Everyone loves a good bad guy
Cancer as a villain and a hero's journey towards understanding
This prose stuff is new to me. As perhaps over-mentioned, my previous professional writing has been of the screenwriting variety. Which makes this style new but writers write and I’d like to think muscle memory is helping. Here I can relax a bit. I can dust off the vocabulary and not worry about formatting so much. Everything in screenwriting is “pace”, no one is luxuriating in the prose.
Screenwriting is also structure. More pejoratively, it is formula. And while all storytelling follows certain elemental equations, film and television demand it due to sitting directly at the intersection of art and commerce.
Per structure, good guys are good and bad guys are bad. You begin there and adjust your profit margins and/or “makeability” accordingly, as the story threatens to veer off into potentially more interesting realms of nuance.
But I’m being knowingly obtuse. To pit art against commerce is a tale of good vs. evil too well and willingly told elsewhere, and I won’t bite the hand that feeds. It is a binary built into our brains that helps us order the world (for better or for worse).
And to the benefit of this newsletter, cancer will always be the biggest, worst “bad guy”.
When I was a kid, the frightening corners of the world drew my attention far easier than the bright ones. Asked to write or draw about the things that scared me and pages would be filled with sharks and ghosts and open, dark doors. Danger is and was alluring. And for me it has always been easier to write a villain than a hero.
But now I’ve grown up and the bad guys have gone grey. The Darth Vader’s have been revealed to be fathers and the ghosts and ghouls have all been revealed to be past trauma. And in Hollywood, there is no character more beloved than the sympathetic antagonist.
They are the bad guys we can relate to. They tickle the funny bone of our own fallibility, give some grace to our own penchant for misdeeds, and play into a fantastical bit of “what if”. On some base level, done right, it gets at the “I could fix them” (or be them) mentality that is fun to indulge.
But villains are bad guys and “bad” is subjective. Studio and producer notes often enlighten this sliding scale of evil. Everyone’s “evil” looks and acts different, but in most cases, people have recoiled from anything too “arch”. An archvillain is anyone too obviously bad. Think of the mustachioed man with a damsel-in-distress tied to the train tracks with a locomotive bearing down.
Cancer is an archvillain and so its sympathy is derived from its experience—more akin to a disaster movie. You can hate a volcano or tidal wave, but its defeat is based on your survival, not necessarily stopping its creation.
And so choose your cancer movie of choice and the disease really serves as catalyst, demanding our heroes or supporting cast reckon with mortality, friendship, marriage, love, and/or fate. Showcased as it is, cancer becomes a sympathy machine. In survival (very few movies) or death (pretty much the rest of them), cancer is not necessarily to be defeated—but rather accepted and grown from (more like groaned from, amirite?).
The word “bad” is always put under a microscope, demanding to be sculpted into something more specific.
“Bad” is an adjective and from the moment we are taught about adjectives, we are taught that “bad” is a bad one. “Bad” becomes public enemy number one for red ink— there is always a better more incisive word to be used. While “fast” and “big” are simply overlooked as lazy choices, there is something punitive to being caught using “bad”. It has a certain vengeful schoolteacher image tied to it, as if a scolding is not enough (Bad!), it is also wholly incorrect.
“Bad” is bad because it is generic, but also because it is important to know what you’re dealing with. Is the bad guy, gal, or creature evil? Deranged? Duplicitous? Vengeful? Untrustworthy? Or merely misunderstood? Can we understand why they are doing that terrible thing they are doing? What is their motivation?
Cancer has no motivation beyond being a mistake (mutation) in your genes. It does not care about killing you. It’s a stretch to say that it “likes” what it is doing— it only “likes” what it is doing in the way that fires “likes” oxygen. Osmosis Jones is a piece of classic cinema, but it’s probably dubious to assign morality to cellular behavior.
Cancer is untrustworthy not because it has a secret agenda beneath its murderous rampage— sometimes it just changes its mind and there is no satisfactory explanation (though hematologists and oncologists will likely disagree on the subjective nature of “satisfactory”).
