From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

Hey, you guys just gonna throw that away?: F. González-Crussi and the strange, chaotic story of medical science

In J.G. Ballard’s superb new memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, the author describes his abbreviated study of medicine as having an unexpectedly formative effect on his distinctive powers as a writer of fiction. Ballard particularly covets his memories of pathological research, the subjects of which were routinely cadavers of other doctors. “Dissecting the face,” Ballard writes, “revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost bringing them back to life.”

This passage has stuck with me, partly because it serves as a vivid reminder for those of us with no special interest in medicine to recognize its role as a source wonderment, and its inherently human foundations—what is medicine but a science wholly driven by the dictates of human life in all its strange and unwieldy patterns? I was reminded of this further still when I recently discovered a terrific book by an author I’d never heard of. There’s a moment in On Seeing, introduced with a certain, provocative brio, where F. González-Crussi, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine—not to mention a witty, unfathomably knowledgeable essayist—directs our attention to how deeply our tendency to see only what we choose effects even our most critical historical endeavours. He refers here to the always awkward, not-at-all orderly story of medical science in general, and anatomy in particular:

“Historians of science have wondered why the systematic study of anatomy did not originate sooner than it did. And as puzzling as the when is the where of its origination. Several ancient cultures left proof of keen intelligence and extraordinary powers of observation. Many learned men in ancient times performed dissections on cadavers or somehow became acquainted with the interior of the body. Yet, knowledge of anatomy, as we now understand it, remained unexplainably rudimentary.”

No matter how many hearts were ripped from decidedly unlucky Aztecs as a method to placate gods and stave off catastrophe, how baffling, writes González-Crussi, that this society, the authors of exquisite poetry and astonishingly accurate astronomical observations, revealed no interest in the actual functions of said organ. Likewise, the ancient Mesopotamians produced impressive codes of law, an admirable literature, and practiced a sophisticated form of divination involving the study of entrails, yet they appear to have developed no anatomical knowledge. Such willful ignorance is found repeatedly in cultures the world round.

The way González-Crussi conveys this feature of human history, our selective perception, is fascinating, fun, clear, and kept me happily distracted for days after reading it. It was with great anticipation then that I awaited the arrival of his newest book, its appeal made plain in its title: A Short History of Medicine (Modern Library, $29.95). Though not quite as conducive to weird anecdotes, literary analogues or philosophical playfulness as On Seeing, this compact yet breezy doctoring-for-dummies is a chamber of insight, careful research, scientific basics and wide-ranging anthropological interest. Finally, while pulling no punches with regards to the abundant failings of medical science, the book nonetheless inspires tremendous respect for the way medicine in all its forms has changed almost every aspect of human life.

Chief among A Short History’s most colorful passages are, naturally, its quick dips into biography. González-Crussi tells of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) the hugely influential iconoclast who was so obsessed with knowledge of the body that he kept rotting corpses in his bedroom and encouraged students to hover over terminally ill patients; of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), who was tragically fired from his post and driven from Vienna for having the gall to suggest that the practice of hygiene on the part of doctors would drastically diminish cases of puerperal fever in pregnant women; of Alexis St. Martin (1794-1880), the French Canadian trapper and all-around tough motherfucker who after surviving a musket shot to his abdomen spent the rest of his life having his conveniently exposed digestive system studied by William Beaumont (1785-1853); of William Halsted (1852-1922), who pioneered the radical mastectomy through the injection of cocaine into nerve trunks, only to fall victim to cocaine’s addictive powers; of the two-man Franco-Prussian War fought between the flamboyant Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and the more reserved and historically underappreciated Robert Koch (1843-1910). These and many other profiles emphasize that the story of medicine is also a story of politics and personality.

Dividing his broad subject into sections—anatomy, surgery, procreation, disease, diagnosis and therapy—González-Crussi breaks medicine down into its essential components, rendering its evolution into a jargon-free, easily digestible network of interrelated fields of study. He ends each section with some reflections on where this evolution has brought us; what we may have lost on our path toward longer, less painful lives; how a surprising number of folkloric or instinctive remedies have proven to be effective (did you know: swallowing semen does help to induce childbirth!); how and whether or not the eradication of pain is a plausible or even desirable goal. In short, A Short History of Medicine asks numerous questions while answering others. And it does what any such volume should do: it presents history as something relevant, alive and ongoing.