoughtful parents, Maris’ were loathed to slot their child into a “sick role.” The mother speaks of worries and feelings of guilt for not having ‘caught on’ faster. It draws tears from the audience who understand that the speaker on screen is among the strongest of the strong. She kept and still keeps the faith that her daughter will be safe while simultaneously terrified another shoe might drop.    

Maris’ parents are in good company with their struggle to understand anorexia nervosa. Though awareness of eating disorders became prominent in the USA circa the 1970s, through star power of musicians and actors, such conditions have been documented for centuries. During the latter part of the last century, we thought these sicknesses were narrowly distributed to affluent young White women. Eating disorders are no longer thought confined by race, ethnicity, gender or class. It turns out these diseases are equal opportunity stalkers. Peer recognition of eating disorders’ signs and symptoms is low in college students—the same populations often affected with those diseases. Similarly, medical students show disproportionately high stigmatization of mental illness and suicide--afflictions for which they themselves carry significant burdens.

Latina incidences of anorexia nervosa and identification with eating disorders are as high or higher than White women. Race is defined here as science does—as a social construct. Though important in Maris’ story, her USA census grouping is not the focus of the film. But, race and ethnicity are worth mentioning here. Maris grew up in an affluent to middle-working class, smaller community in California. There were few people of color in her school. Maris’s family, like many, is blended multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Maris is visibly Latina as is her mother. On direct questioning, director, Taylor, explained that during filming Maris did exchange some thoughts touching race and ethnicity—or being ‘the other,’ especially in school. To be clear, race and ethnicity is not the focus of  I AM MARIS. The exclusion of that dialog was one of many “good calls” which director Taylor made—opting to make mental illness and its management the peak of attention.  

It is the universal qualities of mental illnesses, their manifestations, and the need for expanding tools of care for which IAM makes a clarion call. The point of the film is not how people are different but how we are the same, or at least on the same spectrum. But, IAM also underscores that the Yoga therapy saving Maris’ life is an alternative not often accessible to all because of cost and limits on therapeutic ingenuity. Despite them being cheaper than almost any psychoactive drug, as well as economic terrains.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act acknowledges state licensed clinicians' right to prescribe complementary therapies, but it only begins to lay a foundation for normalizing use of those strategies. Insurers still are not obligated by law to pay for non-allopathic therapies other than acupuncture. Even now, amid recognition of epidemic pain disparity, opioid addiction, mental and physical pain crisis, Traditional and Complimentary therapeutic management of these illnesses are being ignored. Maris was fortunate to be in a community which could absorb the cost of her most valued treatment—Yoga. 

Maris Degener’s journey toward recovery is ultimately self-guided. There is magic in movement. During the buzz of the 2018 film awards season, magnificently heavy with works by and about women, a little film, I AM MARIS tiptoed onto the scene quietly. Itchallenges professional and societal sole allegiance to magic bullets and psychotherapy for managing mental illnesses, teaching that the compliments of the Arts and the wisdom of the ages may do better. 

I AM MARIS is available on Netflix  For more information see I AM MARIS .

ROMA: Bioethics and the Mobius Loop

Production still, compliments of Mill Valley Film Festival. Alfonso Cuaron with actress Yalitza Aparicio

It is difficult to describe the number of ways that writer-director Alfonso Cuaron’s semi-biographical ROMA represents an Ichthian leap in cinema. There are no special effects to speak of, no costumes except at a New Year’s Eve party cum fire. To compare the film with the level of change that Italian Neorealism presented in the middle of the last century seems strident, yet true. Equally valid is the sense that this film represents the 7th Art at its best in both the creative and technical expression of cinema. There is not a super hero among them — but a sense of magic at the level of Murakami’s Wind Up Bird  Chronicle or Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.  It is a universal film from the soul of a Spanish master.  

Written by a man, ROMA is defined by the relationships between three women and their children. There is little or no chatter—The movements, expressions and geography are left to tell the tale. The women are of three generations one an elderly woman sharing a home with her daughter and grandchildren. The daughter is approaching middle age, brilliant in her own right, and a mother of three. The daughter is also a wife, left distraught by a  middle class doctor-husband who has gone cad and ludicrous. Above all other characters rises their Indio maid/nannie, Cleo. Kept company by her roommate, Cleo transcends everything poverty and servitude. If the Virgin of Guadalupe had corporal form, Cuaron proves it would be that of the actress Yalitza Aparicio whilst playing Cleo, during the turmoil of change in the cross cultural class and gender politics of 1970s Mexico.

The writing of ROMA itself leaps across any venial representations or stereotypes. Swaddled in black and white footage, in a giant 65 mm frame, with layered visual symbolism, ROMA is a breath taking journey. In a season competing with the best Marvel films yet made, and a year of the too close to call superior performances by women actors—What might have been a long shot, ROMA is brought by Netflix, sans color but luminous, decked with subtitles, and surpasses all as it flies over the moon.

Added to the visuals ROMA’s sound is extraordinary. Having seen the film at the Dolby Lab Screening Room (San Francisco) with echo-locating sound technology—the viewer becomes an adroit listener as though sharing a room with the characters. Voices move from the right, left or seemingly ahead of of the viewer.  Fair warning, the subsequent screening of other movies may leave you pining for that sensation of being in the midst of the action. You will crave auditory immersion in other films, less technically adroit,  long after seeing ROMA. 

Twenty is the number of  films I've seen since screening ROMA this past October, 2018. Images continue to drift back to me and make me sigh—when I see a bird fly, a dog bark, or a child cry. There is a purgatory of beauty whipped with pain which is the home where certain souls live. Like birth and death — ROMA closes a circle of which the viewer is unaware of being open until the break is sealed. That new poetic mobius loop, twisted between life and death, catapults ROMA into the realm of bioethics.  

Cuaron, Alfonso ROMA  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6155172/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Miyazaki, Hayao HOWL’s MOVING CASTLE https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347149/

Murakami, Haruki https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/murakami-windup.html

Part II, A PRIVATE WAR: Bioethics meets the Guardians of Truth

Marie Colvin with Mike Wallace (CBS, 60 Minutes) receiving the International Women in Journalism Award Media foundations in 2000.

