Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie.
It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.
For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.
She's beautiful too. And she's even layered on mascara and put on jewelry and posed in a shoulder-baring top so that her tattoo of a tree is on display. The ultimate influencer, influencing anyone and everyone to act on the perception that life is not worth living.
She says her psychiatrist told her something she now paraphrases as “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” And her response was, if so, then "I can’t do this anymore."
"This" = life itself.
***
I was watching "My Dinner With Andre" because it's a new month, and The Criterion Channel has its new sets of movies, it's "collections." I found "Andre" nestled amongst the movies in the "One Night" collection:
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70 comments:
People do pay to be castrated.
I loved the scene in As Good As It Gets where Jack Nicholson utters the line that gave the movie it's name--"have any of you ever considered that this is as good as it gets?"
It did occur to me that someone in that room might commit suicide in response, but it did not occur to me that the state may help them do it.
Great One Night movie: "The Warriors"
Zoraya ter Beek has an appointment with death, but she doesn't have to keep it.
Since she's going through her narrative arc in public, there's reason to suspect/hope that she'll find the will to live.
It's important not to make a show of expressing this suspicion, because you don't want to put her in a place where she needs to kill herself to prove her integrity.
The doctor really takes her time. It is not that they walk in and say: lay down please! Most of the time it is first a cup of coffee to settle the nerves and create a soft atmosphere.
If it’s instant I think I found the problem…
…on the other hand if it’s dutch coffee that’s strong stuff. Maybe a decaf experiment before you confirm the grim reaper appointment?
Two cats? No wonder life isn't worth living.
"To Be or Not To Be", the old is new again.
I love "Cleo From 5 to 7", but 5-7pm is not "night". That's been bugging me since the CC announced this collection. LOL.
Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend,
When all else fails, being of service to others is a basic human need.
If you want to feel better, do service work. I friend of mine maintains a couple blocks of flower baskets hanging from the lamp posts. Waters, weeds, prunes. He does it early in the morning, so he doesn't attract attention. He is a retired Professional.
She is autistic, so she has her experience and strength she can share with other. Being of service to other autistic will improve her view of the world. Mostly you feel exactly the way you want to feel.
IF she is clinically depressed, she can't be making an informed decision about ending her own life.
Fifteen Minutes of Fame!
I agree with our host.
My comment was before I read your 7:46 comment.
Yes, self-inflicted trauma is better than apparently natural traumas that may be somehow controlled by the patriarchy. You know, traumas like being born, having sex when you're inexperienced or not in the mood, the Curse of Eve, and death. The only real answer is some pure expression of the autonomous self in a void.
With all the new research on how physical exercise breath control and psychedelics can knock down depression and anxiety, one wonders if they have exhausted all possible options.
This chick's so thirsty I don't see any way she goes through with her suicide threat. I've been trying to avoid her story but it's everywhere and the more I hear the less sense it makes. Other than attention-seeking, that is. Social media is a social disease and a mental illness inducer.
It sounds like Nietzsche's Nihilism is starting to hit folks full force now. If euthanasia weren't offered by Government in it's clean, orderly, and normal manner it is presented today, would she even have considered death as an option?
He should have said "there's nothing more *I* can do for you."
@Vault Dweller at 8:03, we are so there.
And I'm concerned - as a person with depression in my family and three young adult kids who don't live close enough for me to mother-hen them all the time - that, just as the process for transing up someone has gone from deliberate and careful to freewheeling and nearly instant, all too soon will come the day when you go to your euthanasia consult and they end it twenty minutes later with a needle in your arm.
one wonders if they have exhausted all possible options
That's a thoughtful comment from Howard. I did wonder that, and then rejected it because she took the "look at me look at me!" route, which informs my common sense to answer, "No."
No she has not exhausted all other options. People here have already suggested how she could be less selfish by paying more attention to her loved ones instead of her need for attention. Suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness, and others feel the pain far more than the "victim" as I have personally experienced. If the person contemplating it can be partially redirected to consider others' needs instead of focusing so intently inward there's hope for them to survive the events and circumstances that brought them to this point.
