Thinking Out Loud

Tag: 1978

  • Geneviève Bujold fights the medical patriarchy in Michael Crichton’s Coma

    Geneviève Bujold fights the medical patriarchy in Michael Crichton’s Coma

    A thriller set among medical professionals, with just enough scientific accuracy to temper its science fiction, and a craven corporation perverting science for profit? If only Michael Crichton‘s Coma had been set in an amusement park, it would have been the most Michael Crichton movie ever.

    More than just a dry run for his hit TV series ER, it’s also strikingly feminist — in some ways more than a similar thriller would be today. Not for nothing does an inciting incident involve an abortion subplot. Even Crichton’s own Westworld (1973) barely included any female characters at all.

    Geneviève Bujold plays an accomplished female surgeon who discovers and exposes a criminal conspiracy. She is unable to break through the dismissive armor of the establishment bureaucracy, or even her mansplaining boyfriend (Michael Douglas) — an interesting character in that he is not so much an antagonist but an obstacle to her aims.

    She is left to battle alone against an entrenched medical patriarchy that stymies her with variations of “don’t rock the boat”, “you’re being hysterical”, and “take a valium”. Even a sequence in which she removes her stockings is no sexy striptease, but rather a symbolic shedding of constraints in her pursuit of the truth.

  • Laurence Olivier wrestles Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil

    Laurence Olivier wrestles Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil

    Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Boys From Brazil is one of those they-don’t-make-them-that-way-anymore that I miss: the paranoid thriller that blends sci-fi with politics. I’m thinking Coma, The Manchurian Candidate, and Jacob’s Ladder.

    It’s often a fool’s errand to complain about plausibility in genre flicks, but I think internal consistency is a reasonable baseline. So I’m not quite sure I buy Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman’s (Laurence Olivier) rapid leaps of reason. Solely on the evidence of pair of identical twins on separate continents (with a colleague’s unverified assertion he may have seen a third, making it triplets), he leaps a little too quickly to a very fantastical conclusion: cloning.

    The proceedings are interrupted for a film-within-film walking us through the pseudoscience. It’s an odd creative choice to present human cloning as something so matter-of-fact, making me wonder when Dolly the sheep was cloned in this alternate reality, if not in 1996. what other wild scientific advances exist in this world: jet packs, teleportation, iPods?

    “Take your time, old men don’t go back to sleep once they’ve been awakened.”

    For the movie to suddenly jump into the extraordinary realm of science-fiction, equally extraordinary evidence is required to convince a skeptical character to believe. If the fantastic is mundane to the characters of the film, it’s not very impressive to the audience either.

    Also common to the genre is its fatalism; the Nazi cloning masterplan is not something that needs to be prevented. In fact, it already happened, years before. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen pulls a similar narrative trick, but the reveal lands with a heavier dramatic weight; it’s too late for the heroes to do anything about it.

    Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil
    Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil.

    Gregory Peck is mostly reserved in his portrayal of “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, save for a ferocious scene in which he exhorts a Hitler tot to seize what he believes is his destiny. Bruno Ganz appears, and would later play Hitler himself in Downfall (2004). As for Olivier, his jewish accent is really something to hear.

    It all comes down to two old men clumsily biting and scratching each other on the living room floor of a Lancaster farmhouse. It’s one of the more realistic fights ever seen on screen — the closest comparison I can think of is Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones in The Rules of Engagement.