Cinematic Representations of

Alzheimer’s Disease 1st ed. Edition

Raquel Medina
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CINEMATIC
REPRESENTATIONS
OF
ALZHEIMER’S
RAQUEL
MEDINA DISEASE
Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease
 Raquel Medina

Cinematic
Representations of
Alzheimer’s Disease
Raquel Medina
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University
Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-53370-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53371-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53371-5

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 To my sister Esther, my father, and my mother. Always with me.
To all the people living with Alzheimer’s disease, their families, and their
caregivers.
 Acknowledgements

Writing this book has taken longer than initially expected due to some of
the adversities I have had to endure over the past few years. Therefore,
my first thanks are for my husband, Dietrich Lüerßen, and my chil-
dren, Alicia and Adrián, for their unconditional support throughout the
not-so-good and not-so-happy times. Thanks for being there and for
believing in this project, even when I thought I would never finish it.
My gratitude also goes to Raquel Fernández Sánchez, Olga Castro, and
Aurelio Ramos Caballero, as they have always been there when I needed
them the most. Having the consistent presence and support of Professor
Barbara Zecchi, with whom I established the International Research
Network CinemAGEnder, has been key in shaping and sharpening my
approach to film and gender studies. Beverly Adab was a big part of this
project when she read and commented on the book proposal and the
sample chapter. Many friends and family members have been involved in
the process of writing this book, either directly or indirectly, so my grat-
itude goes to Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Marta Cerezo Moreno, Mercedes
Sastre, María José Gómez Amores, Itziar Martínez Tobar, Pilar Cruz
and Belén García Llamas; but especially to my brothers, Nacho and Luis,
and my sister Regina.
During the past few years, I have presented some of the analyses
included in this book at international conferences, which has given me
the opportunity to meet exceptional scholars and colleagues in the field
of ageing studies. Over the last year, I have had the pleasure of working
very closely with Dr. Sarah Falcus, with whom I co-direct the Dementia

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

and Culture Network and with whom I also organised the Dementia
and Culture Narratives Symposium that was held at Aston University
on 8 and 9 December 2017. Sarah has been very supportive through-
out the past few months, thus my gratitude. I would also like to express
my appreciation of my colleagues from the European Network in Aging
Studies (ENAS) and the North American Network in Aging Studies
(NANAS), whose knowledge is part of this book. Among them, special
thanks to Professor Aagje Swinnen, whose support has been invaluable.
The constructive feedback I received from the reviewers must be praised
and acknowledged, as well as the support from past and present editors
at Palgrave, especially Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman.
Aston University granted me a term without teaching in order to fin-
ish the monograph, which proved to be crucial. I am also thankful to my
colleague in the English Department, Nur Kurtoglu-Hooton, and her
brother-in-law, Dr. Ali Nihat Eken, for buying me a copy of the Turkish
film Pandora’s Box in Turkey. I am much obliged to the Catalan film-
maker Carla Subirana, whose film Nedar (2008) is part of this book.
Carla gave me a whole dossier about the film and indirectly convinced
me to include a chapter about historical memory and Alzheimer’s dis-
ease. My nephew Alvaro Medina Sánchez helped me with some of
the technical difficulties I faced, sometimes at very short notice. Vija
Mendelson was very helpful and made sure I had access to some essential
reading matter. Katy Bird played an essential role in the last stages of this
project; I wish her a wonderful life and professional career in Colombia.
I also want to thank Benecé Produccions, Ustaoglu Film Yapim, and
Axolote Cine for responding very quickly and positively to my requests
for permission to reproduce some still images from films they produced.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Spanish poet Juana
Castro for inspiring me to take this research path. It is not an easy topic,
but I hope that this book helps to eliminate some of the stigmas and ste-
reotypes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Old Age and Alzheimer’s Disease in Film 15

3 Intergenerational Interactions and Alzheimer’s Disease 45

4 Gender and Alzheimer’s Disease: The Power of Words,

Herbs, Water, Veils, and Mountains 95

5 Agency and Masculinity in Alzheimer’s Disease: Cortex

(2008) and The Memory of a Killer (2003) 135

6 Recovering the Past: Historical Memory and Alzheimer’s

Disease 171

7 Conclusion 205

Index 215

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Pandora’s Box: The three siblings in the car 58

Fig. 3.2 Pandora’s Box: The distance between mother and daughter 59
Fig. 3.3 Wrinkles: State-of-the-art facilities in the nursing home 80
Fig. 3.4 Wrinkles: The luxurious swimming pool 81
Fig. 3.5 Wrinkles: The great escape 83
Fig. 4.1 The Good Herbs: Dinner scene 103
Fig. 4.2 The Good Herbs: Assisted death 105
Fig. 4.3 Old Cats: The power of water: The fountain 109
Fig. 4.4 Poetry: The meeting at the restaurant with the fathers of the
boys who raped Agnes 112
Fig. 4.5 Poetry: Kang and Mija’s sexual encounter in the bathtub 115
Fig. 4.6 Poetry: Drops of rain soaking the notebook 116
Fig. 4.7 A Separation: Windows and doors separating the characters 126
Fig. 5.1 Cortex: The Rubik’s Cube, the lamp, and the clock 142
Fig. 5.2 Cortex: Charles holding a gun, about to kill himself 147
Fig. 5.3 Cortex: Shot from above of patient files 148
Fig. 5.4 The Memory of a Killer: Ledda’s train journey to Antwerp 157
Fig. 5.5 The Memory of a Killer: Angelo Ledda is shot repeatedly 159
Fig. 6.1 Swimming: Subarina recreates the image of her grandfather as
Humphrey Bogart hiding in the shadows 183
Fig. 6.2 Swimming: Having a good physical appearance is important
for people living with Alzheimer’s 185
Fig. 6.3 Bucharest: The Lost Memory: MRI images 187

xi
xii    List of Figures

Fig. 6.4 Remember: Old Jewish man confined to a wheelchair and

dependent on oxygen support 193
Fig. 6.5 Remember: The shower 196
Fig. 6.6 Remember: Zev walking with difficulty and carrying the bag
with the gun 199
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 2010 I was invited to present a paper on one of my favourite Spanish

female poets, Juana Castro, who was also going to speak at the confer-
ence. When I accepted the invitation, I decided to explore her 2005 book
of poetry Dark Bodies (Los cuerpos oscuros), which had been awarded the
prestigious Jaén Poetry Prize (Premio Jaén de Poesía). Dark Bodies is a
collection of poems written by Juana Castro during and after the time
that she had to look after both of her parents, both living at the same
time with Alzheimer’s disease. While her 1982 poetry book devoted to
the death of her child had had a profound impact on me, the reading of
Dark Bodies opened my mind to the world of Alzheimer’s disease. The
lyricism, beauty, and love encapsulated in these poems did not prevent the
soreness of the experience as both daughter and caregiver from emerging,
but it was shaped in a way that celebrated life, despite what the title of the
book might initially indicate: pain is transformed into beauty.
Prior to reading Castro’s book and writing about it (Medina 2012), my
relationship with dementia had been merely linked to my role as a reader
and viewer of the news. For instance, a few years before I read Castro’s
book, two important Spanish politicians disclosed that they had been diag-
nosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In 2005, it was announced that Adolfo
Suárez—the first Prime Minister appointed by the King Juan Carlos
I after the dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975—had been diagnosed
with the disease; this news was followed in 2007 by the news that Pasqual
Maragall, Barcelona’s mayor during the 1992 Olympic Games and later
President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, also had Alzheimer’s.1 The very

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Medina, Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53371-5_1
2 R. MEDINA

same year in which Maragall gave a press conference to announce that

he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Adolfo Suárez received
a home visit from King Juan Carlos I of Spain. A photograph taken by
Suárez’s son of that encounter was sent to the press as a record of the
event. The photograph showed the King and the former Prime Minister
walking away from the camera, thus not showing their faces. After the
photograph had been widely circulated, Adolfo Suárez’s son told the press
that his father had not recognised the King. This was the last time the for-
mer Prime Minister was seen in public. By contrast, Pasqual Maragall’s
public announcement served as the starting point of his advocacy and sup-
port for, and campaigning on behalf of, the search to find a cure. Even
today, almost a decade after being diagnosed, Maragall continues to make
some public appearances, clearly demonstrating the need to normalise
what it means to live with Alzheimer’s disease. The contrast between hid-
ing and displaying what it is to live with Alzheimer’s struck me as some-
thing which represented two opposite perceptions of Alzheimer’s, the
private and public: it is seen on the one hand as a stigmatic disease, and on
the other as a disease with no cure, that should not be hidden.
In his book of memoirs, My Last Sigh (1983), Luis Buñuel devoted
the first chapter to the effects of ageing in the subject’s memory, the
main effect being that of forgetting. Having witnessed his mother’s lost
battle against forgetting, Buñuel expresses his anxiety about facing the
same health problem.

I’m overwhelmed by anxiety when I can’t remember a recent event, or the

name of a person met in recent months, or the name of a familiar object.
I feel as if suddenly my whole personality has disintegrated … The obli-
gation to find a metaphor to describe ‘table’ is a monstrous feeling, but
I console myself that there is something even worse—to be alive and
yet not recognize yourself, not know anymore who you are… You have
to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that
memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at
all … Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our
action. Without it, we are nothing. (Buñuel 2003, 4–5)2

Buñuel’s words serve as an excellent example of the fear we have as

individuals with regards to losing our memories, and our inclination to
associate memory with well-being and being alive. Almost 35 years after
Buñuel published his memoirs, dementia has become a global mat-
ter of concern. Dementia is predicted to affect 25–30% of the over-65s
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

in developed countries by 2050, and it is present in many areas of our

society, from family relations to policymaking. The need to address the
health and social problems that dementia is creating globally, nation-
ally, and locally appears simultaneously in many different disciplines:
medicine, pharmaceutics, biotechnology, social sciences, care p ­ractices,
health policies, architecture, and culture. For instance, as early as 1994
one could find a description of Alzheimer’s as the epidemic of the twen-
ty-first century in the Spanish newspaper El País (Sánchez 1994). Since
then, and during the first decade of this century, not only has the label-
ling of Alzheimer’s disease as an epidemic burgeoned but also new con-
cepts have become attached to it, such as ‘tsunami’ and ‘challenge’. These
labels have been regularly used by the media, national governments, and
international institutions, so it is not surprising that they have had a dou-
ble impact on the public. On the one hand, neo-liberal agendas have
been persistently highlighting two ‘challenges’ for national budgets: that
of the ageing population and that of dementia. Having to fund pensions
and provide healthcare for a longer period are areas that have created
clear divisions between the young and the old, with old age being blamed
for the pressure on financial resources to fund welfare systems. On the
other hand, the sense of horror associated with dementia that has been
introduced to the public through a variety of cultural texts has alarmed
and increased anxiety about it in public opinion; this applies to especially
the fear of becoming a zombie, a hollow body (Behuniak 2011; Bitenc
2012; Zeilig 2013). I consider these depictions, which stereotype and
dehumanise people living with dementia, to be very disturbing, hence
my curiosity about exploring how other cultures perceive, represent, and
deal with dementia. In her seminal book Forget Memory (2009), Anne
Davis Basting challenges the cultural and social perception of dementia
as a tragedy, and stresses the importance of creativity through the arts for
expressing oneself while experiencing memory loss. Basting’s work claims
the essential re-humanising aspect of cultural narratives about dementia.
Therefore, and following the advice of the Alzheimer’s Society by avoid-
ing negative expressions about and representations of Alzheimer’s disease,
this book uses the term ‘person living with Alzheimer’s disease’ instead of
‘person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease’.
Reading books and watching films from diverse cultures and back-
grounds can offer us a better understanding of how global and nation-
al/local cultures influence conceptualisations of dementia. Although
dementia is a global health issue, it may not be perceived, defined, or
4 R. MEDINA

represented uniformly around the world. Scholarly approaches to

­cultural representations of dementia have taken place mainly in Western
cultural texts belonging largely to the UK, the USA, and Canada.3
However, some new scholarly approaches are slowly emerging, thus
providing visibility for other cultural representations of dementia
from a cross-cultural perspective. This book aims to present this new
cross-cultural approach, by means of which a global issue such as demen-
tia can be shown in its rich multiplicity. Consciously avoiding idealising
or romanticising ‘other’ cinematic representations of dementia, in par-
ticular of Alzheimer’s disease, it explores how these cinematic representa-
tions do not focus on the negative aspects of the disease even when
symptoms are portrayed.
This book aims to elucidate the extent to which the films under study
present a concept of dementia that underscores the importance of the
person living with the disease as a subject, as an individual whose person-
hood and agency are not diminished. In addition, it intends to explore
whether these films challenge the overly medicalised concept of demen-
tia that westernised viewers have, due to the great influence of neg-
ative depictions of it deployed by the ideological apparatus of culture.
This book aims to reveal how, contrary to most mainstream films on the
topic, such as Iris (2001), The Iron Lady (2011), Away from Her (2006),
and Still Alice (2014), films from other cultures whose film industries do
not mirror Hollywood or that of the UK, offer viewers both ontologi-
cal and phenomenological discussions of the self that are crucial for the
understanding of dementia, the people living with dementia, and those
around them. As will be shown in our analysis, most of the films dis-
cussed in this book do not present Alzheimer’s disease, the most com-
mon form of dementia, as just a presence or a motif with which to focus
on the struggle of relatives to understand the disease, or the impact it
has on those relatives. On the contrary, in most of the films explored in
this book the people living with Alzheimer’s disease are the main char-
acters; thus they share and communicate, in many instances, their sub-
jectivity so that the viewer can identify with them and feel what they are
experiencing. Similarly, the book intends to reveal whether these films
use Alzheimer’s disease as a cultural metaphor (Zeilig 2013) through
which to address issues pertaining to different areas of life and society
within the cultures they belong to: for example, family matters such as
intergenerational interactions, or the role of women in the family and
society; tradition versus modernity within the country; the global vs
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

the local; agency in people living with dementia; caring for people with
dementia; and many others that will be explored in the following pages.
In this sense, the feminist framework that links most of the analyses of
the films undertaken is central to this book. Finally, the in-depth exami-
nation of these films aims to highlight and stress the social obligation we
have within the academic and non-academic spheres to make these coun-
ter-discourses visible. This visibility is crucial because it will help to trans-
form stigmatised perceptions of dementia and to reshape public opinion
about Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of staging terrifying images of living
with dementia, these films offer alternative insights on the disease by
describing it as a moment of positive paradigm shift and change in either
the lives of the persons living with dementia or in those close to them.
The corpus of films from different cultures dealing with dementia as
their main topic is quickly growing. The selection of films for the anal-
ysis I present in this book was subject to several considerations: first,
I sought diversity in cultural terms; second, I grouped them according
to the topics they approached, such as gender issues, intergenerational
relationships, agency and personhood, and so on; and third, I considered
the role that filmic genre or subgenre played in constructing a specific
concept of dementia. My quest led me to a great number of documen-
tary films in which caring and living with dementia was documented:
these covered topics ranging from the use of music and art therapies,
to the hardships experienced by caregivers. I had tackled these types of
documentary films in the Spanish context in previous publications, but
found that the question of historical memory in Spain seemed to be met-
aphorically linked to Alzheimer’s memory loss, and thus deserved to
be examined. I have excluded films that have been extensively analysed
by other scholars, such as the Danish Welcome to Verona (Wellkåmm to
Verona 2006), the Swedish A Song for Martin (En sång för Martin
2001), and the Argentinean Son of the Bride (El hijo de la novia 2001).
Other films, like Amour (2012), do not make explicit the cause of the
neurological deterioration suffered by the character, thus their exclu-
sion. The analysis refers in some instances to the Spanish fictional film
Awaking from a Dream (Despertar de un sueño 2008), on which I have
already published an article (Medina 2013a). Films that deal with very
early onset of Alzheimer’s disease deserve to be analysed separately since
the link between ageing and dementia disappears, which makes the dis-
ease’s portrayal different, but very interesting nonetheless; among these
films are the Japanese Memories of Tomorrow (Ashita no kioku 2006), the
6 R. MEDINA