I guarantee others are already informing her how much pain her exit would give them since we've all been exposed to her date with destiny by now. I think we are witnessing someone who will become an vocal advocate for "surviving" after the initial media attention dies down. If I'm wrong at least her exit plan will not be used to pad the false "gun violence" stats that are far less shocking once suicides and accidents are deducted from the annual total. See I've already found the bright side to either outcome!
Live life! Love others!
It sounds like Nietzsche's Nihilism is starting to hit folks full force now. If euthanasia weren't offered by Government in it's clean, orderly, and normal manner it is presented today, would she even have considered death as an option?
No. This is why I oppose it every time it's proposed. Death loves a slippery slope! Just look at Trudeau's dystopia north of here. Senicide is practically mandated now.
That girl in the car with Ted Kennedy was just trying to get attention but she took it a little too far.
See the last act of Zardoz (1974), and the population control method of Logan's Run (1976).
Life imitates dystopian art.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/plotsummary/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
"Ophelia, she's 'neath the window for her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic she wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion, her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row"
"borderline personality disorder."
1. Canada is murdering autistic people.
2. The child mutilation and sterilization trend is one of the biggest moral failures of my lifetime. The future University of Nebraska President is going to be hearing from Begley, in person, on this very issue.
3. "Where did Alex's hope go? Maybe that is the small resolution we can take from here today. To try and regain that hope that must have eluded Alex." From "The Big Chill."
""It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.""
Is that how much angry white moms are paying doctors to inject their young boys with puberty blockers?
The spectacle of these witches parading around with their children's sexual organs on a stick proclaiming how virtuous they are for "helping" their(mostly male) children become damaged sexless cripples and eunuchs is enough to make me reconsider my stance on the Death Penalty.
"After Hours" and "Night on Earth" are two of my old favorites, kind of in the same niche.
It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.
Ten years from today you'll probably have to pay somebody $10,000 in cash under the table to avoid being affected by an official castration order.
She had wanted to be a psychiatrist but because of depression she had to give up on that career goal. Pity. Think of all the people she could have guided to an early death if she had completed her training. Apparently though she was able to seek out a like minded physician......I've seen people die of cancer. I think euthanasia should be valid option, but not for this.... I believe in imprecise reasoning and muddled compromises. To my way of thinking, morning after pills and first trimester abortions are different than killing a viable fetus or snipping a newborn's spinal column on the delivery table. There's a difference between psychic pain and physical pain although, to be sure, both are real.... I'm with Schopenhauer. Life by its very nature is a depressing experience. We can sometimes have these transient moments of happiness between bouts of depression and disappointment,but it all ends in death and futility anyway. The lark at break of day arising from sullen earth ends tangled in the talons of the hawk. Not a cheering thought, but there are lots of good things to eat and the occasional good show on Netflix. You don't need anything especially sublime or transformative to make life worth living. It just happens if you stick around. Depression is just as transient as happiness.
tim maguire said...
People do pay to be castrated.
earth to tim.. this is a wake up call! You are obviously in a coma.
Please wake up and look around.
She's not beautiful (since the topic came up).
Nietzsche called himself a nihilist . . . and tried to get beyond it.
This woman is just pathetic.
three young adult kids who don't live close enough for me to mother-hen them all the time
Maybe you are attempting sarcasm or have tongue firmly in cheek, if so ignore me.
Mothering must take place when they are children. The beauty of male/female pairs rearing little humans, is both sexes are REQUIRED to do the job. My wife is an excellent Mother, and better grandmother. She is in full mothering, nurturing, providing, protecting, insulating mode 24/7. Me on the other hand always leaving out more lead, giving them more opportunity to make poor decisions and experience the outcomes. More than once I was in hot water with mom, because I knew what might happen, but allowed them to go forward. But when they are young, the consequences were never life altering. But sometimes I WAS out of line and should have taken a different approach. I learned, Mom learned the kids learned. But at the core it takes a Mother AND Father to get them to 18.
"as a parent we are to give our children, roots and wings.... with wings, being the most difficult".
If I watch another one in that collection, I think it's going to be "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which I haven't seen in over 50 years.
I might like to watch "Night on Earth" again. I've seen that at least twice.
I'd watch "Mikey and Nicky," and I'm actually not sure if I've seen it. I've seen a few Cassavetes movies.
I love "After Hours," but it's not time for a rewatch yet, though I'm up for watching the scenes with Teri Garr at all times.
