The dying decision: choice, coercion and community

A Japanese drama about medical assistance in dying, Plan 75, reveals a lot about our relationlessness.

Sian Brookes

Sian Brookes is studying for a Doctorate at Aberdeen University. Her research focuses on developing a theological understanding of old age. She studied English and Theology at Cambridge University.

In a retirement home, a older person sings karaoke while the person behind waves a hand.

Chieko Baishô plays Michi.

Happinet.

“Being able to choose when my life will end provided me with peace of mind. With no feelings of doubt. She led a good life on her terms, people will say”.

In Chie Hayakawa’s 2023 dystopian drama Plan 75, these are the words of a silver-haired, wrinkled woman in a promotional video for the eponymous plan – a government scheme which offers all over 75-year-olds the option of a pain-free death at the time of their choosing.

And yet for Michi, an older lady toying with the decisions around Plan 75 it doesn’t really feel like it is her choice which matters at all. Whether it is the $1,000 grant offered as an incentive to die, the luxury amenities on offer at the Plan 75 facility promoted in leaflets and magazines, or the young person employed to gently guide the candidates towards their death (but whose real job it is to make sure they follow through with it), this is a world which has a clear agenda – to rid society of older people. Indeed, it is clear that this is a vision of a world which believes it is better for old people to die than to put financial burdens on the economy or their families, and this is a culture willing to subtly coerce individuals to accept and act on that belief.

Plan 75 reveals an interesting point at the heart of the MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) debate. One of the primary reasons that MAID is so attractive is the ability to take back control of one’s life and death, yet what happens when that seeming control isn’t really within the individual’s own control at all? For Plan 75, what is marketed as giving control back to older people, is really just a twist on a more sinister political policy to pressure individuals to sacrifice their “burdensome” lives for the greater good. Of course, this is a common argument for rejection of assisted suicide. This is the dangerous ‘slippery slope’, where MAID begins as an option only for those who desperately need it to relieve intense physical suffering. Yet it quickly becomes a tool to remove people whose lives no longer seem worth living due to societal expectations and opinions, rather than any objective reality.

Do we ever truly choose to die totally independent of the expectations of those around us?

For many, this problem can be appeased through strict legal controls over MAID – as long as the powers that be are regulated, MAID is still OK. As long as it is the individual who maintains control over their own death (and not the state), the goal of personal autonomy is maintained and all is well. And yet this perspective fails to ask the question - is such control over our own death ever actually possible? Do we ever truly choose to die totally independent of the expectations of those around us? In a world which places so little value on old age, can older people really make choices unaffected by that (deeply flawed and inhumane) logic? And, indeed - the elephant in the room – no matter how much we try to control death, in the end is it not death that ultimately controls us? As fundamentally finite beings we can never escape it completely – it will always find us one way or another. Ultimately, we will all have to face the reality of death when it comes to us. Complete control and autonomy are never truly possible.

In light of this unveiling, the possibility that complete choice and autonomy around death isn’t really an attainable goal, what better options might we pursue?

Where previously we would find comfort and hope in being loved, known and held by others in our death, now all too often this isn’t the case.

One thing is clear in Plan 75, the isolation and loneliness of older people in a society that has rejected them is deeply problematic. The movie primarily follows the stories of Michi, who lives alone with no family and Yukio Okabe, an older man totally estranged from his remaining family. Both face life, and are facing death, alone. We live in a world where increasingly we are forced to face death alone. When our final days and hours rarely happen in the family home, surrounded by our loved ones, but in faceless institutions devoid of lifelong meaningful relationship the sense that we are no longer doing death together as a society is acute. Where previously we would find comfort and hope in being loved, known and held by others in our death, now all too often this isn’t the case.

At the same time, there is no doubt that our modern world is unceasingly committed to the ideal of individual personal agency and autonomy – “She led a good life on her terms”. As a myriad of philosophers and theologians have commented, belief in human autonomy has come to replace belief in God. And MAID is one area which reveals this to be the case most acutely. Where previously we would turn to God to find comfort in the face of our finitude, instead now we turn to ourselves – the last hope we find in the face of death is our individual ability to control it.

Death and health should be a corporate phenomenon – when one person is ill, all of society is ill.

The German theologian Eberhard Jüngel described death in this broken world as “the occurrence of complete relationlessness”. In fact, Jüngel suggests that as human beings we are first and foremost made up of our relationships – we are truly human not by how we self-define in isolation but how we relate – how we relate to the God who made us, and how we relate to other people. This need for relationship is found most acutely in the face of death. As Ashley Moyse points out in his book, Resourcing Hope for Ageing & Dying in a Broken World, death and health should be a corporate phenomenon – when one person is ill, all of society is ill. And so, as death increasingly becomes the journey of the individual – when we face death in isolation from others and in isolation from God no wonder we feel such a strong desire towards control, towards ending our lives prematurely, towards science to help us avoid any more pain than we can bear alone.