Italian A Second Childhood (Una sconfinata giovinezza 2010), and the

South Korean A Moment to Remember (Nae meorisokui jiwoogae 2004).
Where I have included films that have already been studied by other
scholars (Chivers 2011, 2013; Cohen-Shalev and Marcus 2011, 2012a, b;
Gravagne 2013; Zimmermann 2017) I have applied a different kind of
analysis. These films include the South Korean Poetry (Shi 2010), the
Iranian A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin 2011), the Chilean Old
Cats (Gatos viejos 2010), the Turkish Pandora’s Box (Pandora’nin kutusu
2008), and the French Cortex (2008). In addition to the films just men-
tioned, other films that form the corpus under study are the Mexican
The Good Herbs (Las buenas hierbas 2010); the Dutch The Memory of a
Killer (De zaak Alzheimer 2003); the Spanish film Wrinkles (Arrugas
2011), and the Spanish documentary films Swimming (Nedar 2008) and
Bucharest, the Lost Memory (Bucarest, la memòria perduda 2008); and the
Canadian film Remember (2015). A brief synopsis of each film is provided
in the chapter in which it is analysed for the first time.
There are great films which I have not included due to space limita-
tions; this is the case, for example, of the Bollywood film Black (2005).
This film narrates the story of a deaf and blind woman and her long-
term teacher, who has Alzheimer’s and has been confined to a medical-
ised nursing home. It is also the case of the Spanish film The City of No
Limits (La ciudad sin límites 2002), in which the themes of Alzheimer’s,
exile after the Spanish Civil War, and homosexuality are explored. The
Salvadorian film by Brenda Vanegas Flying (Volar) was released in March
2018; thus it was not possible to include it. These and other films such
as the Hindu film Mai (2013), the Bollywood drama You, Me and Us
(U Me Aur Hum 2013), or the German Head Full of Honey (Honig im
Kopf 2014), present important depictions of dementia and deserve to be
examined in depth elsewhere.
The five chapters that form the main body this book (Chapters 2–6)
address varied and important issues around cinematic depictions of
Alzheimer’s such as the ones already mentioned, but they do so, as
explained in Chapter 2, by taking an interdisciplinary approach to the
films under study. Alzheimer’s disease accounts for 60–80% of demen-
tia cases, according to the Alzheimer’s Organisation (Alzheimer’s Disease
International 2017). In this book, the term ‘dementia’ is used to refer to
all types of dementia, as well as to the broad concept used by many dis-
ciplines. I use the term ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ only when referring to cases
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

in which a diagnosis has been made. In all but one of the films studied
(Remember, 2005), a formal diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been made,
hence the reference to Alzheimer’s disease in the title of this book.4
Chapter 2, ‘Old Age and Alzheimer’s Disease in Film’, provides the
theoretical framework for the analysis carried out in the following four
chapters. The growing body of scholarly work on cultural narratives
about dementia reveals its multi- and interdisciplinary character, so the
chapter presents the crucial role played by ageing studies in the develop-
ment of dementia studies. Important concepts such as ageism, the third
and fourth ages, and personhood are explained, as well as the part that
the mind/body dichotomy has played in shaping perceptions of demen-
tia. The importance of approaches to dementia from cultural and criti-
cal gerontology perspectives, and from the viewpoints of gender and film
studies are also described, with the objective of giving a general method-
ological overview. Nonetheless, each chapter will provide a detailed theo-
retical contextualisation of the films under study.
Recent statistics show that the number of people worldwide living
with dementia is believed to be around 50 million, will reach 75 mil-
lion in 2030, and will have reached 131.5 million by 2050 (Alzheimer’s
Disease International, n.d.). Dementia is a significant health problem
that deserves medical, social, and financial attention. However, the way
in which it is usually presented, talked about, and portrayed in the media
removes the focus from the people living with dementia and instead
places it on the burden the disease creates for carers and on the national
financial resources needed. In developed countries, neo-liberalism is
quickly delegating the care of people with dementia—and of the elderly
in general—to their families and their own financial resources. This obvi-
ously adds to the perception that living with dementia is a ‘challenge’,
even more so for those who do not have the economic means to pay
for professional care. Therefore, shifting caregiving from the state to the
family means trading formal caregiving for informal caregiving, some-
thing that might have a negative impact on the quality of care and the
quality of life of informal caregivers.
Chapter 3, ‘Intergenerational Interactions and Alzheimer’s Disease’,
presents an approach that considers cultural diversity when analysing cul-
tural texts about dementia and caregiving. That is, the degree to which
governments rely on local cultural values for caregiving determines the
way dementia is perceived by the public and represented by cultural
texts. In some of the films examined in this chapter, an attempt emerges
8 R. MEDINA

to erase the economic and social negativity associated with dementia

by disputing the postmodern glorification of individualism and youth.
Therefore, these films replace intergenerational conflict with intergener-
ational solidarity or ambivalence. The chapter uses a cross-cultural geron-
tology perspective by examining how different cultures conceptualise the
process of ageing and the social position that old age has. It also explores
the set of symbols that each culture creates and that shape the way reality
is perceived and represented. Finally, it examines films from the perspec-
tive of themes such as types of intergenerational relationships, concepts of
the family structure, and family as a trope for discussing national issues.
Chapter 4, ‘Gender and Alzheimer’s disease: the Power of Words,
Herbs, Water, Veils and Mountains’, approaches the films The Good Herbs
(2011), Poetry (2010), Old Cats (2010), Pandora’s Box (2008), and A
Separation (2011) from a feminist perspective; this enables us to docu-
ment the social and cultural norms that mark the life of men and women
living with Alzheimer’s disease or caring for people living with the dis-
ease. Of those living with dementia, two thirds are women. Women are
not only more at risk of developing dementia but form the largest per-
centage of carers. In developing countries, or in countries with strong
family values, social expectations require that women become carers of
the family’s elderly members. These films place women with Alzheimer’s
at the forefront, either by making them the main characters or by rep-
resenting the personal turmoil they undergo as a result of the clash
between their own individual wishes and their social roles. The social
pressure on women to carry out these caregiving duties affects the capac-
ity of women to be independent citizens, and these films will be stud-
ied within this context. Likewise, all these films will be contrasted with
gerontological studies that have been used to generalise and homogenise
the ageing process across cultures and genders, as if it equally affected
all. The burden on the caregiver, the isolation and loneliness of women
in that role, and their desire to maintain social and professional status
are touched on in these films. The presence of important gender con-
cepts such as sorority and womanhood, motherhood and matrophobia
(the fear of becoming like one’s mother), and working women—particu-
larly relevant in countries with predominantly Muslim and Confucian
values that clash with the transformations those countries are experienc-
ing through globalisation—seems to be of capital importance, and there-
fore deserves to be considered and evaluated. In addition, this chapter
will explore how, as opposed to the narrative of deterioration that main-
stream films such as Still Alice or Iris present, the films mentioned above
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

portray alternative depictions of dementia in which symptoms and horror

are replaced by the prevalence of human solidarity. Finally, this chapter
will consider the role played by nature in Poetry, Pandora’s Box, and The
Good Herbs.
Chapter 5, ‘Agency and Masculinity in Alzheimer’s Disease: Cortex
(2008) and The Memory of a Killer (2003)’ focuses on two films in
which the main characters are male. Whereas Cortex follows the tech-
niques of mystery and detective fiction, The Memory of a Killer uses
film noir and psychological thriller techniques. Using well-known film
approaches to thrillers, detection films, film noir, and psychological thrill-
ers, this chapter focuses on how these two films use Alzheimer’s disease
as a device with which to create and enhance suspense. As will be dis-
cussed, these two films go beyond the mere deployment of Alzheimer’s
as an action-and-suspense trigger by stressing the role, and permanence,
of agency in people living with Alzheimer’s. In both films, the protago-
nists are men whose masculinity is determined by their social and sexual
productivity, as would be expected in any patriarchal society. In addition,
contrary to the approach of mainstream films in which the progression
of symptoms is used to highlight the horror attached to the disease,
here that progression is transformed into a mechanism that captures the
viewer’s attention. The chapter will analyse how the viewer in these films
is placed in the difficult position of deciding whether the main charac-
ters are truly experiencing the symptoms depicted, or are just pretend-
ing they are having them, with the intention of fooling the controlling
forces who want to restrain or kill them. Within the context of ageing
on screen, this chapter will examine how these two male protagonists
can still solve crimes or redeem themselves, which has a clear impact on
how the notion of memory loss is presented. In addition, the contradic-
tion created by the juxtaposition of memory loss and detective or hitman
work will be studied as the driving force of these plots. Finally, these two
films will be explored from masculinity and ageing studies approaches in
order to consider the role of the aged male character. Reflecting on the
Hollywood star system’s propensity to display male ageing bodies as still
being active and attractive, these films will be analysed from the perspec-
tive of the politics of active/successful ageing and gender studies.
Chapter 6, ‘Recovering the Past: Historical Memory and Alzheimer’s
Disease’, develops the topic of the use of Alzheimer’s disease as a met-
aphor for historical memory. This chapter will focus on two Spanish
documentary films, Swimming and Bucharest, the Lost Memory,5 and
10 R. MEDINA

one fictional film from Canada, Remember. The central point will be
the concept of historical memory, which is presented in all three films
as the main thematic thread; that is, the role of the past in the pres-
ent in national and personal terms. Using Pierre Nora’s (1989) and
Halbwachs’s (1992) concepts of collective memory and its connection
to individual memory, as well as Paul Ricoeur's (1994) link between
­memory, history, and forgetting, the chapter examines how forgetting
and remembering, for the good of the country and for the reconciliation
of its people, are employed as the narrative theme of these films. The two
Spanish documentary films are approached within the context of the con-
troversial decision by Spanish politicians, during the transitional period
from Franco’s dictatorship to a democratic Spain, to avoid criminalising
Franco’s government and followers for the atrocities they committed
against Republicans during and after the Spanish Civil War. The so-called
‘pactos del olvido’ (pacts of forgetting)—had the aim of allowing those
politicians to concentrate on the future of a democratic Spain. Thus, the
silencing, incarceration, or killing of dissidents under Franco’s regime
was ignored as the result of this political urge to focus on the future. The
memory loss due to Alzheimer’s of those last survivors of the Spanish
Civil War is analysed in this chapter as an important metaphor for explor-
ing the silenced Spanish past for a generation which needs to discover
and uncover its buried history. To do so, this chapter will study these two
documentary films from several angles, including: the form of contempo-
rary documentary film and its implications in terms of the presentation
of reality and subjectivity; the intertwining of the diagnosis and progres-
sion of Alzheimer’s disease with the personal life of the documentary
film-maker, who is also a character in both films; and the role that his-
torical memory might have in these two documentary films. The last part
of this chapter will be devoted to the Canadian film Remember, which
will be approached from several perspectives with regard to the notion of
dementia in the context of the Holocaust. Upon contextualising this film
within the large scholarly literature on texts representing the Holocaust
and the controversies surrounding these representations, this part of
the chapter evaluates Atom Egoyan’s unexpected intertwining of that
theme with those of revenge and dementia in Remember. The analysis
will explore how Egoyan arranges the features of the thriller and the road
movie in a highly original manner; the main characters are two old men,
one confined to a wheelchair and the other one living with Alzheimer’s
disease. Like the analysis undertaken in Chapter 5 with regard to Cortex
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

and The Memory of a Killer, this chapter explores how this film also uses
dementia as a mechanism for suspense, to keep the viewer engaged and
identified with the person living with dementia. By presenting reality
through the eyes of the person living with dementia, the film not only
communicates to the viewer what it means to live with it, but also what
happens when the viewer identifies and sympathises too much with a
main character and his health problems.
The films examined in this book present an overall concept of
Alzheimer’s disease that goes beyond the usual medicalised focus.
Symptoms, decline in health, and the negative impact of the duty to care
are only tangentially depicted in these films. Instead, these films narrate
and portray personal, interpersonal, cross-generational, national, and
gendered conceptualisations and experiences of Alzheimer’s disease that
offer a significant, unique approach to one of the most feared diseases of
the twenty-first century. In order to change the negative perception that
has been created, portraying Alzheimer’s as a disease that must be feared,
this book presents these other cinematic visualisations of the disease,
which consider it a health condition that does not affect the agency of
the people living with it. On the contrary, the cross-cultural perceptions
on Alzheimer’s disease presented here reinforce from different social, cul-
tural, and gender positions, positive accounts of living with Alzheimer’s
disease. These positive accounts emerge from the impact Alzheimer’s
has on the way we think about several areas of society such as gender
roles, ethics, family relations, and even historical memory. In addition,
most of these cinematic accounts value the person or people living with
Alzheimer’s disease that they portray; therefore their subjectivity and
their experience as lived and sensed become essential to the film.

Notes
1. The Government of Catalonia.
2. Buñuel’s reference to the use of metaphor in stylistic terms is an impor-
tant one and deserves full scrutiny. The gradual loss of vocabulary and
then of syntactic sequencing makes verbal expression by people living with
dementia resemble poetic expression. For instance, Swinnen (2016) has
approached poetic expression as a therapy tool with which to communicate
with people with dementia.
3. Iris (2001), The Notebook (2004), Away from Her (2006), The Savages
(2007), The Iron Lady (2011), and Still Alice (2014) are some of the films
which have attracted more attention.
12 R. MEDINA

4. Demencia, the Spanish word for dementia, has been used to refer to
­madness since before the Middle Ages; therefore, the concept of demen-
tia has been charged throughout many centuries with very negative con-
notations which have equated people living with dementia with mad or
demented people.
5. A small part of the analysis of Bucharest, the Lost Memory has already been
published (Medina 2013b).

