Posted on 06/10/2016 11:18:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's maddening to watch a movie trailer resplendent with engrossing and alluring screenshots projecting a terrific flick, only to learn after paying the price of admission that you'd watched the totality of the movie's value. That's not misleading; it's good advertising.
But sometimes movie studios are just plain guilty of false advertising.
The new movie "Me Before You" looks to be an inspirational love story. A lower-class woman in England is hired to take care of a young man who recently became a quadriplegic after being hit by a car. He inspires her to live a fuller life; she inspires him to find the joys he can still realize from his wheelchair.
That's the commercial, but that's not the actual plot. Spoiler alert: This isn't a love story; it's a story of a man's self-love leading to assisted suicide. Girl meets boy, girl falls in love with boy, girl holds boy's hand as he kills himself.
As Eric Henderson wrote in Slant Magazine, "'Me Before You' is some kind of twisted reversal of those expectations, punking its impressionable audience into believing the lie and then punishing them for their foolishness."
Before the accident, this man was impossibly wealthy and handsome, debonair and athletic. And then came tragedy, and he couldn't accept his new situation. He could only pine hopelessly for the "old me." The title is very apt. He puts himself before everyone else, but imagines his death is a grand act of selflessness.
Advocates for the disabled have been revolted by the plot, which implies that life really isn't worth living from a wheelchair. "Make no mistake: Quadriplegia is hard, and it can be tempting to give up," wrote Ben Mattlin in the Chicago Tribune. "It's a good thing I'm positively bursting with self-confidence and know I do want my life to continue. But how many of those who are struggling to maintain self-esteem, who feel unsure of their right to exist, possess the courage and sheer chutzpah to withstand the invidious message that they're better off dead?"
Mattlin wrote that what he fears about the spread of euthanasia isn't the "angel of mercy" who pulls the plug at the hospital, or the HMO that declines to pay for medications. He fears what happens to the newly disabled person "who will be unduly seduced into relieving their relatives -- and themselves -- of the burden of living with a chronic condition" by movies like this one. It "romanticizes and glamorizes an early exit for those who already feel marginalized, who feel they are living on borrowed time."
The so-called "right to die" movement never takes responsibility for its very real and very dangerous ethics slippery slope, building a cultural expectation that "useless" people will have the dignity to remove their burden from our lives. They're now trying to invent a new word to sell it: "dignicide."
Catholic News Agency blogger Jenny Uebbing pleaded that "Telling clinically depressed, chronically ill, and paralyzed people that their lives are not worth living is a tragedy." She recalled Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning movie "Million Dollar Baby," in which a "gruff but well-meaning" trainer grants a paralyzed female boxer her wish with a fatal shot of adrenaline. It "sent a depressing message about the value of an elite athlete's life post-major-trauma, but the confused message of 'loving someone enough to kill them' at least wasn't mixed in with romantic love."
For the opposing point of view, see Richard Lawson, the film critic in the appropriately named magazine Vanity Fair. He argued that "Me Before You" "approaches this thorny issue with an honorable maturity and forthrightness" and praised it for "giving us something cozy and romantic -- and, in its own weird way, aspirational."
Suicide is an aspiration? This is the siren song of the culture of death.
Anyone who pays money to see a movie about a quadriplegic is only a glutton for punishment.
Sounds revolting, thanks for the heads-up.
I think Millennials eat this stuff up. Instead of getting off their butts to raise a family and get a career, they’d rather wallow in self-pity, as they live with their aging parents after coming home from getting a degree in under-water basket weaving.
Well there is nothing wrong with a movie about a quadriplegic. What is wrong is that he is assisted with suicide.
Doesn’t it? Besides suicide is murder and therefor a sin.
Very timely post!
Is there any doubt that Hollywood, news and entertainment media, government, and academia work in consort to push new societal ideas and governance initiatives.
Media and Hollywood have been fawning over a new film touting the virtues of assisted suicide, released just in time as California’s assisted suicide law that goes into effect June 9th 2016.
Life influences fiction, or does fiction influence life?
