The Bewitched Backlash A case of hepatitis C in the cinema It’s a sad fact that the best-known recent case of “hepatitis C in the movies” was the pointless Nicole Kidman vehicle, Bewitched. A vapid idea for a film, it brought forth howls of scorn for using hepatitis C as the basis for a tacky joke. In case you haven’t heard about it, here’s what happens in the film. Shirley MacLaine plays a witch who wants to keep a guy’s interest when he is distracted by another woman. So what does she do? Magically forces the other woman to announce that she has hepatitis C, thus causing the man to be utterly repelled and come running back to Shirley MacLaine. Screenwriters Nora and Delia Ephron should have known better. The exact same joke would never have been allowed in a Hollywood movie if it had used HIV as the disease instead—and unlike hepatitis C, HIV actually is a sexually transmitted disease! But HCV is invisible to mainstream society as perceived by Hollywood. The result is both a crappy joke and another bit of dangerous misinformation doing the rounds. The then Australian Hepatitis Council was among the first to respond to the film’s release, stating that Bewitched encouraged discrimination against those living with hepatitis C. They noted that “because the public is so uneducated about hepatitis C, it apparently seems acceptable to trivialise this disease in a comedic context, at the expense of the 250,000 Australians who have hepatitis C, and the many millions more worldwide who are affected.”
chains were also contacted with a similar call to action. Sadly, but predictably, neither Sony nor the cinemas did anything. The manager of the UK’s Hepatitis C Trust spoke for many when he began his group’s campaign against the film. “It’s outrageous that a major Hollywood film should trivialize hepatitis C in this way. This is a potentially fatal disease affecting up to 200 million people worldwide and hundreds of thousands in the UK. The remark is unnecessary for the script and it’s tasteless, suggesting that people with hepatitis C are somehow lepers and only serving further to reinforce the stigma that blights the lives of those with this illness. It’s also extraordinarily ignorant. Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus, not a sexually transmitted disease. This film highlights just how little awareness there is about such an enormously widespread disease and how essential it is that we change that.” The American Liver Foundation responded similarly. “Tragically, this remarkably tasteless comment plays into the stigma that many people with hepatitis C have to cope with every single day,” said Frederick G. Thompson, the organisation’s president. “I can’t imagine anyone in Hollywood making a joke about HIV infection, for example. The American Liver Foundation has received hundreds of calls and
emails from movie-goers expressing outrage and dismay.” A number of individuals in the UK also took matters into their own hands, leaving accurate hepatitis C information on every seat in several theatres screening the movie. The only consolation is that most people who were unlucky enough to have paid to see this film were resolutely unamused. Rather funnier than the movie itself, however, are these savage reviews: The Village Voice: “Unrivalled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension. To spend even 10 minutes in the movie’s universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.” The Washington Post: “It sinks so deep and fast, you don’t even see bubbles on the surface.” The New York Post: “[An] unmagical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.” The Portland Oregonian: “A terrible, terrible movie. Its creators have a swell idea at the core, a wonderful leading lady, and several stalwart comic players in support, and they make of all of that a picture with the wit of an armpit fart, the verve of a boxwood shrub, and the appeal of a long night in an ER waiting room.”
The Australian Hepatitis Council called on the distributor of the film, Sony Pictures Releasing Pty Ltd, to include a public service announcement about hepatitis C at every screening of the film and to allow information about hepatitis C to be made available at every cinema screening the film. Cinema Hepatitis C Community News • June 2007 Internal Pages - June 07.indd 6
25/05/2007 10:47:12 AM