Time Magazine designated “The Guardians of Truth,”  as its 2018 person of the year. The Guardians of Truth are journalists who risk it all to assure that those who might force their governments to make change have the information with which to guide their quest. Marie Colvin, the protagonist of  A PRIVATE WAR was a woman who notoriously defined the meaning of her life and journalistic profession by her capacity, and that of her colleagues, to actualized Article 19 of the UDHR. (cf: A MIGHTY HEART). 

The United Nations is history’s best aim at the potential of human beings without the luxury of the naivety of a single generation’s overt success. Every document promoting human enlightenment, including the USA constitution, bears a statement supporting freedom of information. This is the result of the intuition that information is power and, without safeguards, it will always be coveted by the most powerful to the detriment of the least. In precaution, The UDHR specifically states, in article 19 (of its 30), that:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.  

It is a principle by which Colvin lived and for which she was prepared to die.  Even with that, Colvin verbalized personal and professional responsibility on occasions when she missed the boat. She famously admonished her profession for not seeing the writing on the wall in Rwanda. One million Rwandan Tutsis were killed in only 100 days from April to July in 1994. Virtually, no journalist understood and responded until too late.  Whether or not the world would do something about the massacre of innocents if made aware— Colvin knew that they certainly would not have the choice if they knew nothing of the offending incidents. This is because sans information, informed decisions cannot be made by individuals or societies. 

Shortly after in 1949, the Geneva Conventions were signed. Most of those atrocities were manifest using the technology which was created by scientist. In this way, the guardians of truth are not only journalist but those who understand science and its potential applications. The Syrian Journalists' Association (also members of the IFJ) has documented 153 journalists killed, in that country,  since the uprisings of 2011 which lead to the defection of  soldiers from the Syrian army in protest of the governments repressive regime. Among the journalist killed in Syria were American journalists Jim Sokol and James Foley in 2014, by beheading. In 2016, a United Nations official said 400,000 people had been killed in first five years of the Syrian civil war—the vast majority being noncombatants. At the time of this writing the president of the USA claims an unsubstantiated victory in Syria against ISIS and says he plans to pull US troops out of the country. 

As of March 2018, Lyn Maalouf, the Middle East research director for Amnesty International has stated that the "International community's catastrophic failure to take concrete action to protect the people of Syria has allowed parties to the conflict most notably the Syrian government to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, often with the assistance of outside powers."

Since 2012 when journalist Marie Colvin was intentionally targeted by the government of Syria, through transmissions from her satellite phone, the International Federation of journalist (IFJ) reports that more than 600 journalist have been killed around the world. Nine in 10 cases remain unpunished. Hundreds of journalist are imprisoned. 

Daily journalist are attacked, beaten, detained, harassed and threatened. Among women journalist surveyed in the 600,000 member IFJ, 24% have suffered physical attacks while working. Before those us in the USA shake their heads at the state of suppression of the press abroad, we must note that the US Present Freedom Tracker, since its launch in 2017, has documented 220 press freedom violations involving journalist and reporters have taken place in the USA.

Mathew Heineman’s film pushes a new audience of viewers to experience the world through journalist Marie Colvin’s eyes, emotions and suffering. She is not depicted as a superhero but a woman with flaws and scars who believed she could make a difference if she could get people to listen. A PRIVATE WAR adds to Colvin’s enduring legacy and reached out to those free to recognize and commit to protection of the most vulnerable victims of war. For Bioethicist and those who try to understand it, A PRIVATE WAR is a “must see.”  The film is not only about a woman, or journalist but about an idea that that protects innocent third parties.

Part I: A PRIVATE WAR: Bioethics meets THE GUARDIANS OF TRUTH

A PRIVATE WAR had its USA premiere the opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF42) October 4, 2018. The screening was prior to Time Magazine having designated “The Guardians of Truth,” as its 2018 person of the year— and before the targeted killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Turkish Saudi Arabian embassy. Acclaimed documentarian Director Mathew Heineman’s supposed biopic focuses on the  life, career and death of US born war correspondent for the London Sunday Times, Marie Colvin. Surprisingly, Heineman has chosen to re-tool his award winning considerable documentary skills to create this, his first narrative film. A PRIVATE WAR is many things, a Hollywood mirror biopic not being among them. Instead, this screen work is a  gift of reality wrapped in art.

Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, Syria, in 2012— during the second year of the Syrian civil war. This war still continues at this writing and is key to the undeclared World War raging in the Middle East with players from multiple nations beyond the region. Dying along with Marie was the acclaimed French freelance photojournalist Rémi Ochlik. For nearly thirty years  Colvin had covered the “Middle Eastern War beat.”  Her reports uniquely defined the inhumanity of war while she herself role-modeled a hard boiled compassion, accuracy and truth.  She focused on the rights of civilians trapped in the cross-fires of hell on earth. An autopsy conducted in Damascus by the Syrian government concluded Marie Colvin was killed by an “improvised explosive device filled with nails.”  These are the facts but there is more to the film. 

Heineman’s film begins with the image of  a decimated house, in the demolished city of Homs where  thousands and Colvin died. It is so haunting  that the viewer should be forewarned that it will wrench you from your sleep months after the screening. You will scramble to play catch up. The film asks the viewer to choose… “What side are you on?”  Weeks later you will try to understand the history of how the wars in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Iran Libya  Sri Lanka, East Timor and Syria became part of the same war — the war were the most vulnerable, the noncombatants, are used as cannon fodder over near a century. 

Photojournalist Paul Conroy was injured in the attack that took Marie and Remi. He survived to provide context to his colleagues’ final hours.  Crazy with purpose, Colvin had used  her satellite phone to speak—one last time—the truth of the devastation of the civilian population of  Syria. Six years later, in 2018 a Syrian Forces defectors testimony was unsealed by a USA court. The document presented evidence that the forces of Assad, the president of Syria, locked into the slain  Colvin’s phone transmission to target and kill her.  

