Something the Lord Made, an HBO original production which premiered in the US in 2004, will premier in Taiwan on HBO on Tuesday. It is supposed to be an uplifting tear-jerker about two men who defy racism to accomplish miracles. Fortunately, it's much, much better than that. As Alan Rickman plays him, Dr. Alfred Blalock, who pioneered open-heart surgery, initially for the treatment of blue babies, is an ambiguous hero. And he's not just cosmetically ambiguous, as so many movie heroes are, their bad qualities (messiness, a taste for Champagne) being little more than charm.
He's simply not charming. Rickman's Blalock has a venal air, an oleaginous, even faintly lecherous manner and a cloying self-regard that appears to blind him at times to the very existence of other people. Rickman deserves praise for forfeiting the opportunity to play an attractive Southern gentleman; he does not muck up his performance with cuteness.
By contrast, his partner in surgery, Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), is cute: charming, kind and physically agile, with a knack for dignified deference of the kind that possibly characterized model black men during segregation days, when much of this movie is set. But Thomas is also depressed, almost fatally. Blalock hires him in the Depression-era South, first as a janitor and then as a lab tech-nician, for which Thomas is evidently supposed to be grateful. Grateful? He tirelessly earns every promotion with technical work and medical insights that go largely uncredited. He submits to Jim Crow, refraining from using the hospital's front door. And he's paid virtually nothing, US$16 a week for 16 hours a day, as he says, working after hours at Blalock's whites-only cocktail parties to make ends meet.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HBO
It's grinding racism; it's unjust. But the movie underscores the real problem that torments Thomas: Why is he supposed to be grateful? Because Blalock doesn't run from him in horror? As Blalock's only interest is in rising to prominence as a surgeon, why imagine that anything but pure opportunism led him to exploit the intelligence and surgical talents of his teenage janitor? We need not. That's it. Blalock wanted fame, and he took on a black man who helped him develop his most important procedures, a surgical assistant who gives him instructions in the operating room. For not going to ludicrous lengths to conceal Thomas's achievements though he didn't trumpet them, either he's not due gratitude. All that would be clear if it weren't for one catch: Thomas loves the work. He loves and Mos Def pulls this off the euphoria of medical discovery. He loves, just as Blalock does, the surgeon's high. And, without a medical degree or the time or money to pursue one, he can get that high only by Blalock's side.
A cornier movie would twist this logic to let Thomas have both, somehow: his freedom from patronage and his accomplishments. But here he has to choose. Can he forfeit his pride, even his humanity, for the joy of good work?
Something the Lord Made is based on a true story, and it faithfully tracks the rise of both Blalock and Thomas. But along the way, the weepy movie raises true moral stakes, the ones in good fiction, and they make the tears the film works to inspire feel more real.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HBO
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist