国产传媒

Written by Acting Director of the Bioethics Certificate Program, Wanda Teays

There are a number of ways that courage is presented in film. We see it with soldiers in war, whose courageous acts on the front lines are often born of patriotism, as with, The Hurt Locker. Other acts of courage are in response to external threats like the cyborg-stalker in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There is also the courage required to fight the monsters close at hand. Dirty Pretty Things¹ offers insights into the courage required for that battle. Given its focus is on illegal organ transplants, it is a great film for Bioethics.

Dirty Pretty Things

Okwe is one of the many illegal immigrants working at a London hotel in Dirty Pretty Things (2002). He juggles two jobs, one at the hotel front desk and the other as a taxi driver. To save money, he sleeps on a couch in tiny flat rented by Senay, a beautiful young Turkish woman who works days at a sweatshop and nights at the hotel. Given their illegal status, they are both ripe for exploitation, which is what we find. The hotel is not your typical B&B—it’s is a site for drugs and prostitution, and worse.

One day Okwe is asked to come up to a hotel room for a plumbing repair. As he sticks his hand in to fish out what has jammed up the toilet, out comes a heart, a human heart. What in the world is this? That question rattles Okwe’s brain. He’s about to call the police when hotel manager Senor Juan (alias “Sneaky”) stops him in his tracks. If he calls the police, Sneaky will hand in Okwe and he’d be deported to Nigeria, where a worse fate would await him. Okwe is caught in Sneaky’s net. Thus begins his journey into a corrupt underworld, the black market in human organs. The buyers are wealthy people with an intermediary who comes to Senor Juan to pick up an organ. The sellers (“donors”) are illegal immigrants. They receive falsified documents (passports) in exchange for having a kidney removed in one of the hotel rooms. The more Okwe learns, the more appalled he gets. Being a man of integrity as well as a doctor in his native land, Okwe can hardly stand by and not try to help the ones whose organs have been harvested. He is also trying to figure out what to do to stop Sneaky from his profit-making organ business. Whether the appropriate response is an “eye for an eye” brings up key issues for discussion.

The movie is most timely, given the global traffic in organs. Not only does it exploit the vulnerable, but it can also result in physical problems and social stigmatization. Nancy Scheper Hughes (1998) has interviewed kidney sellers around the world. A 27-year-old man who sold a kidney in Moldova observed that “we have sold something we can never get back.” Okwe saw that, which is why he wanted to protect Senay from Senor Juan’s willingness to butcher her to make money at her expense.

Work Cited

¹ © 2019 Wanda Teays. Published in Seeing the Light: Exploring Ethics Througb Movies by Wanda Teays.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, “Keeping an Eye on the Global Traffic in Human Organs,” The Lancet, Vol. 361, 10 May 2003, 1645-48.