Robert McNeil
Eternal life would be one big middle-aged Saturday night, as long as my DVD player works and fish suppers are not outlawed.
PERSONALLY, I believe life is too short to go and see a film about immortality. But plenty of people, I’m sure, will waddle forth to be entertained, appalled or both by slasher movie Self/ less, the latest offering from director Tarsem Singh.
With grim inevitability, the film has brought to life a debate about immortality, prompting wild-eyed, frizzy-haired scientists to emerge from their laboratories and holler: “What are the chances, eh?”
You and I have been here before, dear reader. Not through reincarnation but through the fact that, as you know, I have spent half of my life worrying about death. And the other half drunk or asleep.
So, if you would kindly sober up, I will first provide a resume of the film and then proceed to examine the debate, before finally expiring somewhere near the bottom of the page or, if you are reading this online, just before the appreciative suggestions about a potential Pulitzer prize begin.
Self/less concerns an ageing cancer sufferer who signs up with a secretive organisation to have his consciousness implanted into the body of a healthy young donor. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. As usual. The trouble with immortality is that, as John Patterson has pointed out in The Guardian, it brings nothing but grief.
Whether it’s vampires or the elves in the Bible – not the Bible, what’s that other big one?
Oh yes, The Lord of the Rings – sufferers are forever bemoaning their lot. They never receive closure.
Hands up who wants that? “Me! Me! Me!” I hear you. Me too. As long as the Tories aren’t still in power – forever. Hang on, that’s not immortality, that’s England.
Which brings me to the class divide and an everlasting fact of life that might even pertain to immortality.
For a small detail about Ben Kingsley’s character in Self/less is that he is humongously wealthy and pays the quarter of a billion dollars for his operation just by rummaging under the cushions on his couch.
Top worriers have already expressed concern that, like fancy cars, Apple products and football season tickets, only the fabulously wealthy will be able to afford to
‘‘ Immortality comes at a price beyond mere cash. I’m not referring to the sheer tedium of waiting forever for Hibs to win the Scottish Cup
live forever. But immortality comes at a price beyond mere cash. I’m not referring to the sheer tedium of waiting forever for Hibs to win the Scottish Cup.
If immortality is licensed I’d be happy to sit there in a stupor with a glaikit grin on my face. Eternal life would be one big middleaged Saturday night, as long as my DVD player still works and fish suppers haven’t been outlawed.
In Self/less, a different kettle of fish suppers emerges. Kingsley’s character inherits some of the psyche of his donor, leading to considerable overcrowding in his heid.
Maybe you could live with that. Maybe it would be like one of those pop tunes that invade the brain no matter how much you shake your cranium to get rid of it.
It’s an odds-on certainty that some of the finest words in literature have been written by someone with the chorus of Agadoo going round his or her noggin.
Now it’s going round your head too. You were warned before reading this column that it was not for those of a suggestible disposition. Agadoo-doo-doo. Oh God, what have I started?
These last words, indeed, might be uttered by whoever invents immortality. Rather like Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, it might be something he’d live to regret forever.
But, as online intellectuals have pointed out, even if we did achieve immortality, it would only be a matter of time before some nutter waving a religious tract blew up the world with a nuke.
Raised as I was in the Cold War, I still have trouble planning two weeks ahead. And I can’t think immortality would change that.
Others say nobody could be immortal forever, as it were, because you’d be bound to have a fatal accident some time, even 700 years hence.
Not me. I never go out. Never say boo to a ghost (and how would they cope with us being immortal?), though it’s true that in 412 years’ time I might live to regret still not having the house rewired.
We are hot-wired to contemplate immortality. It’s never going to go away. We’re always going to be thinking about it, yea, even unto the time yon Grim Reaper comes waddling forth with his agricultural implement.
Whistling Agadoo.