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Jul. 23rd, 2009 11:01 pmI get really tired of cancer as a narrative device.
This is prompted by me reading two different plays today, for a festival we're doing at CMU in the fall, that both involved oncology in some way. One, Odin's Horse, involves a pediatric oncologist who, upon losing one of her young patients, leaves her practice in despair and ends up living in a redwood to keep a logging company from cutting the tree down. The other, Songs of Extinction, involves a woman dying of stomach cancer -- actually, it's about her husband and son dealing with her dying of stomach cancer, with some stuff about deforestation tacked on to make it ecological.
When I saw Angels and Demons, there was a preview for My Sister's Keeper that nearly had me in tears. (That one looks really good, though. I may go see it and resign myself to crying like a baby and feeling terrible afterwards.
See -- I know this is not the first time I've talked about it here, but it bears repeating, I suppose -- my mom had cancer. Chronic myeloid leukemia. My mom is a cancer survivor. It will have been twelve years since her successful bone marrow transplant come this fall. I know at least two other people on my f-list who have similar stories. I know people who have survived breast cancer and skin cancer.
I also know people who weren't as lucky. And if watching these movies and plays and reading these books is hard for me . . .
Cancer is a great narrative device. It's senseless, so it's full of pathos. It's not particularly disfiguring, if you choose the right cancer, apart from hair loss. Nor is it degenerative in a way that'll prevent the character from making speeches -- again, you have to choose right, which is probably why leukemia is so popular. It lends the work an air of Real World Tragedy and elevates it to True Art. And it's got a deadline, if you'll pardon the word, so you can off the character before the audience gets antsy.
It's that last part that bothers me. If someone in a story has cancer, there's a 90% chance that they'll be dead before the curtain falls -- 95% if it's a movie. (Example: the Wikipedia summaries for My Sister's Keeper the novel and My Sister's Keeper the film.) And that strikes me as . . . exploitative.
I don't know how to solve this. Obviously I'm not about to suggest that people stop using cancer as a narrative device like this entirely; for one thing, it'll never happen, and for another, that's an overreaction. Suggesting that some other chronic illness get used as the Grim Reaper of Srs Literature seems callous. (AIDS replaced cancer as the gritty real world true art is angsty Grim Reaper of Srs Literature for a while in the '80s and '90s, but seems to have become less of a specter in America now.) Man, I don't even know if it should be solved. It's nearly midnight and I'm hormonal anyway. I just know that it's frustrating.
I'm just gonna end this by linking to the TV Tropes article on Funky Winkerbean and leave it at that. ("Cancer, cancer. Cancer?" "Incest! . . . Cancer incest?")
This is prompted by me reading two different plays today, for a festival we're doing at CMU in the fall, that both involved oncology in some way. One, Odin's Horse, involves a pediatric oncologist who, upon losing one of her young patients, leaves her practice in despair and ends up living in a redwood to keep a logging company from cutting the tree down. The other, Songs of Extinction, involves a woman dying of stomach cancer -- actually, it's about her husband and son dealing with her dying of stomach cancer, with some stuff about deforestation tacked on to make it ecological.
When I saw Angels and Demons, there was a preview for My Sister's Keeper that nearly had me in tears. (That one looks really good, though. I may go see it and resign myself to crying like a baby and feeling terrible afterwards.
See -- I know this is not the first time I've talked about it here, but it bears repeating, I suppose -- my mom had cancer. Chronic myeloid leukemia. My mom is a cancer survivor. It will have been twelve years since her successful bone marrow transplant come this fall. I know at least two other people on my f-list who have similar stories. I know people who have survived breast cancer and skin cancer.
I also know people who weren't as lucky. And if watching these movies and plays and reading these books is hard for me . . .
Cancer is a great narrative device. It's senseless, so it's full of pathos. It's not particularly disfiguring, if you choose the right cancer, apart from hair loss. Nor is it degenerative in a way that'll prevent the character from making speeches -- again, you have to choose right, which is probably why leukemia is so popular. It lends the work an air of Real World Tragedy and elevates it to True Art. And it's got a deadline, if you'll pardon the word, so you can off the character before the audience gets antsy.
It's that last part that bothers me. If someone in a story has cancer, there's a 90% chance that they'll be dead before the curtain falls -- 95% if it's a movie. (Example: the Wikipedia summaries for My Sister's Keeper the novel and My Sister's Keeper the film.) And that strikes me as . . . exploitative.
I don't know how to solve this. Obviously I'm not about to suggest that people stop using cancer as a narrative device like this entirely; for one thing, it'll never happen, and for another, that's an overreaction. Suggesting that some other chronic illness get used as the Grim Reaper of Srs Literature seems callous. (AIDS replaced cancer as the gritty real world true art is angsty Grim Reaper of Srs Literature for a while in the '80s and '90s, but seems to have become less of a specter in America now.) Man, I don't even know if it should be solved. It's nearly midnight and I'm hormonal anyway. I just know that it's frustrating.
I'm just gonna end this by linking to the TV Tropes article on Funky Winkerbean and leave it at that. ("Cancer, cancer. Cancer?" "Incest! . . . Cancer incest?")
