Never Let Me Go: The Brave New World of National Socialized Medicine
In the new film Never Let Me Go, set at an eerie school in an alternate-reality England, a schoolmistress declares to her classroom of wide-eyed young charges: “The tide is not with forward thinking. It never is. No, the tide is with the entrenched mindset!” The children dutifully applaud.
It’s a marrow-chilling moment because the matter that has brought the educator (played by a devastatingly heartless Charlotte Rampling) to a venomous fury is any hint of “subversion,” as she calls it, that might undermine the school’s reason for existence. All of the children who study at the Hailsham school are clones, and they have no value except to become “donors” of vital organs — until, as young adults in their early twenties, they have no vital organs left. At this stage, they are told, their lives “will be complete.” The end.
Never Let Me Go is an adaptation of the 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose previous works include 1989′s The Remains of the Day (adapted into the well-received film starring Anthony Hopkins). It’s directed by Mark Romanek and stars Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan (who last fall got an Oscar nomination for An Education and this fall will star as Gordon Gekko’s daughter in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) as two of the students at the academy. As was the case with the book, the movie depends heavily on a hint-laden atmosphere instead of plot turns or the idea that the characters might be able to escape their fates. (The 2005 action-adventure flick The Island, which starred Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as young people who didn’t realize they were clones, had the same basic premise but went for thrills instead of reflection.)
What is devastating about Never Let Me Go is how it resonates down the decades, reminding us how many times we have heard leaders and peers instruct us that “forward thinking” demands we overturn established ways of doing things. The story takes place in a parallel history in which unspecified scientific advances in the 1950s led, in the 1960s, to a brave new world in which everyone could expect to live 100 years or more.
The cost is only hinted at. Ishiguro’s Hailsham is full of decent, loving, squabbling, excitable, wondering, flawed but fully human beings whose existences are simply treated as disposable. Any ethical questions must be ignored; science has made it possible to clone human beings for spare parts, therefore this must be the right thing to do.
Sounds like great sci-fi. Great science fiction uses unfamiliar settings to confront us afresh with the eternal moral choices. It leaves you with something more to think about than a series of wish fulfilling fight scenes.
Dear Mr Boot, Fascism was bad enough as it was, without Nazi crimes being added to its mistakes. Eugenic experiments were Hitler’s plaything, not Mussolini’s.
Parts is parts.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078062/
Well written review. Can’t wait to see it.
This sounds like another corporate propaganda film about the so-called discussion pitting “science” against “religion” when the real issue is democratic compassion versus corporate greed. Questions over end-of-life decisions are distraction invented by the insurance lobby to obscure the reality all of the uninsured regardless of how treatable their conditions are merely left for dead.
The so-called “death panels” in Obama’s program are necessary only because greed will remain a big part of the health care system even if Obama care passes. All these panels will do is slightly mitigate against the currently all-powerful, ruthlessly greedy insurance companies who consign all the sick and injured who are not rich to suffer and die without any succor at all. “Death panels” will become uneccessary if we had a health care system based exclusively on compassion and not profit, because then all people would have all of the care they need.
Quite the idealist aren’t you. When you accept propaganda as truth, everything becomes so simple. Let me guess…you are about 30ish give or take, or you are a social worker.
Does Throbbin Yobbin refer to indoor or outdoor plumbing? Obama care did pass. I’m still confused on how you exactly square the circle between infinite compassion and finite resources? Or, do you really think “free love” was the highest form of hippie altruism? Are you familiar with crackpot realism?
Bear: My theory is that “Thobben Yobben” is a put-up job. No once can actually believe what he/she/it(?) spouts. The age of this entity? I believe it was Churchell who said in response to questioning about his change of political parties, “If you aren’t liberal when you are young, you don’t have a heart. And if you aren’t conservative once you mature, you don’t have a brain.” Since “Throbben Yobben” clearly doesn’t have a brain, he/she/it is obviously young.
the matter that has brought the educator . . . to a venomous fury is any hint of “subversion,” as she calls it, that might undermine the school’s reason for existence.
The really frightening thing is the Orwellian doublethink undertones of it. Creating a new, horrific status quo, and then maintaining it as long as possible, is “progress”; attempting to fix it is not “improvement” nor “progress”, but “subversion”.
The same with all things that these people foist upon us — they create a radical new paradigm, in the name of Progress, and then once the paradigm is set they turn around and declare it to be The Way Things Will Be From Now On. They refuse to accept any changes after that. They’ve given us a brand new, stable status quo; how dare we presume to follow their example and alter it?
By the time we can reliably clone people the cloning of individual parts (hearts, kidneys, etc.) will be possible as well. There will be no need to clone entire people.
Sci-fi chick flick:-)
“Any ethical questions must be ignored; science has made it possible to clone human beings for spare parts, therefore this must be the right thing to do.”
That’s where we’re headed. It’s just a matter of time.
When society not only condones abortion but encourages it, the next move is to get rid of those at the other end of the age spectrum (see “assisted suicide” in Oregon, Nevada, etc.)
The logical progression is to grow humans as body parts suppliers . . . sort of like what China uses its inmate population for, only more calculated.
Clones raised for parts. Nancy Farmer has an equally chilling book, “The House of the Scorpion”, with that premise. Society in her book “deals with” the horror by legislating that all clones to be raised for parts must be brain damaged before birth (by surgically removing higher brain centers). The resulting body in PVS state is fed and exercised by machine. However, a certain ultra wealthy drug lord, who doesn’t care about the law, raises his clones without brain damaging them. One of them is the protagonist of the story. (There are also high tech zombies used as slaves.)
Larry Niven, writing in the 1970s, came up with a far more plausible scenario. It begins with the proposal that when a criminal is executed for capital crimes, this should be done in a hospital so that organs can be harvested from the criminal and used to save other patients (since there are never enough donor organs). Seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it? If it’s done right, even a serial killer could end up saving more lives than he ended.
The problem is that there still won’t be enough organs for everyone who needs them. The obvious solution is to vote for legislators who will change the laws so that more people are executed. If there aren’t enough serial killers, then we require death sentences for manslaughter and rape . . . then for aggravated assault and armed robbery . . . and, eventually, for speeding tickets and parking violations. The result is a fascist police state in which any citizen who steps out of line is immediately arrested, tried, convicted, and broken up into parts to extend the lives of everyone else.
Growing clones is a lot of trouble and takes a long time. It’s much easier to find an excuse to use your fellow citizens as “donors.”
WHY DID YOU GIVE IT AWAY? I WAS SO LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING THIS MOVIE, AND I STILL WILL, BUT COULDN’T YOU HAVE WARNED YOUR READERS THAT YOU COMPLETELY WRECKED IT?! JEEZ