More and more countries are legalizing euthanasia: the influence of literature and cinema

Suicide is the last great gesture of self-determination and therefore a popular motif in art. In the photo: a scene from Pedro Almodovar’s latest film “Mar adentro”.

Sony Pictures Classics via AP/keystone

The great stories about euthanasia are engraved in the collective memory. A Swiss research project is bringing together works on this subject from around the world. But what is the influence of this art on politics and society?

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January 7, 2025 – 1:47 p.m.

“Mar adentro”. “Untouchables”. The two great quadriplegic stories of the last two decades have one thing in common: they are based on real events. For the rest, they could hardly be more opposite.

Here, the melancholy and hypnotic film about a sailor who, after a swimming accident, fights for his right to commit suicide and leaves life only with the help of friends. There, the buddy comedy about a nurse who helps a rich entrepreneur regain the taste for life after a paragliding accident.

At the box office, “Mar adentro,” which received the Oscar for best foreign film, grossed about $43 million – “Intouchables” about ten times as much.

Pedro Almodovar’s latest film presents the story of a sailor who becomes quadriplegic following an accident.

Keystone

The audience chooses life, but the people involved choose death.

“In many parts of the world, the legalization of euthanasia has progressed in recent years. In Europe, in addition to Switzerland, long synonymous with death on demand, nearly a dozen other countries now authorize assisted suicide, or even active euthanasia.

Among them, Spain, where the affair of the sailor Ramón Sampedro, in the 1990s, sparked a widely publicized debate, brought to the screen in a striking way by the film “Mar adentro”.

In France, the government presented a bill this year aimed at opening access to assisted suicide to people suffering from incurable illnesses. This project is the result of a long societal fight in which Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, model of the main character in the film “Intouchables”, participated. Until his death in 2023, he was the godfather of the ‘Relieve, but not kill’ movement, which opposes euthanasia and defends the practice of palliative medicine at the end of life, already established in France.

The trailer for the French film “Intouchables”

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The law and the laws of art

The great stories about euthanasia are engraved in the collective memory. But how far does the influence of literature and cinema extend?

A Swiss research project is addressing this question: the website “Assisted Lab’s Living Archive of Assisted Dying”External link brings together works from around the world, analyzes them and makes them accessible with reference points for the legislative process and media debate.

So far, around 60 works have been prepared for the archive. “But we already have more than 350 works in our collection, which we will gradually make accessible,” explains Anna Elsner, professor of French culture and Medical Humanities at the University of St. Gallen and initiator of the project*.

She herself was surprised by the scale of the subject: “When I wrote the request to the European Research Council at the time, I was referring to barely 30 works.”

We still see cultural productions as a by-product of political debates, says Anna Elsner. “It’s fascinating how strong their influence is. The fact that art is actively cited in the legislative process has increased over the last ten years. There is also a new form of “Ars Moriendi”, a media coverage of stories of suffering.

The Anne Bert case

The French example is called Anne Bert. The author of erotic novels, suffering in the middle of her life from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Charcot’s disease, openly spoke out in favor of legislative reform in France. In a 2017 bill, which ultimately did not result in the legalization of euthanasia, Anne Bert is cited as a co-author.

The documentary “I decided to dieExternal link » shows her in the last months of her life. A few days after her accompanied suicide in the liberal neighboring country of Belgium, her book “The Very Last Summer” – a plea for a self-determined death – was published, which she condensed into this sentence: “I love the life to let me die.

You can watch the entire Anne Bert documentary for free hereExternal link.

After the death of Anne Bert, her story and her artistic treatment were mentioned numerous times in French parliamentary debates.

No longer a purely Western theme

The collection focuses on Europe and Canada, countries that legalized their legislation in the years following the turn of the millennium (the collection period). But recently, Anne Elsner expanded the circle of the project’s four permanent collaborators to include freelancers, in order to take other languages and cultural areas into account.

Today, euthanasia is no longer a purely Western subject, she says, “it’s changing. For example, I was in contact with an Indian director who accompanied an Indian artist who went to Zurich last year to die.”

Often, the treatment of the subject by art is more nuanced and less binary than the political and social debate, believes Anna Elsner. “We show the suffering of loved ones, even if they supported a desire to die.”

The disciplines each follow their own logic: art aims at ambivalence, legislation at overcoming it. The collection itself is indifferent on the matter. It is a neutral archive in terms of values, a research fund which does not seek to support a thesis either.

Trailer for the Canadian film “The Barbarian Invasions”

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Thus, the links between art and political debate are often not as obvious as one might think. In the 2003 Canadian film “The Barbarian Invasions,” one of Anna Elsner’s favorite collector’s items (also an Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film), the protagonist is injected with a lethal dose of heroin at the end.

More than a decade later, Canada legalized active euthanasia. In the political process, the film has repeatedly been a topic of discussion, not necessarily as an advocacy for euthanasia, but in its depiction of an outdated and unworthy public health system.

“Switzerland, land of death” and the Sarco capsule

In Switzerland, in recent years, the subject of euthanasia has been discussed primarily from the angle of death tourism. There has been no debate on the delimitation of palliative care, as in France.

The case of Geneva doctor Pierre Beck, who helped a healthy woman commit suicide with her sick husband, made headlines. The Federal Court acquitted Pierre Beck last March and confirmed Switzerland’s liberal position, which only punishes assisted suicide if it is for selfish reasons. Marc Keller, project collaborator at Assisted Lab, wrote a book based on this caseExternal link on the question of existential suffering, which appeared in November.

Since the death of a person in the Sarco suicide capsule this fall in the canton of Schaffhausen, Switzerland has also been confronted with a real debate on euthanasia. With the capsule, chosen death is just a button away, no doctor involved.

The fatal button of the very controversial Sarco capsule

Keystone / Ennio Leanza

“It’s a question of whether we should include medicine or not,” explains Anna Esner. This reminds him of the 2016 news: in “SuissID” (published in the anthology “Futurs insolites”External link), where Swiss author Vincent Gerber imagines a service that provides suicide assistance upon telephone order. Customers can choose from a catalog of different methods – depending on their needs and financial possibilities.

Dystopia targets the commercialization of euthanasia, but also captures the real complexity of the current situation in progressive countries. Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, etc., face the question of where the liberal approach to self-determined death becomes negligent. Where assistance in suicide turns into promotion of suicide. A difficult field opens up for politics and art.

Text proofread and verified by Balz Rigendinger, translated from German by Mary Vakaridis/op

* The Assisted Lab project was selected by the European Research Council for the Starting Grant program; it is mainly funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Other supporters are the universities of Saint-Gall, Zurich, Glasgow, Newcastle, McGill University in Montreal and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.

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