My new theory from watching television and movies is that everyone who is going to die will die tragically. This, in fact just means cancer. I have had to give up on television and movies for this reason. I start watching something and I really get into it.
Then, it usually goes two ways. The first way starts in with the male character that is strong, charming, handsome, and rebellious. The female character is soft, and quiet, but a rare unnoticed beauty. She is a good girl, and he has a dark past. She changes him, they fall in love. Then, right as we are so happy for them, Bam!! She has a dark secret to confess, she is dying. And we wonder of what???? Because, it would suck to die of something normal, or something no one has ever heard of. Is she psychic and knows she will be murdered tomorrow night? Is it old age?? Is she really a 76 year old trapped in the body of a 19 year old?? Is it Systemic Mastocytosis? Nobody knows what the hell this is so it can’t possibly be that! Is it Maple syrup Urine disease? No! Of course not! That sounds like a disease that is kind of gross, weird, and possibly ugly. We can’t give our beautiful lead an ugly disease.
We give her cancer. Why do we give her cancer? Everyone knows what cancer is. A lot of people have a personal connection to cancer, which means we can drag sympathy out of our viewers. She can look pretty while dying of cancer. We put her in a hospital in a short, tight, mini gown. We don’t let her fake bake for a couple days, and we only spend two hours doing her make-up. Plus, we find an actress who does a sexy sad face, big pouty lips and everything. This also gives us the ability to get shots of our male lead going around pouting and brooding to everyone he knows yelling, “The love of my life has cancer”, and everyone can give him the oh no! face. Cancer is something love can’t conquer, but can make a lot worse to have. There is also a count down, because we can’t have her die too suddenly, we need to draw out the teenage angst.
Scenario two can play into some of the aforementioned things as well. We start with a quiet boy who is handsomely and charmingly dorky and sticks to himself. In comes the pretty, popular, blonde, girl who falls for this hot geek of a sad man candy and tries to pursue him. She falls hard for him; he falls for her, but then suddenly becomes a drift, spacey, and backs off from it all. She is confused, and finally after moody faces and days of wonder, she confronts him. He breaks down about a girl that he loved and broke his heart.
She asks…. “Did she cheat on you? Go lesbian? What??”
He says, “No, no, no, nothing serious like that….. She died.”
“Oh my! I am so sorry I had no idea.”
He says, “She found a lump one day on her neck and…….. Yes, yes it was cancer.”
The audience gasps, looks at each other in disbelief. He finally breaks down and tears up, she consoles him. He falls into her, letting her console him, pushing his face way to close to her cleavage that it becomes a little disconcerting. Together they help each other with the sadness, bond, and kind of forget the dead girlfriend. The dead cancer girlfriend has brought them closer together. Yay for her, she’s dead and still helping him get some. Now, that’s a devoted girlfriend. He can use dead girlfriend for at least three years after, dead girlfriend of cancer means he can use it at least five years.
Television and movies have been ruined for me. I have broken the code. Once I see two characters who make a breakthrough and fall in love and become happy, I can already call it that somebody has or will die of cancer. Because AIDS just doesn’t have the same effect.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think, rightly or wrongly, AIDS still carries with it a stigma of immoral behavior. The public tends to think "you can prevent AIDS." Again, let me stress this is my opinion of public perception. AIDS, Magic Johnson taught us, comes with an apology to family and friends. And AIDS entered our culture as a "homosexual" disease. Postmodern psychoanalysis uses a term called "primal baptism." Essentially, however something is introduced to us, it will always retain traces of its introduction. AIDS emerged as a punishment for decadent behavior.
ReplyDeleteBut cancer doesn't discriminate. Unless its lung cancer. I imagine no pretty innocent kids die of lung cancer in any of those movies you are referring to. Cancer spins off the wheel of fate--beyond any of our control. It symbolizes our existence in a cruel, cruel world.
What you miss here when I call Cancer 'pretty' is the underlying sarcasm mocking our cultural views on diseases when provoking sympathy. By calling Cancer pretty, I relate to the fact that it doesn't take away from our sympathetic effect as many things can in a society where we sometimes unemotionally think Ew before Aw as a reaction. Cancer is a disease where the actress can still look normal, she can fool the audience. It is also a disease where those without first hand experience associate nothing more with it than baldness and death. The main stigma attached to cancer, if any, is that you always die from it. Where as something like aids has less sympathetic and more guilt centered stigmas as you have mentioned. Cancer is usually chosen because it tends to provide the most heart wrenching reaction of ill fated tragedy. I just chose to approach that from the mind point of a studio exec laying it out in a funny but truly disappointing method. I wrote it to specifically maximize the cruel world we live in, when cancer becomes a tool for entertainment.
ReplyDelete