therapy at oscars

‘The Snow Society’ (2023) is the fifth feature film by José Antonio Bayona and the twenty-first Spanish film nominated for the Hollywood Oscar as Best International Film, which is why it will compete at the ceremony on Sunday, March 10. Held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Additionally, the film is nominated in the Best Makeup and Hairstyling section – the first time a Spanish film has achieved this feat. The crude film swept the recent Goya Awards and won 12 awards, including the Goya Award for Best Film. To date, only four of the 20 nominated Spanish films have won the award: “Restart” (1983) by José Luis García, “Belle Epoque” (1993) by Fernando Trueba, “All About My Mother” (1993) by Pedro Almodóvar ( 1999) and “The Sea Inside” (2004) by Alejandro Amenabar. In almost all of them, like in JA Bayona’s film, medicine has been the protagonist. In “Start Again,” the first Spanish film to win an Oscar, Antonio Miguel Albajarra (Antonio Ferrandis), a Spanish writer living in the United States, returns to Spain to say goodbye as he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. In “All About My Mother”, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is a nurse who works in a transplant unit. When her teenage son dies in an accident, her hospital colleagues demand his organs. “See Inside” tells of the last days of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), a quadriplegic for 28 years. Ramon Sampedro begs for the end of his life. Seeing the impossibility of achieving this, his friends help him to die. “Belle Epoque” is the only one that has no medical theme. Focusing more on paying tribute to Billy Wilder, when Fernando Trueba received the Oscar he thanked him saying: “I would like to believe in God and thank him. But I only believe in Billy Wilder, so thank you, Mr. Wilder, The next day, Billy Wilder called her and when she answered the phone she said: “Hello Fernando, I am God, José Antonio Bayona has also contacted medical attention. In his first film, “The Orphanage” (2007), a couple adopts an HIV-positive child, an example of generosity. “The Impossible” (2012) is based on the true story of Maria Belon, a Spanish doctor who was a victim of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, starring Naomi Watts in the film. The hero will suffer various types of injuries, so the seriously injured Maria will have to undergo surgery on her leg. In the delicious “A Monster Comes to See Me” (2016), 13-year-old teenager Connor O’Malley’s (Lewis MacDougall) mother (Felicity Jones) is seriously ill. He has to go to the hospital regularly to receive chemotherapy. Connor gets help from a demon (Liam Neeson) to overcome his fears.

Hollywood and medicine

Hollywood has always loved great drama and extreme characters, which is why Medicine has presented it with numerous stories and characters, many of which have won the Golden Statuette, the most precious film award. As an example, a film from recent decades that won the Oscar for Best Picture and made medicine (or disease) the protagonist: “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), starring Dustin Hoffman, sick with tuberculosis; “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), which portrays the inhumanity of old asylums; “The Force of Affection” (1985), where the hero dies of cancer; “The English Patient” (1996), the story of a man seriously injured during the war; “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), a biography of mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe) and his paranoid schizophrenia; “The King’s Speech” (2010), about King George VI’s (Colin Firth) stuttering difficulties; Or the recent “CODA” (2021), about a deaf family with only one hearing member.

“The Snow Society”

“The Snow Society” tells the story of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountain range in 1972, where 45 crew and passengers were traveling, including the Old Christians Club rugby team traveling with their friends and family. Was. After 72 days in extreme conditions and temperatures in the Andes, only 16 travelers survived. This story has already been published in the popular “Viven!” Had been filmed in. (1993), starring Ethan Hawke, and “Survivors of the Andes” (1976). In addition, several documentaries have been made, including “Noufragos: I come from a plane that fell in the mountains” (2007) or “I’m Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash” (2010). Then why did JA Bayona want to undertake this ambitious project? After reading Pablo Virsi’s book, JA Bayona thought the story could be told in a different way. In addition to introducing more realism, I wanted to give prominence to those who did not survive, rather than those who survived, as had been done so far. With the passage of time the dead have been forgotten and have not received the same recognition as the survivors. For this reason, the protagonist is Numa Turkati (Enzo Vogrinsic), a law student and the last to die in flight. After the accident, the survivors have to organize themselves to move forward. Those who are better off take care of the weakest and sickest. The first 33 survivors are several medical students, among them Roberto Canessa (Matias Recalt) and Gustavo Zerbino (Tomas Wolf). Roberto and Gustavo, being in their second year of medicine and only 19 years old, are forced to take care of the sick, doing triage among them, that is, giving priority to the most serious, but with the potential to recover. He has to take care, among others, of Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella), who suffered a skull fracture and was in a coma for several days, Enrique Platero (Federico Aznarez), who suffered a serious stomach injury because a steel pipe had entered his body. is trapped, or Alfredo Pancho Delgado (Valentino Alonso), who suffers serious leg injuries. Gustavo Zerbino is also in charge of saving the personal belongings of the deceased, giving them to their families so that they are not forgotten. Numa turned 25 while he was waiting to be rescued. He is one of the leaders of the group and helps in all their expeditions in search of food or aid. Unfortunately after an accident he developed an infection in his leg, rendering him immobile. The viewer realizes that this is the beginning of his end. Numa dies in his sleep and like everyone else, he too becomes completely silent. Gustavo Zerbino tells in his lectures that before he died Numa Turcatti wrote on a piece of paper: “There is no greater love than the love that gives one’s life for one’s friends.”, from the Gospel of St. John. JA Bayona has shown this in the film. In 1973, the Numa team was renamed “Numa Turkatti”.