It is a visually gritty, granular polluted air Colvin breaths. Visually, A PRIVATE WAR ends with that same decimated ruin in Homs where it begins. So why is a film whose story begins and ends in the same place worth telling in yet another way? It is, after all, a story that has been told in documentary film,  magazine articles and in books elsewhere.  Importantly, much of the script is adapted from an interview by Marie Brenner with Marie in Vanity Fair magazine.  That is-- the perspective of the film derives from the war journalist herself telling the world parts of her own story. Therein lay the value. 

Screenwriter Arash Amel’s work was challenging because it is not from the perspective of an onlooker. We know what Colvin said —because she said it. But how do you show the vulnerability and sometimes confusion she felt? If the purpose of the film was to leave her feeling, not chronological data, the work has succeeded. Context takes a back seat to the main characters reflection of her times at a given moment. 

“Biopic’ is a misnomer — A PRIVATE WAR is a memoir. You jump geography and timeframes. Strangers appear without announcement of names or titles — as they do in one’s own memory. If we can’t tell why the scene is there by Pike’s performance — shame on us. The burden of Heineman’s complex film is absolutely carried by the power of Academy Award® nominee Rosamund Pike’s portrayal of Marie Colvin.  Pike channels Kate Hepburn, in a role the silver screen actress never played. The  performance is no less astounding for the uncanny likeness to miles of available film and sound footage of the slain reporter. Heineman allows Pike to express the pain and suffering in Colvin’s aging battered body, in her womanhood rattled love,  and journalistic commitment to truth.  

But all is not dour. Pike’s Colvin masterfully conveys the physical comedy of facial expression as an irascibility when the character jokes. This heightens the contrast when actor also brings an exquisite  portrayal of a body and mind racked with tragedy. The accuracy of the performance even includes the slight imbalance of gait in the mono-optic, eye patch wearing Colvin—whose distant traumatic brain injury had resulted in a lost dominant eye. By allowing Pike to dive deeply into the body of the woman she portrays, Heineman delivers the character’s inner voice.  You can’t write or tell this stuff in words. 

A PRIVATE WAR is not a film for the faint, or even exhausted of heart. The actor’s task was to flip the character’s insides to the outside. Even laughing, Pike’s  Colvin is always only a tear drop away from being left naked and exposed to the devastations of war, post traumatic stress, and survivor guilt. The audience receives the same, as if from a ricocheting bullet.

For more, see Part II of A PRIVATE WAR: Bioethics meets Guardians of Truth at http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com

Part I: THE WIFE and BIOETHICS, BREAKING OATHS, AND STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

This week I saw two films that were about the theft of creative property. One of the films was THE WIFE and the other THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Peculiarly, in each case the stealing is linked to a profound purgatorial love for another character. This is not the way one typically thinks of plagiarism. 

THE WIFE, stars Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, playing a long-married couple, Joan and Joe Castleman. They are thrown into a circumstance that brings on a full throttle life review, the type that people need as they move into their later years — a great adventure backward. The intimacy of those years does not wain but has an intensity that leaves the viewer waiting for the other shoe to drop.

There is a first grandchild on the way. Their twenty-something son seeks his own creative path from beneath the shadow of his famous literary giant of a father and— we think— shrinking personality of his mother. This is a story of two writers whose lives, children and work are so enmeshed that it has allowed them to sublimate the truth that they are neither one intellect nor a single spirit. 

At first, the soft beauty of a New England landscape in early winter lures us into the family romance of the film couples’ enduring love affair. Then, the stark early winter of Stockholm, with its block architecture and grid format streets, is quickly unsettling. The dialog written by Jane Anderson and based on the novel, THE WIFE, by Meg Wolitzer, is delivered like bread crumbs trailing to the climax, not of a melodrama, but a riveting suspense.

Close’s portrayal of Joan, THE WIFE, is magnificent in its simplicity. The actress creates a woman who keeps her cards so near her chest that she seems to have forgotten they are there. But the audience hunches forward in anticipation. Joan’s stoicism is contrasted with the eccentricities of her husband’s faded sexiness, as he pushes 80, while still trying to philander. Clearly, director Bjorn Runge’s bent toward mystery— and veteran stars capable of taking direction so well they reach beyond the stratosphere— brings this “little movie” into the arena of the grand—maybe even the grandest. 

And for bioethicists? It’s an exploration of the role of life review in relationships and health. The simplicity of copyright handling intellectual property dissolves into a bioethical concern momentous as the complexities of creative threads which spawn a finished artwork. The film is a teasing apart of strands. It is dizzying enough to drive one to split the baby in half to redistribute its parts. 

Just when you can barely tolerate the high pitched squill of this marriage between Joan and Joe a moment longer, the darn string ruptures. We are left wondering how and why people get themselves tangled in such clearly toxic webs.  Oddly, I found the answer to that question while considering the film, THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.  That is part ii of this exchange — on bioethics, breaking oaths and Stockholm Syndrome.  

THE WIFE https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3750872/

THE WIFE official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81im0loh7o

Celia Jameson (2010) The “Short Step” from Love to Hypnosis: A Reconsideration of The Stockholm Syndrome, Journal for Cultural Research, 14:4, 337-355, doi: 10.1080/14797581003765309

BIOETHICS and NO MAS BEBES

Lack of appropriate informed consent is historically the most common bioethical violation in medical, research and other settings. The history of bioethics is replete with such examples.  Among those examples is the forced sterilization of Hispanic, Black and other vulnerable women. 

Given the recent events where the United States Immigration and Custom Enforcement service separated Hispanic parents from their children at the USA-Mexico border, the film, No Mas Bebes is particularly poignant. This theft of children showed complete disregard for the Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It seems appropriate to recall the depths of disregard for Hispanic women and children that has been shown at other times in recent USA history. Listening to the rationalizations of men empowered by medicine for the heinous acts describe in No Mas Bebes is chilling -- but so very familiar with events in our current times

In the 1970s, at Los Angeles-County Hospital, the University of Southern California Obstetrics and Gynecology services systematically sterilized Latina and Black women. Film director Renee Tajima-Peña and producer Virginia Espino have created the definitive documentation of major medical sterilization of those women under the guise of therapeutic privilege. The 2015 award winning film No Más Bebés  tells the story of a little-known but landmark event in reproductive justice. 

A small group of Mexican American immigrant women, on behalf of a much larger class, sued the state of California, and the US federal government after they were sterilized while giving birth at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center. The violations occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s where such events had become common. The filmmakers’ statement explains, “Marginalized and fearful, many of these mothers spoke no English, and charged that they had been coerced into tubal ligation.,” during the late stages of labor.

The No Más Bebés production spent five years tracking down sterilized mothers and witnesses of the bioethical violations at Los Angeles County Hospital. Those violations occurred under the direction of the University of Southern California division of Obstetrics and Gyneocology. 

Most of the women abused were reluctant at first to come forward, but ultimately agreed to tell their painful stories. Set against a debate over the impact of Latino immigration and perceived overpopulation by university physicians, and the birth of a movement for Chicana rights and reproductive choice, No Más Bebés revisits a powerful story racism and sexism that still resonates today.

The forced sterilization of Hispanic Women at USC-LA County Hospital coincided with the book the 'Population Bomb'.  The footage of several physicians involved in the 1970s lawsuit was chilling and referenced that book. In the film, shot 40 years later, some clinicians interviewed  maintained that they were "helping the Hispanic women by sterilizing them." Most of the women plaintiffs in the law suit were unaware that they had undergone tubal ligations unlit the legal challenge was mounted. These Latina mothers had only known that they were no longer able to have additional babies. Many became depressed and felt inadequate. 

The wronged Latina mothers’ cause was taken up by a then recently admitted to the California Bar, attorney Antonia Hernandez. She was armed with hospital records secretly gathered by the whistle-blowing Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld’s moral intuition was peaked by eyebrow raising events witnessed while on Obsterics & Gynecology rotation at Los Angeles County Hospital. In their landmark 1975 civil rights lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan,  the women argued that a woman’s right to bear a child, as well as not to, is guaranteed under the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade.

The Madrigal v. Quilligan case was lost by the women who had been sterilized. However, when the United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study case—Pollard v. the United States—was settled in favor of the plaintiffs, the state of California immediately passed legislation upholding the doctrine of informed consent.

No Maas Bebe's http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/ 

Stern, Alexandra, M. Sterilized in the Name of Public Health. Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California. Am J Public Health. 2005 July; 95(7): 1128–1138. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449330/

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ 

The declaration of the Rights of a Childhttps://www.unicef.org/malaysia/1959-Declaration-of-the-Rights-of-the-Child.

Parts of this article are found in the book by Williams, S. and Mothers' Milk Bank San Jose, The Elephant in the Room: Bioethical Concerns in Human Milk Banking available 09/2018.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: Bioethics, Surrealism, Personhood & Environmental Justice

THE SHAPE OF WATER set up is highly character driven. A mute Hispanic woman janitor, her Black woman colleague suffering a bad marriage, a gay unemployed artist, and a Sadist walk into a Cold War bunker. It could have been the beginning of a bad joke. Instead, it is the start of an amazing work of postmodern surrealist film.

If we consider surrealism, as Andre Breton suggests, to be an attempt to reconcile the simultaneous existence of the awake and sleep states—THE SHAPE OF WATER is a poster child for that movement. The phenomenon applies to characters as well as the movie’s viewers. Visually, THE SHAPE OF WATER contrasts a hypnogogic state with harsh reality. Scenes are often in a gritty nightmarish Cold War industrial military bunker. In the bunker dangerous ‘isms’ compete for ranking—fascism, racism, sexism, and classism are all at play. A visually serene fantasy world exist beyond the bunker’s locked doors. It is a place where old Hollywood musical choreographies hold key product placement territory. Anything can happen and does. Those entitled to hatred by persecution for any number of reasons, choose love instead.

The relationships between the living beings in that outer realm defy all the conventions of the time, history, environment and evolution. There is one exception, the convention of ‘Villain’ has no wiggle room for alteration. He is just an unadulterated evil.

The theatrical ensemble is remarkable—Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Dough Jones are among them. There is not much else to say other than be prepared to watch the awards roll in.

THE SHAPE OF WATER feels like a sequel to Del Toro’s earlier film, PAN’S LABYRINTH. But, there are differences. While the current work is a cross genre piece which traverses cultures, the earlier movie is culture locked. PAN, and the girl for whom he provided escape, lived in the confines of the rise of Francoists. The politic is physicalized by an archaic estate operated by the girl’s fascist stepfather. THE SHAPE OF WATER set realizes many different types of signifying characters from multiple cultural and economic backgrounds. The time period is the USA Cold War. In both THE SHAPE OF WATER, and PAN’S LABYRINTH, the “monsters” are supposedly human, but it is they who actually give monsters a bad name.

Why is the SHAPE OF WATER not just another “Beauty and the Beast” but worthy of bioethical consideration? This is not a medical movie though it is a scathing rebuke of the forces that thwart good science. At stake in the SHAPE OF WATER is the personhood of all the characters in our previously depicted Cold War bar joke. Dignity, a state of the healthy intelligent mind, is carried about by the body. Abuse the body, abuse the dignity. Malign the body, malign the dignity. Remove the dignity, remove the personhood. By this reasoning, restoration of dignity in large part means protection of the body from torture and other forms of abuse. That protection is requisite, though not always sufficient for the reclamation of personhood. One never knows what is most effective until one tries. It is the organized beneficence of trying to ‘do good,’ tempered by autonomy, in order to render equipoise and justice, which ought to be delivered by bioethical consideration.

This film helps explore the aforementioned cascade. In Del Toro’s hands, the ominous danger and political distrust manifest in science fiction shifts toward fantasy. The mystery, myth and truth escape of those most vulnerable to the abuse of dignity, because of their bodies, is fully manifest in The SHAPE OF WATER. The process of the film dissolves disability into strength. In the tradition of super heroes, Del Toro’s SHAPE OF WATER sheds the horn-rimmed glasses and neck ties of its characters so they leap, fly or swim into their own made magic. THE SHAPE OF WATER is technically exquisite. This film is one to watch on as large a screen as you can afford.

