“You cannot imagine how time can be so still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly. And yet it is so scarce.” (Vivian Bearing, Wit)

Last night, in a small, dimly lighted theater in Frontenac, Jerram Barrs introduced the movie Wit (referral link). The audience consisted of 20 Covenant Theological Seminary board members, a dozen faculty and staff, and as many students and alumni.

Wit is a film about Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson), a professor of John Donne’s 17th Century poetry. The film begins with the announcement that she has cancer, and the story follows the remainder of her days. Vivian’s character development, intellectual assent and physical decline, center on the poem by Donne, “Death Be Not Proud.”

Jerram commented as introduction, “The poem by Donne is [perceived] a paradox, but not really. It sounds like a paradox, but for the Christian it is the ushering into glory. It’s harrowing. Be prepared to be moved, dealing with questions of death and suffering.”

The Film
The very first words of the film, spoken by Dr. Harvey Kelekian, are, “You have cancer.” No name. No recognition of the human element under duress of the “insidious…treacherous” news of cancer: just the mechanical diagnosis of disease. This inhuman treatment, developed throughout the film in the behavior of most every doctor (most of them males), stands in direct contrast to the treatment of two women: a nurse, Susie Monahan, and Vivian’s professor, Evelyn Ashford. It is just one of the many demonstrative paradoxes that graphically illustrate the tension of Donne’s poem.

Kelekian and research assistant, Jason Posner—referred to largely as Jason—are painstakingly deliberate in their careless treatment of Vivian as a human being. And yet, they are the characters most reduced in their own humanity: singularly focused, shallow, and trapped in cause-effect thinking. This is further illustrated by the fact that, after the first appearance of each, they are almost universally referred to as “Kelekian and Jason”: two men not even worthy of having full names.

Jason, meaning “healer” in Greek, is anything but that. His bedside manner is nonexistent. He is crass, abrupt, and intrusive. At one point he bluntly states, “There’s a whole course on [bedside manner] in med school. It’s required. Colossal waste of time for researchers.”

Knowledge versus Meaning
For her part, Vivian stands between two poles of great magnitude. On the one side, her own lonely cynicism in Donne’s “paradox” finds voice in the person of Dr. Kelekian. To call him stoic or emotionless is inaccurate; he lacks compassion, but then seems to take great delight in urging Vivian on toward “the full dose,” with a pat and a feigned smile. On the other side is Vivian’s own professor, Evelyn Ashford—a woman who, in the words of Jerram, “gets it. She understands Donne’s faith in a way that Vivian never gets…until the end.”

The call of both is pronounced: