"An Exercise in Moral Botox"

By Dave Andrusko

Again, thanks to all of you who wrote to me about my thoughts on HBO's "You Don't Know Jack" (as in Jack Kevorkian). If you missed them, you could go to either www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/April10/nv042310part2.html or (more recently) www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/April10/nv042610part3.html.

Al Pacino and Jack Kevorkian

Why do I talk about a slavishly pro-assisted suicide movie? An awful lot of people, including many newly-involved pro-lifers, know only the bare minimum about a man who almost defies description. Let me talk about it one more time for those new to the history of a man who assisted in over 130 suicides and who was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder for directly providing one of his victims with the lethal drugs, videotaping it, and showing the sickening narrative on "60 Minutes."

"In character" is an interesting publication which I read sporadically. I ran across a link today to an online debate about the Barry Levinson-directed film between someone I don't know (Lane Fenrich), and someone I do, Mary Eberstadt, a brilliant writer and social critic.

Fenrich is very sympathetic to assisted suicide but pans "You Don't Know Jack" for being shallow, at best. Neither the arguments for nor the arguments assisted suicide are fleshed out, he says.

"Worse, although a good many thoughtful people have profound reservations about assisted suicide, the filmmakers dismiss their objections out of hand, opting instead to depict Kevorkian's opponents almost exclusively as sign-carrying, car-pounding, self-righteous crazies."

Eberstadt ("It was an exercise in moral Botox") takes the time to remind the reader what we (used to) know about Kevorkian. The film "scrubbed clean" such background as the fact that Kevorkian is a man "whose early enthusiasms included siphoning blood from corpses into living humans and experimenting with the eyeballs of the dying and dead…whose artistic offerings include subjects like decapitation and a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse. Did we mention that

Kevorkian sometimes painted with his own blood?"

What we see in "You Don't Know Jack" is not a man who as a medical "stalked corridors and entered rooms to watch people die," Eberstadt writes. Instead Al Pacino's portrait is of "a crotchety, well-meaning, card-playing, persecuted (by the religious right, of course) sometime flautist and all-around aesthete ('Bach is my god')."

If you get a chance, read the debate at http://incharacter.org/pro-con/hbos-you-dont-know-jack-kevorkian. It'll be well worth your time.

But perhaps the best analysis remains one written years ago by TIME magazine's Nancy Gibbs. She wrote (at www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,978613,00.html),

Every time he speaks or writes he hands them ammunition to dismiss him as a psychopath. 'If I were Satan and I was helping a suffering person end his life, would that make a difference?' he asks. 'Any person who does this is going to have an image problem.' That larger-than-death image grew with each story of his early experiments transfusing blood from cadavers to live patients, his paintings of comas and fevers, his bright-eyed enthusiasm for his "Mercitron" machines. With his deadly humor and his face stretched tight around his skull, he has become a walking advertisement for designer death.