The Shape of Water annotation http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/
Pan’s Labyrinth annotation http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457430/

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN

My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond (clip) from Luna Productions
TV Screenings and Viewing options for  MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN: 
SOME TV SCREENINGS:
My Love Affair with the Brain will screen in the San Francisco Bay Area On TV,  
March 22, Wed., 8 pm on KQED9 Plus the following7 other times (note that KQED9 is a different channel than KQED WORLD, etc.)·  
KQED World: Fri, Mar 10, 2017 -- 6:00am ·  
KQED World: Fri, Mar 10, 2017 -- 12:00pm ·  
KQED 9: Thu, Mar 23, 2017 -- 2:00am ·  
KQED Plus: Fri, Mar 24, 2017 -- 3:00pm ·  
KQED World: Sun, Mar 26, 2017 -- 2:00pm ·  
KQED Life: Tue, Mar 28, 2017 -- 9:00pm·  
KQED Life: Wed, Mar 29, 2017 -- 3:00am

PURCHASE: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN  is  available for ACADEMIC PURCHASE (Libraries, Colleges, Schools.) http://lunaproductions.com/buy-love-affair-brain-marian-diamond/individuals: http://lunaproductions.com/personal-use-dvd-my-love-affair-with-the-brain/

Part I: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN Bioethics, Neuroplasticity and Whimsy

Marian Diamond portraits, 1984, photos by Ed Kash

Dr. Marian Diamond, photo courtesy of Luna Productions

Dr. Marian Diamond, photo courtesy of Luna Productions

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN is an award winning documentary about the life and work of Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, PhD, neuroanatomist, researcher and educator. Filmmakers Catherine Ryan and Gary Weinberg (Luna Productions) make an argument which by all reasonable standards would support Diamond’s candidacy for a Nobel Prize, not only in science but also for peace. 

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN shows Marian Diamond is a filmmakers dream. She is fluid and animated as anyone who routinely spends hours of her day on a stage before a judging audience of hundreds of students ought to be—but often are not. The camera loves her. With aesthetic wisdom the film not only focuses on Marian but on others sharing the territory she inhabits. It is a broad domain of geography, mind and family tradition. She is a catalyst for laughter fueled intelligence.

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN has established an iconic visual representation of Dr. Diamond’s vantage. It is the long view and the long shot. In Diamond’s mind the brain is always at the forefront, the seat of human intelligence and humanity. It is this view that Luna Production’s camera reflects in the film. We see Diamond watch the brain, from a distance but in sharp focus. Then we see the audience, and the world, watch her. The  filmmakers take the opportunity to not only show us her but the joyous reactions of others ignited in the wake of her whimsy. 

The lightness of Marian Diamond’s ‘being,’ is even reflected in Ryan and Weinberg’s choice of narrator for MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN,  Mayim Bialik. Bialik holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA but also plays a neuroscientist on TV’s BIG BANG THEORY. 

Marian Diamond is a scientist who is also a woman. She came up through a period when women did not teach in academia. Well qualified and well suited to lecturing she may have never have found that passion were it not for the persecution of her employer and mentor while working at Cornell University. That professor was fired during the rise of the witch-hunt of McCarthyism in the 1950s. However, the professor’s parting shot was to recommend the only person he knew could, and should, take his lectern— a woman, Marian Diamond,PhD. And so, at that University, Diamond became the first woman science lecturer in its history. 

Marian Diamond did not mean to dismantle archaic science with new truths, she’s just made that way—a fact to which she is not oblivious. Her youth and adult life has been filled with brilliant scientist husbands, mother, father and free thinking siblings first then her own children. She did not only study dead brains as specimens, but watched the living ones around her. They were all collaborators and conspirators in her quest to understand.

Dr. Marian Diamond’s major scientific contributions are generally divided into three: discovery of the impact of the environment on brain development; differences between the cerebral cortex of male and female rats independent of sex hormones; and the likely link between positive thinking—or happiness—in maintaining individuals immunological health reflected in brain tissue and function. Rigorous scientific inquiry often divides domains of investigation of a single entity. But Dr. Marian Diamond’s hallmark is: that which others might think static she suspects is mobile, multifaceted, unified though plastic—and when needs be— able to be remodeled.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5691476/companycredits?ref_=tt_dt_co

See an extensive Bibliography of  M.C. Diamond’s work at 

 http://lunaproductions.com/my-love-affair-with-the-brain-a-documentary-for-broadcast/all-episodes-marian-diamond/

Marian Diamond’s brief autobiography https://www.sfn.org/~/media/SfN/Documents/TheHistoryofNeuroscience/Volume%206/c3.ashx

http://worldbreastfeedingtrends.org/84-country/

http://www.mothersmilk.org

Concussion, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2016/05/concussion-bioethic-foot-ball-and-post.html

States of Grace, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2015/01/states-of-grace-disability-and-chronic.html

Going the Distance, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2014/12/going-distance-meets-surfing-for-life_15.html

PART II: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN Bioethics and Meaning Derived from Science

Catherine Ryan and Gary Weinberg’s documentary film MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN shows Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, PhD is not only a theoretical scientist but also an applied one. The Nuremberg Code—the rules for research conduct arising from the Nuremberg trials—has ten points. The second of those ten is that: Experiments should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature. Dr. Diamond’s scientific integrity at the work bench has yielded a change in how we view human capacity. 

Luna Productions film shows a field clinic on brain growth, Diamond’s project, Enrichment in Action. It uses findings of the doctor’s brain enrichment research to directly benefit impoverished, orphaned children. In Cambodia a group of children are provided with an environment fortified with supplementary vitamins, language skills, computer lessons, and promotion of the children’s wider social acceptance. She has been facilitating, watching and documenting those children’s growth over years. 

There are multiple other clinical applications to the insights of brain malleability derived from Marian Diamond’s work. In the not too distant past, medical students were routinely taught that only a tenth of the cerebral cortex (the heaviest part of the brain) was actively used. The implication was that if brain cells were lost that portion of the brain’s function was permanently diminished. The observation that nurture, as well as abuse, can alter brain function through structural change—is among neuroanatomist Marian Diamond’s major contributions to scientific history. That truth defines a choice to be made, by humanity, about how we can proceed, as individuals and a group. We either promote brain health or we do not. 

