Character Growth

In April, I was invited to see a sneak preview of the upcoming film “50/50,” which concerns 27-year-old Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who’s fighting cancer, and Kyle (Seth Rogen), the pal who stands by him. It’s based on the true story of Will Reiser, writer, Rogen associate and cancer survivor. I felt like it was fine — sure, it killed a character off just after we got to like him, but by and large it played fair and found some laughs in an experience few of us could imagine. I was sure that, before the movie opened at the end of September, I’d have the chance to think about it more from my distant, abstract, wouldn’t-know-what-it’s-like perspective.

In May, I realized I didn’t like my doctor. So I got a new one. In June, my new doctor poked and prodded me and thought that my liver felt big, so he prescribed an ultrasound. I got one, eventually, on the 19th. And on the 22nd, I was called and asked to come in as soon as possible. My liver was fine, but there were “unusual changes” in my right kidney: a mass about 2 inches across. Which turned out to be cancer. And then, sympathizing with the characters of “50/50″ got much, much less abstract and the end of September felt a lot further away than it did before.

If I were a doctor, I’d know all about cancer — its medical history, the fact its name is from the Latin for “crab” after the knurled, tough masses pulled from dead men, the fact that there are as many kinds of cancer as there are kinds of sandwiches or trees, the survival percentages calculated over five- and-10-year periods with surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiation. But I’m a film critic, and all I know about cancer is from the movies. This doesn’t sound so bad, but, then again, if you knew about sex only from the movies, and watched only ’80s films, you’d think people made love by lowering their faces toward each other in front of blue-lit Venetian blinds, at which point Tom Cruise just brushes Kelly McGillis’ chin and she explodes in pleasure. Since I know that isn’t the case — sorry, Ms. McGillis — I had to assume the movies weren’t that well-informed about cancer, either.

Diagnosis: Drama

Perhaps the greatest cinematic use of cancer is that it gives guys something they can cry about at the movies without feeling unmanly. In the movies, we’re taught that a real man can walk off any injury, illness or state of distress — see “Die Hard,” “Reservoir Dogs” or, for that matter, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Therefore, feeling any sympathy for an injured, ill, or distressed man on-screen is, for guys, a big-time no-no.

Except for cancer.

You can’t man up to beat cancer, and you can’t beat it up or shrug it off — meaning that when it’s time to go, it’s time to go, thus making it a perfect dramatic device for when dudes need a trip to the waterworks. “Brian’s Song”? Big-time weepie, especially when James Caan gives that speech. “Magnolia“? Jason Robards reconciles with scumbag son Tom Cruise thanks to Philip Seymour Hoffman in a circle-of-life moment that will have even the hardest-hearted fool reaching for the Kleenex. Akira Kurosawa’s most emotionally moving film, “Ikiru,” is about a man facing a diagnosis of cancer that gives him less than a year to live — a year he intends to live to the fullest. “The Bucket List,” with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman going through a list of fun things to do after busting out of the cancer ward, also makes guys cry — in many cases, though, because it’s just bad and boring.

If you want to put a bromance through some real bro-pocalypse, bring in the cancer. 

This is what “50/50″ does — with no small amount of success, modern humor and reefer smoke — and that level of drama is a pretty solid go-to for screenwriters and directors and actors. Of course, when an actor dies of cancer, they get up after someone says “Cut!” Those of us who have HMOs instead of directors aren’t that lucky. I myself would have loved to have whipped up some drama — and I did — about my diagnosis, but I was held back somewhat by my doctor’s insistence that there was a 10-15 percent chance it could be a cyst — in which case, I would be fine, just fine. Presumably this was either a) true or b) said to keep me from freaking out, but either way, it kind of sapped the movie-learned melodrama from my diagnosis. Wasn’t all this supposed to make me like Debra Winger in “Terms of Endearment”: calmer, wiser, more loving, with better hair? I thought, “If I have cancer, that’s awards-season stuff the academy loves, baby; if I have a cyst, that’s not even a Lifetime movie.”

Body Horror and Bawdy Humor

And now that I think about it, keeping me from freaking out was probably a major goal of my medical team. The idea of something growing inside your body, beyond your control, is the sort of thing David Cronenberg makes movies about. “The Fly,” “Shivers,” “Rabid” — a lot of Cronenberg films feature rogue, or new, or misbehaving organs. (Cronenberg himself has stated that “The Fly” was his way of processing his thoughts on aging and death.) I don’t know if I could have asked  and, frankly, I didn’t want to — but the medical team never offered to show me anything from their tests, like the ultrasound, the CT scans, any of the graphic imaging of the mass.

