The Body as a Grenade : Illness Metaphors, The Suffering of Others and Conservativism in Contemporary Sick-Flicks

Sammanfattning: Film has since its inception been a potent storytelling tool, and the concept of illnesses and death havebeen a critical element in the stories mankind has told through cinema since the beginning. While theearly years of film saw few titles which directly named or featured diseases such as cancer, the 1980’sand 1990’s saw a vast increase in illness narratives being produced. By the beginning of the newmillennium, a new subgenre of film was beginning to emerge, specifically targeted at youngaudiences: Sick-Flicks.The purpose of this thesis is to examine the Sick-Flick subgenre, and scrutinize the films which the author has identified according to how they handle a variety of factors. These include the portrayal ofmale and female sufferers in accordance with the feminist theoretical observation of masculinity beingrepresented as active, while femininity is typically passive in nature. Beyond this, the essay alsoattempts to add to Susan Sontag’s essay Illness as Metaphor, exploring how the portrayal of illnessmay have shifted since the essay’s publication in 1978. Finally, this thesis also concerns itself with thereoccurring narrative trend of featuring talented adolescents as terminally ill sufferers and how thismay tie into neoliberalism and belief in the meritocracy.This thesis concludes that while there has been a shift in the metaphorical portrayal of diseases,especially as it pertains to cancer, which Susan Sontag concludes unsuitable for romanticization,overall, many of the criticisms and potentially problematic commonalities which both Sick-Flicks andtheir literary counterpart Sick-Lit have featured through the years remain. There is a remaining focuson heteronormative and racially homogenous victims, and innate talents and intelligence are present,arguably in order to make the eventual loss of the ill characters more tangibly tragic. The authorconcludes that while it is debatable whether or not filmmakers should feel any responsibility to portrayillnesses accurately, they should at least likely strive to reflect the current reality as far as survivalrates are concerned.