It’s introduction obliterates the world around you and yet you have lived with it your whole life; an ask for a one dollar donation at a CVS payment kiosk, a passing bit of small talk regarding a family friend, a look-away moment during a commercial for a children’s hospital— it is the Everest of bad news that fits in the palm of your hand.
And then the red ink comes in, crossing out cancer and demanding specificity. Down to individual phenotype mutations, the pursuit of cancer’s defeat demands more. Cancer’s specific iterations could fill a thesaurus, each body part and organ susceptible to some version of its tyranny.
For me, it was in the revision of cancer that it lost some of its edge. Even though versions of its villainy can be more dire, the attribution of stages of severity and survival rates giving numeric intensity in the way that Harrison Ford has had to deal with various, ascending “Defcon’s”— Knowledge and experience did in fact become power.
Specificity brought understanding, and at a much later date, perhaps some peace. Cancer remained in its most deadly boogeyman form on Day 1. That’s not to say it gets any easier for those of us who have had recurrences or years-later relapses. I write with fatigue and annoyance and a hopeful dash of bitterness, but the shadow of cancer has been illuminated into a discernible shape.
But I have recovered from the jump scare. I know too much. I know its inner workings and branching possibilities. The sense of adventure to vanquish my foe has been neutered into a more ambling character study where the stakes are cyclical and the end is the beginning is the end— but nice.
To imagine having to do battle with cancer again is to imagine the fourth movie in a trilogy. The plot is thin, the ideas are running out, and we’ll probably need to invent a new character/mcguffin/timeline to keep it interesting. Truthfully, I don’t want to see it and I don’t think anyone else does.
And yet… Like any good story, there is always the hope that, dammit if we have to do it (Writer’s note: maybe we reboot and follow a new main character… please?)— it could still be good. The stakes are built in. The primordial struggle between life and death has never failed to enthrall.
There is still a sense of satisfaction when the hero defeats the bad guy. And given that there is seemingly no end to this well-trod story popping up over and over again—there must be hope.
So cancer is a worthy villain. Its strength is in its broad appeal. Death has no better spokesperson. Untimely demise surely tests through the roof in focus groups when cancer’s name is shown. It is “arch” in its evil and is a better bad guy when it remains towering and undefined; the Eye of Sauron glaring and bleating, Michael Meyers faceless and relentless, Anton Chigurh emotionless and with a bad haircut.
I don’t like to talk about people “beating” cancer, or “winning” or “losing”, but cancer has no known cure, more “wins” than “losses”, and even in its “losses”, lingers in the minds and bodies of those who have won, incurring psychic damage until they begin writing about it.
But its beauty is in the aggregate experience, in the archetypal struggle. We who remain silo ourselves off into our communities, with all our own colored ribbons denoted by God-knows-who to attribute tribe and address. We are every imagined iteration of a hero attempting to defeat the same villain. The many questing after the one.
The framework of a hero’s journey has guided me until my experience has been rewritten into something more specific, and in fact, something more relatable (hopefully even a little bit boring). The epic has turned into a medical drama and the path to victory has been revealed to be sleep and stool softener.
But that first impression lingers, the journey to defeat the bad guy able to give meaning to another wave of heaving nausea, of fresh diagnosees, of post-cancer estrangement.
Cancer’s wildly arch form is its greatest weakness. There will never be a mountain too tall for us tiny humans to try and climb. While it is emotionless, uncaring, and blindly murderous— cancer, that little, dumb word, will never not be the bad guy. And so people will never not want to defeat it.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
“Skater”, Four Tet
I have been on hold with countless branches of various health insurance companies or ungainly hospital phone boards and am always delighted when this track plays. So when I listened to the new Four Tet album, I was delighted to hear that what sounded like my favorite hold music jam had been sampled.
It might not actually be the hold music sample, but the record’s been on rotation for writing this week and it brought back not-fond memories of disputing incorrect coding on health insurance claims, so… Enjoy? (this guy gets it)
And please confirm or deny if you have any idea what I’m talking about.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, please Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. But most of all, I would love to hear from whoever is reading.