What can we understand as agency, for individuals placed into contexts that are fabricated in dehumanizing forms? How does the capacity for someone to willfully choose their fate become troubled when the conditions that this choice must occur within are marginalized and inequitable? Director Reid Davenport, in his sophomore feature Life After, assembles a discourse that interrogates the milieu into which MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) is made both more accessible and proffered to disabled communities in its expanded eligibility. Starting from the 1983 case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman with cerebral palsy who sought her right to die in California’s Riverside General Hospital, Davenport charts the trajectory of assisted dying programs and their subliminal policies that encourage the euthanasia of disabled populations against the costs of up-kept health and home care. Mixed into this web are the deficiencies of long-term care facilities, the not-so-invisible ableism that has legally authorized the death of hundreds, and disability activism that seeks to materially analyze the consequences of societal infrastructure that has normalized and affirmed the non-disabled experience.
Most striking to Davenport’s general thesis — that these targeted expansions of MAID onto disabled communities are a systemically facilitated push to prioritize the option of death over welfare — is a moment occurring about halfway through the film, when the director and the film’s producer, Colleen Cassingham, go about completing a mock application for Reid’s assisted suicide. Disturbingly, Davenport and Cassingham learn that Reid, in his position as a working community member and successful artist, is still eligible for death. Such an insight becomes indicative of the insidious, persistently decontextualized nature through which these assisted dying programs operate. To have a disability, in their malformed and transparently discriminatory sense of liberalism, is to have enough wrong with you that you are eligible to die. Davenport’s scrutiny and focus on Bouvia, a woman who simply asked to be supported in her death, finds its focus in a small montage of journalists asking her if she “wants” to die. There is always hesitation in response to this question — a reframing — Bouvia placing irresolute emphasis on the “want.” Davenport suggests that this is not about wanting to die, but about having no other option. He posits that living in this ableist world, where austerity won’t uniquely hit the arts or education, but the very healthcare that provides latitude to live in one’s own body against an apathetic, if not cruel, reality, are exasperating pretexts that render autonomy void even prior to the question of MAID.
It becomes evident why the film’s trajectory moves toward disability activism, for hegemony maintains to construct itself as an increasingly hostile sphere wherein the disabled are told it would be more convenient for them to kill themselves than for the state to enfranchise welfare programs. Long-term care facilities are denoted as a kind of containment, accruing disabled peoples like 311 confines rabid beasts. Long-term care, in its current emaciated form, is a method of institutionalizing those groups of people that the social economy wishes not to see, sweeping their care and aptitudes under a carpet, to be lost and forgotten, awaiting MAID to kick into gear at some point down the line. There’s no humanity sought in the design of this policy, only shrewd neoliberal lobbying practices that refute and refuse the humanity of a community it places in harm’s way. Life After delicately constructs an emphatic and empathetic argument against this itemization of disabled peoples, taking stock of the hundreds who have died across the years who could have maybe kept living if the infrastructure around them prioritized well-being over profit margins.
DIRECTOR: Reid Davenport; DISTRIBUTOR: Multitude Films/Independent Lens; IN THEATERS: July 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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