Analysis of Extreme Measures Movie - Essay Example

Extreme Measures of the movie At the heart of it, Extreme Measures is a wonderfully created thriller film which has not lost its charm even though it is more than 12 years old. The movie has an interesting plot which starts with Hugh Grant playing the role of Dr. Luthan in a New York hospital where he finds a patient who is homeless and seems to be suffering from an unknown disease. The patient mentions a drug the doctor is not familiar with and dies soon afterwards leaving Luthan with many questions. However, his questions go unanswered as the body of the patient and all the records associated with the body seem to go missing. While he is curious, his superiors at the hospital tell him to drop the matter. When he does not stop asking questions, his life starts to unravel around him. His house is ransacked and when the police arrive they discover cocaine in his bedroom which Luthan claims was not his. He is charged and convicted which leads him to lose his medical license and he becomes friendless as he is thought to be a drug user. Desperate for answers that can get him his life back, he manages to talk to some homeless people who lead him to an organization governed by Dr. Myrick (Gene Hackman) who is performing dangerous experiments on homeless people without their consent. Further, Luthan finds out that all of the subjects of these experiments have died. Luthan himself experiences the pain and misery of those who suffer from paralysis when he is led to believe that an injury to his spinal column has left him paralyzed from the neck down. However, he discovers that to be untrue and regains use of his limbs. He manages to find out where the experiments are being conducted through the help of the ‘moles’ who have an uneasy co-existence with the homeless people and finally confronts Dr. Myrick. Dr. Myrick tries to bring Luthan into the organisaiton and wants him to join his team of doctors. However, Luthan refuses since he does not believe that taking the life of an individual, no matter how worthless that life is, is the right thing to do. The confrontation ends with an FBI Agent accidentally shooting Dr. Myrick and the whole scheme is laid bare. Some time on in the future, the wife of Dr. Myrick meets with Dr. Luthan who is practicing medicine again and she hands him a package containing the tapes and the documents Dr. Myrick was working on. It is unclear if Dr. Luthan would use the research done by Dr. Myrick but he certainly seemed interested in it. The Message The message contained within the film is simply, truth triumphs over evil and playing god or using unwilling human subjects is not something which can ever lead to positive gains. A shady business never leads to a sunny life and this becomes painfully clear as Dr. Luthan clarifies in his own words that finding cures for disease becomes immaterial compared to the murder and torture which Dr. Myrick engaged in. Luthan has a clear idea about right and wrong and that is the measure which he wants to apply to Dr. Myrick Undoubtedly, Dr. Myrick behaved in a completely unethical manner primarily because he was following his own set of ethics. The message contained within the movie becomes clear when Dr. Luthan reminds Dr. Myrick of his oath that overrides personal ethics and personal beliefs. The frontiers of medical science have certainly brought us to a point where it can be debated if one path is more ethical than the other yet choosing a clearly wrong path is something that everyone must avoid. Perhaps the moral imperatives of Kant would be useful in guiding Dr. Myrick and had he followed moral imperatives, he might not have gone down the dangerous route of consider some lives to be expendable for the greater good. The Dramatic Elements The dramatic elements of the plot as seen by the viewpoints of the characters are the events and the objects which they are involved with. For Dr. Myrick, the first instance of such a dramatic element would be his own will to find the cure for spinal injury paralysis regardless of medical ethics and the rules that he is supposed to live by. Further, the presence of Dr. Luthan and his interference in the cure that Dr. Myrick seeks is certainly an irritation for Dr. Myrick. In their final confrontation, Myrick makes it perfectly clear that he thinks that Dr. Luthan is a weak man who is not willing or is unable to make the right decision. The unwilling patients he deals with as well as the nature of medical ethics and even the laws of the land are something which are immaterial to Dr. Myrick. As long as the men he murders are being murdered in a good cause as per his own perceptions, he is happy to go along killing them. He is certainly misguided since even though he is supposed to bring cures and to help those who need his help, he can not cause others to suffer based on the ethics which apply to him and the oath taken by him as a doctor. On the other hand, the dramatic elements for Dr. Luthan include several misconceptions which were created about him. The first of which is him being a cocaine user and the second of which is him being left paralyzed due to the attack he had and the injury sustained within that attack. The first misconception turns his life upside down while the second makes him a complete wreck as he is left unable to move. The discovery that he is actually not paralyzed and the knowledge that the drugs were planted on him certainly help him come to terms with his existence but they do not turn away from his ideals. He still believes that it would be wrong to hurt others even if the hurting was done in the process of finding a cure and he still has a clear sense of right and wrong as opposed to the grey area Dr. Myrick is living in. Perhaps the nurse gives the best sense of drama as a character since she outwardly seems to be helping Dr. Luthan but she is actually deeply involved with Dr. Myrick who is helping a relative of hers to walk again. She knows that if Dr. Luthan discovers what Dr. Myrick is doing, she would lose all hope of finding a cure for the boy. However she does not come across as being as evil as Dr. Myrick since she is not directly involved in the kidnapping and murder process even though she does help Dr. Myrick conduct his activities. In a similar manner, the law enforcement officer is also involved in the process for personal gain and to end the suffering of his own loved ones at the expense of the lives of others. Dr. Myrick’s Rationality As discussed by Knowles (2002), “Hegel is emphatic that he is not dictating the logic of how we ought to think; rather, he is articulating the way the mind has learned to think (Knowles, 2002, Pg. 60)”. This creates a mind-set which determines how we consider actions to be right and wrong and with this definition, the mind-set of Dr. Myrick is that he is willing to make a few individuals, who have worthless lives, suffer for the greater good as their suffering would lead to an improvement in the lives