"Before Sunrise" is a movie I've gone out of my way to avoid watching. I think if I forced myself, I'd bail in less than 5 minutes. I've heard so many people push this movie, and I would have thought it's something I'd like, but something about it very actively repels me. The actress? The actor? The assumption that a foreign city is a compelling star in its own right? I don't even really know if that's the assumption. I'm assuming it's the assumption!
If men wanna go early, there’s always the Benny Hill route.
"$10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."
Why pay? Better try and make $100K being affected by social media celebrity.
I just hope, as a species, that we can soon get over this fad of needing to constantly push the boundaries of what is considered normal. Wanting to be put to death is not, and never can be, normal.
Carving, appending, grooming, and self-abortion are milestones in social pathology.
They are doing it NOW!!
with two cats in the yard,
life used to be so hard
now everything is easy, because of you…thanasia
It was not too long ago that a certain segment of our population was very concerned about a fellow that took an unexpected amount of time to meet his maker via nitrogen gas. It is contended that there is a dearth of humane methods to execute folks so we should not do it. Apparently the Dutch have figured it out. We could ask them or possibly our neighbors to the north. I think I read that for the last year they had statics, 11,000 Canadians were sent on their way using MAID.
I'm glad I can source maple syrup locally.
When I read that story of the Dutch girl with borderline personality disorder, I thought to myself that her psychiatrist found a convenient way to get rid of a difficult patient.
I have seen all of those movies except for "Oslo August 31st".
I can't do anything more but recommend "Before Sunrise" once again, but I have had a long-time crush on Delpy so maybe that clouds my judgement.
All persons wanting the state to off them should first be required to read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."
Choice:
(1) Kill oneself by jumping off a building;
(2) Be administered IV drugs in a medical setting, probably using other drugs to make the experience emotionally pain-free.
The second option is a catalyst to induce death and should draw major moral opprobrium. The people offering this poor woman this pathway to death are no better than murderers.
Howard: "With all the new research on how physical exercise breath control and psychedelics can knock down depression and anxiety, one wonders if they have exhausted all possible options."
Stop playing dumb. You know perfectly well this advanced stage republic destroying whacked out leftyism, THE dominant strain running the entirety of the democratical "lets commit national suicide" party, is quite literally incapable of even conceptualizing any other pathway.
You might as well just ask them "whats a woman?" and watch them melt into a pile of goo.
Everyone has a reason to live, that being to serve others.
Realizing that got me through some tough times (though not of the suicidal sort).
Narr, you are being ugly and pathetic. The girl is mentally ill and no one is stepping up to help her out of the abyss. The fucked up world of modern psychology, social media enablers and a compliant boyfriend are conspiring to allow a homicide. It's an awful situation, she's circling the drain, and shit stain asswhipes keep flushing the toilet.
I will do it for $5k.
Well, somebody will do it, I'll just be the broker.
That sounds nasty.
I just watched Mikey and Nicky recently. It's intense (as you'd expect from Cassavetes and Falk) with a script written by director Elaine May. Fascinating, but not something I'd want to return to very often; it's all a bit too much. As the New York Times said at the time, "It's nearly two hours of being locked in a telephone booth with a couple of method actors...".
If they can specify that euthanasia is available to only democrats, liberals, and 'In this house we believe...' folks, I say full speed ahead!
She had wanted to be a psychiatrist but because of depression she had to give up on that career goal.
Perhaps cause and effect have been reversed here. Almost without exception the psychology and psychiatry majors I have known were all emotionally distressed people hoping to self-diagnose once they gained enough knowledge. Of the people I know who entered those professions, mental instability seems to be higher than average.
A great (but sadly overlooked) movie on the theme of one night and suicide is Last Call (not the 2002 one with Jeremy Irons or the 2021 one with Jeremy Piven; this is the 2019 one with Sarah Booth and David Wilkins). On Amazon it only seems to be available with ads (God I hate when they do that) but it’s streaming on Peacock if you have that.
Just what exactly is bottom surgery for a male transexual? It's castration. There's other things involved, but that's it. And often, before the full surgery they'll get the castration part in order to stop those nasty male hormones from affecting them.