Was anthropology justified?

“The Snow Society” raises important medical questions, such as triage in an emergency or the special responsibilities of doctors (and even medical students) in serious situations. But the main ethical dilemma we face is whether, in extreme survival situations, it is appropriate to violate norms we thought could not be compromised, such as eating your fellow human beings. to feed. In the film we see how the survivors, suffering from thirst and hunger (they soon ran out of limited supplies), extreme cold and snow storms, wounds and infections, know that the end is near. Some people eat their own skin, which falls off due to malnutrition. On the verge of exhaustion, the only source of calories available are the bodies of dead colleagues, friends and relatives, so a dilemma arises: survive by resorting to cannibalism, or respect the corpses. Faced with this dilemma, many people argue that there is no other solution, but others point out that it is against the law, that it is not moral or that it is contrary to religion, that it is a sin. The second counterargument is that the dead have not given their consent to have their flesh eaten. Finally, some people go a step further and decide to open their bodies to extract protein and calories. Some passengers who refused anthropomorphism eventually agreed to avoid dying. There are also people who say that, if they die, they can use their bodies as food. The crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountain range in 1972 was not the first case of anthropogenesis, nor would it be the last. roger w byrd⁽¹⁾ In a recent review he described how cannibalism, the consumption of one individual of the same species by another, is a widespread practice among many animal groups. Human cannibalism or cannibalism, however, is less common, but has been found in very diverse groups, from hominids to medieval crusaders, in prisoners of completely isolated prisons or in soldiers during World War II, especially Stalingrad. In the front. According to Roger W. Byrd, the motivation for consuming human tissues, whose taste is similar to that of pork according to evidence, may be: nutrition, simply for survival, as there is no other source of nutrition; Rituals, described in some prehistoric and primitive groups (for example, from Brazil or the Gambia), or even in cases of ritual killings; Pathological, due to a mental illness, is very rarely described in patients with mixed personality disorder with sadistic and psychopathic traits associated with severe schizophrenia or paraphilias. According to Raymond S. and others⁽²⁾For the schizophrenia group, cannibalism is a self-defensive response to the perceived threat of destruction: survival depends on the destruction or assimilation of the other. For the mixed personality disorder group, narcissism and narcissism are the main themes, along with a desire to overcome deep-seated frustrations through an extraordinary act. If we go back to the cinema, “The Snow Society” would be a case of nutritional anthropology, “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980) would be a case of ritual anthropology, horrified by the cannibalism of an Amazonian tribe, and the psychopath Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) of pathological anthropophagy. Leaving aside the residual cases of mental disorders and ritual anthropology, the main question that JA Bayona’s film raises is whether nutritional anthropology can be justified. Certainly, in an orderly society this would be contrary to the laws, it is probably prohibited by many religions and to many people it would be a violation of morality. However, the boundaries of morality are not fixed and circumstances can shake them. Furthermore, in an orderly society where laws are enforced, extreme situations do not arise due to which one has to choose between eating human flesh or dying. Therefore, normal legal or ethical norms cannot be applied to the situation that arises in “The Snow Society”. At such times, specific circumstances dictate what is right. And in the end, as shown in the film, each person has to choose. We cannot escape our personal responsibility.

And the winners are…

Filmed in the Sierra Nevada and Andes at the actual site of the crash, “The Snow Society” was filmed in chronological order so that the actors would lose weight bit by bit and experience the effects of starvation. Furthermore, to deepen the sense of loss, characters who died disappeared from filming forever. “The Snow Society” is an action and dramatic film. Epic and adventure cinema. Good cinema which also forces us to think. On March 10, “The Snow Society” will have to compete with “Perfect Days” (Japan), Wim Wenders’s fourth Oscar nomination, “The Hot Spot” (United Kingdom), “I Captain” (Italy) and “The Will happen. Teacher’s Room” (Germany). All four are good films, but the biggest rival for JA Bayona would be “Perfect Days”, because the United States is indebted to the great Wim Wenders, who made American films like “Paris, Texas” (1984) or “The Friend American” (1977). Despite everything, our hearts are with JA Bayona and the passengers and crew of Flight 571.

⁽¹⁾ Byrd RW. Cannibalism-Observations and Medicolegal Issues. Forensic Sci Med Pathol. 2023 Jun;19(2):281-287.

⁽²⁾ Raymond S, Leger AS, Gasman I. Psychopathological profile of cannibalism: a review of five cases. J Forensic Sci. 2019 Sep;64(5):1568-1573.