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.

Review

Comment

Culture

Death & life

14 August 2023

5 min read

'Do you guys ever think about dying...?' - Barbie

Pat Allerton reflects on the Barbie movie, the societal questions that it answers and the existential question that it doesn't.

Pat Allerton

Pat is vicar of St Peter’s Notting Hill and author of A Pocketful of Hope.

Margot Robbie as Barbie in Greta Gerwig's Box-Office smash hit movie

So I’ve just got home from watching the brand new and much acclaimed ‘Barbie’ at the cinema (don’t worry, I also watched ‘Oppenheimer’ last week). It’s 11pm, my wife and our 8.5 month old daughter are asleep upstairs and despite having church in the morning, I feel stirred to write some thoughts.

First and foremost, huge congratulations to Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, the whole cast, crew and team. It’s an absolute belter! Full of laughs from beginning to end. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would encourage anyone else to go and see it.

But secondly, far from being the shallow, plastic cliché that you might expect, what you actually get is an intelligent, searing critique, albeit somehow gently done, of the world we live in and what’s predominantly wrong with it. Which is, you guessed it, men. Or more specifically, patriarchy.

The film begins in ‘Barbieland’ where everything is seemingly perfect, as encapsulated by Barbie when she describes the day we first meet her as, ‘the best day ever. So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.’ That is, until we meet Ken (played by the excellent Gosling). It is here that the first inkling of imperfection or wrinkle in their world is detected. As the narrator (voiced by Dame Helen Mirren) makes clear, ‘Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.’ (We’ve all been there guys). His niggling insecurity and consequent competitiveness towards other Kens however, still aren’t enough to wake Barbie from her dream-like state and reveal that all is not well in paradise.

Issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this 'pale, stale male' challenged but not condemned.

That moment arrives unexpectedly, during what appears to be a standard evening with ‘a giant blowout party with all the Barbies, and planned choreography and a bespoke song’ to which Ken is told he should ‘stop by’. The dance is breathtaking, the happiness palpable, and yet suddenly, as if from nowhere, Barbie blurts out the pivotal line in the film, the hinge on which the whole (Barbie) world turns, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Cue the DJ’s vinyl record screeching to a halt, the choreography closing down, the dancers looking at her in disbelief, and the general sense of a serious buzz-kill. ‘Dying to dance’, she disingenuously adds, desperate to keep the party going, to shrieks of relieved delight and Dua-Lipa's return. Disaster averted, reality restored.

Except it’s not, it’s simply avoided. Avoided by everyone that is, bar Barbie. Something has changed for her, she knows it, and she must somehow find out why. That wrinkle in her world (along with the wrinkle on her thigh) turns out to be caused by a tear in the fabric separating her plastic world from the real one.

Long-story short, avoiding spoilers where I can, Barbie and Ken then embark on an eye-opening, perspective-shattering, journey from their world to the real world in order to find out where such unnerving questions (and cellulite) were coming from. Major issues with (or norms within) our world are encountered, from the objectification of women (Barbie receives immediate unwanted attention from all kinds of men), to the totally unmerited respect of any man (with someone even asking Ken if he had ‘the time’). They each go on an existential journey of discovery, with Ken delighted to learn that in the real world, men rule the roost (except for a brief time when he thought that horses did). Inspired with fresh vision, he quickly returns home in order to make some fundamental changes to and establish much of the best practice that he’s witnessed in patriarchal L.A.

I won’t say how things end up, but suffice it to say, issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this ‘pale, stale male’ feeling both challenged but not condemned. Kudos to the team for getting that balance right! However, as big and important as these issues are, and as satisfying an ending as was reached from a social justice warrior’s point-of-view, it struck me that the biggest elephant of all was still left there in the room, or at least charging around on the beach. Because the very question that began her journey, the deepest one that woke her up, is the very one that’s just left hanging, unaddressed and ungrappled with.

The music stops and that is it. And yet don't our hearts long for more?

It’s almost as if that moment of existential angst on the dancefloor (and who hasn’t had one of them), realising the fragility of our own mortality, did nothing more than focus Barbie on the need to lay hold of everything she can in this life, rather than exploring the reality (or not) of the next. Our culture has a word for it. YOLO, if you didn’t know, standing for ‘you only live once’. Which of course is true, whether you’ve got faith or not. But the Christian worldview would go further, saying that whilst indeed you only live once, the Scriptures tell us that you also live forever (or YALF, to coin a phrase). Which sounds ridiculous on the face of it (the concept, not the phrase, although granted, YALF might not catch on). After all, as the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, tells us in the film, ‘ideas live forever, humans not so much.’

Unless, of course, they do, or can, which only our creator could possibly make possible. And so Ruth’s appearance raises another interesting question, if she made Barbie, who made Ruth? Only when we’re dealing with questions of this nature can we be positioned to take on the big mama (I was tempted to say ‘daddy’) question of, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Which, of course, every one of us does. You can’t be human and avoid doing so. You’d have to be a doll in a made-up world.

But it’s a frightening thing to do, whether in Barbieland, in England’s green and pleasant land or anywhere for that matter. Because it all just looks so final. Like the music stops and that is it. And yet don’t our hearts long for there to be more? For one more song, for the beat to continue? Dare we hope for resurrection where life and light beat death and darkness? Because as beautiful as this life is, with all its opportunity for growth and freedom, be it in self-revelation and actualisation like Ken (the film ends with him wearing a hoodie that says, ‘I am Kenough’), or greater progress and equality on a socio-political level, experience tells us that until we have an answer for Barbie’s first and biggest question, then our own days here on earth, however good, happy and choreographed, will always be rudely interrupted by the reality of death and its long shadow. Find an answer for that... and let the DJ’s music play.