Terrible Title, Depressing Themes, Susan Sarandon... HBO Must Hate Me

You Don’t Know Jack has been playing on a near-continuous loop on forty-two of the forty-six HBO stations lately. Starring Al Pacino as the infamous assisted-suicide advocate Dr Jack Kevorkian, Know Jack treats the viewer to an interminable* and macabre parade of heart-wrenchingly desperate invalids, each one begging Kevorkian for a means to end their suffering without leaving their loved ones to dig a bullet out of the headboard.

Liberty’s most basic premise is ownership of one’s body, so most of my gentle readers can likely extrapolate their own Finch-worthy argument in support of Kevorkian’s efforts. What struck me from the film, though, was the unexpected nausea induced by his methods. After losing access to the planned site for Kevorkian’s first assisted suicide at the last minute, the doctor carried out the procedure in the back of his VW van rather than pulling the plug* for the day and rescheduling. His apparatus for administering the lethal drug cocktail was jerry-rigged from secondhand bits of mismatched aluminum and binder clips, and –- in the most upsetting scene of the film -– when Kevorkian began trying to reduce how much gas it took to achieve termination, one elderly man was subjected to saying goodbye to his wife from inside a miserable-looking Scotch-tape and Saran Wrap gas-retention tent which bore striking resemblance to a grade-school astronaut costume.

Don’t misunderstand; the melodramatic pageantry of post-death rituals these days is atrocious and generally exploitative. But considering nearly every one of Kevorkian’s cases left behind the deceased’s loved ones who will forever struggle with their own decision to "let" the suicide happen, the doctor owed them a bit more effort in terms of professionalism. According to the film, Kevorkian himself reached this same epiphany from jail but was stymied by a government committed to suffocating* his plans to open an end-of-life clinic in the US.

A life so painful that death seems winsome is positively unimaginable, but an eternal solution that strips any dignity from one’s final moments manages to make it worse. Government needs to stand aside and let the market perfect this process.


*Get it?