The idea of the mind-body complex evolved in western culture more slowly than in others. After time in China, Kenya and Australia, Dr. Diamond’s paradigm expanded even the Mind-Body complex to include the significance of the brain as a switching station—validating a Mind-Brain-Body complex as it were. Science at its best over turns old beliefs with new information. There are many applied applications to Diamond’s science. Clinicians now see their tasks as recruiting brain cells and promoting their growth and function within the window of best opportunity to promote neuro-plasticity, or brain flexibility. This is as important in maximizing function after any neurological insult like stroke or traumatic brain injury, dementia or aging—as it is in early childhood development. 

Those recently experiencing the birth of a baby in a hospital may notice that policy has shifted so that mothers and babies are no longer easily separated in the first moments after delivery. We now know that immediate breast feeding is essential for best growth and development of infants brains, and also prevention of chronic disease later in life for children and their mothers. These phenomena are in part nutritional but also the effect of early bonding—nurture. 

There is a story told by a friend who was sitting for days to become a Buddhist Priest. It was arduous. On her brief breaks she would light a stick of incense at the window. Doubting that she may have chosen the wrong direction for her existence she asked the universe for a sign. Just then a magnificent shooting star crossed her eye-line. Then she wondered, ‘But what does it mean?’ This is the quandary of both life and science.  

Marian Diamond has written, “The greatest thrill in my life up to that moment was when I held my first newborn child in my arms against my breast. I knew why I existed.” That child was born in immediate proximity  to Dr. Diamond’s completion of her PhD, in 1953. Though her life’s work was set at that time it would take decades to realize its meaning. 

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN spreads the word not only about what Dr. Diamond’s research has been but what it means. Diamond has summarized her take home lessons from her 60 years in brain research. She believes all the signs lead to the idea that brain health is dependent on five things, diet, exercise, challenge, newness, and love.

References:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5691476/companycredits?ref_=tt_dt_co

See an extensive Bibliography of  M.C. Diamond’s work.  http://lunaproductions.com/my-love-affair-with-the-brain-a-documentary-for-broadcast/all-episodes-marian-diamond/ 

Marian Diamond’s brief autobiography https://www.sfn.org/~/media/SfN/Documents/TheHistoryofNeuroscience/Volume%206/c3.ashx

http://worldbreastfeedingtrends.org/84-country/

http://www.mothersmilk.org

Concussion, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2016/05/concussion-bioethic-foot-ball-and-post.html

States of Grace, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2015/01/states-of-grace-disability-and-chronic.html

Going the Distance, http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2014/12/going-distance-meets-surfing-for-life_15.html

Part I: LOVING and Bioethics The Right to Marry

LOVING - Official Trailer from Mill Valley Film Festival

Courtesy: Focus Films

LOVING was the closing night film of the 39th Mill Valley Film Festival. Jeff Nichols is its writer/director. At 38 years old, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Nichols is a master at breaking stereotypes about cultures, especially those below the Mason Dixon Line.  

LOVING is based on the lives of Mildred  and Richard Loving. The portrayals by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in the title roles is an exquisitely intimate, internal portrait. The main characters met young, fell in love in a poor rural neighbor of Virginia where races interacted socially. The love aspect of the story is prominent but the underclass nature of interracial life in the region is equally as strong. In 1958, the couple were forbidden to marry because their state was among many with anti-miscegenation laws.  

Nichols’ LOVING is as much about class— working poor—as it is about race. As long as Mildred and Richard kept within the constraints of the geo-social ‘Bottoms’ the state powers would not care. They weren’t so much jailed because Mildred was Black while Richard White but because they dared want their love and children legitimated. Anti-miscegenation laws stemmed, above all else not from morality but economics—controlling who could own property, historically determined by parentage. The law they violated was a vestige of slavery in their state.

LOVING, the feature length fictional film, evolved from director Nichols’ admiration for a documentary made years before. Nichols LOVING defies the Hollywood Film industries tendency to make heroism only a characteristic of overtly  “charismatic people.” LOVING is a work that celebrates that every day, ordinary people do the impossible. 

The Lovings were interested in living their lives. Referred by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s office to the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) at Mrs. Loving’s initiation, the couple left the lawyers to the legal job. While the Loving’s tended their own work, raising a family.

The ACLU fought and won Loving V Virginia in the supreme court in 1967 — near ten years after the birth of the couple’s first child. The case was won based  on Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law  being in violation of the  Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which, provides equal protection under the law — including the right to marry. 

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of the Restoration amendments after the US Civil war. The Restoration Amendments among other things legally dismantled the economic system of slavery. The Loving case was fought  nearly 100 years after the slavery emancipation proclamation.

Loving v Virginia was proceeded and followed by many other legal presidencies adjudicated by the supreme court and supported by The Fourteenth Amendment including, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) regarding racial school segregation, Roe v. Wade (1973) about abortion, Bush v. Gore (2000) regarding the 2000 presidential election, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) regarding same-sex marriage.The foot prints of the Fourteen Amendment are also solidly ensconced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its 16th Article —The right to marriage and Family.

Why is this film important to Bioethics?  The Lovings predicament is a cautionary tell about historical abuse of scientific process in supporting anti-miscegenation practices. LOVING also identifies a victory for the strength of persistent struggle — particularly one having an influence on the understanding not only of humanity but the moral obligations of scientist to do good work, and to monitor its moral implications. 

LOVING is a gentle film—not designed to be a blockbuster but one which will stand the test of time.  