Bibliography
Alzheimer’s Disease International. n.d. The Global Voice on Dementia. Accessed
October 29, 2017. https://www.alz.co.uk/research/statistics.
Basting, A.D. 2009. Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with
Dementia. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Behuniak, S.M. 2011. “The Living Dead? The Construction of People with
Alzheimer’s Disease as Zombies.” Ageing and Society 31 (1): 70–92.
Bitenc, R.A. 2012. “Representations of Dementia in Narrative Fiction.” In
Knowledge and Pain, edited by E. Cohen, L. Toker, M. Consonni, and
O.E. Dror, 305–329. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Buñuel, L. 2003. My Last Sigh. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Castro, J. 2005. Los cuerpos oscuros. Madrid: Hiperión.
Chivers, Sally. 2011. Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2013. “Seeing the Apricot: A Disability Perspective on Alzheimer’s in Lee
Chang-dong’s Poetry.” In Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and
Television, edited by M.E. Mogk, 65–73. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Cohen-Shalev, A., and E. Marcus. 2011. “Lifting the Lid of Pandora’s Box:
Alzheimer’s Disease in the Cinema.” Accessed October 12, 2017. http://
www.interdisciplinary.net/wpcontent/uploads/2011/08/shalevhpaper.pdf.
———. 2012a. All Over and Done with Indeed? Picturing Alzheimer’s Disease in
Recent Films. Haifa: University of Haifa.
———. 2012b. “An Insider’s View of Alzheimer: Cinematic Portrayals of the
Struggle for Personhood.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
7 (2): 73–96.
Gravagne, P.H. 2013. The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and
Identity in Later Life. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Medina, R. 2012. “Donde impere el olvido: poesía y Alzheimer en Los cuerpos
oscuros de Juana Castro.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 36 (6):
541–561.
———. 2013a. “Alzheimer’s Disease, a Shifting Paradigm in Spanish Film: ¿Y
tú quién eres? and Amanecer de un sueño.” Hispanic Research Journal 14 (4):
356–372.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

———. 2013b. “From the Medicalisation of Dementia to the Politics of

Memory and Identity in Three Spanish Documentary Films.” Ageing and
Society 30 (10): 1688–1710.
Nora, P. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.”
Representations 26 (Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory): 7–24.
Ricoeur, P. 1994. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Katheleen Blamey.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Sánchez, M. 1994. “El mal de Alzheimer será la epidemia del siglo XXI, según
los expertos.” elpais.com. January 31. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://
elpais.com/diario/1994/01/31/sociedad/759970811_850215.html.
Swinnen, A. 2016. “Healing Words: A Study of Poetry Interventions in
Dementia Care.” Dementia 15 (6): 1377–1404.
Zeilig, H. 2013. “Dementia as a Cultural Metaphor.” The Gerontologist 20 (3):
1–10.
Zimmermann, M. 2017. The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-
Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography
A Moment to Remember. Directed by John H. Lee. South Korea: CJ
Entertainment, 2004.
A Second Childhood. Directed by Pupi Avati. Italy: Duea Film, 2010.
A Separation. Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Iran: Asghar Farhadi Productions,
2011.
A Song for Martin. Directed by Bille August. Sweden: Film i Väst, 2001.
Amour. Directed by Michael Haneke. France, Les Films du Losange, 2012.
Awaking from a Dream. Directed by Freddy Mas Franqueza. Spain: Terra a la
Vista S.L., 2008.
Away from Her. Directed by Sarah Polley. Canada: Foundry Films, 2006.
Black. Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. India: Applause Bhansali Productions,
2005.
Bucharest, the Lost Memory. Directed by Albert Solé. Spain: Bausan Films, 2008.
Cortex. Directed by Nicolas Boukhrief. France: Les Films du Worso, 2008.
Flying. Directed by Brenda Vanegas. El Salvador: Crowdfunding, 2018.
Head Full of Honey. Directed by Til Schweiger, Lars Gmehling. Germany:
Barefoot Productions, 2014.
Iris. Directed by Richard Eyre. UK: BBC, 2001.
Mai. Directed by Mahesh Kodiyal. India: AMG Worldwide Entertainment, 2013.
Memories of Tomorrow. Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi. Japan: ROAR, 2006.
Old Cats. Directed by Pedro Peirano and Sebastián Silva. Chile: Elephant Eye
Films, 2010.
Pandora’s Box. Directed by Yesim Ustaoglu. Turkey: Ustaoglu Film Yapim,
2008.
14 R. MEDINA

Poetry. Directed by Chang-dong Lee. South Korea: UniKorea Pictures, 2010.

Remember. Directed by Atom Egoyan. Canada: Serendipity Point Films, 2015.
Son of the Bride. Directed by Juan José Campanella. Argentina: Instituto
Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, 2001.
Still Alice. Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. USA: Lutzus-
Brown, 2014.
Swimming. Directed by Carla Subirana. Spain: Benecé Produccions, 2008.
The City of No Limits. Directed by Antonio Hernández. Spain: Icónica S.A.,
2002.
The Good Herbs. Directed by María Novaro. Mexico: Axolote Cine, 2010.
The Iron Lady. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. UK: Pathé, 2011.
The Memory of a Killer. Directed by Erik Van Looy. Belgium: MMG Film & TV
Production, 2003.
The Notebook. Directed by Nick Cassavetes. USA: New Line Cinema, 2004.
The Savages. Directed by Tamara Jenkins. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007
Welcome to Verona. Directed by Suzanne Osten. Denmark: Filmlance
International AB, 2006
Wrinkles. Directed by Ignacio Ferreras. Spain: Cromosoma TV Produccions,
2011
You, Me and Us. Directed by Ajay Devgan. India: Ajay Devgan Films, 2008.
 CHAPTER 2

Old Age and Alzheimer’s Disease in Film

2.1  Old Age, Ageing, and Ageism

In her book The Coming of Age (1972), Simone de Beauvoir reveals not
only how society perceives, represents, and marginalises old people, but
how the subjects, especially women, see and feel the process of ageing.
Ageism is a term coined by Robert Butler (1975, 12), who defined it as
‘a process of systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people
because they are old’. Ageism is considered to be a function of the social
system: it is an attitude that the members of society develop from child-
hood. Hegemonic social discourses have portrayed later life as a time of
decrepitude, fragility, poor health, dependency, loss of sexual vigour, social
isolation, passivity, lack of physical attractiveness, and unproductiveness
(Bengtson et al. 1997; Riley and Riley 2000; Cole et al. 1993). As a result
of these discourses, ageing and old age have been charged with negative
connotations which must be eliminated. Discourses about ageing and old
age have, therefore, caused discrimination against the elderly through the
creation and dissemination of cultural narratives that homogenise ageing
and old age. This stigmatisation of old age impels the subject to a con-
stant attempt to mask or disguise the signs of ageing in the body (Cole
et al. 1993; Featherstone and Wernick 1995; Gullette 1997, 2003; Katz
1995; Woodward 1991). In this way, as Margaret Cruikshank (2008)
points out, the body has become the text in which age registers and pre-
sents itself. The ‘mask of age’ (McHugh 2003, 169) positions the sub-
ject as the youthful identity that is behind the embodiment of age; that is,

© The Author(s) 2018 15

R. Medina, Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53371-5_2
16 R. MEDINA

behind the aged body there is an ageless subjectivity/mind. Margaret

Morganroth Gullette (1997), who coined the term ‘ageing studies’ in
1993, believes we are not aged by our body but by culture, and therefore
suggests we need to challenge the cultural discourses that are made about
the body in decline.
Ageism and its foregrounding of positive or successful ageing (Rowe
and Kahn 1987, 1997) has led to a distinction between the third and the
fourth ages. Peter Laslett (1996) characterised the third age as that of
a retirement in which leisure, self-fulfilment, health, and social engage-
ment are stressed. In this sense, in the third age we are ‘older but not
old’ (Higgs and McGowan 2013, 22) and our independence is main-
tained. In contrast, the fourth age means the end of life and is charac-
terised by a lack of autonomy and individuality, decrepitude, and death
(Laslett 1996; Gilleard and Higgs 2000, 2010); thus, older people are
‘stripped of social and cultural capital’ (Gilleard and Higgs 2010, 123).
The emphasis placed on productivity and successful ageing leaves those
who are chronically ill or disabled, or those who prefer not to be active,
as a problem for society due to their complacency about being ‘old’
(Holstein 1999; Katz 2000). Linn Sandberg’s (2013) work on vindicat-
ing a theoretical space for affirmative ageing clearly overcomes the binary
approach to ageing as either decline or success. In this sense, affirmative
old age, according to the new approach proposed by Sandberg, on the
one hand acknowledges the material specificities of the ageing body, but,
on the other hand, eliminates the clear masculinisation to which success-
ful ageing is linked (Sandberg 2013, 14) when it is specifically defined it
by its association with productivity, independence, and activeness.
Ageist stereotypes in Western culture, from the classical period to the
present, have gained strength in a social environment in which ageing is
perceived as a problem and portrayed negatively (Palmore 1999; Atchley
1997). The general connotations of being old—of being ill, disabled,
failing in memory, senile, sad, lonely, grouchy, sexless, boring, lacking
vitality, in decline, unable to learn, and unproductive—‘unwittingly work
to displace older people from their communities into situations of being
undervalued, unproductive, less capable, and dependent’ (Thornton
2002, 303). Furthermore, stereotypes spread through cultural produc-
tions, the media, and social policies, hence they are perpetuated in the
social structure, and empower collective ideologies by marginalising
those belonging to the stereotyped group (Featherstone and Wernick
1995; Friedan 1993). Social-gerontology approaches play a crucial
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 17

part in the study of ageing. Among the different approaches of social

gerontology, critical gerontology stresses that old age is a social construc-
tion (Thornton 2002). Within this development, the ‘cultural turn’ in
gerontology described by Gilleard and Higgs (2000) has finally opened
the field to the study of representations of ageing in cultural texts.
Ageing is diverse and needs to be understood in the context of that
diversity and from an intersectional perspective whereby class, gen-
der, race, ethnicity, and religion are all conceived as having an impor-
tant role to play when experiencing old age. Ageing studies have been
strengthened in the last two decades by feminist approaches to ageing,
which have not only highlighted their intersectional angle, but have also
shown that cultural texts create intertwined and interrelated discrimina-
tory levels. In this sense, Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2003) analyses,
in the context of American culture, how the various stages of age have
become discriminatory tools that, in turn, affect women more. Kathleen
Woodward (1999) has also explored how this discrimination against the
elderly affects women in multiple ways, but above all, how discrimina-
tion focuses especially on the female body as viewed by men. Slevin and
Wingrove (1998) have approached ageing from a black race perspective
in the USA, pointing out, for example, that signs of ageing in African
American women may confer on them a social status of respect not
found in the white American culture. The same can be said about ageing
and religion, the latter of which greatly affects the status of the elderly
within certain religious communities, as well as deciding which role fam-
ily members will take in their care. In this sense, the Qur’an depicts old
age as a stage of weakness, greying hair, physical decline, and infertility. In
terms of culture, the concept of ageing and its experience is also diverse.
For instance, Japanese conceptions of ageing are linked to Buddhist,
Confucian, and Taoist philosophical traditions that conceive of ageing
as a socially valuable part of life (Kitamaya 2000; Lebra 1984). Ageing
means maturing and gaining transcendental understanding (Lebra 1984);
thus, popular Japanese culture emphasises the concept of the old wise
person. The Confucian norm of filial piety supports the respect and care
of elderly parents (Hwang 1999).
This diversity in terms of gender, religion, race, and ethnicity has
found a fruitful space for analysis in the discipline of cross-cultural ger-
ontology. Jay Sokolovsky (2009) has stressed the need to approach age-
ing and old age by acknowledging that each culture has its own way of
perceiving reality, and therefore ageing. Following this idea of diverse
18 R. MEDINA

ageing across cultures, cross-cultural gerontology, as defined by Sandra

Torres (2011, 341), ‘examines how different cultures conceptualise the
process of ageing, and the social position that old age holds’. In explain-
ing this conceptualisation, Torres (2011, 341) points out how cultural
values play a key role in the understanding of ageing, given that they are
passed from one generation to the next and determine the way in which
people from a given culture make sense of their community. Western
perceptions of ageing cannot be imposed on other cultures; hence the
urgency of approaching ageing from a comparative and cross-cultural
perspective. Each culture perceives successful ageing differently depend-
ing on its prevailing social and cultural values.
In addition, interestingly, and as we shall discuss in most of the chap-
ters, the cultural diversity found across all the films included in this study
is concentrated on gender issues. From questions related to masculin-
ity and sexuality to the role of lower- and middle-class women in secu-
lar Islamic states and in other patriarchal societies, gender is an essential
factor of these films. They depict the social roles of men and women
they depict as being strongly linked to their ethnicity, class, race, disabil-
ity, and/or religion. Consequently, the analysis of the representation of
Alzheimer’s in these films demands an intersectional approach in order to
show this cinematic richness and diversity. Although no black women are
presented in any of the films, we are given an array of non-white female
and male characters. Likewise, the national and cultural contexts to which
these films belong also underline the need to approach them by means of
a concept of feminism that is plural and responds to the specific national
context. Similarly, those films with male main characters are all Western—
European or Canadian—films that reinforce patriarchal gender ideologies.
Finally, as many demographic reports have made explicit, the older
population is growing rapidly and this has brought a number of crucial
issues into the social and economic spheres. On the one hand, the older
population is becoming more influential in political terms, given that
they represent a large number of votes and exercise their right to vote
in greater numbers than younger voters; thus, their votes can have an
important impact on the outcome of local and national elections. On the
other hand, however, older populations have been portrayed in political,
social, and economic terms as a burden on younger generations: a bur-
den of care, a burden on scarce national budgets in terms of pensions, a
burden in terms of employment if retirement is delayed, and a burden on
national welfare systems.
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 19

2.2  Mapping Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease

Until Alzheimer’s disease was known by that name in 1910, thanks to
the work of Alois Alzheimer, the medical community used the term
‘senile dementia’, which was coined in 1838 by the French psychia-
trist Jean Étienne Esquirol (Shenk 2003, 15) to classify any disease
that caused some sort of memory loss at an advanced age. From Latin
dementia—de- absence + mens- mind + ia-belonging to—dementia was
considered from the nineteenth century onwards to be an irreversible
disorder, mainly in the elderly, of intellectual functions, in particular of
memory (Boller and Forbes 1998, 126). Within the evolution of the
concept of memory in the history of philosophy and medicine, demen-
tia acquired clear negative connotations. According to Rafael González
Maldonado (2001, 17–18), Celsus (30 bc–50 ad) was the first physi-
cian to use the term ‘dementia’, which he divided into four categories:
frenzy, melancholy, deceptive images, and mental aberrations. Aretacus
of Cappadocia uses ‘senile dementia’ for changes associated with senes-
cence. The physician of Emperor Julianus, Oribasius, wrote in the
fourth century about an atrophy of the brain that caused loss of intellec-
tual capacity and paralysis.
In medical terms, dementia was associated initially, and until the late
nineteenth century, with psychotic states; that is, with insanity. It is pre-
cisely this correlation, as Victoria Quirosa García (2007) points out,
that has passed from medicine and philosophy to literature and art, and
from these to society in general. While Plato distinguished between
clinical madness and creative madness, a distinction from which would
emerge the theory that links the artist with madness as an essential vehi-
cle for creation, centuries later Erasmus of Rotterdam in his In Praise
of Folly (1509) would perceive madness as liberation and happiness, the
reversal of the unhappiness of wisdom (Quirosa García 2007, 53). The
Middle Ages had made madness the source of evil, assigning it to indi-
viduals who displayed irrational and libertine behaviour that was alien
to Catholic orthodoxy. However, artistic and literary representations
showed madness as a free state, a privileged means by which to carry out
transgressions, to disobey moral norms and, especially, to carry out crit-
icism of certain social classes (Quirosa García 2007, 62). For instance,
these were the representations that prevailed in the work of Hieronymus
Bosch, especially in Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) and The Extraction of
the Stone of Madness (1494).
20 R. MEDINA

During the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, as Foucault (1988,

30) pointed out in Madness and Civilization, madness becomes one
of the very forms of reason. It integrates itself into it, constituting one
of its secret types. Foucault (1988, 31) perceived both Cervantes and
Shakespeare as the last artists whose art recognised the presence of mad-
ness as a tragic experience. In this line of thought, the French philoso-
pher maintains that when in the seventeenth century hospitals began to
be populated with ‘madmen’, their functioning had no relation to any
medical reasoning, but rather to the relationship between absolute mon-
archy and bourgeois society. For bourgeois society, family disgrace could
only be avoided by the confinement of those who endangered the virtue
of the family as an institution; thus, all of those who were labelled as
libertines or degenerates, those suffering from venereal diseases, homo-
sexuals, and so on, were all considered insane. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, such family issues
became private ones and were given the appearance of psychological
problems related to insanity. According to Quirosa García (2007, 72),
an ambiguous concept of madness was reintroduced by Romanticism.
For instance, Francisco de Goya represents this ambiguity in The Sleep/
Dream of Reason Produces Monsters (1798) and in The Madhouse (1812).
In this sense, irrationality becomes an indispensable aspect of artistic
creativity, through which the artist defines himself as a mad genius. The
ideological and aesthetic parenthesis established by realism and natural-
ism, by means of which artists aimed to make a psychological portrait of
dementia, did not prevent the concepts of madness and irrationality as
elements linked to artistic creation from re-emerging at the end of the
nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. Freud, Wittgenstein,
Münch, Van Gogh, Schiele, Breton, Dalí, and many others found in the
world of the irrational a way of liberating themselves from the social con-
straints established by the social sphere (Quirosa García 2007, 73–79).
The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented level of scientific
and medical development that in the case of mental illness culminated
in a process of identification, classification, diagnosis, and treatment.
Loss of memory, disorientation, or inability to express oneself, how-
ever, continued to be considered as symptoms of senile dementia, even
though Alois Alzheimer’s findings had shown that the disease suffered
by his patient had nothing to do with ageing or insanity. The patient
was 51 years old; her symptoms were gradual loss of memory, psy-
chotic episodes of persecution, gradual loss of oral and written language,
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 21

slow deterioration of vital organs, and muscular atrophy (Shenk 2003,

11–25). However, the disease did not arouse the interest of the scien-
tific community until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed,
it would not do so until the evident spread of Alzheimer’s disease led
the medical and scientific institutions to consider it the disease of the
twenty-first century (Moser 2008, 98–110). Despite the predomi-
nant place that the disease has acquired in social, medical, and scientific
spheres, in the public sphere dementia is still perceived and represented
mainly as senile dementia, as Cervantes and Shakespeare did centuries
before with their characters Don Quixote and King Lear. Senile demen-
tia has created a series of images such as infantilisation, disorientation,
and forgetfulness, among others, which are rooted in the social and
cultural imaginary of Western society. Given the influence culture has
in shaping public opinion, these images have not only been accepted
as ‘‘normal’’ but have greatly affected the lack of social understanding
around both ageing and Alzheimer’s disease.
In the past two decades, dementia studies has emerged as an inter-
disciplinary approach that has facilitated the study of dementia from the
sociological perspective of illness/disease and health, as well as from the
viewpoint of the sociology of knowledge, thus its focus on the impor-
tance of addressing the social and cultural impact of dementia on those
who live with it directly or indirectly. Both of these sociological perspec-
tives have dealt with issues and concepts developed by the biomedical,
social-psychology, and social-gerontology disciplines. What emerges from
some approaches to dementia and disability is that illness ‘is the antithe-
sis of the norm and ideal of a healthy mind and body and brings with it
associations of dysfunction and deviance’ (Innes 2009, 3). Others, how-
ever, consider that impairment is the rule, while ‘normalcy is the fantasy’
(Davis 2002, 30). Whatever approach we take, drawing the line between
normalcy and deviance is highly difficult and problematic.
Additionally, other advances have taken place; for instance, the sep-
aration between different forms of dementia, of which Alzheimer’s
disease is the most prominent and common form. Even though ger-
ontologists and geriatricians have tried to dismantle the old relation-
ship between dementia and ageing, other scholars, such as Lawrence
Cohen (2006), have stressed the place that the study of senility has had
in the social sciences and the medical humanities in relation to demen-
tia. Cohen (2006, 1) defines senility as ‘the perception of deleterious
behavioural change in someone understood to be old, with attention
22 R. MEDINA

to both the biology and the institutional milieu in which such change is
marked, measured, researched and treated’. For instance, Cohen (2006)
considers that, as a result of the medicalisation of senility and dementia,
new approaches could emerge, such as the ‘personhood turn’ (Kontos
2006; Basting 2003, 2009; Leibing 2006; among others), which dispute
important aspects of that medicalisation.
Even with all the multidisciplinary discussions around how to
approach dementia, biomedical discourses have continued with their
construction of a negative language to represent this disease. Thus, from
a perspective of discourse analysis, Lakoff and Johnson (2008, 270)
imply that the creation of stereotypes or metaphorical phrases to refer
to a reality is not found in language but in thought. In the twenty-first
century, stereotypes of dementia have joined the pre-existing stereotypes
of ageing, stigmatising those who live with it and, in Gillespie’s (1997,
5) terms, producing ‘little more than an oversimplified approximation of
the condition’.
How stories about dementia are told is essential to the public’s
understanding, perception, and representation of dementia. Zeilig’s
(2013) enlightening study of the cultural metaphors of dementia and
Alzheimer’s disease provides evidence of the tendency of cultural texts
such as news, films, fiction and non-fiction novels, speeches, pamphlets,
and so on to present dementia as an epidemic, a tsunami, a war, a silent
crisis, among other such terms. These metaphors create fear and stigma,
which obviously results in discrimination against those living with the
disease. Negative images of dementia have spread rapidly across Western
societies, thus affecting the way people perceive and treat those living
with dementia. One of these wrongly constructed images is one that
strips dementia of its temporality. Mainstream cultural representations
portray its symptoms as presenting themselves instantaneously, when in
reality, in most cases, the symptoms occur gradually. Hence, when it is
said that memory loss is one of the symptoms, it is not considered that
the loss of memory is not abrupt, but rather that it occurs slowly and is
accompanied by the decline of linguistic ability. The scope of this misrep-
resentation is extremely important since it deprives the person living with
dementia of any basic human identity: this is because losing memory and
linguistic ability is equivalent, in a society that emphasises the division
between mind and body, to the disappearance of identity and, therefore,
of personhood.
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 23

There are two key issues when analysing the problems which ­people
living with dementia and their family carers face: the problem of iden-
tity, and the problem of the mind and its relationship to the body.
Biomedical discourses such as that of neurologists attribute the disease
to a progressive degeneration of certain areas of the brain that results in
the ‘loss’ of memory and identity, accompanied by a progressive decline
in linguistic ability. It is enough to name memory, identity, and language
to understand that their absence implies ‘loss of mind’; that is, of any
rational element that distinguishes us as persons. This reductionism seg-
regates and discriminates against people living with dementia, causing
them to be considered as empty shells, hollow bodies that simply vege-
tate, or as basic biological entities. In opposition to the medicalisation of
the body, by means of which organs can be transplanted to ensure sur-
vival or where aesthetic surgery can erase the signs of ageing, the brain
can neither be transplanted nor subjected to cosmetic surgery. Juvenal’s
famous verse in the Satire X, orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore
sano (you should pray for a healthy mind in a health body) conveys the
loss associated with dementia and leads to a rethinking of issues such as
subjectivity, subject, identity, personhood, agency, among others, at the
ontological, phenomenological, and ethical levels.

2.3  The Medicalisation of Dementia

Conrad (2005, 4) emphasises that three factors have contributed to
the different approaches to medicalisation: first, ‘the medical profes-
sion and the expansion of medical jurisdiction was a prime mover for
medicalization’. Second, the activism of social movements and inter-
est groups sought a medical definition for a problem. Third, inter- or
intra-professional activities supported those with a medical degree.
Conrad (2005, 4) also points out that the changes experienced in med-
icine after the 1980s were due to the importance placed on to managed
care, cost control, and corporatised medical care, along with the signif-
icant position pharmaceuticals acquired. In this sense, Conrad (2005,
5) perceives a ‘shift in the engines that drive medicalization in Western
societies: biotechnology, consumers, and managed care’. The pharma-
ceutical industry has been the driving force of this medicalisation in its
placing of drugs for diseases before the physician’s care. For instance, as
Katz and Marshall (2002, 2003) have shown, Viagra is one of the most
24 R. MEDINA

powerful examples of the medicalisation of healthy and successful ageing.

Likewise, managing care through healthy habits and an active lifestyle
has become pivotal for keeping the ageing population from causing the
collapse of national health and welfare systems.
Social scientists such as Gubrium (1986), Lyman (1989), and Bond
(1992) have all drawn attention to the control performed by society
around dementia and its social construction as a disease. Making demen-
tia a disease, according to Holstein and Gubrium (2000, 171), facilitated
its politicisation and its popularisation, thus creating and developing new
social roles for those around people with dementia. Harding and Palfrey
(1997) have analysed how linking dementia to old age led to the percep-
tion of ageing as equalling decay and death, thus producing a generalised
fear of ageing. Similarly, the high incidence of Alzheimer’s disease has
impacted on national economies and welfare systems, and therefore has
materialised as a crucial issue in political, social, and financial terms. It
affects national health systems, pension plans, care facilities, and modali-
ties. As a result, dementia is perceived as one of the greatest problems in
our contemporary world.1 In conclusion, neo-liberalism and its austerity
agendas have triggered an unsympathetic environment for both old age
and people living with dementia. A good example of this was the pro-
posal by Theresa May, Prime Minister of the UK, during the 2017 elec-
tion campaign, to introduce a so-called ‘dementia tax’. Even though this
proposal was scrapped soon after it was suggested, due to its unpopular-
ity, the very idea of taxing those who develop dementia suggested a clear
neo-liberal agenda of profiting from the most vulnerable citizens.
Bond (1992) has highlighted that the biomedical discourse around
dementia, by defining the disease as an abnormality of enormous propor-
tions, has stigmatised those living with it. This discourse has dominated
the public sphere, causing a fearful public perception of the disease. It
has also influenced the social and political responses to dementia by suc-
cessfully attracting policymakers and research funds to the area of med-
ical research for a cure. Bond’s study of the medicalisation of dementia
points out the favourable and unfavourable aspects of this process, and
explains how it has exercised its expert and social controls, as well as
leading to the individualisation and depoliticisation of behaviour (1992,
400). From a Foucauldian perspective, it can be argued that the med-
icalisation of dementia, and therefore of Alzheimer’s disease, is a con-
trolling force, because knowledge is a socially constructed category
through which power manifests itself. If dementia is socially constructed
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 25

by discourses used to control the experiences of those living with the

­disease, as well as to legitimise powerful narratives assigned to dementia,
then it is possible, as Hardin and Palfrey have done (1997), to challenge
what is known about dementia.

2.4  The Burden of Care and Personhood

The picture of Alzheimer’s disease emerging from the majority of
socially constructed cultural discourses is that of a body without a
mind, of a hollow shell; that is, a picture in which Alzheimer’s dis-
ease obliterates the subject, and calls for constant care either by family
members—informal caregivers—or by formal caregivers, at home or
in nursing-home facilities. The emphasis, then, is placed on confine-
ment and separation as the only ways to deal with persons living with
Alzheimer’s disease. The social burden for the caregiver, formal or infor-
mal, represented by both the disease and the confinement displaces the
person living with Alzheimer’s disease and places the caregiver at cen-
tre stage. The ‘burden of care’ is highlighted in most social discourses as
negative, stressing the isolation, the psychological effect, and the finan-
cial hardship it places on the caregiver.
In 2004, the Kyoto Declaration called for action to tackle the ‘epi-
demic’ nature of dementia. Soon after, national dementia plans were
developed in many countries, following the ten recommendations of the
Kyoto Declaration. Among those ten recommendations, the following
were specifically related to caregiving: to provide treatment in primary
care; to give care in the community; and to involve communities, fami-
lies, and consumers (Anon. 2004). From 2005 onwards, many countries
around the globe, mostly developed countries, established national strat-
egies with which to deal with dementia. However, some other countries,
as will be discussed in Chapter 3, have never come up with a national
strategy to tackle the challenges dementia represents, thus leaving the
care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease in the hands of family
members without any medical, psychological, or financial support from
the state.
In the last couple of decades many countries have experienced an
important shift in care for the elderly due to the financial constraints
it has placed on national budgets. This way, as the Kyoto Declaration
suggested, states support the move from long-term residential facilities
and nursing homes to home care. This is no other than the result of the
26 R. MEDINA

neo-liberal privatisation of health care. Long-term residential facilities,

as well as nursing homes, are now mainly run by the private sector, a
fact that clearly discriminates against low-income families and locates old
age within the politics of consumerism (Needham 2003). Private long-
term residential care facilities and nursing homes, as will be investigated
in Chapter 3, have adopted a commercial discourse (Gilleard and Higgs
2000; Clark and Quinn 2002; Rudman 2006; Scourfield 2007) that, in
addition, tries to hide the perception of nursing homes as a last refuge in
which to await death (Scourfield 2007, 1135).
An increase in longevity has resulted in several generations of the same
family living simultaneously. The family structure is now characterised by
a bigger number of living generations, a lower number of siblings, and
fewer children. Known as the ‘beanpole family structure,’ this is most
common in countries in which the number of children has been reduced
to below the replacement level (Bengtson 2001). In some instances, for
example, longevity and family structure determine that some people in
their 60s must care for their parents and their own grandchildren. This
multigenerational family is required to serve three different functions as a
mechanism for intergenerational support or reciprocal care, in solidarity
or support roles, and in the transfer of goods and cultural capital (Harper
2006). Therefore, the family as a unit embodies conflict and solidarity
since social structural forces and individual interests materialise and clash
within it. Furthermore, Meil (2006) suggests that the new family struc-
ture exerts more pressure on daughters, who seem more predisposed
than sons to maintain communication with older parents. The feminisa-
tion of caregiving brings important social and financial implications for
women across cultures. Thus, women are either restricted to certain jobs,
or cannot work at all due, first to their childcare responsibilities and then
to caring for the elderly and ill.
Although it is crucial to focus on the needs of caregivers, it is also
important to shift attention to the person living with dementia. Kitwood
(1993, 1997) and Sabat (2000, 2006) led the challenge against focus-
ing on the caregiver only, and called for the placing of the individual
living with Alzheimer’s disease at the centre of all discourses about the
disease. Even though Dewing (2008) questions the concept of person-
hood that, among others, Sabat and Kitwood have developed, she gives
a very detailed account of the origins of the concept of personhood. The
Cartesian duality of body and mind, and mind and brain, dominates
Western personhood and person-centred approaches, placing emphasis
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 27

on cognition. As Dewing explains (2008, 6), emphasising cognition

leads to a conception of the person with dementia as mindless, a position
which ignores the body and embodied experience: ‘person and person-
hood becomes associated with the mind, spirit, and the subjective, and
the body as simply the carrier’. As soon as the person is diagnosed with
dementia, she is transformed into a ‘patient’. Becoming a patient means
that the rights of the primary social persona are removed, therefore mak-
ing it possible for others to perceive her as inferior, and as having inferior
social status (Alvargonzález 2012).
Stephen Katz (2013) traces a complete and detailed history of mem-
ory from the Middle Ages to modern philosophy, with the aim of sug-
gesting that a concept of memory not linked completely to the split
body/mind is possible. He suggests (Katz 2013, 311) incorporating five
principles of the medieval art of memory into our present concept of
memory:

First, memory is an act of agency and imagination, not simply a passive

and cognitive process of ‘input’ and ‘output’. Our personal interpretations
of traces and images of the past are expressed in variously creative ways
that go beyond measurable recall. These also include the shaping of our
ageing memories through partial remembering and forgetting. Second,
memory is a force that intersects individual, environmental and worldly
forces, beyond and between individuals, across communal spaces and col-
lective activities. Memory is integrative rather than divisive. Third, memory
can be expressed on and through the body, our great symbolic resource
for embedding and emplotting our lives even when our minds might fail
us. Thus, memory health is affected by health in general, by diet, exer-
cise and well-being. Fourth, memory loss is not necessarily a disease but a
contingent condition of growing older. The cognitive status of older peo-
ple is part of the cognitive status of people at all ages because memory is
adaptable at all ages. Reducing people to their brains and isolating them
as sick and marginal in the name of cognitive care harms memory, which
is continual, even when forgetful. Lastly, memory, as with other cognitive
activities, is emotional as well as cerebral because our brains are centers of
feeling as well as cognition; to separate the two means failing to under-
stand memory as an ‘art’ as well as a ‘science’.

The understanding of memory loss and ageing in Cartesian terms

has caused the isolation of the elderly and of those living with demen-
tia. Ryan et al. (2000, 148) emphasise that individuals who lack social
28 R. MEDINA

interaction are incapable of expressing a social identity, and so lose

their social and familial roles. Alvargonzález (2012, 385) distinguishes
between the human individual and the human person. Hence, he disa-
grees with the belief that memory and reasoning are the sole criteria on
which to evaluate personhood, and proposes that both must be consid-
ered, alongside the ability to form and hold relationships with others,
which implies a central role for feeling and emotion.
The concept of personhood with regards to dementia was defined
by Kitwood (1993, 1997) as ‘a status or standing bestowed upon one
human being, by others, in the context of social relationship and social
being. It implies recognition, respect and trust’ (Kitwood 1997, 8).
Sabat (2002) argues that aspects of the self remain in Alzheimer’s dis-
ease even in advanced phases, and therefore speaks about the semiotic
subject (Sabat and Harré 1994). In addition, Pia Kontos (2006) intro-
duces the concept of embodied selfhood, which stresses that memory is
also embedded in the body. In ‘Mind, Meaning and Personhood in
Dementia’, Sabat (2006, 287–302) proposes a person-centred approach
to care. Brooker (2004, 216–219) defines this person-centred care as a
combination of four factors: valuing people with Alzheimer’s disease and
their carers; treating people with Alzheimer’s disease as individuals; look-
ing at the world from the perspective of the individual with Alzheimer’s
disease; and creating a positive social environment in which the person
with Alzheimer’s disease can experience relative well-being.
The concept of care, when understood as an ethical issue, entails
some sort of responsibility that emerges from people’s relationships with
others (Gastmans and De Lepeleire 2010; Tronto 1993; Van Hooft
1995). The ethical duty to care for another human being is part of our
existence as subjects/individuals (Gastmans and De Lepeleire 2010,
84). In addition, the way in which we think about being old influences
our moral reaction to the fourth age, thus embedding the model of dis-
crete life stages in our consciousness (Silvers 1999). Tronto (1993) con-
siders that the ethics of care offers a context for maintaining the rights
of citizenship in the care provision of people with dementia and their
families. Tronto’s (1993) ethics of care positions people with demen-
tia and their caregivers as interdependent people rather than within
the binary of dependent and independent. Hettema (2014, 497) has
approached the ethics of care by means of Ricœur’s perspective on vul-
nerability and autonomy, thus claiming the centrality of the receiver of
care as a person with capacities.
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 29

2.5  Dementia Narratives
The social construction of dementia in popular culture has been amply
examined by Anne Davis Basting (2003, 2009). Basting explores how
being useful in and for society impacts the concept of the self and links
the notion of memory to that of selfhood (2003, 97). Her in-depth anal-
ysis on how people with dementia communicate and connect through
art in Forget Memory (2009) positioned the person living with dementia
at the forefront, thus contributing to new perceptions and approaches to
topics such as experiences of selfhood, the concept of identity for people
living with dementia, as well as the diverse lines of communication which
living with dementia opens. Nonetheless, dementia narratives in the form
of autobiographies by caregivers have outnumbered those dementia nar-
ratives by people living with dementia. According to DeFalco (2010,
62–63), these narratives have a testimonial quality since, as in any other
trauma narrative, ‘the caregiver provides the testimony the victim can no
longer formulate’.2
Klienman’s (1988, 3–6) distinction between illness and disease is of
great importance when analysing and contrasting medical and personal
discourses around dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. As he explains,
while disease is ‘the practitioner’s perspective’ and therefore in biomed-
ical terms it is ‘reconfigured only as an alteration in biological structure
or functioning’, illness ‘refers to how the sick person and the members
of the family or wider social network perceive, live with, and respond to
symptoms and disability’. Hence disease can be conceived of as a pathol-
ogy, a list of symptoms that leads to a diagnosis.
Frank (1995) and Couser (1997) have examined the ‘autopathogra-
phy’, the autobiographical narrative of illness or disability in contempo-
rary culture (Couser 1997, 5). Frank (1995) classifies illness narratives
under three categories: the restitution narrative that focuses on the vic-
tory over illness; the chaos narrative, a sort of anti-narrative that under-
scores the instability caused by illness; and the quest narrative, which
centres on the temporality of the illness experience and the transforma-
tions experienced by the subject. Frank points out that most illness nar-
ratives take the form of ‘quest stories’ in which the ill person believes
that the experience of the illness will lead to some sort of personal gain
or knowledge (Frank 1995, 115). If the subjectivity of experiencing
illness or disability is core, then, according to Couser (1997, 29), narrat-
ing the experience of illness is a way of resisting a medicalised discourse
30 R. MEDINA

that depersonalises the person. Kathlyn Conway (2007, 24) has shown
the dangers of ill narratives which concentrates on triumph, given that
they enable culture and society ‘to ignore the needs of the ill and disa-
bled’. Moreover, she stresses the paradoxical nature of illness narratives,
which due give visibility to the ill and their experience, but simultane-
ously also displace and marginalise them as ‘others.’
Martina Zimmermann (2017) has explored Alzheimer’s narratives,
identifying the problems raised by Frank’s (1995, 17) assertion that
they are ‘chaos narratives’, stories with ‘no narrative sequence, only an
incessant present with no memorable past and no future worth anticipat-
ing’. She points out that Frank fails to distinguish between first-person
accounts of Alzheimer’s disease and those by caregivers. Zimmermann
(2017, 12–13) rightly mentions the prominent place that Alzheimer’s
disease narratives authored by caregivers currently have in the cul-
tural arena, which shapes the general public’s perception of the illness.
Consequently, her study clearly reinstates the position first-person nar-
ratives by people with Alzheimer’s disease should have within the the-
oretical approaches to life-writing. The dysnarrativia conferred on
Alzheimer’s-disease life-writing, as Zimmermann explains (2017, 8–11),
has resulted in the denial of the effect first-person narratives have in
reconstructing identity and maintaining self-worth.
Dementia narratives have been approached from multiple disciplines
and perspectives, enriching not only the theoretical framework for their
analysis, but also giving visibility to their crucial role in our contempo-
rary society. These multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to
dementia narratives have touched on essential questions. Among them,
it is important to highlight the following for the purpose of the analy-
sis undertaken in this book. Dementia narratives show that the Cartesian
division between mind and body is deep-rooted in autobiographical
dementia narratives by caregivers (Moran 2001, 248). Similarly, in most
fictional narratives, dementia functions as a structuring device or as a
theme (Bitenc 2012). Dementia has been used as a trope or metaphor
for social issues (Zeilig 2013) and narratives therefore have the power to
influence the way society perceives, talks and lives dementia.
Subjective experiences of dementia, although not always reach-
ing the public, have been emerging during the past couple of decades,
thus giving rise to first-person accounts. In these accounts the herme-
neutic experience the reader has of the text is placed at centre stage in
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 31

an effort to offer a first-hand encounter of what living with dementia

feels like. Furthermore, as Rodriquez (2013) explains, narratives have
an important role not only in the construction of the self, but also in
the construction of the community—in this case, of the community of
people living with dementia. Mainstream films about Alzheimer’s disease
tend to present the effect of the disease in the subject from a binary per-
spective determined by the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the disease (Gravagne
2013). In this sense, the before is always presented as plenitude, while
the after as what it has ceased to be, a vacuum. At the heart of this
approach is the notion of the historicity of memory and of language as
the only instrument with which to communicate that memory. DeFalco
(2010, 13) has stressed how the assumption that narrative creates mean-
ing and identity has placed people living with dementia in a difficult
position, given their inability or reduced ability to narrativise their life
through memory. Thus, conceiving of memory as non-linear and com-
munication as not only linguistic allows people living with Alzheimer’s
disease to narrate themselves.
Marlene Goldman’s last book, Forgotten (2017, 9), underlines how
dementia narratives have shifted from the elegy to the Gothic; such a
narrative promotes ‘the identification of illness as unequivocally evil, and
treats disease as a mystery and a crime to be solved’. However, as she
clearly shows throughout her detailed analysis of Canadian fiction, not
only Alzheimer’s disease but all forms of age-related dementia need to be
socially treated and perceived like any other illness. Removing the horror
and the embarrassment associated with dementia should be the priority
in order to avoid stigma and discrimination.
In the past few years, there has been a clear academic line of
approaching dementia from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within these
approaches, a crucial contribution has been to map where disability stud-
ies, ageing studies, feminism, queer studies, and dementia studies inter-
sect with each other. Sally Chivers (2011, 23), for instance, traces these
links when analysing the representation of old age on screen by acknowl-
edging that McRuer’s Crip Theory (2006) serves as the point of depar-
ture not only to reveal ‘youth as the over-visible norm, but, like critically
queer and severely disabled positions, it reveals hetero-ability as an invisi-
ble norm’. Sandberg and Marshall (2017, 5) reinforce these connections
and place emphasis on the queer-crip temporality of dementia:
32 R. MEDINA

dementia disrupts the familiar both in the sense of disorientation, in that

we do not know where we will end up, and troubling of generativity in the
heteronormative life course. The specter of dementia is fearful because it
proposes an unknown and muddy future as well as a lost past, and this also
threatens hetero-reproductive temporalities.

Rice et al.’s (2017, 8) proposal for a feminist crip time could be

employed when exploring dementia narratives, given that it replaces a
fixed and linear understanding of time—of a ‘future perfect’—with mul-
tiple and changing understandings of temporality that include those
which are not in normative representations. In fact, it can be argued that
dementia’s temporality is fluid. Its fluidity is not based on chronological
temporality, or on a perpetual present, but on the principles of new and
constantly regenerating temporalities which are defined by interpersonal
relationships. As will be explained when examining some of the films, not
remembering can lead to the power of continuous self-regeneration and
self-redefinition.
Alzheimer’s disease is used in many non-mainstream films as a trope
with which to directly or indirectly explore gender issues. Given the
cultural and ethnic diversity of the films under study, it is important to
consider the cultural and social context of each film in relation not only
to the concept of old age but also to that of gender in relation to old
age. Women account for two thirds of the world population living with
dementia, and in most countries with strong familial values women are
expected to serve as caregivers to the elderly and the ill. If the focus is
on mainstream films from the UK, Canada, and the USA, female char-
acters are predominantly portrayed as the persons living with dementia.
These female characters are generally presented, even in more posi-
tive depictions as is the case in Away from Her (2006), as the origin of
the problems, psychological and physical alike, affecting those close
to them. In non-mainstream films such as Poetry (South Korea, 2010),
The Good Herbs (Mexico, 2010), Old Cats (Chile, 2010), and Volar
(San Salvador, 2018) the focus is on the subjectivity of the person liv-
ing with Alzheimer’s disease or on the positive impact the disease has on
those close to the women: sisterhood, friendship, and intergenerational
bonding, among others, are some of the features emerging from these
films. It is interesting to note that men are the main characters living
with Alzheimer’s disease in the non-mainstream European films: The City
of No Limits (Spain, 2002); Do I Know You? (¿Y tú quién eres? Spain,
2007), Awaking from a Dream (Spain, 2008), The Memory of a Killer
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 33

(The Netherlands, 2003), Welcome to Verona (Denmark, 2006), and

Cortex (France, 2008) among others. All these films show the character
from different perspectives: some perpetuate the stigma associated with
Alzheimer’s disease, while others stress the issue of intergenerational rela-
tions in the global world. But interestingly, The Memory of a Killer and
Cortex show that individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease are still able
to use what remains of their agency, and thus use the techniques of the
thriller genre to create suspense and action via high levels of masculinity.
As Sally Chivers (2011) noted with regards to ageing in Hollywood films,
these films seem to stress the favouritism shown by the silvering screen
towards aged men who are still mentally and sexually active.

2.6   Alzheimer’s Disease in Film

Discourse practices shape the way society perceives and represents
Alzheimer’s disease, and therefore might have the final responsibility
for either socially drawing in or marginalising the group of people living
with it. This book understands the concept of culture as consisting of the
everyday processes and practices of creating meaning. From this perspec-
tive, cultural artefacts dealing with Alzheimer’s disease in general, and
film in particular, shape how we as social subjects perceive, think about
and act in relation to Alzheimer’s disease. Culture puts facts into context,
so cultural artefacts can either sustain hegemonic discourses—stigma,
isolation and exclusion—or challenge them. Cinema functions as a mir-
ror to social realities, and its power to effect social change is generally
considered to be determined either by its commercial success, where
the film is a medium for mass-influence (as in mainstream films), or
by the reactions of fewer but more committed viewers(in the case of
non-mainstream films). As a prominent social reality, Alzheimer’s disease
is becoming visible in films either as their main topic, or in the back-
ground as an inevitable presence in the contemporary world.
On Golden Pond (1981) was the first fictional feature film to talk
about dementia, followed by Do You Remember Love? (1985). Since
then, and particularly in the first two decades of the twenty-first century,
we have witnessed an important number of mainstream films in which
Alzheimer’s disease is the main topic; films from North America and the
UK such as Iris (2001), The Notebook (2004), Away from Her (2006),
The Savages (2007), The Iron Lady (2011), Still Mine (2012), Robot and
Frank (2012), or Still Alice (2014), among other fictional films.
34 R. MEDINA

The celebration of youth by postmodern culture and the

­ arginalisation of old age3 and dementia have permeated cinematic rep-
m
resentations of the latter in films around the world. However, as Cohen-
Shalev and Marcus (2012, 2013) have established, there is an important
body of non-mainstream films which offer a depiction of ageing and
dementia beyond the young vs. old and/or the memory vs. forgetting
divide. Their focus on these films has opened a space within which to
approach film representations of Alzheimer’s disease from a cross-­cultural
perspective, that allows them to reveal other perceptions and rep-
resentations of dementia that do not dwell on its negative aspects but
also portray the multiplicity of other aspects that come to light. Among
non-mainstream fictional films from across the world we can find The
Memory of a Killer, Black (2005), Welcome to Verona, Cortex, Awaking
from a Dream, Old Cats, The Good Herbs, Poetry (2010), Pandora’s Box
(2011), A Separation (2011), Wrinkles (2012), or Flying (2018).
Sadie Wearing (2013, 316) has indicated that the way these films
represent dementia reflects how ‘the condition is imagined, under-
stood and negotiated’. As Cohen-Shalev and Marcus (2012, 2013),
Chivers (2011), Swinnen (2012), Gravagne (2013), Zeilig (2013), and
Zimmermann (2017) have all noted, the depiction of dementia and age-
ing in fictional film can sustain negative stereotypes associated with the
disease and its medicalisation. Alternatively, however, it can focus not so
much on deficits as on the subjectivity and personhood of the individual
living with Alzheimer’s disease.
In ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Jean-
Louis Baudry (1974, 13–14) states that the specific function of cinema is
to work as an instrument of ideology. Every single element of technology
and film technique used to produce a film needs to be considered as part
of the discursive nature of cinema. From the camera to the projector,
cinema works as an ideological mechanism, as an apparatus that serves
ideology. In this sense, Baudry (1974, 13) considers that ‘The ideolog-
ical mechanism at work in the cinema seems thus to be concentrated on
the relationship between the camera and the subject.’
Cinema has become a form of mass entertainment with the power of
reflecting social issues. However, both national and global film indus-
tries aim to reach the widest audience possible to make a profit; that is,
the goal is to please as many viewers as possible, thus avoiding alienating
groups of people. Hollywood’s film industry has made youth the c­ entre
of its ideological mechanism in order to attract audiences and make
 2 OLD AGE AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN FILM 35

a profit. The glorification of youth in mainstream film has either made

old age invisible or has placed it as a secondary and stereotyped topic.
As Sally Chivers (2011, 34) indicates, youth veneration has also resulted
in some fascination with ageing on screen. Even though in the past few
years more films are emerging that finally address ageing, it is important
to stress the type of ageing that these mainstream films promote. For
instance, making full use of the star system, Hampstead (2017) and Our
Souls at Night (2017) are good examples of the film industry’s attempt
to reach a huge swathe of ageing audiences with films that promote suc-
cessful ageing among white heteronormative middle-class people. It can
be argued that ageing is being absorbed into Hollywood’s white heter-
onormative middle-class machinery, thus once more marginalising other
non-normative experiences.
Moving to the social reality of Alzheimer’s disease, Hollywood’s pro-
duction of fictional films solely on this theme, as previously shown, is
not abundant. Additionally, these films mainly focus on symptoms and
deficits, on the burden of care, on the impact on caregivers and loved
ones, and on the tragedy of a dreadful disease. The tragic tone of these
films, usually narrated from the perspective of a family member or the
caregiver, seeks to gain the sympathetic response from the specta-
tor towards the hardships faced by those living with the person with
Alzheimer’s disease (Swinnen 2012, 14). In contrast to these depictions
of Alzheimer’s disease, as indicated above, non-mainstream films pro-
duced within national contexts generally contribute to the representation
of Alzheimer’s disease from different angles and perspectives; in these
films, the person living with Alzheimer’s disease is either the focus, or
becomes a trope for important national cultural, social, political, gender,
and ethnic issues. Consequently, these films approach Alzheimer’s disease
from a rich variety of perspectives, highlighting different experiences of
the disease, and diverse ways of aesthetically presenting it. Each of the
films that will be examined in this book introduces a unique perspective
on the disease, ranging from the subjective experience of Alzheimer’s
to ethical questions such as euthanasia and suicide, to name just a few.
The variety of genres and subgenres that the films under study employ
reinforces the multiple perspectives from which Alzheimer’s disease can
be approached. Without denying the tragedy of the disease, these films
undoubtedly supersede the mere negative features attached to it in order
to explore other issues that pertain to the local and national contexts in
which these films are produced.
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gorgeous banqueting-hall of her father, she looked and felt as if
assisting at a funeral feast, and that she even then would have been
the better of the visor to prevent many conjectures on what her
saddened looks might mean. But the time for assuming the mask
arrived, and the nobles of the land, with their haughty dames, and
many a knight, and many a damsel fair, bedight in silk and cloth of
gold, and blazing with jewels, graced the tapestried ball-room, on
which a flood of brilliant light was poured from lamp and torch. And
each in joyous mood, cheered by the merry minstrels, and by the
sound of harp and viol, impatiently awaited the commencement of
the dance, when they were informed that it was stayed for an
expected and honourable guest. And now again curiosity was at its
height. But presently there was a flourish of the music, and a cry of
the ushers to make way for the noble Earl of Ormisdale, and the large
doors at the foot of the hall were flung wide open, and the gallant
young earl, masked, and attended by a train of young gentlemen, all
his kinsmen, or picked and chosen friends, advanced amid murmurs
of admiration to the middle of the hall. Here they were met and
welcomed by the baron, who led the earl to his lovely daughter, and
having presented him to her, the guests were presently gratified by
seeing the gallant young nobleman take the hand of the Lady Isabel,
and lead her out to dance. Nor were there any present whose eyes did
not follow them with admiration, though the measure chosen by the
high-born damsel savoured more that night of grace and dignity than
lightness of either heart or heel. Meantime, the old baron was so full
of joy and delight, that it was remarked by all, as he was still seen
near his daughter and her partner. But their hearts were both
quaking: the unhappy Lady Isabel’s with thinking of her promise to
her father, and that of her betrothed with a fear known only to
himself, for he had heard that she had loved, and now observed her
narrowly. And, not content with this, he asked her, as he sat beside
her, many a wily question, till at last he spoke his fears in plain guise,
and she, with many sighs and tears shed within her mask, confessed
the truth; still saying, that for her father’s sake she would be his wife,
if he accepted of her on such terms. But now her father whispered to
her that she must presently prepare to keep her word, as this must be
her bridal-night, for to that purpose alone was this high wassail kept.
Her lover, too, no way daunted by his knowledge of her heart,
pressed on his suit to have it so. And now was the despairing damsel
almost beside herself, when her father, announcing aloud his
purpose to the astonished guests, called for the priest, and caused all
to unmask. But in what words shall we paint the surprise, the
delight, the flood of joy that came upon the heart of the Lady Isabel,
when the earl’s mask was removed, and she beheld in him her much
beloved Roderick, who, his cousin being dead, was now the Earl of
Ormisdale!
And now was each corner of the castle, from basement stone to
turret height, filled with joyous greetings, and the health and
happiness of the noble Earl Roderick, and of his bride, the dutiful
Lady Isabel, deeply drank in many a wassail bowl.
The stately castle and its revels, the proud baron and his pomp, the
beauteous dame and her children’s children, have now passed away
into oblivion, save this slight record, which has only been preserved
in remembrance of the daughter’s virtue, who preferred her father’s
happiness to her own.—Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1833.
 THE DESPERATE DUEL.

By D. M. Moir, M.D.
Nay, never shake thy gory locks at me;
Thou canst not say I did it!—Macbeth.