Good thing, too, I should say, because I’ve seen “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” and “Alien” and “The Manitou” and plenty of other films that show lumps and bumps and bulges manifesting themselves as horrible creatures. My doctors keeping the actual image of the mass away from me was fine, as the movies give us all overactive imaginations. Although, it’s probably no coincidence that a film I returned to during all of this was John Carpenter’s “The Thing” from 1982, with its invading alien composed of nothing more than fluid, shifting, hostile cells, each one with dark purpose, each one independent — and really, I can’t think of a better definition of cancer than that. But I didn’t have to get chemo or radiation — it wasn’t an option for my kind of tumor — so I didn’t have my body changed; I just knew it was changing, and that was odd enough. 

Of course, there are also films that mine cancer for comedy — usually the bleaker and blacker the better. “Fight Club“‘s time among cancer support groups has a comedic edge as finely honed as the blade of a scalpel. From the get-go, with Edward Norton as a quizzical poseur looking for emotional relief in cancer support groups, it savages the language and group-think of the modern age. The Kids in the Hall’s scabrous flop comedy “Brain Candy” mocked the way the media makes cancer into an industry with “survivors” as products through Bruce McCulloch‘s turn as a character named, yes, Cancer Boy. Denys Arcand’s “The Barbarian Invasions” shows the friends and family of a cancer victim coming together to say goodbye, only to realize the patient is not going gentle into that good night, or even the following day. And in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Royal (Gene Hackman) claims to have stomach cancer to stay with his family in order to reconnect with them, but is exposed as the lowest of the low for his callous deception. There were some laughs in my circumstance — when I was told I had to have a complete kidneyectomy, a friend suggested that was a great heavy metal band name — but not a lot. And nothing as good as Ed Norton between Meat Loaf’s breasts or the Kids in the Hall.

Going Out Swinging

Plenty of movies use cancer specifically as a nice, fat, phony-baloney ticking clock to make sure a character only has so much time before performing some essential task. It’s also useful for giving characters an out — an escape hatch where, since they’re dying, they can do whatever they want, and whatever the movie needs. In “Gran Torino,”Clint Eastwood‘s Walt is clearly dying from lung cancer — at one point coughing up blood like Camille — and, thus, when he goes on a multicultural killing spree later, we’re supposed to think “Better to go out in a blaze of glory, full of fire, than go out on a bed, full of tubes.” John Wayne, in “The Shootist,” also has cancer — at least he has Jimmy Stewart to tell him, which I’m sure was a comfort — and decides to spend his last remaining days cutting other people’s remaining days short. Wayne, of course, would himself later die of cancer, possibly sped along by his time on the set of the 1956 release “The Conqueror,” where the producers’ two biggest bad ideas were a) hiring John Wayne to play Genghis Khan and b) shooting near what used to be nuclear test sites. (People magazine disclosed in 1980 that 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed cancer in the intervening 24 years — not including extras, or studio workers exposed when the production shipped the radioactive dirt back home for matching shots.

In the original, 1960 version of “Ocean’s Eleven,” Richard Conte confronts a doctor about a diagnosis with one of the most jarringly try-to-be-cool lines ever uttered: “What is it, Doc — is it the Big Casino?” The film never makes it clear what it is Conte dies of exactly — Is it cancer or a heart attack? — but for my money, there’s never been a better euphemism for cancer than “the Big Casino,” and Conte’s knowledge that death is coming is a big part of the film’s finale. Same for “Space Cowboys,” where Tommy Lee Jones’ aging astronaut has some bad news (“What is a pancreas, anyhow? I mean, I don’t know what the damn thing does for you, besides give you cancer.”) that he turns into good deeds. In the absence of such firm and frightening news — and a casino to heist, or a space shuttle to fly alongside Clint Eastwood — I couldn’t take advantage of that movie tradition, either.

Happy Endings

On July 25, just over a month after it was found, doctors at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles removed my right kidney and the mass inside it. My chest X-rays and CT scans were clear, meaning no cancer had migrated — metastasized — to other parts of my body. I went home. I watched movies. I took painkillers. I wondered why the one did not improve the other. I felt horrible. Then I felt better. And a week after my surgery, at the follow-up, my physician told me with German thoughtfulness that they had examined the mass, and, yes, it was malignant. And apparently gone. “While we do not like to say ‘never,’ because of the way mathematics and the universe work,” he explained, “this is something you should not have to worry about ever again.” In a few months, I’ll get a blood test; a few months after that, a CT scan. And I’ll always wait and wonder if my own little cancer movie is going to get a sequel, some story meeting ticking away in my cells and body to write an unexpected new chapter. Probably something else will kill me — a truck, a killer clown, an Adam Sandler film that really does burst a blood vessel in my head.

Until then, I think I’ll do things I like, including — especially — watching movies. And if anyone ever tells me they have cancer and asks if there are any good movies to watch, I’ll say that movies are a diversion, not a diagnostic tool; they’re entertainment, not education; they’re therapeutic, not therapy. And then I’ll tell them the most important thing the movies about cancer taught me about life — namely that, really, watching “The Bucket List” is a waste of time no matter how much of it you have.

–From my article at The Hitlist