Hollywood & The Big "C"

Cancer is everywhere, even in our favorite films. But does its presence in films help us process its outcomes or hinder our understanding?

In the 2003 Canadian film, My Life Without Me, a seemingly healthy, young hard-working mother of two young children, Ann (Sarah Polley) is given the unfortunate news that she has advanced ovarian cancer. Ann decides to withhold this information from her young daughters and more surprisingly, her devoted husband, Don (Scott Speedman) and to make plans for their future without her in it. She also makes the somewhat controversial decision to seek a new love interest, Lee (Mark Ruffalo) - something that she never would have allowed herself to do if she had not received her diagnosis. In between tender moments with her family, falling in love with Lee and Ann’s reconciliation with her parents, she records tapes for Don and the girls so they can keep her in their thoughts after she’s no longer there to care for them. It’s a truly heartbreaking movie.

Sarah Polley as Ann and Mark Ruffalo in Isabel Coixet’s “My Life Without Me”

My Life Without Me is one of many films in the past 40+ years centered around cancer and its ravaging effects on its victims and their families. Ovarian or breast cancer are often the main culprits in these women-centered films. Take, for example, the 2001 film Wit, with Emma Thompson in which she plays Vivian, a professor whose work explores religion and death. Vivian has to contend with her mortality when she learns she has ovarian cancer. The film shows how devastatingly experimental treatments can work, but more so how the mind, however informed, wrestles with a cruel fate. Even famed film critic Roger Ebert, who died of cancer, cited the movie as being “too graphic to watch” as it brought back “many vivid and painful memories of treatment.”

Emma Thompson in Mike Nichols’ "Wit” (2001)

Perhaps the most iconic film capturing the grueling and unrelenting heartache of cancer loss is Terms of Endearment (1983) in which Debra Winger, a young, vibrant mother, receives a terminal breast cancer diagnosis and her estranged relationship with her mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, is put to the test. The film was considered a comedy-drama in the 1980s and in many ways, the humor was the antidote to the weighty gravitas of the big “C.” Nowadays, such a depiction would be verboten.

Both Wit and Terms of Endearment yield profound empathy and sadness for these tragic characters while simultaneously affirming how good it is to be alive and healthy. The underlying message: If lower back pain is the worst affliction you have to deal with, then don’t complain. On the whole, these films do good by increasing awareness of cancer and making health information accessible to the public. But there’s evidence that watching such films might actually perpetuate misinformation

Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine as daughter and mother in “Terms of Endearment” (1983)

A study published in January 2024 by JCO Oncology Practice, led by David J. Benjamin, an oncologist, found that Hollywood films may provide unrealistic depictions of cancer and create false narratives around curability, treatment options and types of available care. The study notes the usually grim outcomes of the cases of cancer presented in films.

Hollywood films featuring cancer nearly always result in a beloved character succumbing to death and often make prominent the loss of those left behind. Take for example Shadowlands (1993) starring Anthony Hopkins as famed theologian and grief expert (author of A Grief Observed), C.S. Lewis. The film is a dramatized account of Lewis’ grief over losing his wife, poet Joy Davidman (Debra Winger) to metastasized breast cancer and the longing he felt for her, as he started to lose her to the illness. Theirs was a short-lived romance, unfortunately.

Anthony Hopkins as C.S Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy Davidman in “Shadowlands” (1993)

Despite the prevalence of breast and ovarian cancer in the films mentioned above, in recent cancer-centered films, brain cancer has a lead role, but it’s not even in the top 10 types of cancers diagnosed in the U.S. In contrast, lung cancer, which is the second most common cancer in the U.S. barely gets screen time. Of course, this trend might also have to do with the fact that cinematic cancer representations have tended to skew younger in the past 25 years. In 2021, according to the CDC, brain cancer was the most common type of cancer in youth.

Popular cancer films also depict young, attractive adults fighting terminal illnesses while also embarking on intense romances (e.g. A Walk to Remember, 2002). This theme reappears in the high-grossing YA adaptation, The Fault in Our Stars (2014) in which a sixteen-year-old cancer patient, played by Shailene Woodley, attends a support group, where she meets and falls in love with another cancer patient, played by Ansel Elgort.

Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in the YA bestseller “The Fault in Our Stars” (2014)

This film was cited in a Time article, entitled, “The Difference Between Cancersploitation and Art- According to a Cancer Survivor.” The writer here asks whether cancer “is simply a storytelling device — shorthand for eliciting sympathy and turning up the heat on the issues in a character’s life — or do the filmmakers take it seriously as a situation to explore? This question sorts the cancersploitation from real cancer art.”

It may be hard to define what taking it “seriously as a situation” looks like.  My Life Without You and Terms of Endearment may not bring fully to light the financial burdens, state-of-the-art cancer treatment options, and consequences of chemo in an accurate way. But these films do depict the workings of the human mind when faced with mortality, even when that mortality is grossly exaggerated for the sake of box office earnings. There’s a delicate balance at play here - one that film creators must carefully consider in presenting the effects of cancer.  I’m of the mindset of Roger Ebert: Things that are too graphic might just be too painful.