The Problem With Cancer Movies
The movies use cancer as a tidy shorthand plot device or condense the experience into two hours. It's unrealistic, in my experience, and very much not in the spirit of Christmas.
If you’re lucky, everything you know about cancer comes from movies. This means that you have never had cancer, nor has anyone close to you, so your understanding of cancer comes from movies where a character has or had cancer. If you’re in this camp, congratulations and I hope you stay there forever.
Before I got sick, I didn’t know much about cancer because I was part of that lucky group of people without any family members having died of cancer. I come from heart attack stock.
The media portrayal of cancer is, now that I’ve seen it up close, mixed. To quote Italian soccer manager Gennaro Gattuso - it’s …
You might say it’s …
50/50.
The most accurate Cancer Movie is actually Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Surprised? I’ll use my own personal experience to back that claim up.
I knew guys in high school who would smoke weed before school. I never got it. Aside from the fact that I was extremely afraid of getting in trouble, it just seemed very unappealing to me. As far as I understood it, smoking weed was supposed to be for fun. You did it and then you listened to music, watched dumb movies or cartoons, and ate shitty food while you giggled with your friends in a basement or in the woods somewhere. I never got the idea of “Hell yeah. I’m so stoned. This is great. You know what would be awesome right now? Geometry.” “Wow, I’m so high. You know who I’d love to hang out with right now? Our history teacher.”
Despite this, by the time I got sick in 2021, the agreed upon narrative is that medical marijuana helps you through the rigors of treatment and cancer symptoms. The doctors told me this and the movies told me this.
There’s that scene in 50/50 when JGL is chilling with his old friends in the chemo chair and one offers him an edible. That is unrealistic in my experience. There were no cool old guys to offer me perspective and occasional tragicomic relief, and I didn’t leave the hospital with a dumb smile like everything was great. Instead, I read the same page of a book at least 12 times until I gave up and then just kind of zoned out.
Usually, I liked riffing with the staff when they’d come check on me or change a bag, but on that day I just avoided eye contact until they left the room. I did, however, have an appetite, which was rare. So, when I was met at the hospital by Michele and picked up by our friend, we raced the clock to get me food before my body decided it would never eat again. My food of choice was Popeye’s. Not the healthiest, but at that point any food is better than no food.
Then when we got there, I was so out of it from the combination of chemicals and poisons in my body that when they asked me what drink I wanted, I yelled (as best I could) “BUFFALO!” Everyone laughed. When they asked what sides I wanted, I told them Sprite. The laughter continued while I pleaded for someone to just bail me out.
And this is why Harold & Kumar is the most realistic cancer movie — because ordering fast food is really, really hard sometimes.
The cancer experience is simplified in movies and TV because it has to be. Everyone’s is different, for one. And no one has time to watch someone sit through a full meeting with an oncologist to explain the treatment plan. It’s sped up to near-Sorkin levels because the plot has to move. And until they let me make a movie where a character sits down and you watch him watch an entire movie before the rest of the movie continues, you won’t see anyone sit in chemo for four hours or just kinda hang out. It has to be all action, all drama, all lessons. Bang bang bang. That’s what we in the screenwriting world call pacing.
Speaking of pacing, I’m doing a bad job of it. The point I’m making here is that cancer media, be it movies or TV, sort of places itself into a few different categories. There’s the “Person gets sick and it causes them to make a sharp left turn in their life.” Those turns can be, again to quote Gattuso here, sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. Sometimes they use their illness as an opportunity to be a better person and grab life by the horns in a good way. Other times they become the most prolific meth cook/dealer in the Southwestern United States if not the world, causing all sorts of collateral damage to your family and friends.
I didn’t really change my life too drastically after I got sick. I won’t say these shows are unrealistic, but in my experience, as soon as my life was disrupted to this level, all I wanted to do was get my mundane life back.
There’s a show that just came out called “Dying for Sex,” and the central premise is that a woman is diagnosed with terminal cancer, so she leaves her unfulfilling marriage and has as many sexual experiences as possible before she dies. It’s a true story. I saw the trailer for it one day and thought, “I wonder what I would do if I got diagnosed with cancer,” and then I remembered.
And it’s funny, for a second a thought actually crossed my mind: Did I waste my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really flip the table? Did I waste having cancer by being boring and extra-medium in sickness as I was in health? Did I miss my chance to totally reinvent some aspect of my life? And the answer, again when thinking rationally, is no. My life rocks and I was and am happy to have it back, even on the days where it feels boring. Boring is a gift!
Another big media portrayal of cancer is the buddy aspect. These are your 50/50s. I am lucky in the fact that I, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, had many Seth Rogens in my life – friends who care deeply about me and went above and beyond during my treatment. Someone asked me once if I was surprised by anything in treatment, and I could only think of a positive response: Everyone in my life who I have chosen to keep around not only stepped up to the plate, but exceeded my expectations, so it proved that I have even better taste in friends than I was aware. The only surprise was how much better the people in my life actually are.
Sometimes the real cancer is the friends we made along the way hooooly shit.
But yeah to that smarmy lessons-learning point – there are the cancer movies where the plot is “Someone gets cancer and someone learns the true meaning of Christmas.”
By that I mean, quite literally, Christmas movies. Did you realize how many Christmas movies involve cancer? It’s so many. One time we turned off one of the new cornball Christmas movies, I think it was Hot Frosty because it came to light that Lacey Chabert’s late husband died of some nondescript cancer. They tell you this by showing a piece of paper in the basement that basically says something like “TREATMENT - INOPERABLE. CHEMO.”
Even this far out from the bad days, we didn’t really want to be reminded of the bad days during the holidays, so we switched to something we thought was equally silly and less likely to mention cancer. We chose the Emma Roberts flick The Holidate. Guess what: At one point, her mom is shaming her for being single and says something along the lines of, “Who will be there during chemo?” to which Roberts’ character responds, “I don’t have cancer, Mom.” and the mom says, “It runs in our family.”
What the fuck, man? Hollywood, if you’re listening, I am begging you to find another easy stand-in for sad, untimely death than cancer. Bear attacks happen all the time. Start there. Not to throw bears under the bus either, actually, bus accident works, too. I don’t know. Figure it out.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of all from this is to lean on your loved ones when times get tough, even when they are laughing at you as you severely fumble a simple task. And for all of you Hollywood movie producer types looking for an easy plot device to stir up universal sympathy, I get it. I’ve been using my cancer for that very purpose for almost five years now, this very blog included. But, maybe branch off into other diseases. Don’t take the easy road all the time. I believe in you.
Merry Christmas, everyone.