of countless millions. Discussing the Philosophy of Right by Hegel, Knowles says that, “In the Philosophy of Right, we take our repertory of moral and political beliefs and rewrite them in the systematic from that dialectic dictates – the concept of right (Knowles, 2002, Pg. 60)”. This certainly meets the justification and rationality given by Dr. Myrick who believes that, “Good doctors do the correct thing. Great doctors have the guts to do the right thing”. However, it is his definition of good and great which is applied to the actions he is doing and in his own eyes he is a great doctor while it is obvious that his actions, if made public, would be seen as criminal and even barbaric. By presenting his mindset and his own explanation of right and wrong, he rationalizes his actions as Hegel might have suggested him to rationalize his acts (Mullender, 2003). Dr. Luthan’s Reply While the reply is certainly a personal point of view it is also a fact. It can be shown that the reply meets several theoretical and practical approaches given when it comes to the idea of ethics. For example, ethical relativism certainly supports the viewpoint taken by Luthan. The basis of ethical relativism is explained completely by Velasquez et. al. (1992) as: “Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of ones culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The same action may be morally right in one society but be morally wrong in another (Velasquez, 1992, Pg. 1).” Further, being a personal point of view does not exclude it from the domain of ethics since it is an ethical point of view. Velasquez et. al. (1987) report that when individuals on the street were asked about the meaning of ethics, they said that ethics have to do with internal feelings of right and wrong or that ethics were religious beliefs and even legal requirements. Some took ethics to be acceptable behavior defined by the norms of and some simply did not know what it meant. While these responses may come naturally, it has to be understood that ethics have nothing to do with the feelings of a person (Alexandra & Woodruff, 1990). This is because internal feelings or emotions about an act or an object may lead a person to behave unethically. A person’s feelings can also change and what is hated at the present moment and is considered unacceptable may be perfectly acceptable depending on how a person grows and develops. Ethics therefore have to be taken as the professionally mandated and created standards of what is right and wrong and these standards have to be supported by reasonable arguments which show how professionals ought to perform their duties to their clients in particular and society at large (Velasquez, 1992). In these terms, the reply given by Dr. Luthan clearly shows that Dr. Myrick behaved in an unethical manner since the medical ethics and the regulations which apply to Dr. Myrick were disregarded by him in his search for medical subjects to experiment with. In fact, it is also clear from the film that Dr. Myrick knew his actions to be unethical since he went to great lengths in order to hide his actions and to prevent others from finding out about what he was doing with his subjects. Scientific Progress Understandably, society depends on science and technology to provide advancements to its members to improve their health, wealth, well being as well as their security (Drydyk, 1991). Of course, as scientific advances are made in the world, it also becomes important to understand their ethical impacts and effects (Lachapelle, 2005). Further it is also important to know if the scientific advancement was reached ethically or not. Perhaps the question can be avoided entirely by using the ideas of ethical relativism. Such an analysis gives us the advantage of saying that we do not know what is right and wrong since we do not know how one society will react to the ethical concerns of another. A state which has high medical bills may welcome Dr. Myrick to reduce medical expenses even if it means that some of their homeless or improvised individuals have to suffer and die. On the other hand, a state which is highly concerned with medical ethics, reducing suffering, civil rights and other such concerns may abhor the idea. Basically, if the culture of the society accepts the ideas being given by Dr. Myrick as acceptable then his actions become ethical. In essence, the same argument can be applied to other ethical issues which plague different societies and medical science such as abortion or euthanasia. Since the culture governs the need and process of making things ethical or unethical, the culture defines what most people are comfortable with and find acceptable. Further, since the culture itself is composed of religion, social orders, social acceptability, it is easy to say that all factors combine to guide science in what it can and cannot do. In conclusion, it is easy to say that scientific and medical progress is not a self-legitimated process since it is society itself which regulates them. The influence of society may come from religious beliefs, cultural acceptability and even the socially acceptable norms of the people but the regulation is certainly present. A few decades ago, a doctor in Germany was performing hideous experiments on helpless individuals while trying to progress on the frontiers of medical science. He was only able to do so since it was acceptable for the society of the time to give him the freehand in order for him to do the experiments (Duster, 2003). Further, under the heading of racial hygiene, the Nazi party conducted extensive experiments which would today be considered inhuman, unethical and unforgivable in terms of breaches of medical and scientific ethics. Everything from Josef Mengele’s experiments with twins to the forced sterilization of thousands of people belonging to groups such as gypsies or Jews. Even in America, eugenics was considered a perfectly acceptable thing and there were laws which prevented certain classes of individuals to get married (Duster, 2003). Luckily, the times have changed and we have become a lot more ethical at least in terms of medical science if not anything else. Works Cited Alexandra, A., & Woodruff, A. 1990, Ethics and the Professions, Prentice-Hall. Drydyk, J. 1991, ‘Capitalism, socialism, and civil society’, Monist, vol. 74, no. 3, p. 457-478. Duster, T. 2003, Backdoor to Eugenics. Routledge. Knowles, D. 2002, Hegel and Philosophy of Right. Routledge Lachapelle, E. 2005, ‘Morality, Ethics, and Globalization: Lessons from Kant, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas’, Perspectives on Global Development & Technology, vol. 4, no. 4, p. 603-644. Mullender, R. 2003, ‘Hegel, Human Rights, and Particularism’, Journal of Law & Society, vol. 30, no. 4, p. 554-574. Velasquez, M. et. al. 1992, ‘Ethical Relativism’, Santa Clara University, [Online] Available at: http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/ethicalrelativism.html Word Count: 2,518 Read More