Doctors Finally Have the Guts to Demand Your Guts
Yuck
In 28 Years Later, Ralph Fiennes plays a former medical doctor who has occupied himself during the series’ decades-long “rage virus” pandemic by constructing a giant outdoor ossuary. He gathers corpses, the one thing this society has in abundance, and then strips them of their flesh and builds towers out of the skulls and bones. It’s his own ghoulish way of manifesting the Latin dictum “Memento mori,” or “Remember you must die.”1
Well, there’s a lot of that going around lately.
How’s this for a New York Times headline?
Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death.
Let’s see what these ghouls want this time. Sandeep Jauhar, Snehal Patel, and Deane Smith write:
People die in many ways, but in medicine there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating.
A person may serve as an organ donor only after being declared dead… This common-sensical rule underpins organ donation in the United States and many other countries…
The need for donor organs is urgent. An estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant…
New technologies can help. But the best solution, we believe, is legal: We need to broaden the definition of death.
Oh, great. Are they trying to convince people not to sign donor cards?
I wasn’t really paranoid about it until now. I’ve always been fine with the idea of helping somebody else who needs my innards, at least after I’m not using them anymore.
Hell, I’m a beneficiary of that system. Fifteen years ago, my shattered knee was reconstructed with tissue from a donor. Without that, I’d probably never walk again without a cane. I’ll never know who that guy was, but I honor him every time I take a step.
If it means pulling the plug on me before I’m ready, though? I’m with the late George Carlin:
Okay, forget the part about Geraldo. But the rest of it, yeah.
Well, it only took four tries to get the Fantastic Four right!2 Seems appropriate.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is utterly charming and a lot of fun. The retro-futuristic 1960s setting works best for those characters, since that’s when Stan Lee & Jack Kirby did their best work together on “The Galactus Trilogy.” I won’t spoil the plot, but it goes to some places I wasn’t really expecting in a superhero3 flick. There’s a genuine ethical conundrum at the heart of the story. For the first time in recent memory, maybe ever, the stakes in a superhero movie feel like they actually matter.
One gripe, though: Ben Grimm’s voice! Ebon Moss-Bachrach is a good actor,4 but his voice just sounds weird coming out of that rocky orange face. It’s way too high. Marvel was smart enough to cast the basso profundo Ralph Ineson as Galactus, but the Thing sounds like a castrato in comparison.
It’s not the worst bit of miscasting in the film — that would be hiring Pedro Pascal to play a smart person — but it bugged me. They spent all that money on a CGI Thing and then made him sound like a wuss.
But then, I’m spoiled. This is the voice I always hear when I imagine the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing:
No, that’s not the real Jimmy Durante, but rather impressionist and voice actor Joe Baker.
“Thing Ring, do your thing!” Ben’s origin was completely different than in the comics, where he definitely wasn’t a teenager who somehow discovered two magic rings that turned him into a super-strong monster dude at will. And for whatever reason, the show was packaged as Fred and Barney Meet the Thing. The ‘70s were a weird time, man.
But anyway, that’s what the Thing should sound like. Maybe not the whole Durante impression, but a guy made of rocks should have a bit of gravel in his voice.
On a happier note, Marvel finally did something that’s 17 years overdue. They publicly acknowledged artist Jack Kirby, who co-created (and arguably co-plotted) most of the early Marvel stories and characters that have gone on to earn billions for lesser talents.
The movie ends with this quote from Kirby:
“If you look at my characters, you will find me. No matter what kind of character you create or assume, a little of yourself must remain there.”
Until the end of his life, Stan Lee hogged all the glory for himself. But there was always some Kirby in it. More than a little.
One of my favorite bands has a song on the soundtrack for an upcoming movie based on a book from one of my favorite novelists:
No, it’s not based on the John Updike novel. Boring!
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I enjoyed and appreciated the movie, but the world-building baffles me.
At the end of 28 Days Later, we see the infected starving to death a couple of months into the pandemic, and it’s implied the problem will soon take care of itself. But in 28 Weeks Later, the virus reinfects England and is inadvertently spread to the mainland by the protagonists.
That’s all waved away with a title card at the beginning of the latest film. It turns out the infected don’t naturally die off on their own, and in the intervening decades, the rest of the world has quashed the infection and quarantined the British Isles.
Otherwise the western world is just like our own, but the Brits have no contact with civilization and have reverted to Medieval technology. The main character, a 12-year-old kid, has never seen a smartphone (owned by a stranded, plot-convenient Swedish soldier) or even heard of the internet.
What, Elon couldn’t airdrop a few Starlinks on the poor bastards? The libs haven’t started a #FreeEngland hashtag campaign? The US didn’t bomb the hell out of the whole place and take their oil?
You probably know there were two Fantastic Four movies released 20 years ago, and a reboot 10 years ago. But you might not know there was also one in the ‘90s. It was a low-budget effort from Roger Corman, reportedly made for $1 million so a German film distributor could maintain the rights to the characters. It was never officially released, but some people who’ve seen bootleg copies say it was actually better than the other three previous FF movies.
Couldn’t be worse!
If you want to quibble, and I usually do, technically the FF aren’t really superheroes. They’re explorers and adventurers who just happen to have amazing abilities. So there.
Head's up about getting out of the donor loop - it's not enough to just tell the DMV you don't want the stupid pink dot on your CDL. You must also go to the state website and remove yourself from the donor list. The ghouls check the online state donor list - they don't look at your driver's license. At least that's the case in California.
In jurisdictions with "physician assisted suicide" - i.e., you pay your doctor to kill you - social and cultural pressure on the elderly to spare their families the expense of ongoing medical care has been shown in numerous studies to increase substantially. This is only going to make it worse.
"Don't be selfish, Granny - some younger person out there needs your liver, kidney and lungs."