Assisted suicide:New California law to take effect June 9
KPCC | March 10, 2016 | Paul Glickman
Posted on Thu Jun 9 15:00:08 2016 by MarchonDC09122009
http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/03/10/58421/assisted-suicide-new-calif-law-to-take-effect-june/
Assisted suicide:New California law to take effect June 9.
Fourth state in the US with such a law.
TOPICS: Breaking News; Government; US: California; Click to Add Topic
KEYWORDS: abortion; assisted; bioethics; california; deathpanels; democrat; obamacare; suicide; zerocare;
California’s citizens indicate there are solidly pro-Choice / pro-Abortion (in favor of an adult choosing to kill their innocent infant for whatever reason).
So naturally it stands to reason the state thinks similarly about residents having the choice of assisted suicide.
Ironic that CA has the death penalty still on the books and refuses to carry out the law against its worst murderous monsters.
1 posted on Thu Jun 9 15:00:08 2016 by MarchonDC09122009
Well, obviously you’ve never seen “Monkey Shines” :P
My twenty four year old daughter loved the book and the movie. She insisted on reading passages of it to me. It’s very well written but I was horrified by the story.
She loved the tragedy of it. We’ve had some interesting conversation because of it.
In my real life, I’m an advocate for assisted suicide. I believe it to be self-evident that nobody should suffer needlessly and that if somebody is terminal and wants to spare themselves and their family and their friends the painful throes of death, that is absolutely their prerogative.
I’ve never heard a non-religious argument against my position. I’m not entirely sure there is one. I for one have no patience for people trying to codify their religious beliefs in U.S. law.
Wow, you’re an advocate for assisted suicide. How voluntary does it have to be? Can the person who “wants” to die have said something years ago, in order to qualify? Is with holding food and water an okay way to go?
You have a lot of good company - eugenicists, Terry Schiavo’s husband, those who want to get rid of useless eaters, those who run suicide parlors in Switzerland, the NIH’s “pathway to death” designers, and plenty more. No icky religion there.
2ndDivisionVet - do you have the ping lists? If no one has them, maybe I should start them up again.
My father was a quadriplegic for 11 years before he finally committed suicide via overdose. Someone must have helped him but we don’t know who. He went slowly insane over those 11 years. I thought then and I think today it would have been better if he’d died in the accident. It was awful watching a healthy man turn into a wild-eyed scarecrow.
I wouldn't say that. "The Other Side of the Mountain" is a 1975 movie based on a true story about a young skier who was headed to the Olympics before a ski accident left her paralyzed. The movie shows her adjustment to life after becoming a paraplegic. I only saw the movie once, when it was new, and it left a life-long impression on me. The real person it portrayed died in 2012 at the age of 75.
Yeah, that’s precisely the sort of thing I work to end. I’m always amazed at the people who oppose euthanasia on moral grounds, as though it’s in any way moral to force people you love to suffer, often long after they’re no longer really the people you love anymore. My entire family has long advocated for their own euthanasia while they were alive and healthy, and not having that option always seemed unspeakably cruel. My mother lingered in a hospital bed for two weeks and would’ve been utterly aghast at such a circumstance.
And in other related Assisted suicide news, this just in:
Gay man, 39, has asked to be euthanised under Belgium’s radical right to die laws because he cannot
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3439006/posts
“But sometimes movie studios are just plain guilty of false advertising.”
Sometimes?????
Is the last line in the Movie “Soylent Green, it’s People”?
![](http://i47.tinypic.com/15mn2hx.jpg";;;;;)
bttt
I have a friend who has been in the hospital for a couple weeks.
She was in ICU on a ventilator, totally non-responsive. Couldn’t even breath on her own.
I visited her a couple times and prayed for her a couple times.
The third time, I decided to quote some Scripture to her. I no sooner started when her heart rate dropped and her BP went up. (the needed direction for both). I watched the monitor in awe as that happened.
I kept speaking and a few minutes later, she opened her eyes. Then she lifted her arm.
Within a half an hour, she was moving around.
Within a couple days, she had improved so much that they took her off the ventilator.
She’s going to be transferred to a regular room soon.
What a miracle because they weren’t even sure there was brain activity.
There’s never *No hope*.
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