Farrah Fawcett’s unseemly death watch
Last night, I got to see Farrah Fawcett dying.
It was a ghastly experience, but Fawcett seemed to believe it important that I and others watch it, and so we did. All 9 million of us. The unflinching documentary, filmed by Fawcett pal Alana Stewart, was the highest-rated show on television May 15 among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 and 25 and 54, The New York Times reported. NBC was so tickled with the documentary’s success that it is said to be considering another Fawcett special. It will have to move fast. Fawcett, diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, is in her final hours.
If you have had cancer, or have watched someone you love endure the lethal, degrading, de-humanizing “treatment” we now prescribe for its patients, you are likely to have found Fawcett’s story resoundingly familiar. Suffering, regardless of one’s “support system” is a stark, isolating business. To have that mirrored by a familiar, iconic face has to be a chilling, but somehow consoling experience. To that end, Fawcett’s candor can only be beneficial.
But what on earth motivates a 61-year-old woman to share her most intimate hideous moments with 9 million ogling strangers? Fawcett insists that hers was a humanitarian gesture, intended to open viewer’s eyes to alternative treatments (which, in her case, failed) and to address issues of patient privacy [Dash] a segment I must have missed. But as Alessandra Stanley noted on the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, nowhere in the two-hour documentary are screening procedures or risk factors for anal cancer addressed.
For the record, The American Cancer Society estimates that 5,000 Americans were diagnosed with anal cancer last year and 680 of them died. If caught early, it has an 82 percent survival rate.
Risk factors for anal cancer include anal infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Some 85 percent of anal cancers are associated with persistent infection with the sexually transmitted virus. Other risk factors include being over 50, having many sexual partners, anal intercourse and smoking. Most victims are men, but after age 50, the cancer is slightly more common in women.
Among the unanswered questions that may have been helpful to her audience include how quickly Fawcett sought treatment for her symptoms and of what that treatment consisted. The touching, tender portrait of a woman dying [Dash] particularly a woman with whom we have the illusion of intimacy [Dash] is touching but ultimately prurient.
The one lethal blow Fawcett struck was to the parasitical paparazzi, who ghoulishly stalked her through cancer treatments. “I always thought that the National Enquirer was as invasive and malignant as cancer,” Fawcett says in a voice-over narration. “But now I realize that it just runs a close second. The main difference between them is that the tabloid will try to destroy your life with bold-faced lies in front of the whole world.”
So Fawcett snatched the cameras from their clutches and did them one better; she showed them the raw truth of cancer’s pitiless ruin, insisting, at one point, that Stewart film her projectile vomiting.
Perhaps the real malignancy here is celebrity, whose poison is so venomous that its victims believe they are only worthwhile under a camera’s lens.
I don’t know what perverted version of altruism Fawcett thought she was practicing when she invited viewers into her private anguish. But I suspect O’Neill and Stewart are more to blame for compiling a documentary that focused more on the hellish ordeal of their loved one than on a missed opportunity to provide a valuable service to Americans. Perhaps by being so long the victims of the voyeuristic paparazzi themselves, they have been infected by its salacious perspective.