I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh, but although there is a lot of humour in many of his movies, they’re generally pretty dark. His latest movie, Happy-go-lucky, is quite different, yet it retains those essential characteristics of Mike Leigh films – I can’t quite explain it but he manages to make you both care about and squirm about his characters. But what they do more than anything else is highlight what it means to be human, with all the frailty and awkwardness that comes as part of the package.
Happy-go-lucky tells the story of Poppy, a Primary School teacher in London. She’s a single 30 year old with a totally irrepressible positive spirit. She’s smiles a lot, laughs a lot, jokes a lot. Even when she encounters difficulties she deals with them positively. At one point in the movie, she’s told “You can’t make everybody happy” and she replies that it’s worth trying.
My favourite scenes are the flamenco classes. Flamenco always moves me. I love its passion and its fire. The Spanish flamenco dance teacher whose class Poppy attends is brilliant – probably one of the best characters in the whole movie. You can see a couple of scenes in this Channel 4 interview with Mike Leigh –
I have a very positive spirit. In fact, I don’t really see the point in taking a negative attitude to life. I’m pretty sure the stance we take determines the experiences we get.
I use movie clips a lot when teaching. I’ve posted a bit about some of the movies I use before (put “how we cope – learning from the movies” into the search box at the top right of this blog to see some examples). People now often suggest movies I might want to see because they show something about human character, about coping mechanisms or some of the ways in which things go wrong. Today, a colleague at work lent me “Control“.
It’s the movie based on the autobiography of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer’s widow. I was never really a Joy Division fan but I do still really like some of their songs. It’s no secret that this is a depressing movie. Ian Curtis hanged himself at just 23 years old. I found it a very powerful story, not least because it tells of a young man’s struggle with epilepsy. Convulsions are very scary to witness if you’ve never seen one before and the way they appear so suddenly and so completely take over a person’s life for a few seconds or minutes is always very dramatic. Ian Curtis couldn’t deal with having this complete loss of control and an experience of somebody he knew dying from an epileptic seizure probably magnified his fear of the disease and the terror that the next fit may well be his last. As the band begins to find success, his marriage begins to drift and he starts an affair he with a Romanian woman. In short, his life begins to unravel on all fronts at once. You might think success (selling more records, getting concert dates, becoming famous) would be a positive but to Ian it felt that he was being sucked empty by it. He gave his everything into his music and his performances but felt that success brought demands for more and more. He was losing control of his own life.
It was all too much and he committed suicide aged 23.
We all need to feel that we have some control in life. How much control varies between individuals and it alters at different points in life. But everyone I’ve ever met needs some sense of being in control of at least some important part of life. What a lot of people miss though is that we almost always have choices, and even though we find ourselves in circumstances outwith our control we can still choose how to respond. When it feels as if the choices have run out, it’s a very, very hard place.
I posted recently about change. Well in the face of too much change it can feel as if our choices have run out. But you know what? I don’t think they ever do. It’s just that sometimes it takes someone who loves us, or cares about us, to help us realise that.
It strikes me this is an important part of the practice of medicine – not just treating diseases, but helping people to see, and to make, more positive choices. A doctor can only do that if he or she understands the relationship between a patient’s illness and their life.
We construct our sense of self, and we experience our own very unique lives through the tool of narrative. Narrative means the story and the way its told. This is something I look for all the time during my consultations. I’m interested to notice not just the words people use but the tone of voice, the speed of speech, the hesitations, the facial expressions and the body language. The way a story is told is actually what gives the content of a story its meaning.
Have a look at this short French film (English subtitles)
It’s brilliant. Starts bland, with words that don’t convey much, but with a small piece of direction the words are said again in an entirely different way and WHAM – if it doesn’t get you, I’ll be surprised! (Well, it got me sniffing anyway!)
Tell me what you think. How aware are you of the way you say things? How aware are you of the way things are said to you?
