I hate message fiction

My wife conned me into seeing the movie “Me Before You” the other night.

Caution: spoilers ahead.

I highly recommend this movie if you’re interested in sticking your head in the oven when you get out of the theatre.

   Seriously, it was a nice movie, a love story, right up until the last 7 minutes or so, when it becomes serious message fiction- I call it “Right-to-Die porn.”

    Well, that’s what it was. It was packaged tolerably well, and being a love story with a euthanasia dessert, it presented fairly well the emotional trauma that would accompany someone offing themselves. By packaging it well and giving a nod to the heartache such things cause, you then get pimp-slapped but good, over and over with the message of the film.

 So, if you’re OK with the whole assisted suicide and choosing death thing, you might find it a touching love story.

 If you’ve got any moral qualms about suicide, or worse, practice any sort of Christian faith or come from a strong faith tradition, the ending is going to poison the shit out of the story for you.

 I found it abhorrent, in the truest sense of that word, and I’m not going to get on a soapbox about assisted suicide, except to say that in our broken-hearted world, with our modern culture of death,  I often feel pity towards those who lose their faith or embrace no religion, because it leads to false choices like that presented in the film, where the question becomes one of choosing life or death, rather than choosing to seek meaning from tragedy or embrace meaninglessness and forego love, fellowship and joy.

     Knowing my wife also loved the movie right up to the end, and unsure of how to broach the subject initially, we walked out of the theatre, saddened by the experience. “Honey, dat mang was a terrible coward” was all Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife said, and then the gates were opened, and we discussed how a sweet, lovely film turned into a piece of message fiction with all the subtlety of a kick to the balls. 

         Well, those with a less rigid moral compass may be able to winnow out some pleasure from the movie, but like finding a fly in a bowl of soup, it spoiled the whole thing for me. Not even that hot chick from Game of Thrones could make me like the movie, and she was cute as a button the whole time. 

Seriously, fuck that film. I have enough shit in my life. I can take a moral disagreement with a movie and still like it, usually, but present a point awkwardly and unsubtly, and you lost me forever.