The Cinema, Ethics and Medicine at the End-of-Life: The Power of Metaphor

Abstract

Death continues to be a mystery. We know little or nothing about it, except that someday it will come calling at our door. This is because, despite the certainty that we are all fated to die, death is always conjugated in the third person; it is always someone else who leaves this life. This is why it is so difficult to talk about it. Nevertheless, I propose two environments in which we aspire to death having some meaning: medicine, and its empirical-technical savvy, on one hand, and narrative and its attribute of metaphor, on the other. Here it is this metaphoric aspect that I shall be addressing. I shall address the capacity of narrative in general and of an audiovisual narrative in particular to speak of that entity, death, an obliquely human form, through metaphors. The narrative in question is The English Patient (1996) by Anthonly Mingella. With the entangled stories of the different characters featured in this movie and with the metaphors appearing there I shall attempt to show that the narrative experience may offer a true moral experience, because in it the characters come to life, acquire a face, reasons and emotions, general and specific aspirations and life projects, aims fulfilled and desires left unfulfilled. Of course, it is not a question of deriving, from a film, any norms about our moral actions or that the film should tell us how we are to act; instead my aim is to highlight the capacity of movies to increase our receptiveness to what is plural, what is singular, and the emotional dimension of life and death.