Loving (2016) Dir. Jeff Nichols http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4669986/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm  T

Loving (2016) Trailer:  https://youtu.be/9QYEwlzpa9A

Loving V. Virgina  Interacial and Mixed  documentary HBO Trailer  https://youtu.be/h62ZBiHNJoM trailer

The Constitution of the United States http://constitutionus.com

Loving V. Virginal Ruling https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/declaration-human-rights/ 

Part II: LOVING, Bioethics and How Miscegenation became a ‘thing’

Photo Courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival

Long Before Jeff Nichols, writer/director, chose to make the film LOVING (2016),  about a heroic couple of modest means striking a blow for the maintenance of humanity—by ending anti-miscegenation laws in the USA—The field of Eugenics had to be born and the term  ‘miscegenation’ coined. Miscegenation laws were present in many states  of the USA into the 1960s, in defiance of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution and  the Declaration of Human Rights. 

Modern “bioethics” emerged from the documentation of the atrocities associated with both WWI and WWII, and the manipulation of science and technology to serve ‘evil’ rather than beneficence, autonomy and justice. The film Loving speaks to the need to carefully consider the obligations of science. There is no evil science, just bad science and immoral applications. In particular, scientist, and physicians (who are all ultimately researchers) should at least read the Nuremberg Code. The document is a page long with only ten points. 

How did Anti- miscegenation laws come about? Let’s be clear, they were an economic mechanism to oppress slaves and other underclass people and prevent their owning property. This begs the question of how miscegenation became ‘a thing.’

Philosophy and the applied sciences used to be one school—and still were in the 1800s. Philosophy, was not separated from maths, astronomy, medicine and engineering. The footsteps of philosophy still drive scientific method —theory, hypothesis, proof and argument. Francis Galton was born into that time of interface and development of knowledge. Oddly Galton,  a  latter day Renaissance thinker in the  model of Da’Vinci, is attributed with coining the words miscegenation and eugenics. And yes, Galton started out in Medicine, circa 1838. 

In agriculture miscegenation was defined as the “interbreeding of two different species.” Galton’s Cousin Charles Darwin had published the Origin of the Species in the 1850s. Gregor Mendel an Austrian monk had observed variation in pea plants during the same period. Most biology students learned that Mendel is considered the father of genetics. From those works came Galton’s leap implying that human beings’ external appearance could make them different species. 

Galton was a Sociologist, Psychologist, Scientist, Geographer, and Statistician. He looked for proof of the patterns of his cousin and the monk in other aspects of the world — looking for a primary pattern in nature which was repeated. That is what good science does. When you think of Galton, think—regression from the mean — that was among his many contributions or to some of us—tortures. The mathematical models of Mendel for peas and other plants were being extrapolated and converted into statistics applied to human beings.

What came first, racism or the science?  The essence of scientific integrity is not only honesty in hypothesizing, recording and reporting but coming to unbiased conclusions. Galton began considering ‘lessor social' attributes to be apparent in people who looked one way and not another. The espousing that conclusion, for a statistician, had to be an unfounded extrapolation. But he likely knew that even then. 

In 1863, the science of separation, and its conclusions espoused by Galton, was rejected by some as a political tool deciding who should receive the benefits of a society. The difference between animals and people was thought to be decided by humanist to be  “the soul.”  Perhaps the soul is a more nebulous concept than that ‘a scientific certainty’—but also one less likely to bastardize the scientific process. Nonetheless, it was the soul which  ended slavery in the USA and many other parts of the world.  

The post civil war Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution, codified the belief that all “men” were created equal. That was adjusted in the 1900's to include women. The devil remains in the detail. However, it was the 14th amendment, which  applied to the winning of Loving v. the State of Virginia, and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was generations after Galton, Mendel and Darwin.

What is the lesson? Bioethical conflicts often coincide with historically poor scientific understanding, or abuses. However, they coexist with equal and opposite reactions — leaps of moral and scientific process.  Thinking  about how the film LOVING,  based on the lives of Mildred and Richard Loving,end of Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. Remember, LOVING is a film  not only about law, but about the debunking of archaic, if ever valid, science.

Loving (2016), Dir. Jeff Nichols http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4669986/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

Legal Judgement Loving v. Virginal Ruling https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1

The Nuremberg Code, https://history.nih.gov/research/downloads/nuremberg.pdf 

Galton Memories of My Life, https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Galton+Memories+of+My+Life+(London:+Methuen,+1908),+pp.+22+-+47.&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, STANDING @ THE SCRATCH LINE: Bioethics meets real Cross Cultural Competency

Director July Dash (Daughters of the Dust and Scratch Line) at the MVFF 39 October 14, 2016

As a member of  the National Writers Union and affiliate of  the International Federation of Journalists, it is my profound honor to represent the California Film Institute in presenting  director Julie Dash the Mill Valley Film Festival Award. This award honors the excellence of  her lifetime body of work.” —None of  these words could I have imagined coming from my mouth. But, on October 12, 2016, that is what I said at the 39th Mill Valley film festival. MVFF is one of the longest running Film Festival’s in North America with an audience this year of more than 65,000. 

Recently digitally remastered by the Coleman Library, director Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST aesthetic remains incomparable with a message persistently timely. An African American family prepares to leave their Gullah Island home. They and their descendants have lived on that land since long before the Emancipation Proclamation. Tensions between the power of the familiar and perils of a new existence are made abundantly clear by a matriarch. She is a first degree relative to those brought as slaves from Africa. 

The re-released version of DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, screened at the MVFF39, was preceded by the premiere of Dash’s provocative new short film, STANDING @ THE SCRATCH LINE. This new work is a part of the Great Migration Project. It lyrically traces the arrival of the first Africans on the Gullah Island shore their generations of migration from the Gullah Geechee Lowcountry to Philadelphia, PA. The film links the survival of a people to the strengths of the sacred architecture of African American Churches.

Filmmaker Julie Dash’s screen voice is an offspring of the “LA Rebellion”. The LA Rebellion creative movement emerged from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television  during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Rebellion was, and is, the bard of  complex justice issues, while also an anti-venom for racism and classism.

Twenty years after the LA Rebellion, in 1991,  internationally recognized, Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, was the first feature-length film by an African American woman with United States theatrical release. The film coincided with a period when we, in clinical medical ethics, were defining the importance of cross-cultural communication in medicine — particularly at the edges of life — birth and death. 

The battle was to get an understanding of race class and culture into the medical curriculum. 