A big part of the debate about homeopathy centres on the issue of ultra-high dilutions of medicines. One of the explanations wheeled out is something called ‘the memory of water’ – it’s a catchy phrase but very problematic. Does water have a memory and if so, how does that work? The anti-homeopathy campaigners say it can’t be explained. In short, they say it’s implausible. More than that, they say that the difference between a starting substance and a highly diluted remedy is the difference between ‘something and nothing’. But still, I think it’s more reasonable to say it’s the difference between something and something else. One of the commenters here, Andy, asked ‘does the water retain a memory of everything else it has had in solution since the dawn of time? Or just the things that the homeopath wants it to remember?’ I rather liked that question. It got me thinking…..and I’m still thinking! But amongst the things it got me thinking about were how memory isn’t physical but water is, about how human beings are meaning-seeking/meaning-creating creatures and how we enrich our physical world with meaning, how we use language, symbolism, memory and imagination, to create an incredibly powerful presence in the world, and how experience is more than physical, more than can be measured.
So here’s the non-science bit – first off, some photos of my own. I love water and water imagery and it amazes me how diverse and complex it is. Have a browse through this slide show. I wonder how these images of water will feel to you? I wonder what they’ll mean to you?
Here’s the slide show
And then, here are some of my favourite water songs. Let’s start with Rain
I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s still the same
When it rains and shines it’s just a state of mind
Patty Griffin next…..
Sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep
You think that you’re gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep
With all this rain falling down
Strange how hard it rains now
Rows and rows of big dark clouds
When I’m holding on underneath this shroud
Rain
And, the fabulous Eurythmics –
Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you
It’s amazing how much the rain can change our emotions, our state of mind, and our mood, isn’t it?
Let’s spend a little time by the river! Rivers are so important to us. How many towns and cities grow up around rivers? Think how we use metaphors like “river of life”. Here’s Alison Krauss set to a lovely montage of BBC nature videos.
A complete change of musical genre, but keeping a religious theme, with Good Charlotte,
Baptized in the river,
I’ve seen a vision of my life,
My favourite river song about the importance of place – really, a song that gives us a real understanding of psychogeography! (the way place fashions a sense of self)
And, finally, with Christmas coming, here’s Sarah McLachlan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s The River
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Which paintings, photos, songs, films, poems or stories come to your mind on the theme of water, and what do they mean to you?
This series is about using the movies to help us understand how we are all different, how we experience the world differently and how we all try to cope with challenges and change in our own ways. One of the commonest responses to challenge, is to withdraw – to hide, retreat, shut down. It’s an especially common way to try to deal with hurts and disappointments. The downside of this strategy is that we disengage and can easily spiral down into depression.
To see all five parts of this series put the phrase “learning from the movies” in the search box up on the top right of the blog.
We all cope in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of coping.
Now let’s consider control as a strategy. The world can be a very scary place. For many people the events that occur in their lives face them with overwhelming uncertainty and doubt. If we feel the world is scary and dangerous and random, one way to cope with this reality is to shrink daily life into containable, controllable pieces. People do this to try and reduce the uncertainty and randomness in their experience. They do this by introducing routines, habits and rituals. They do this by either trying to control their physical environment – cleaning and ordering – and/or by trying to control the people in their lives. Watch the following three clips to see what this is like if we take it too far!
I’ll consider the third strategy – withdrawal – in final part – Part 5.
One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore to what extent they see themselves as connected to, and identifying with, others, and to what extent they see themselves as separate and independant. I’ve explored this latter aspect in Parts 1and 2.
But another key issue for all of us is how we cope in the face of challenges, and how we adapt to change. Just as I have a map of body, mind and spirit in consideration of the kind of world a person lives in, so I have a map of coping strategies, and again there are three – action; control and withdrawal. Let me reiterate that this is a dynamic map and whilst some people almost always seem to default to the same strategy, most of us are more flexible and use each and all of these strategies to different degrees.
Let’s explore to activist – the person who when faced with a problem or a challenge, rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into it –
You can see it takes a certain self-belief to be able to cope with challenges this way!
We’ll have a look at control as a strategy in Part 4
This is Part 2 in a series. You’ll find Part 1 here.