It was on a fine summer morning, somewhere about four o’clock,

when I waukened from my night’s rest, and was about thinking to
bestir mysel, that I heard the sound of voices in the kail-yard,
stretching south frae our back windows. I listened—and I listened—
and I better listened—and still the sound of the argle-bargling
became more distinct, now in a fleeching way, and now in harsh
angry tones, as if some quarrelsome disagreement had ta’en place. I
hadna the comfort of my wife’s company in this dilemma; she being
awa, three days before, on the top of Tammy Trundle the carrier’s
cart, to Lauder, on a visit to her folks there; her mother (my
gudemother, like) having been for some time ill, with an income in
her leg, which threatened to make a lameter of her in her old age; the
twa doctors there, no speaking of the blacksmith, and sundry skeely
old women, being able to mak naething of the business; so nane
happened to be wi’ me in the room, saving wee Benjie, who was lying
asleep at the back of the bed, with his little Kilmarnock on his head,
as sound as a top. Nevertheless, I lookit for my claes; and opening
one-half of the window-shutter, I saw four young birkies well
dressed; indeed three of them customers of my ain, all belanging to
the toun; twa of them young doctors; ane of them a writer’s clerk;
and the ither a grocer; the hale looking very fierce and fearsome, like
turkey cocks; swaggering about with their hands and arms as if they
had been the king’s dragoons; and priming a pair of pistols, which
ane of the surgeons, a speerity, out-spoken lad, Maister Blister, was
haddin’ in his grip.
I jaloused at ance what they were after, being now a wee up to
firearms; so I saw that skaith was to come o’t, and that I wad be
wanting in my duty on four heads—first, as a Christian; second, as a
man; third, as a subject; and fourth, as a father, if I withheld mysel
frae the scene, nor lifted up my voice, however fruitlessly, against
such crying iniquity as the wanton letting out of human blood; sae
furth I hastened—half-dressed, with my gray stockings rolled up my
thighs, over my corduroys, and my auld hat aboon my cowl—to the
kail-yard of contention.
I was just in the nick of time, and my presence checked the
effusion of blood for a little;—but wait a wee. So high and furious
were at least three of the party, that I saw it was catching water in a
sieve to waste words on them, knowing, as clearly as the sun serves
the world, that interceding would be of no avail. Howsomever, I
made a feint, and threatened to bowl awa for a magistrait, if they
wadna desist, and stop from their barbarous and bluidy purpose;
but, i’fegs, I had better have keepit my counsel till it was asked for.
“Tailor Mansie,” quoth Maister Thomas Blister, with a furious cock
of his eye (he was a queer Eirish birkie, come ower for his
yedication), “since ye have ventured to thrust your nose,” said he,
“where nobody invited ye, you must just stay,” said he, “and abide by
the consequences. This is an affair of honour,” quoth he; “and if ye
venture to stir one foot from the spot, och then,” said he, “by the
poker of St Patrick, but whisk through ye goes one of these leaden
playthings, as sure as ye ever spoiled a coat, or cabbaged broadcloth.
Ye have now come out, ye observe, hark ye,” said ye, “and are art and
part in the business;—and, if one, or both, of the principals be killed,
poor devils,” said he, “we are all alike liable to take our trial before
the Justiciary Court, hark ye; and, by the powers,” said he, “I doubt
not but that, on proper consideration, they will allow us to get off
mercifully, on this side of hanging, by a verdict of manslaughter.”
’Od, I fund mysel immediately in a scrape; but how to get out of it
baffled my gumption. It set me all a shivering; yet I thought that,
come the warst when it wad, they surely wad not hang the faither of a
helpless sma family, that had naething but his needle for their
support, if I made a proper affidavy, about having tried to make
peace between the youths. So, conscience being a brave supporter, I
abode in silence, though not without many queer and qualmish
thochts, and a pit-patting of the heart, no unco pleasant in the
tholing.
“Blood and wounds!” bawled Maister Thomas Blister, “it would be
a disgrace for ever on the honourable profession of physic,” egging
on puir Maister Willie Magneezhy, whose face was as white as
double-bleached linen, “to make any apology for such an insult. You
not fit to doctor a cat,—you not fit to bleed a calf,—you not fit to
poultice a pig,—after three years apprenticeship,” said he, “and a
winter with Doctor Monro? By the cupping-glasses of ’Pocrates,” said
he, “and by the pistol of Gallon, but I would have caned him on the
spot, if he had just let out half as much to me. Look ye, man,” said he,
“look ye, man, he is all shaking” (this was the truth); “he’ll turn tail.
At him like fire, Willie.”
Magneezhy, though sadly frightened, looked a thocht brighter, and
made a kind o’ half stap forrit. “Say that ye’ll ask my pardon once
more,—and if no,” said the puir lad, with a voice broken and
trembling, “then we must just shoot one another.”
“Devil a bit,” answered Mr Bloatsheet, “devil a bit. No, sir; you
must down on your bare knees, and beg ten thousand pardons for
calling me out here, in a raw morning; or I’ll have a shot at you,
whether you will or no.”
“Will you stand that?” said Blister, with eyes like burning coals.
“By the living jingo and the holy poker, Magneezhy, if you stand that
—if you stand that, I say, I stand no longer your second, but leave you
to disgrace, and a caning. If he likes to shoot you like a dog, and not
as a gentleman, then let him do it and be done.”
“No, sir,” replied Magneezhy, with a quivering voice, which he
tried in vain, puir fellow, to render warlike (he had never been in the
volunteers, like me). “Hand us the pistols, then, and let us do or die!”
“Spoken like a hero, and brother of the lancet: as little afraid at the
sight of your own blood, as at that of your patients,” said Blister.
“Hand over the pistols.”
It was an awfu’ business. Gude save us, such goings on in a
Christian land! While Mr Bloatsheet, the young writer, was in the act
of doing what he was bid, I again, but to no purpose, endeavoured to
slip in a word edgeways. Magneezhy was in an awfu’ case; if he had
been already shot, he could not have looked mair clay and corpse-
like; so I took a kind of whispering, while the stramash was drawing
to a bloody conclusion, with Maister Harry Molasses, the fourth in
the spree, who was standing behind Bloatsheet, with a large
mahogany box under his arm, something in shape like that of a
licensed packman, ganging about from house to house through the
country-side, selling toys and trinkets, or niffering plated ear-rings
and sic like, wi’ young lasses, for auld silver coins or cracked tea-
spoons.
“Oh!” answered he, very composedly, as if it had been a canister fu’
of black rappee, or blackguard, that he had just lifted down from his
tap shelf, “it’s just Doctor Blister’s saws, whittles, and big knives, in
case ony of their legs or arms be blawn away, that he may cut them
off.” Little wad have prevented me sinking down through the ground,
had I not remembered, at the preceese moment, that I myself was a
soldier, and liable, when the hour of danger threatened, to be called
out, in marching order, to the field of battle. But by this time the
pistols were handed to the two infatuated young men—Mr
Bloatsheet, as fierce as a hussar dragoon, and Magneezhy, as supple
in the knees as if he was all on oiled hinges; so the next consideration
was to get weel out of the way, the lookers-on running nearly as great
a chance of being shot as the principals, they no being accustomed,
like me, for instance, to the use of arms; on which account, I
scougged mysel behind a big pear-tree; baith being to fire when
Blister gied the word “Off!”
I had hardly jouked into my hidy-hole, when “crack, crack” played
the pistols like lightning, and as soon as I got my cowl ta’en from my
een, and looked about, wae’s me, I saw Magneezhy clap his hand to
his brow, wheel round like a peerie, or a sheep seized wi’ the sturdie,
and then play flap down on his braidside, breaking the necks of half a
dozen cabbage-stocks, three of which were afterwards clean lost, as
we couldna pit them all into the pat at ae time. The hale o’ us ran
forrit, but foremost was Bloatsheet, who, seizing Magneezhy by the
hand, said wi’ a mournful face, “I hope you forgive me?—Only say
this as long as you have breath, for I am off to Leith harbour in half a
minute.”
 The blude was rinning ower puir Magneezhy’s een, and drib-
dribbling frae the neb o’ his nose; so he was truly in a pitiful state;
but he said with more strength than I thocht he could have mustered,
—“Yes, yes, fly for your life, I am dying without much pain—fly for
your life, for I am a gone man!”
Bloatsheet bounced through the bit kail-yard like a maukin, clamb
ower the bit wa’, and aff like mad; while Blister was feeling
Magneezhy’s pulse with ane hand, and looking at his doctor’s watch,
which he had in the ither.
“Do ye think that the puir lad will live, doctor?” said I till him.
He gave his head a wise shake, and only observed, “I dare say, it
will be a hanging business amang us. In what direction do you think,
Mansie, we should all take flight?”
But I answered bravely, “Flee them that will, I’se flee nane. If am
ta’en prisoner, the town-officers maun haul me frae my ain house;
but nevertheless I trust the visibility of my innocence will be as plain
as a pikestaff to the een of the fifteen.”
“What then, Mansie, will we do with poor Magneezhy? Give us
your advice in need.”
“Let us carry him down to my ain bed,” answered I; “I wad not
desert a fellow-creature in his dying hour! Help me down wi’ him,
and then flee the country as fast as you are able!”
We immediately proceeded, and lifted the poor lad, wha had now
dwaumed away, upon our wife’s hand-barrow, Blister taking the feet,
and me the oxters, whereby I got my waistcoat a’ japanned with
blude; so, when we got him laid right, we proceeded to carry him
between us down the close, just as if he had been a stickit sheep, and
in at the back door, which cost us some trouble, being narrow, and
the barrow getting jammed in; but, at lang and last, we got him
streeked out aboon the blankets, having previously shooken Benjie,
and waukened him out of his morning’s nap.
A’ this being accomplished, and got ower, Blister decamped,
leaving me my leeful lane, excepting Benjie, wha was next to
naebody, in the house with the deein’ man. What a frightfu’ face he
had, all smeared ower with blude and pouther! And I really jaloused,
that if he deed in that room, it wad be haunted for ever mair, he
being in a manner a murdered man, so that, even should I be
acquitted of art and part, his ghaist might still come to bother us,
making our house a hell upon yirth, and frightening us out of our
seven senses. But, in the midst of my dreadful surmeeses, when all
was still, so that you might hae heard a pin fall, a knock-knock-knock
cam to the door, on which, recovering my senses, I dreaded first that
it was the death-chap, and syne that the affair had gotten wind, and
that it was the beagles come in search of me; so I kissed little Benjie,
wha was sitting on his creepie, blubbering and greeting for his
parritch, while a tear stood in my ain ee, as I gaed forrit to lift the
sneck, to let the officers, as I thocht, harry our house, by carrying aff
me, its master; but it was—thank Heaven!—only Tammy Bodkin
coming in whistling to his wark with some measuring-papers hinging
round his neck.
“Ah, Tammy,” said I to him, my heart warming at a kent face, and
making the laddie, although my bounden servant by a regular
indenture of five years, a friend in my need, “come in, my man. I fear
ye’ll hae to tak charge of the business for some time to come. Mind
what I tell’d ye about the shaping and the cutting, and no making the
goose ower warm, as I doubt I am about to be harled awa to the
Tolbooth.”
Tammy’s heart louped to his mouth.
“Ay, maister,” he said, “ye’re joking. What should ye have done
that ye should be ta’en to sic an ill place?”
“Ah, Tammy, lad,” answered I, “it is but ower true.”
“Weel, weel,” quo’ Tammy—I really thought it a great deal of the
laddie—“weel, weel, they canna prevent me coming to sew beside ye;
and, if I can tak the measure of customers without, ye can cut the
claith within. But what is’t for, maister?”
“Come in here,” said I to him, “and believe your ain een, Tammy,
my man.”
“Losh me!” cried the puir laddie, glowering at the bluidy face of the
man in the bed. “Ay—ay—ay! maister; save us, maister; ay—ay—ay—
you have na cloured his harnpan wi’ the goose? Ay, maister, maister!
what an unyirthly sight!! I doubt they’ll hang us a’;—you for doing’t,
and me on suspicion, and Benjie as art and part, puir thing. But I’ll
rin for a doctor. Will I, maister?”
 The thocht had never struck me before, being in a sort of a manner
dung stupid; but catching up the word, I said wi’ all my pith and birr,
“Rin, rin, Tammy, rin for life and death!”
Tammy bolted like a nine-year-auld, never looking ahint his tail:
so, in less than ten minutes, he returned, hauling alang auld Doctor
Gripes, whom he had wakened out o’ his bed by the lug and horn, at
the very time I was trying to quiet young Benjie, wha was following
me up and doun the house, as I was pacing to and fro in distraction,
girning and whinging for his breakfast.
“Bad business, bad business; bless us, what is this?” said the auld
doctor, staring at Magneezhy’s bluidy face through his silver
spectacles—“What’s the matter?”
The puir patient knew at once his maister’s tongue, and, lifting up
ane of his eyes—the other being stiff and barkened down—said in a
melancholy voice, “Ah, master, do ye think I’ll get better?”
Doctor Gripes, auld man as he was, started back, as if he had been
a French dancing-master, or had strampit on a het bar of iron. “Tom,
Tom, is this you? What, in the name of wonder, has done this?” Then
feeling his wrist—“But your pulse is quite good. Have you fallen, boy?
Where is the blood coming from?”
“Somewhere about the hairy scaup,” answered Magneezhy, in his
own sort of lingo. “I doubt some artery’s cut through!”
The doctor immediately bade him lie quiet, and hush, as he was
getting a needle and silken thread ready to sew it up; ordering me to
get a basin and water ready, to wash the puir lad’s physog. I did so as
hard as I was able, though I wasna sure about the blude just; auld
Doctor Gripes watching ower my shouther, wi’ a lighted penny
candle in ae hand, and the needle and thread in the ither, to see
where the bluid spouted frae. But we were as daft as wise; so he bade
me tak my big shears, and cut out a’ the hair on the fore part of the
head as bare as my loof; and syne we washed, and better washed; so
Magneezhy got the ither ee up, when the barkened blude was loosed,
looking, though as pale as a clean shirt, mair frighted than hurt; until
it became plain to us all, first to the doctor, syne to me, and syne to
Tammy Bodkin, and last of a’ to Magneezhy himsel, that his skin was
na sae much as peeled; so we helped him out of the bed, and blithe
was I to see the lad standing on the floor, without a haud, on his ain
feet.
I did my best to clean his neckcloth and sark-neck of the blude,
making him look as decentish as possible, considering
circumstances; and lending him, as the Scripture commands, my
tartan mantle to hide the infirmity of his bluidy breeks and
waistcoat. Hame gaed he and his maister thegither, me standing at
our close mouth, wishing them a gude morning, and blithe to see
their backs. Indeed, a condemned thief with the rope about his neck,
and the white cowl tied ower his een, to say naething of his hands
yerked thegither behind his back, and on the nick of being thrown
ower, couldna been mair thankfu’ for a reprieve than I was, at the
same blessed moment. It was like Adam seeing the deil’s rear
marching out o’ Paradise, if ane may be allowed to think sic a thing.
The hale business—tag, rag, and bobtail—soon, however, spunkit
out, and was the town talk for mair than ae day. But ye’ll hear.
At the first I pitied the puir lads, that I thocht had fled for ever and
aye from their native country to Bengal, Seringapatam, Copenhagen,
Botany Bay, or Jamaica; leaving behint them all their friends and
auld Scotland, as they might never hear o’ the gudeness of
Providence in their behalf. But—wait a wee.
Wad ye believe it? As sure’s death, the hale was but a wicked trick
played by that mischievous loon Blister and his cronies, upon ane
that was a simple and saft-headed callant. Deil a haet was in the ae
pistol but a pluff o’ pouther; and, in the ither, a cartridge paper, fu’ o’
bull’s blood, was rammed down upon the charge, the which, hiting
Magneezhy on the ee-bree, had caused a business that seemed to
have put him out o’ life, and nearly put me (though ane of the
volunteers) out of my seven senses.—Mansie Wauch.
 THE VACANT CHAIR.

By John Mackay Wilson.