And- they'll never be female. No matter how many operations or public praise for how brave they are for living their fantasy life. And their suicide rate- which could, I suppose, be called self euthanasia, will be significantly higher then the rest of the population S they fail to live out their allotted three score and ten.
"Zoraya ter Beek, 28, expects to be euthanized in early May.
Her plan, she said, is to be cremated."
Sounds like a hard way to go.
I don't get the Criterion Collection but I did rewatch Bubba HoTep last night. A classic tale of a man's redemption through self-sacrifice and taking care of business with an improvised flame thrower.
Plus mummies and Bruce Campbell in his prime. Probably not on the Althouse viewing list.
We're on the slippery slope to killing the marginalized and "useless" humans. Look at Canada where 4% of deaths are govt sponsored suicide. Look at Ezekiel Emmanuel the medical ethicist who thinks life over 75 isn't worth living and is for euthanasia. The slippery slope arguments always seem to come true. That's how we get gay porn and transvestites in our grammar schools. The hurting people need help, not euthanasia.
Howard said . . . a bunch of words.
Go take a pill, Howard.
Or light a candle.
"I just watched Mikey and Nicky recently. It's intense (as you'd expect from Cassavetes and Falk) with a script written by director Elaine May. Fascinating, but not something I'd want to return to very often; it's all a bit too much. As the New York Times said at the time, "It's nearly two hours of being locked in a telephone booth with a couple of method actors..."."
I recently rewatched "Husbands" (with Cassavetes and Falk... plus Ben Gazarra).
I don't think I've seen "Husbands". I find that summoning up the nerve to watch a Cassavetes movie is even more difficult than it is for a Jane Campion movie.
On a serious note, if the woman was truly clinically depressed it is highly unlikely that she would be out in public with this. Doesn't fit the pattern.
In 1970, in a film class, Charles Champlin got Cassavetes and Falk to screen Husbands, which is loaded w/improv. They were like two monkeys.
for folk that have been sleeping for the last SEVERAL Years
The puberty blocker “Lupron” given to kids is the same drug used to chemically castrate pedophiles
Technically, Lupron is a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist used to treat prostate cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis, and uterine fibroids. It has also been used in the past to chemically castrate pedophiles. It is now being used off-label – having never been approved by the FDA or Health Canada – to stop puberty in kids who want to change their sex. It stops the production of testosterone in boys and estrogen in girls.
Trans folk will continue taking their "puberty blockers" (chemical castraters) until they have bottom surgery
Several good choices to be had from the One Night collection. Even though I plan to watch some of those I've not seen, I have already re-enjoyed "My Dinner with Andre" and "After Hours."
I don't have a time-for-a-rewatch standard before viewing movies again. If it's available and I'm still interested I will go ahead and watch it. It's hard to tell how long movies like these, not to mention the Criterion Channel, will be generally available.
I looked at the list of movies in the Criterion Collection. The must influential one was undoubtedly George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". It's hard to believe but there once was a time when there were no zombie movies. Nowadays only a few movies are made without zombie, mass extinction events. The drama and narrative interest of all the movies on the Criterion list would be improved with a few zombie, brain eating interludes to rev up their slow patches.
The fucked up world of modern psychology, social media enablers and a compliant boyfriend are conspiring to allow a homicide
Except for the homicide, that is exactly what is going on with minor children, absorbed by the social contagion of "gender identity.
Society is conspiring to fuck over children. Why? Because the pedophiles that populate the gay fetish parade are supported by the alphabet fetish group.
Never got the Cassavetes aesthetic. Although Gena Rowlands, in her hay day, was an exceptionally beautiful woman with brains and strength. They did do a nice episode of Columbo.
I’m getting a Meet John Doe vibe from this Dutchess
What Howard said, about Cassavetes and Rowlands.
I have more sympathy for her boyfriend and cats than I do her.
You need to be approximately the age of the characters in the Before Sunrise trilogy when you watch in order to appreciate them. And they occur about 10 years apart. So for you to start with the first one at age 70 would be pointless.
Male viewers all fall for Delpy. I don't know what women see in the Ethan Hawke character. He seems like a jerk.
Brings to mind Andy Warhol's "10 minutes of fame". Perhaps her short-term fame will provide her sufficient incentive to remain alive.
Add this story to large body of evidence that confirms social medium is destructive to human mental health.
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