Christina Ricci will have to lose 10 pounds to act the part of Terri Schiavo. The movie will recount Schiavo's early life when she struggled with bulimia, and her later years in a bedridden state, when she survived only with the aid of medical support (the current topic of legal, moral and political debate).
For the Jeff Weise film, a young Native American actor will be used to show the soft side of the 16-year-old from Minnesota who recently murdered his grandfather and grandfather's companion, a teacher, an unarmed security guard and five of his classmates before finally taking his own life.
Both films will be based on the tragedies of real-life events. We will watch them and be fascinated. We will be the audience.
"Hope" will be the title of the Schiavo film. It will tell the tale of a woman who struggled with subconscious feelings about her weight when she was younger, once losing 100 pounds on a diet in high school. The movie will detail how Schiavo retained her slim and petite body only by vomiting.
Actors playing doctors will then tell her husband, Michael Schiavo, (played by Barry Pepper) that bulimic purging caused severe potassium deficiency in his wife's body, leading her to suffer cardiac arrest and fall into a "persistent vegetative state."
It'll be just like the March Newsweek story that detailed it all, but with Hollywood special effects and added dramatic plot lines.
The film about Weise will be called "The Reservation," for lack of a more appropriate title. Set at the reservation in Red Lake, Minn. (where Weise grew up), the movie will characterize Weise as a loner: intelligent, but incapable of dealing with others. It will show that Weise was obsessed with Hitler and listed "Death and Dying" as one of his MSN profile interest categories.
Both movies will be released next year and will draw millions of viewers -- people anxious to remember this year's news on the big screen, with more attractive people and perfectly practiced emotions.
In "Hope," the director will show -- through graphic animation -- how the loss of oxygen to Schiavo's brain after cardiac arrest caused her permanent damage. In role, Ricci will lie in a hospital bed for much of the movie. Like Schiavo, she'll be capable of reflexive actions like coughing and changing facial expressions, but without cognitive ability. But the movie will not remind us only of Schiavo, but also the right to die (or live, if you prefer).
"The Reservation" will also use animation -- a cartoon from real-life archives. The movie will include "Target Practice," the 30-second animation short Weise allegedly posted online under the pseudonym "Regret."
The cartoon shows a masked murderer as he rampages through the streets. The animated character picks off two civilians with a shotgun at close range and then shoots the head of a cloaked Ku Klux Klan member -- only to later blow up a police vehicle just before shoving a gun into his own mouth.
But both of the movies will be for entertainment purposes only. The suicide, drugs and violent crimes that are common to Native American reservation life (especially among young males like Weise) will be ignored again. Similarly, the eating disorder that was the root of Schiavo's medical situation will again be forgotten.
Instead, we will cry at the end of the movies because the music tells us to cry. We will remember Schiavo and Weise as characters instead of people. We will fail to learn from them because we will only watch. We will be an audience.
The worst part is that they'll both be turned into movie stars. Or maybe they already have.
Ty Thompson is a journalism sophomore. Reach him at tyler.w.thompson@asu.edu.