You have all heard of the Cheviot mountains. They are a rough,
rugged, majestic chain of hills, which a poet might term the Roman
wall of nature; crowned with snow, belted with storms, surrounded
by pastures and fruitful fields, and still dividing the northern portion
of Great Britain from the southern. With their proud summits
piercing the clouds, and their dark, rocky declivities frowning upon
the glens below, thay appear symbolical of the wild and untamable
spirits of the Borderers who once inhabited their sides. We say, you
have all heard of the Cheviots, and know them to be very high hills,
like a huge clasp riveting England and Scotland together; but we are
not aware that you may have heard of Marchlaw, an old, gray-looking
farm-house, substantial as a modern fortress, recently, and, for aught
we know to the contrary, still inhabited by Peter Elliot, the proprietor
of some five hundred surrounding acres. The boundaries of Peter’s
farm, indeed, were defined neither by fields, hedges, nor stone walls.
A wooden stake here, and a stone there, at considerable distances
from each other, were the general landmarks; but neither Peter nor
his neighbours considered a few acres worth quarrelling about; and
their sheep frequently visited each other’s pastures in a friendly way,
harmoniously sharing a family dinner, in the same spirit as their
masters made themselves free at each other’s tables.
Peter was placed in very unpleasant circumstances, owing to the
situation of Marchlaw House, which, unfortunately, was built
immediately across the “ideal line,” dividing the two kingdoms; and
his misfortune was, that, being born within it, he knew not whether
he was an Englishman or a Scotchman. He could trace his ancestral
line no farther back than his great-grandfather, who, it appeared
from the family Bible, had, together with his grandfather and father,
claimed Marchlaw as their birthplace. They, however, were not
involved in the same perplexities as their descendant. The parlour
was distinctly acknowledged to be in Scotland, and two-thirds of the
kitchen were as certainly allowed to be in England;—his three
ancestors were born in the room over the parlour, and, therefore,
were Scotchmen beyond question; but Peter, unluckily, being
brought into the world before the death of his grandfather, his
parents occupied a room immediately over the debatable boundary
line which crossed the kitchen. The room, though scarcely eight feet
square, was evidently situated between the two countries; but, no
one being able to ascertain what portion belonged to each, Peter,
after many arguments and altercations upon the subject, was driven
to the disagreeable alternative of confessing he knew not what
countryman he was. What rendered the confession the more painful
was, that it was Peter’s highest ambition to be thought a Scotsman.
All his arable land lay on the Scottish side; his mother was
collaterally related to the Stuarts; and few families were more
ancient or respectable than the Elliots. Peter’s speech, indeed,
bewrayed him to be a walking partition between the two kingdoms—
a living representation of the Union; for in one word he pronounced
the letter r with the broad, masculine sound of the North Briton, and
in the next with the liquid burr of the Northumbrians.
Peter, or, if you prefer it, Peter Elliot, Esquire of Marchlaw, in the
counties of Northumberland and Roxburgh, was, for many years, the
best runner, leaper, and wrestler between Wooler and Jedburgh.
Whirled from his hand, the ponderous bullet whizzed through the air
like a pigeon on the wing; and the best “putter” on the Borders
quailed from competition. As a feather in his grasp, he seized the
unwieldy hammer, swept it round and round his head,
accompanying with agile limb its evolutions, swiftly as swallows play
around a circle, and hurled it from his hands like a shot from a rifle,
till antagonists shrunk back, and the spectators burst into a shout.
“Well done, squire! the squire for ever!” once exclaimed a servile
observer of titles. “Squire! wha are ye squiring at?” returned Peter.
“Confound ye! where was ye when I was christened squire? My
name’s Peter Elliot—your man, or onybody’s man, at whatever they
like!”
 Peter’s soul was free, bounding, and buoyant as the wind that
carolled in a zephyr, or shouted in a hurricane, upon his native hills;
and his body was thirteen stone of healthy substantial flesh, steeped
in the spirits of life. He had been long married, but marriage had
wrought no change upon him. They who suppose that wedlock
transforms the lark into an owl, offer an insult to the lovely beings
who, brightening our darkest hours with the smiles of affection,
teach us that that only is unbecoming in the husband which is
disgraceful in the man. Nearly twenty years had passed over them;
but Janet was still as kind, and, in his eyes, as beautiful as when,
bestowing on him her hand, she blushed her vows at the altar; and he
was still as happy, as generous, and as free. Nine fair children sat
around their domestic hearth, and one, the youngling of the flock,
smiled upon its mother’s knee. Peter had never known sorrow; he
was blest in his wife, in his children, in his flocks. He had become
richer than his fathers. He was beloved by his neighbours, the tillers
of his ground, and his herdsmen: yea, no man envied his prosperity.
But a blight passed over the harvest of his joys, and gall was rained
into the cup of his felicity.
It was Christmas-day, and a more melancholy-looking sun never
rose on the 25th of December. One vast, sable cloud, like a universal
pall, overspread the heavens. For weeks the ground had been covered
with clear, dazzling snow; and as throughout the day the rain
continued its unwearied and monotonous drizzle, the earth assumed
a character and appearance melancholy and troubled as the heavens.
Like a mastiff that has lost its owner, the wind howled dolefully down
the glens, and was re-echoed from the caves of the mountains, as the
lamentations of a legion of invisible spirits. The frowning, snow-clad
precipices were instinct with motion, as avalanche upon avalanche,
the larger burying the less, crowded downward in their tremendous
journey to the plain. The simple mountain rills had assumed the
majesty of rivers; the broader streams were swollen into the wild
torrent, and, gushing forth as cataracts, in fury and in foam,
enveloped the valleys in an angry flood. But at Marchlaw the fire
blazed blithely; the kitchen groaned beneath the load of preparations
for a joyful feast; and glad faces glided from room to room.
Peter Elliot kept Christmas, not so much because it was Christmas,
as in honour of its being the birthday of Thomas, his first-born, who
that day entered his nineteenth year. With a father’s love, his heart
yearned for all his children; but Thomas was the pride of his eyes.
Cards of apology had not then found their way among our Border
hills; and as all knew that, although Peter admitted no spirits within
his threshold, nor a drunkard at his table, he was, nevertheless, no
niggard in his hospitality, his invitations were accepted without
ceremony. The guests were assembled; and the kitchen being the
only apartment in the building large enough to contain them, the
cloth was spread upon a long, clean, oaken table, stretching from
England into Scotland. On the English end of the board were placed
a ponderous plum-pudding, studded with temptation, and a smoking
sirloin; on Scotland, a savoury and well-seasoned haggis, with a
sheep’shead and trotters; while the intermediate space was filled
with the good things of this life, common to both kingdoms and to
the season.
The guests from the north and from the south were arranged
promiscuously. Every seat was filled—save one. The chair by Peter’s
right hand remained unoccupied. He had raised his hands before his
eyes, and besought a blessing on what was placed before them, and
was preparing to carve for his visitors, when his eyes fell upon the
vacant chair. The knife dropped upon the table. Anxiety flashed
across his countenance, like an arrow from an unseen hand.
“Janet, where is Thomas?” he inquired; “hae nane o’ ye seen him?”
and, without waiting an answer, he continued—“How is it possible he
can be absent at a time like this? And on such a day, too? Excuse me
a minute, friends, till I just step out and see if I can find him. Since
ever I kept this day, as mony o’ ye ken, he has always been at my
right hand, in that very chair; I canna think o’ beginning our dinner
while I see it empty.”
“If the filling of the chair be all,” said a pert young sheep-farmer,
named Johnson, “I will step into it till Master Thomas arrive.”
“Ye’re not a father, young man,” said Peter, and walked out of the
room.
Minute succeeded minute, but Peter returned not. The guests
became hungry, peevish, and gloomy, while an excellent dinner
continued spoiling before them. Mrs Elliot, whose goodnature was
the most prominent feature in her character, strove, by every
possible effort, to beguile the unpleasant impressions she perceived
gathering upon their countenances.
“Peter is just as bad as him,” she remarked, “to hae gane to seek
him when he kenned the dinner wouldna keep. And I’m sure Thomas
kenned it would be ready at one o’clock to a minute. It’s sae
unthinking and unfriendly like to keep folk waiting.” And,
endeavouring to smile upon a beautiful black-haired girl of
seventeen, who sat by her elbow, she continued in an anxious
whisper—“Did ye see naething o’ him, Elizabeth, hinny?”
The maiden blushed deeply; the question evidently gave freedom
to a tear, which had, for some time, been an unwilling prisoner in the
brightest eyes in the room; and the monosyllable, “No,” that
trembled from her lips, was audible only to the ear of the inquirer. In
vain Mrs Elliot despatched one of her children after another, in quest
of their father and brother; they came and went, but brought no
tidings more cheering than the moaning of the hollow wind. Minutes
rolled into hours, yet neither came. She perceived the prouder of her
guests preparing to withdraw, and, observing that “Thomas’s
absence was so singular and unaccountable, and so unlike either him
or his father, she didna ken what apology to make to her friends for
such treatment; but it was needless waiting, and begged they would
use no ceremony, but just begin.”
No second invitation was necessary. Good humour appeared to be
restored, and sirloins, pies, pasties, and moorfowl began to disappear
like the lost son. For a moment, Mrs Elliot apparently partook in the
restoration of cheerfulness; but a low sigh at her elbow again drove
the colour from her rosy cheeks. Her eye wandered to the farther end
of the table, and rested on the unoccupied seat of her husband, and
the vacant chair of her first-born. Her heart fell heavily within her;
all the mother gushed into her bosom; and, rising from the table,
“What in the world can be the meaning o’ this?” said she, as she
hurried, with a troubled countenance, towards the door. Her
husband met her on the threshold.
“Where hae ye been, Peter?” said she, eagerly. “Hae ye seen
naething o’ him?”
“Naething, naething,” replied he; “is he no cast up yet?” And, with
a melancholy glance, his eyes sought an answer in the deserted chair.
His lips quivered, his tongue faltered.
 “Gude forgie me,” said he, “and such a day for even an enemy to be
out in! I’ve been up and doun every way that I can think on, but not a
living creature has seen or heard tell o’ him. Ye’ll excuse me,
neebors,” he added, leaving the house; “I must awa again, for I canna
rest.”
“I ken by mysel, friends,” said Adam Bell, a decent-looking
Northumbrian, “that a faither’s heart is as sensitive as the apple o’
his e’e; and I think we would show a want o’ natural sympathy and
respect for our worthy neighbour, if we didna every one get his foot
into the stirrup without loss o’ time, and assist him in his search. For,
in my rough, country way o’ thinking, it must be something
particularly out o’ the common that would tempt Thomas to be
amissing. Indeed, I needna say tempt, for there could be no
inclination in the way. And our hills,” he concluded, in a lower tone,
“are not ower chancy in other respects, besides the breaking up o’ the
storm.”
“Oh!” said Mrs Elliot, wringing her hands, “I have had the coming
o’ this about me for days and days. My head was growing dizzy with
happiness, but thoughts came stealing upon me like ghosts, and I felt
a lonely soughing about my heart, without being able to tell the
cause; but the cause is come at last! And my dear Thomas—the very
pride and staff o’ my life—is lost—lost to me for ever!”
“I ken, Mrs Elliot,” replied the Northumbrian, “it is an easy matter
to say compose yourself, for them that dinna ken what it is to feel.
But, at the same time, in our plain, country way o’ thinking, we are
always ready to believe the worst. I’ve often heard my father say, and
I’ve as often remarked it myself, that, before anything happens to a
body, there is a something comes ower them, like a cloud before the
face o’ the sun; a sort o’ dumb whispering about the breast from the
other world. And though I trust there is naething o’ the kind in your
case, yet as you observe, when I find myself growing dizzy, as it were,
with happiness, it makes good a saying o’ my mother’s, poor body.
‘Bairns, bairns,’ she used to say, ‘there is ower muckle singing in your
heads to-night; we will have a shower before bedtime.’ And I never,
in my born days, saw it fail.”
At any other period, Mr Bell’s dissertation on presentiments would
have been found a fitting text on which to hang all the dreams,
wraiths, warnings, and marvellous circumstances, that had been
handed down to the company from the days of their grandfathers;
but, in the present instance, they were too much occupied in
consultation regarding the different routes to be taken in their
search.
Twelve horsemen, and some half-dozen pedestrians, were seen
hurrying in divers directions from Marchlaw, as the last faint lights
of a melancholy day were yielding to the heavy darkness which
appeared pressing in solid masses down the sides of the mountains.
The wives and daughters of the party were alone left with the
disconsolate mother, who alternately pressed her weeping children
to her heart, and told them to weep not, for their brother would soon
return; while the tears stole down her own cheeks, and the infant in
her arms wept because its mother wept. Her friends strove with each
other to inspire hope, and poured upon her ear their mingled and
loquacious consolation. But one remained silent. The daughter of
Adam Bell, who sat by Mrs Elliot’s elbow at table, had shrunk into an
obscure corner of the room. Before her face she held a handkerchief
wet with tears. Her bosom throbbed convulsively; and, as
occasionally her broken sighs burst from their prison house, a
significant whisper passed among the younger part of the company.
Mrs Elliot approached her, and taking her hand tenderly within
both of hers—“Oh, hinny! hinny!” said she, “yer sighs gae through my
heart like a knife! An’ what can I do to comfort ye? Come, Elizabeth,
my bonny love, let us hope for the best. Ye see before ye a sorrowin’
mother—a mother that fondly hoped to see you an’—I canna say it—
an’ I am ill qualified to gie comfort, when my own heart is like a
furnace! But, oh! let us try and remember the blessed portion,
‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,’ an’ inwardly pray for
strength to say ‘His will be done!’”
Time stole on towards midnight, and one by one the unsuccessful
party returned. As foot after foot approached, every breath was held
to listen.
“No, no, no,” cried the mother, again and again, with increasing
anguish, “it’s no the foot o’ my ain bairn;” while her keen gaze still
remained riveted upon the door, and was not withdrawn, nor the
hope of despair relinquished, till the individual entered, and with a
silent and ominous shake of his head, betokened his fruitless efforts.
The clock had struck twelve; all were returned, save the father. The
wind howled more wildly; the rain poured upon the windows in
ceaseless torrents; and the roaring of the mountain rivers gave a
character of deeper ghostliness to their sepulchral silence; for they
sat, each wrapt in forebodings, listening to the storm; and no sounds
were heard, save the groans of the mother, the weeping of her
children, and the bitter and broken sobs of the bereaved maiden,
who leaned her head upon her father’s bosom, refusing to be
comforted.
At length the barking of the farm dog announced footsteps at a
distance. Every ear was raised to listen, every eye turned to the door;
but, before the tread was yet audible to the listeners—“Oh! it is only
Peter’s foot!” said the miserable mother, and, weeping, rose to meet
him.
“Janet, Janet!” he exclaimed, as he entered, and threw his arms
around her neck, “what’s this come upon us at last?”
He cast an inquisitive glance around his dwelling, and a convulsive
shiver passed over his manly frame, as his eye again fell on the
vacant chair, which no one had ventured to occupy. Hour succeeded
hour, but the company separated not; and low, sorrowful whispers
mingled with the lamentations of the parents.
“Neighbours,” said Adam Bell, “the morn is a new day, and we will
wait to see what it may bring forth; but, in the meantime, let us read
a portion o’ the Divine Word, an’ kneel together in prayer, that,
whether or not the day-dawn cause light to shine upon this singular
bereavement, the Sun o’ Righteousness may arise wi’ healing on His
wings, upon the hearts o’ this afflicted family, an’ upon the hearts o’
all present.”
“Amen!” responded Peter, wringing his hands; and his friend,
taking down the “Ha’ Bible,” read the chapter wherein it is written
—“It is better to be in the house of mourning than in the house of
feasting;” and again the portion which saith—“It is well for me that I
have been afflicted, for before I was afflicted I went astray.”
The morning came, but brought no tidings of the lost son. After a
solemn farewell, all the visitants, save Adam Bell and his daughter,
returned every one to their own house; and the disconsolate father,
with his servants, again renewed the search among the hills and
surrounding villages.
 Days, weeks, months, and years rolled on. Time had subdued the
anguish of the parents into a holy calm; but their lost first-born was
not forgotten, although no trace of his fate had been discovered. The
general belief was, that he had perished on the breaking up of the
snow; and the few in whose remembrance he still lived, merely spoke
of his death as a “very extraordinary circumstance,” remarking that
“he was a wild, venturesome sort o’ lad.”
Christmas had succeeded Christmas, and Peter Elliot still kept it in
commemoration of the birthday of him who was not. For the first few
years after the loss of their son, sadness and silence characterized the
party who sat down to dinner at Marchlaw, and still at Peter’s right
hand was placed the vacant chair. But, as the younger branches of
the family advanced in years, the remembrance of their brother
became less poignant. Christmas was, with all around them, a day of
rejoicing, and they began to make merry with their friends; while
their parents partook in their enjoyment, with a smile, half of
approval and half of sorrow.
Twelve years had passed away; Christmas had again come. It was
the counterpart of its fatal predecessor. The hills had not yet cast off
their summer verdure; the sun, although shorn of its heat, had lost
none of its brightness or glory, and looked down upon the earth as
though participating in its gladness; and the clear blue sky was
tranquil as the sea sleeping beneath the moon. Many visitors had
again assembled at Marchlaw. The sons of Mr Elliot, and the young
men of the party, were assembled upon a level green near the house,
amusing themselves with throwing the hammer, and other Border
games, while himself and the elder guests stood by as spectators,
recounting the deeds of their youth. Johnson, the sheep-farmer,
whom we have already mentioned, now a brawny and gigantic fellow
of two-and-thirty, bore away in every game the palm from all
competitors. More than once, as Peter beheld his sons defeated, he
felt the spirit of youth glowing in his veins, and, “Oh!” muttered he,
in bitterness, “had my Thomas been spared to me, he would hae
thrown his heart’s blude after the hammer, before he would hae been
beat by e’er a Johnson in the country!”
While he thus soliloquized, and with difficulty restrained an
impulse to compete with the victor himself, a dark, foreign-looking,
strong-built seaman, unceremoniously approached, and, with his
arms folded, cast a look of contempt upon the boasting conqueror.
Every eye was turned with a scrutinizing glance upon the stranger. In
height he could not exceed five feet nine, but his whole frame was the
model of muscular strength; his features open and manly, but deeply
sunburnt and weather-beaten; his long, glossy, black hair, curled into
ringlets by the breeze and the billow, fell thickly over his temples and
forehead; and whiskers of a similar hue, more conspicuous for size
than elegance, gave a character of fierceness to a countenance
otherwise possessing a striking impress of manly beauty. Without
asking permission, he stepped forward, lifted the hammer, and,
swinging it around his head, hurled it upwards of five yards beyond
Johnson’s most successful throw. “Well done!” shouted the
astonished spectators. The heart of Peter Elliott warmed within him,
and he was hurrying forward to grasp the stranger by the hand, when
the words groaned in his throat, “It was just such a throw as my
Thomas would have made!—my own lost Thomas!” The tears burst
into his eyes, and, without speaking, he turned back, and hurried
towards the house to conceal his emotion.
Successively, at every game, the stranger had defeated all who
ventured to oppose him, when a messenger announced that dinner
waited their arrival. Some of the guests were already seated, others
entering; and, as heretofore, placed beside Mrs Elliot was Elizabeth
Bell, still in the noontide of her beauty; but sorrow had passed over
her features, like a veil before the countenance of an angel. Johnson,
crest-fallen and out of humour at his defeat, seated himself by her
side. In early life he had regarded Thomas Elliot as a rival for her
affections; and, stimulated by the knowledge that Adam Bell would
be able to bestow several thousands upon his daughter for a dowry,
he yet prosecuted his attentions with unabated assiduity, in despite
of the daughter’s aversion and the coldness of her father. Peter had
taken his place at the table; and still by his side, unoccupied and
sacred, appeared the vacant chair, the chair of his first-born,
whereon none had sat since his mysterious death or disappearance.
“Bairns,” said he, “did nane o’ye ask the sailor to come up and tak
a bit o’ dinner wi’ us?”
“We were afraid it might lead to a quarrel with Mr Johnson,”
whispered one of the sons.