In a real way Ms. Dash’s work help to combat health disparity across race, class and culture. Her's is an anthropological short hand bundling the reality of what had before been like talking only about the reflection of stars — Now, one can actually show the celestial body of cultural complexity to colleagues and say, “ This is part of what you are working with when you diagnose a person with a life threatening illness, with its fears, attendant loss of family and culture.” Director Julie Dash manages to demonstrate that a culture can be simultaneously different from others, while expressing universal concerns.

Other works by Ms. Dash are THE ROSA PARKS STORY,  INCOGNITO, FUNNY VALENTINES, LOVE SONG and SUBWAY STORIES. Coming soon is her film  TRAVEL NOTES OF A GEECHEE GIRL, about writer- actor-griot-culinary anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.

References:

Daughters of the Dust http://www.cohenfilmcollection.net/films/daughters-of-the-dust

Standing@the Scratch Line https://vimeo.com/180110116

Julie Dash official website: http://juliedash.tv

http://www.colemanlibrary.com

LA LA LAND and BIOETHICS: Aspiration, Casuistry and Musical Mimetics

La La Land Opening Night Mill Valley Film Festival 2016, Mark Fiskin (CFI/MVFF), Damien Chazelle (director), Justin Hurwitz (composer), Emma Stone (actor) 

The opening and closing films of the 39th Mill Valley Film Festival were both romances, different from one another as night and day. The starting film was about elusive love. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, LA LA LAND is a romantic musical whose comedic elements facilitate the dramatic. It feels like a cross between Preston Sturges' Sullivan’s Travels and Singing in the Rain. LA LA LAND’s enduring impression is a sensibility for people defined by creative aspirations.

The title, LA LA LAND, is a double entendre. The more concrete allusion calls up the musical note ‘La,’ as in the Rogers and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music, “La is just to follow so.” What marks the feature as a high concept film is the other meaning— the rarely attainable, though ubiquitous, high hopes for creative success in the unreal Los Angeles — while moving into the developmental stage of adult intimacy.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone act (and dance) in subtle ways. Their performances are beyond being the coat hangers for music, choreography, and the exquisite mostly on location scenery. Complexity of the main characters is clarified by the arrival of the co-star, John Legend, at the mid-point of the film. He draws the arrow telling Gosling’s character, a musician, that there is only one path to follow. That way pushes him away from his lover, Stone, a writer.

The opening scene of La La Land is set squarely in one of the plagues of Los Angeles life. The setting, time, and characters shout that you are entering a cross cultural zone, where fantasy is allowed. Replete with classic musical film homages, Justin Hurwitz’s score shares the passion of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, rather than the showmanship of an Arthur Freed musical. We quickly learn the rival gangs are the tensions between the creative aspirations in the heads of each star, fighting for attention and love.

Hurwitz’s uses the advantage of Jazz, Blues and Rock & Roll, having been racially integrated after the glory days of the classic 1940s and 50s musicals, to broaden the range of emotions. The love theme of La La Land represents the magical inner voice of the protagonist’s relationship. When you hear this film’s music forty years from now, be forewarned, if it made you cry this year, it will then. How does a Romantic Musical help Bioethics?

LA LA LAND shows tension between the ‘competing goods’ of the noble aspirations of intimacy and creativity. The film is a captivating metaphor, showing a version of goal attainment reached through an unexpected narrative path. Other creative intents are not unlike those of a surgeon in training, or a doctoral student dreaming to cure global warming, in conflict with raising their families. The shared challenge is not aiming for competence but greatness.

Casuistry can exist beyond ‘the word.’ When visuals are added to written narratives additional neuropsychological features join ‘the case’ presented. Even a single photograph is a visual narrative. Music, as in LA LA Land, is interpreted even more subjectively than visual cues. “Research into the bodily basis of musical meaning has focused on conceptual metaphor and image theory but the processes whereby embodied experience becomes relevant to music conceptualization remains largely unexplained.” 

We do not know exactly why the blues is cathartic, for some and not others though we know it is so. Related are examples where sound, say of a bottle of soap falling, has been known to result in smelling soap for some people sans attendant visual stimulus. It is clear that the sound of music has a narrative language specific to its own form. 

The core of the “musical mimetic hypothesis” suggests we understand sounds in comparison to sounds we have made ourselves, and this process of comparison involves tacit imitation, or mimetic participation, which in turn draws on the prior embodied experience of sound production.  That is second hearing draws a reaction to the first hearing of the primary sound and stimulates a similar feeling and physical response. Each note delves into the influence that note has had in one’s life. If this is true, clearly the Casuistic case for LA LA LAND is maximized by the music itself.

LA LA LAND is a choreography of the mind, expressed by over a hundred dancers, actors and musicians along with nearly as many crew. It takes a lot of nerve and talent to wield  such a team. Luckily for the audience composer Hurwitz choreographer Mandy Moore (Silver Lining's Playbook), cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle), and writer-director Damien Chazelle are chutzpah endowed. LA LA LAND is a film to watch and hear. It opens in theaters December 16, 2016.

Casuistry uses cases or narratives to illustrate ethical conflicts and their resolutions. Despite the potential abuse of Casuistry, Medicine and Law are both fields where cases are applied to ethical decision making. Religious books, literature, drama and film can also be used in Casuistic analysis of moral dilemmas. At its core, Casuistry requires solving a second unrelated case by using the logic of the original narrative — so stories need not be medical or science based to argue Bioethics. 

La La Land http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3783958 

Suliivan’s Travels http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034240/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt

West Side Story http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Singing in the Rain http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045152/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.septemberwilliams.com/what-is-bioethics/

Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, Berkeley, U California Press (1990)

Underriner IV, Charles Francis THE SOUND-POETRY OF THE INSTABILITY OF REALITY: MIMESIS AND THE REALITY EFFECT IN MUSIC, LITERATURE, AND VISUAL ARTdigital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/.../UNDERRINER-DISSERTATION-2016.p Accessed  October 31, 2016

Cox, Arnie, The mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning, Musicae Scientiae Fall 2001 5: 195-212,http://msx.sagepub.com/content/5/2/195.abstract  Accessed November 3, 2016