Awakenings

“The summer was extraordinary. It was a season of rebirth and innocence, a miracle for 15 patients and for us, their caretakers. But now we have to adjust to the realities of miracles. We can hide behind the veil of science and say it was the drug that failed or that the illness itself had returned or that the patients were unable to cope with losing decades of their lives. But the reality is we don’t know what went wrong anymore than we know what went right. What we do know is that as the chemical window closed another awakening took place — that the human spirit is more powerful than any drug and that is what needs to be nourished with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter. This is what we’d forgotten. The simplest things.” shared by Dr. Sayer from <Awakenings>. It was a lesson learned through pain and tears; a lesson of appreciate and be present in life; a lesson learned through a treatment failure.

This central message of the movie was delivered in multiple approaches from different perspectives in life. I like how it was delivered through an awakening of a catatonic patient and not some professional talkings, which made it more persuasive and relatable to the audience as it was not just said, but played.

The first scene that tried to deliver the message was when Leonard's mother talked about how she blamed everything when his son fell sick but she never felt grateful when she gave birth to a healthy son. This is what every normal person is doing almost every single day. Often times, we notice how negative things have been impacting our life due to  We rarely be grateful of the little positive things, we never realise how fortunate we are to be able to breathe and stay conscious.

The message started to get salient when it came to the midnight call by Leonard to Dr. Sayer.

There was one night when Leonard excitedly called Dr. Sayer to come back to his office and talk about what he had been thinking. 

“Look at this newspaper,” he says, handing him the paper. “What does it say? All bad. It’s all bad. People have forgotten what life is all about. They’ve forgotten what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded. They need to be reminded about what they have and what they can lose, and what I feel is the joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!”

Then the next morning, Leonard tried to talk to the board of doctors from the hospital and persuade them that he was all fine to go out for a walk. The rejection got him frustrated and he decided to just go out without permission. However he was stopped by the guard and the doctors.

The movie created an unconscious comparison of the movie characters and the audience in the audiences themselves. It reminds the audience could be the ones mentioned that have countless blessings (eg. Health) everyday but never appreciate.

When Leonard tried to get out of the hospital just for a walk but was stopped by the guard and the other doctors, there was a scene shot from Leonard’s view where the hospital door was so close but he was immediately dragged away and the door became further away which soon lost from sight. This scene had immediately changed the audiences’ initial third-person view to first-person view. It enabled the audiences to be put into Leonard’s shoes and feel more empathetic seeing how his freedom was being taken away. Again, the scene strikes the audience with the message of how pathetic a human could be when he could not even decide which direction he is walking to, what he wants to look at, who he wants to talk to and where he wants to go. Yet, it is a freedom, a blessing that we often take for granted.

Seeing the other patients who also experienced the awakenings, it was not all about happiness when having the second chance to be alive again as the a lot of things have changed due to the long period of sleep. Many of them have skipped few of their life stages development and hence there were patients who made life adjustments. While most of the patients were very happy about waking up again, there was a patient who was utterly outstanding when he was asked by Anthony, “Hey how do you feel right now?” I thought the answer will be almost the same as Leonard’s “better than ever”. In fact, the patient did not seem to be happy as his parents were dead, his life was in institution and his son was nowhere to be found. That was the part that made me wonder how I would react and how life would be if I were to be one of them. The counter-factual thinking was induced to help the audience to think about their lives currently and compare it with the patient’s circumstances.

Another part of the film that was worth noted was the romantic interaction of Leonard with Paula. Although Leonard was already in his 40s, his mental age was still in 20s when he lost his consciousness. It would be the stage of “Intimacy vs Isolation” in stage development. I came to a wonder, when the patients are being treated in the hospital and are isolated from the outside world, would their mental development continue or just stop when they started receiving treatment? At the beginning, Anthony said to Dr Sayer, describing the ward as a garden, because the patients are like the plants, as they are unresponsive and the doctors would water them. This would be related to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where they only need to fulfill their basic needs as they did not have their consciousness, they only needed to be fed to stay alive without their own thinking. It explains the reason Leonard decided to stay back at hospital just to talk to Paula, the girl he had crushed on. As his basic needs were fulfilled, he had his own thoughts, he had bigger desire to fulfill the higher hierarchy of needs.

As everything seems to be wonderful, plot twisted with the beginning of Leonard’s negative emotions that rise from the side effect of L-dopa, meanwhile his tics surfaced and grew more. Leonard and the other patients were finally back to catatonic state, just like the poem "The Panther" he pointed at Ouija to Dr Sayer earlier. 

His gaze, from staring through the bars,

has grown so weary that it can take in nothing more.
For him, it is as though there were
a thousand bars; and behind the thousand bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
his powerful strides are like a ritual dance around a center
where a great will stands paralyzed.

At times, the curtains of the eye
lift, without a sound
and a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart and dies.  

It was heartbreaking to see someone used to be so lively to fade, more so when he was dying again for the second time. At the same time, the feelings of regret and guilt of Dr Sayer could be felt by seeing the video flashback of how Leonard gained consciousness from his one-decade-sleep because of him, how he got to read, had a crush until he finally had grown more tics and fell into deep sleep again. The movie tried to put the audience to view the summary of what had happened through Dr Sayer's perspective whereas the audience got to experience the feelings, the sense of helplessness as if we had given someone hope but it was then taken away, without our permission.

However, I was amazed by Dr Sayer’s spirit when he first found how the patients would borrow the will of other objects but was not agreed by any other doctor in the field. In the world that conformity is so common, I am utterly grateful of how he was stern about his discovery and the efforts he took to prove everyone else wrong, which led to the awakenings. Even though the drug failed in the end, the awakenings have been worthwhile as the message to be present in life, to be appreciative of what we have now, was perfectly presented.