Ara Mina would probably disagree, but when disaster happens to others, I have an instant need to become a witness. As the 21st century has allowed, to be swept up in the stream of news coverages.
In this age of the status message, reaction is relative. If the command “YouTube it” is any indication, we’ve all become obligated spectators. Like the clip of that kid riding on novocaine high from his dentist, you should have seen the footage of earthquake aftershocks in Chile. No excuses. If only to extend to people today’s proper greeting of “Did you see what happened?”
Nothing Casual About Casualties
The C in CNN should stand for “contemplation.” Online clips of recently devastated Haiti and Chile — both making me feel like an extra in a disaster flick’s montage of “People The World Over Watching The Worst News Broadcast Ever” —seem all-too- edited for existentialism.
By our being affected, we reassert our humanity, especially in these days that Mother Earth has settled nicely into the role of a bitch that’s been scorned. We share in a sympathy that’s more for ourselves. Hey, I’m ecstatic an intensity-9 earthquake didn’t, by some freak occurrence, send a billboard collapsing on me, but what if that was the case? After Ondoy, when would Manila be up again on the World Ruination Roulette?
Clumping the Chilean mega-quake into that montage, what I’ve felt is a familiar sort of dread, similar to when I was eight and I stayed up in bed, for the first time unsettled by the eventual: that I would one day die.
Lately, with CNN’s frequent documentation of doom and the almost daily reports on how just about everything causes cancer, I’m convinced I’ll end up buried alive by quake-broken chunks of a mega structure without knowing that some form of leukemia has spread inside me.
The Ease In Disease
While all this news at your fingertips has been a reliable source for anxiety, entertainment has become morphine for our mortality. Certainly, with all this calamity and cancer talk circulating in the air like a carcinogenic fume, there would have to be a place for the cancer comedy.
You had to expect this sort of fare from the people who gave us jokes on jerking off. Judd Apatow’s Funny People is the first film in a while to depict the unbearable lightheartedness of being sick. Adam Sandler plays George, a comedic star resting on his laurels/jester’s hat. He plays himself, practically, but funny thing he finds out he’s got cancer. So, we take the grim with a few giggles along the way. As he undergoes chemo, George tries to heal himself in the least corny way possible. He makes contact with “the one that got away” and heads back to the stand-up stage for therapy, helping an amateur amuser like Seth Rogen clean up his comedy act in the process.
We get little redemption from Sandler’s character, however, even after the remission of his cancer. In the end, we’d rather see bastards like him die anyway. Apart from realizing that Eric Bana should have stuck to what made him famous in Australia in the first place — comedy, seriously — we realize that Rogen, the more milquetoast and juvenile of the two, is still more a man and less of a joke than his supposed mentor. Laughable is the man who needs an expiration date stamped on his forehead to do people, much more himself, a little good.
Maybe Funny People, shown mid-2009, didn’t do too well in the box office because people didn’t know what to do with it yet. Why couldn’t Apatow stick to virgins, stoners, and zeroes becoming heroes, his audience must have wondered. Not to mention the movie was shown at a time when all manners of death, destruction, and douchery (Ponzi schemers, mostly) were novel and palpable because the 24-7 Situation Room that is online news made it seem that way. Through the Internet, no longer could we turn away from our disastrous world.
The spread of cancer comedies comes at an opportune time then. Entertainment and enlightenment follow from the sour realization that we should have assessed the situation of life — of shit happening — and dealt with it from the beginning. And not waited for our T-cell counts to go up. Or for the earth — quake or otherwise — to swallow us.
The none-too-grandiose consolation of the cancer comedy is, “Hey, you fool, shouldn’t it be enough of a consolation that you’re living?”
From there, it’s much easier to laugh, I guess.
I’M DYING TO SEE THESE…
Following the birth of the cancer comedy are a few death-defying feats in film and TV. They may make you laugh — and more importantly, live — out loud.
Breaking Bad
Synopsis: A high school chemistry teacher gets lung cancer, decides to try his hand at high living, selling crystal meth.
Prognosis: With four Emmys and a third season premiering this month, you’d best keep this show in your “stream” of consciousness.
The Big C
Synopsis: Laura Linney plays a suburban mom who tries to make the most of a disheartening diagnosis by “finding hope and humor.”
Prognosis: Will perhaps have more substance than Cougar Town.
The Buried Life
Synopsis: MTV pits reality with realization, getting a writer, a social activist, and a “funny guy” to realize a list of dreams before they die — and those of others as well.
Prognosis: Throw Road Rules and the Make-A-Wish Foundation in and it may prolong a show’s lifespan.
I’m With Cancer
Synopsis: James McAvoy plays a 25-year-old diagnosed with cancer. Not only does Seth Rogen co-star, he produces the film.
Prognosis: Director Jonathan Levine, who made the ’90s look fresh in the stoner-and-shrink flick The Wackness, could inject some terminal cool into terminal illness. And how can you go wrong with Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) injecting Oscar-nominated ingénue-ity into the role of a young shrink?