One of the major ways of creating a sense of self is through group identity. We see this especially strongly in small towns and villages where there are very real, very active communities. What I mean by that is not just people who live in the same street or same town but people who work together, play together, live together. Communities of people who share values and traditions which bond them together. I gave an example of such a community in the Part 1 of this series where I showed a clip about Hobbits. Well, hobbits are, of course, imaginary creatures, and some people find it hard to identify with fantasy so here are two clips from a movie entitled “Brassed Off”. This is an at times funny, at times tragic tale of a mining community in the north of England. It’s set in the Thatcher years when the coal mines were being closed down and these communities were being destroyed. A characteristic of these northern towns was the brass band. It was just one of the ways the community bonded. Mining towns would regularly have brass band contests – like this –
You can feel the spirit of these people and how the music, the beer and the comraderie created a cohesive, group identity.
The band leader is called Danny and in one scene he has a heart attack and as he lies, seemingly dying, in his hospital bed his band gather outside and pay their respects, by playing “Danny Boy”
Oops! I should’ve warned you to have your tissues ready! Moving, isn’t it? It’s probably the only time a brass band has moved me to tears!
Think back to the character we saw at the start of About a Boy. Can you imagine that he would have the same needs, the same desires and the same experience as these characters in this tale?
We are all different in so many ways and, in health care, to find the best treatment for someone, we have to discover who this person is who has this particular disease. Otherwise we’re probably going to fail to help them to recover.
I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the talk. I hope you like them.
TWO QUESTIONS FOR ALL DOCTORS
I think the core of a doctor’s job is to try and understand people. One thing I find helpful in that regard is to have two questions at the back of my head during every consultation –
What kind of world does this person live in?
How does this person cope?
With the first question, I’m trying to understand what’s important to the person and how they create a sense of self. I won’t go into this in much more detail just now but one well-known way of viewing the world is through the triad of body, mind and spirit. I find that quite helpful. We can consider each of these as a focus and for every one of us we can place ourselves on the this map – the body, mind, spirit map.
For the purposes of understanding where someone lives on this map, I think that the body represents the physical. These are people to whom physical security and physical reality are paramount. They prioritise material issues and they tend to prefer to have a rational, logical approach to problems – you’ve probably heard someone say “Don’t give me your touchy-feely nonsense!” when asked to discuss how they are feeling. Utility and practicality are their key values. For others, emotional security is more important. They are very aware of feelings and of relationships. They see themselves in relation to others. The third focus is spiritual and by this I mean the need to make sense of the world and the idea that there is something greater than each of us as individuals. This might be religious but it might not. What is important to that person is that they need to have a sense of purpose.
This map, by the way, is not a set of boxes into which people should be placed. The map is more like a map of three areas or neighbouring countries with flexible, moving, overlapping borders. Some people spend all their lives in only one of the countries but most move around!
This, for me, is a fundamental way of creating a sense of self – a way of answering the “who am I?” question. But related to this there is another way, which is how we see ourselves in relation to others. For all of us we live with a tension of two opposites – the need to be separate, unique, individual AND the need to belong, to love and be loved, to identify with others. I say this is related because I find that often the physically-focussed person is more towards the pole of individuality and separateness and the emotionally-focussed towards the pole of identification with others.
So take a look at this movie clip and listen the main character’s monologue. Here is a man who has a sense of being self-contained and who is materially-focussed.
“I am Ibiza!”
To see the opposite pole, have a look at this clip. Here are people whose sense of identity comes from the community –
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”
These are two good examples of very different ways of experiencing the world, different sets of priorities and different ways of creating a sense of self.
OK, so some of you will be saying hobbits?? They’re not real! But, trust me, the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy isn’t real either! But let me address that in Part 2 where I’ll show a couple of clips from one of my favourite movies, Brassed Off, which is set in a Northern English mining community. You can compare that to the lifestyle of the hobbits in the Shire.
I stumbled upon this news item. It’s the story of Pfizer, an $8.5 billion law-suit and the Nigerian government. It’s one of those sad tales of a drug company testing out a new drug developed in Africa. The drug concerned is Trovan and the case relates back to 1996 when an epidemic of meningitis was raging in Kano, Nigeria. Pfizer gave Trovan to 100 children and another “proven” treatment for meningitis to another 100. Nigeria alleges that the deaths of 11 children and permanent health problems of many others were the result of Pfizer’s trial. Whatever the truth of the matter, and however the trial turns out, it raises an issue which is highly contentious which is the use of poor African’s in drug trials conducted by multi-nationals. The original story was broken by the Washington Post.
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Heroes Not Zombies 