Hear the Silence TV Review the Times

[Guest guest]

>From: " john " <whaleto4@...>

December 16, 2003

TV Review the Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-933539,00.html

By Joe ph

Hear the Silence controversially treated a link between

the MMR vaccine and autism as fact, but did that make it a bad drama

OLIVER STONE is going to be really mad if he ever gets to

see Hear the Silence (Five). He'll be kicking himself that he didn't think

of making a film about the MMR controversy first. Hear the Silence was his

kind of movie. " This film, " said a notice preceding this two-hour-long

drama, " is a dramatised account of the work of Dr Wakefield and his

colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital in the late Nineties, and a mother's

search for what happened to her child. Some of the characters have been

merged or created for dramatic effect. "

Just the kind of dramatic effect, in fact, that Oliver

Stone made the trademark of his movie, JFK: never settle for the obvious

answer, and if you are not sure whom to blame, then blame everyone. That's

the great thing about a conspiracy, it neatly covers all bases.

Watching Hear the Silence is like looking at one of those

paintings in which the artist has covered the entire canvas in white paint;

or maybe entirely in black paint. Either way, there are definitely no

shades of grey. It treated a link between the MMR vaccine and autism not as

a bewitching, largely anecdotal theory which remains unproven, let alone a

reckless scare story, but instead as a law of nature, like gravity for

example. And this law of nature is ignored only because the unbelievers are

mulish, head-in-the-sand flat-earthers, or else because they are protecting

their self-interests. In short, an MMR-autism link is granted the authority

of a self-evident truth - like, say, the intrinsic rightness of votes for

women - and thus becomes something discounted only by fools and knaves.

This programme paints the medical profession as both.

In such an atmosphere, the refusal of some doctors to

take part in the television debate on Five which followed the film is

interpreted as evidence not so much of the medical world's wariness about

discussing a drama as if it were hard fact, but further proof of the

medical world's obstinacy and its masonic tendency to close ranks in the

face of criticism. Of course, we all enjoy a pop at the medical

establishment, largely because doctors never explain why, when they send us

off with a bottle the size of a lipstick to produce a urine sample, it's so

vital that the sample be from " the middle of the stream " ; unless, maybe,

doctors get their kicks from watching secretly-filmed CCTV footage of

patients struggling in tiny cubicles to fulfil this request (you'd bet that

this is why the Prince of Wales has his valet hold his sample bottle for

him). Even so, doctors will wince at their portrayal here: all, bar

Wakefield, are smug, patronising, heartless and deaf to patients' concerns.

Does all this make Hear the Silence a bad film? No more

or no less than it makes a white canvas a bad painting - and you see those

hanging in the Tate Modern and along Cork Street in the West End of London.

An irresponsible film? Possibly. But since when was it drama's job to be

responsible? Are Hare's political plays irresponsible because they

beat the drum for only one partisan viewpoint? Or Harold Pinter's anti-Bush

verse?

Hear the Silence certainly exploits all its available

armoury when assaulting our emotions. It milks our instinctive sympathy for

the underdog. Here the underdog is Shields, a bewildered mother

who feels that she is battling against the entire medical mafia in her

search for truth, and for an explanation of what has triggered her son's

autism: is to the medical world's Goliath, and our reflex

is to believe that - like - it is the plucky underdog who is in a

tight corner and facing a sea of scepticism from the forces of state

authority, who deserves our trust: at any rate, that's the way we all used

to think until the O. J. Simpson trial came along.

The effect is amplified by casting the wonderful t

son as Shields. son, when she is truly, madly deeply in full

flow, is so persuasive that she could make you believe that Liza Minnelli

married Gest for his looks. As for Wakefield, who better to cast than

bumbling, likeable Hugh Bonneville? Wakefield, at least as we see him here,

is caring, warm, thoughtful, reasonable, clever, a devoted husband, an

ideal father, sceptical, unfanatical, heroic, and morally courageous.

Criticising him would be like criticising Mandela.

Will many people watch this film and change their minds

about the safety of the MMR jab? Possibly, if they are dolts who haven't

read a newspaper in the past few years. Those who think the MMR injection

is safe have already had their children immunised. Those who don't have

opted for single jabs, or else may be playing roulette with their

children's (and their neighbours' children's) health by not having them

vaccinated at all. Tony Blair has hardly helped to quell the continuing

hullabaloo by not saying whether his son Leo had the MMR jab or not.

If it's OK for the Prime Minister to fuel the

controversy, then why shouldn't it be OK also for a tautly directed,

well-acted television movie, however one-sided? And as long as the

teensiest doubt remains, who wants to behave like Gummer ramming a

beefburger down his daughter's throat on television just to prove that

eating British beef was as safe as sleeping. ly, you're happy any time

that Five makes headlines with a powerful programme that isn't

controversial in a -Chegwin-baring-his-genitals kind of way.

--------------------------------------------------------

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Classical Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

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ANY INFO OBTAINED HERE NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS MEDICAL

OR LEGAL ADVICE. THE

DECISION TO VACCINATE IS YOURS AND YOURS ALONE.

******

" Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down.

Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy

knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information

and religions destroy spirituality " .... Ellner