Nearly 20 years after making his debut in The Player, Griffin Mill has returned.
By Elisabeth Crean
Hollywood loves a sequel. Studios eagerly greenlight new movies featuring the same old comic book heroes, intergalactic warriors, and sexy superspies. Even boxer Rocky Balboa put on his trunks for a sixth round at the cineplex, notwithstanding his eligibility for AARP membership. So it is entirely fitting that author Michael Tolkin ’74 has brought back a delightfully debauched Hollywood executive in his sequel novel, The Return of the Player (New York: Grove Press, 2006).
The fictional studio shark, Griffin Mill, first surfaced in the pages of Tolkin’s savage satire, The Player (1988). Tolkin also penned the Academy Award-nominated screenplay of the story for the late director Robert Altman’s 1992 film. The delicious send-up of the unscrupulous studio system—which the famously iconoclastic Altman scrupulously avoided throughout his career—became one of the director’s most popular and successful films.
On-screen, Tim Robbins portrayed Griffin Mill unforgettably: slick, seductive, and sinister. On the page, Tolkin’s character is even richer: an endearing sociopath who constantly tinkers with the basic laws of physics governing his moral universe. For Griffin, getting away with murder isn’t a metaphor. It’s a slightly unusual day at the office.
When The Return of the Player opens, 15 years have elapsed in the life of Griffin Mill. The thirtysomething rising star is now 52 and frustrated, with one ex-wife, a second marriage on the rocks, and a vexing allergy to Viagra. The Player’s neuroses have multiplied since his career stalled a few steps short of the pinnacle of Hollywood power. His failure to become a studio boss signifies more than loss of influence or status: it means he hasn’t attained financial security.
Down to his last six million dollars, Griffin can barely support his current obligations. And he sees a dying planet all around him. To survive, and protect his family, he needs to own a small South Pacific island—with sufficient elevation to accommodate rising sea levels caused by melting polar icecaps. To earn an island-buying income, he casts his net beyond the movie-making world. He targets a business alliance with Philip Ginsberg, a wealthy fellow parent at his children’s private school. Griffin knows an ostentatiously large donation will catch the almost-billionaire’s eye.
Plenty of outlandish scheming takes place along the way. Griffin’s gambits lead to a job with Ginsberg, who commissions the ex-movie man to come up with the Next Big Idea to make megamoney. But Griffin soon comes to wonder if he has made a megamistake. Griffin is capable of ruthlessness and rationalizing that would make Machiavelli blush. In Ginsberg, however, Griffin is consorting with—and trying to please—a mercurial and morally-bankrupt monster of mythic proportions.
Tolkin’s acid pen cuts deep as he parodies a parade of modern excesses, extremes, and obsessions. Among his targets: plastic surgery junkies, dangerous Internet liaisons, lavish bar mitzvahs and rampaging materialism. The author’s eye is unsparing; his language, vivid and blunt. For example, Ginsberg “was mean and worked alone like a troll under a bridge, demanding a tax of everyone who passed: money, gold, cattle, a first-born child.”
Against this background of cultural decay, the remarkable twist is that Griffin turns out to have a bit of a soul after all. His years spent developing screenplays have conditioned him to analyze his own life like a script: seeing crises, failings, and needs as a series of plot points. But he is determined to be the hero of his own journey, to resolve everything by the decisive third act.
No Hollywood executive would buy the breathtakingly improbable humdinger of an ending that Tolkin has scripted to Griffin’s story. And yet somehow it works, maybe because we find ourselves so utterly charmed by this very bad boy, turned just a tiny bit good.
* * *
Medical education is so rigorous that doctors learn procedures they will never perform and memorize conditions they will never encounter. Even budding psychiatrists and dermatologists take 300 hours of obstetrics training and study infectious diseases that do not occur in North America.
Yet during years of med school, internship, and residency, physicians receive virtually no preparation for the one thing that 100 percent of their patients will eventually face: death. In Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), journalist Stephen P. Kiernan ’82 demonstrates that medical advances have made dying in America more painful, not less, in part because doctors are woefully trained in end-of-life care. A startling disconnect has arisen between the peaceful passage Americans say they want and the tumultuous final days many endure.
The book opens with a chilling account of a doctor hastening his patient’s demise. An elderly woman with severe lung disease is on a ventilator against her express, written orders. The extra drug that her longtime physician slips into the final injection—is it mercy, or manslaughter?
Ultimately, the doctor receives a modest slap on the wrist and major community support. And while the hot-button topics of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia remain outside his book’s main scope, Kiernan argues that the very existence of these issues on our cultural radar screen represents an indictment of the current system. Neither would be necessary if dying were handled compassionately in America today.
Kiernan admits the difficulty of maintaining “traditional journalistic objectivity” while reporting on such an emotionally freighted subject. He spent time with dying patients and their families, whose stories illuminate the issues more powerfully than the alarming statistics the author has also amassed.
A key numerical shift—in the 1920s, 75 percent of Americans passed away at home; by the 1990s, 75 percent died in a hospital. The comfort of one’s own bed gave way to beeping machines and invasive tubes. Kiernan elucidates the complex systemic and psychological reasons for resorting to “heroic measures” far past the point where any meaningful improvement is possible. Families sometimes “have confused medical persistence with love.” Doctors view death as defeat.
Ironically, better treatment is simpler and less expensive. Palliative care focuses on effective pain and symptom management. Hospice treats the needs of the patient and family together—from helping run errands to healing emotional wounds. Even though these approaches align closely with what research shows Americans want, many elements of the medical system stand firmly entrenched against their widespread use.
The only thing more difficult than dealing with death is not dealing with it until it’s too late, argues Kiernan. The failure to prepare—to make decisions and communicate wishes in advance—vastly increases the potential for emotional distress, physical pain, and financial devastation. It’s impossible to read Last Rights without reflecting on personal experiences, and Kiernan shares his own. His father died in a prolonged and pointless ICU ordeal. “We were textbook cases of the American approach to death. We were completely unprepared, unschooled, and unassisted.” Four years later, his mother died peacefully at home, with “nothing left undone” and “her bright character ... undimmed.”
Kiernan’s message is clear. “Death is something we can indeed bear to face, and should face—because if we do, we can shape its meaning and effect.” He wants families to talk: communicate final needs and wishes well ahead of time, and prepare advance directives.
And he also urges Americans to rally as “noisy consumers” to force public policy changes —from medical training to Medicare rules—that support dying well.
Recently Published
Spirit of the Village: A Maui Memoir (Write On Maui Publishers, 2006) by Jackie Pais Carlin, M.A. English ’04
The Book of Emma (Insomniac Press, 2006) by Marie-Célie Agnant, translated by Zilpha Bentley Ellis, M.A. French ’61
Marine Metapopulations (Academic Press, 2006) co-edited by Peter Sale and Jacob Kritzer ’95