The Thing with Two Heads

One night, while I was visiting my parents, they told me they had saved a movie for me which they thought was right up my alley. Then, we all sat down, and they started playing The Thing with Two Heads off of their DVR. They were right.

The Thing with Two Heads is a great example of how a movie can frame the audience perspective, and also of how that framing can be changed based on who they think is watching the movie. The film is about an old white doctor who discovers a way to transplant a person's head onto the body of another. He has perfected this operation because he suffers from a disease and is trying to find a way to extend his life, since, as he reasons in the film, he as a doctor is more important than other people and should be kept alive so that his studies can be continued. However, when his disease starts to really hit him, and his staff can find no suitable body anywhere else, they are forced to use a black man who only agreed to be part of the program (of which he does not know the full extent) in order to escape federal execution and to buy himself more time to find the REAL criminal who framed him. When the doctor, a documented racist, wakes up and finds out what has happened, he's angry. When the convict wakes up and finds out what has happened, he's angry. The film then goes on to a ridiculous chase scene and some other stuff and then it ends. I'm sorry if I'm not being so specific here, but the movie doesn't really need any more recapping beyond this point.

Race is a big point in the movie. The doctor is evil because he undervalues the lives of others, he's racist, and he's white. The convict is good because he has been framed, and he's black. The movie doesn't bother expanding either of the characters. The only moral dilemma in the film is faced by a black doctor, who was hired by the racist one and then fired immediately after he found out he was black. Now this doctor must choose whether to save the white doctor or the convict. The conclusion he reaches is to save the convict, since he has committed no actual crime, and to leave the doctor to die, since he is evil and since he was supposed to die in the first place by his disease. After the scene in which we see the doctor's disembodied head on a table, hooked up to a blood machine and asking for help, we see all the black characters of the movie in a car, driving off and singing “Oh Happy Days.” It's ridiculous, but I can get behind the simple morals and the idea itself.

I'll just say that this is one of those movies which I'd like to remake. I think the concept had a lot of potential, but was carried out sloppily because the film industry just wanted to bank in on the post-civil rights era.