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Halloween is over… at least, officially. I’m still munching on last night’s candy.
Since I’ve posted more about Death, I thought I’d mention the real protagonist of the film, Dr. Hedd. I put a lot of consideration into how I wanted to shape Dr. Hedd’s character. As his name not-so-subtly implies, he is a man driven by science and logic who works in a world that crosses paths with the concept of death and all of the non-scientific aspects of that concept.
As a cardiologist who works directly with his patients, he can’t help but deal with the more “blurry” psychological, emotional, and even spiritual responses to the constant presence of Death in his ward. My main concern when I was writing the script is how to shape Dr. Hedd’s own response to Death in a way that was comedic, genuine, and exploratory all at once… without offending actual doctors.
A reader of my script commented, “I don’t think actual doctors are going to like this.” After all, in the course of the story Dr. Hedd does some morally ambiguous things (no, I won’t spoil the surprises), at times even seeming negligent of his duties. As my mom said: “How can he be doing all this when he has three dying patients waiting for him?”
I think I decided two things very early on: Firstly, that Dr. Hedd was not perfect. As cool-headed, smart, and mature as he seemed, he would do things in response to Death’s constant hampering that were far from ideal. I felt this was much more realistic than the “perfect” doctor who always knew just want to do. That brings me to my second decision: This was not reality… Or anything close to it, really. I mean, c’mon. The plot centers around a Grim Reaper that walks around a hospital ward cracking one-liners all day. So I didn’t mind pushing things to the extreme, exaggerating characters’ actions not to create caricatures, but to create cinematic representations of what might seem mundane in real life.
So Dr. Hedd is not a real doctor, “ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Just as Magritte’s pipe represented, well, representation rather than a pipe, Dr. Hedd represents a mind-driven society much more than he represents health professionals.