In Plan 75 we see glimmers of hope in the possibility of relationship. As Michi and Yukio find rare moments of human connection with a long-lost nephew, with a young person working for Plan 75, with another older person going through the same questions around mortality you can’t help but feel deeply uncomfortable with their choice to apply for the scheme. It is in the hints of love, physical touch, smiles exchanged, even a simple conversation shared between two people that suddenly MAID seems so disconnected with the hope that life still has to offer through relationship. Perhaps if we could imagine a world where death became no longer an occurrence of complete relationlessness, but a locus for relational dependence, for familial connection, for leaning on God and not ourselves, the need for MAID would feel a little less necessary. It would be a world with a little more hope.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

21 May 2024

4 min read

Shardlake: the Disneyfication of the Monasteries

What works, and doesn’t, translating from page to screen.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Two men in Tudor clothing converse in a street

Shardlake, left, played by Arthur Hughes.

Have you ever had that sense of dread on discovering your favourite novel is going to be a movie or a TV series? Fans of CJ Sansom’s books have been divided on the adaptation of their favourite historical novels about a hunchbacked lawyer during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Some have been delighted by what they’ve seen, and felt the four episodes of Shardlake on Disney+ were true to the original books. Others were appalled.

The originals books are greatly loved. On The Rest is Entertainment podcast, Richard Osman read out comments from his own mother about how and why she loved CJ Sansom’s book so much. I was not so captivated. I read the first book, Dissolution, some years ago and liked it. But I didn’t like it enough to read more.

So when the TV adaptation landed on Disney+ I was curious. My own reaction was relief that CJ Sansom had passed away only days before his first novel arrived in our living rooms. Sansom was committed to historical accuracy and authenticity. The TV Series? Not so much.

But Shardlake is entertainment for the masses, not the bookish. Why shouldn’t sixteenth century monks have incredible teeth? Why shouldn’t they burn candles by the dozen in every room of the monastery, day and night, despite the fact that candles were eye-wateringly expensive back then? And yes, these monks should be going to church at least nine times a day, and spend hours in prayer and private study. But who really wants to watch that? This isn’t Wolf Hall on BBC2. This is mainstream global streaming TV: the Disneyfication of the Monasteries.

Given the differences in the media, why are both versions of Shardlake so successful? The secret sauce is the hunchback himself, Shardlake.

As a screenwriter myself, I know all too well that the dynamics of twenty-first century television – aka ‘content’ – and novels are very different. (My failed novels have reinforced this lesson for me). Shardlake has to appeal to an international audience who have not read, and will never read, CJ Sansom’s books. They won’t even listen to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk about the Dissolution of the Monasteries on The Rest is History podcast.

Novels are fairly cheap to print. TV is expensive, burning money faster than the monks of St Donatus can burn candles. Shardlake is international TV, financed internationally and filmed internationally. Consequently, you are not looking at the Kent countryside. You are looking at Hungary, Austria and Romania for a mixture of reasons. Mostly these would be tax breaks, cheaper crews and financial incentives.

St Donatus’s monastery is a mash up of the medieval Kreuzenstein Castle near Vienna and the gothic Hunedoara Castle in Transylvania. It looks brilliant. It just does not in any way resemble a medieval monastery – which were surprisingly uniform through Europe. The chapel at the monastery is comically small, whereas there would, in real life, be a hilariously large abbey.

The New Stateman said, “This is not Merrye Englande. It is the Grand Anywhere we’ve come to know all too well in the age of streaming, and it bores me to death, my eyes unable to stick to it,” which seems a little over dramatic. Most of the reviewers were unconcerned by this lack of historical accuracy. The Guardian called it ‘magnificent’, others ambivalent. It scored about 80% on Rotten Tomatoes with both the critics and the audience. Overall, Shardlake has been a hit.

Given the differences in the media, why are both versions of Shardlake so successful? The secret sauce is the hunchback himself, Shardlake. He is the sleuth, trying to solve the murder of a fellow commissioner in the service of the King’s ruthless right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell. The recipe for the Shardlake sauce is made up of two key ingredients.

Shardlake bears his cross with fortitude, not bitterness.

The first is his goodness. It seems like a bland attribute, but it’s rather refreshing, especially in a world divided both then and now. Shardlake is not complex character with inner demons. (At least that’s not how he’s presented in the first book or this adaptation.) When I read the book, my abiding memory is that Shardlake was one of the good guys. This was surprising at the time as normally Protestants were seen Philistines and cultural vandals who cynically changed their theology to strip the church of its wealth, before passing the churches on to their descendants who smashed the statues, whitewashed the walls and, eventually, cancelled Christmas. Shardlake may be in the service of Thomas Cromwell, but he knows in his heart of hearts that Anne Bolyen was innocent of the crimes for which she was beheaded. And in some small way, he makes amends for this.

But Shardlake’s goodness is only half of the recipe. The other half is his hunched back. In the sixteenth century, this makes him an object of ridicule and shame. It is not flipped around to become a strength. It is an affliction with which he has to cope. Given Shardlake’s world steeped in religion, we are reminded of the ministry of Jesus, who attracted the sick, the crippled, the lepers and the blind. They were, of course, healed and Shardlake is not so fortunate.

Shardlake bears his cross with fortitude, not bitterness. Likewise, Jesus Christ himself bore his cross as a victim of injustice on trumped up charges, beaten and executed as one cursed alongside criminals, saying ‘Father forgive’. Shardlake, like Christ in the gospels, is a suffering servant. And now Disney may see the Gospel According to Shardlake spreading all over the world.