The Brain on Dallas Buyers Club, part one

The neurobiology of post-partisan storytelling

Every now and then, I invite my parents to go to the movies. We live in a small community, and mostly it’s the big blockbusters that come here. And mostly, we're not all that interested in the big blockbusters. My life would be no different if there were never another Marvel film. I don’t need to see Star Wars, Episode XXXII. Sometimes, though, a film comes that we just have to see. Or, if I'm totally honest, a film comes that I just have to see, and that I hope they will enjoy. When that happens, I invite the folks, and they always say yes, because they are good people and good sports. Always, these outings conclude at the local brewpub, where, over glorious wood-fired pizza and a large pitcher of microbrew, we dissect the film we've just seen and have a grand old time.

Over the years, we've seen Oppenheimer and The Blind Side, Zero Dark Thirty and American Horse, The Boys in the Boat and Philomena, Air and Argo and American Sniper. We saw the Hunger Games trilogy together, and Skyfall, and every single Harry Potter film, but not before my father re-read the book. He’s been retired for many years, but he’s still a scientist at heart, and he does his research.

In 2013, we took a film field trip to see Dallas Buyers Club. Afterward, like always, we repaired to the local brewpub to debrief. Dallas Buyers Club is a powerful film, and was well worth seeing on a big screen. There was much to notice about it, much to discuss, much to debate. We sat for hours, nursing our pints, eventually moving from pizza to a gigantic eclair shared three ways. Great film, great night, great indigestion.

I didn’t know it then, but that outing marked the beginning of a set of obsessions that have only grown over time. Those obsessions have to do with how stories can move people and change them, with how, in particular, stories can unite people across differences in ways no other medium can. Today, more than a decade later, these obsessions have shaped themselves into concentrated, mission-driven work: They underwrite not only this Substack, but also the Story Incubator Writing Lab, the nonprofit Maurice and I founded with the goal of supporting storytelling that moves us, individually and collectively, past our rigid partisan divisions and into a flourishing, expansive post-partisan era.

I. Obligatory Plot Summary, Without Which this Piece Won’t Make Much Sense

I used to teach English. Which means I used to teach writing. Not creative writing, but analytical writing: critical essays about literature. I taught for years at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, I taught as a grad student at the University of Michigan. At one point, Maurice and I spent a year teaching high school English in a boarding school — itself a wild story for another day. Always, when speaking to students about what constitutes good analytical writing, I harped and harped and harped some more about Rule Number One: Do not write a plot summary. Plot summary is not literary criticism. It is storytelling that is trying to pass as literary criticism. I lectured at length about the difference between the two, and warned students that turning in a plot summary in lieu of an actual work of analysis would not be a good move for their grade.

Years and years of preaching about the evils of plot summary — and yet: here I am, breaking Rule Number One. Reader, if you’ve never seen the film, or if you saw it long ago and your memory of it isn’t all that fresh, this plot summary is for you. If you know the film well, please do skip ahead!

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Garner, Dallas Buyers Club tells the true story of Ron Woodroof, a Texas cowboy who is diagnosed with advanced HIV/AIDS in 1985. The doctors give Ron 30 days to live — and refuse to give him the then-experimental drug AZT. Instead, they tell him to join a support group and wish him luck.

But Ron isn’t ready to die. He drags his failing body to Mexico to see a doctor who is getting good results treating AIDS with drugs and supplements not available in the US. Ron improves, smuggles a huge supply of pills and elixirs across the border, and founds a "buyers club" where he and other AIDS sufferers can secure non-FDA-approved drugs that could extend their lives. These alternative treatments did sometimes work — Woodroof himself lived another seven years after being told he would die within the month. But they were illegal and the government went into overdrive, shutting down buyers clubs and persecuting the people running them.

The utter injustice and illogic of the government’s refusal to let terminally ill people seek to live is a major theme in the film. People ought to have the right to decide what they put in their bodies, Ron argues, especially when they have been told they are about to die. They ought to have the right to try experimental treatments — to try anything at all — that might help them live a bit longer, or give them a better quality of life during their remaining time. The right to try to save your own life is a fundamental human right, Ron argues, and the government has no business interfering with that. Toward the end of the film, Ron makes his case in court after the Fed shuts down his business.

The judge is sympathetic, but his hands are tied. “The court is highly disturbed by [the FDA’s] bullying tactics,” he says; “the FDA was formed to help people, not to keep them from getting help. ... If a person has been found to be terminally ill, well, they ought to be able to take just about anything that will help. But that’s not the law. Mr Woodroof, I am moved to compassion by your plight. What is lacking here is legal authority to intervene.” Ron returns to Dallas defeated, but a hero nonetheless in the eyes of those for whose dignity, humanity, and freedom he has fought.

II. Dallas Buyers Club Changes the World

Dallas Buyers Club was a huge success. Made for $5 million, it grossed $55 million at the box office. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Matthew McConaughey and Best Supporting Actor for Jared Leto. It also won two Golden Globes, two SAG awards, and much more besides.

And then something truly remarkable happened. Over the next four years, 41 states passed laws allowing terminally ill people to seek non-FDA-approved treatments to prolong their lives. These laws, based on model legislation crafted by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, enshrined the "right to try” as a basic human right. They were colloquially known as "Dallas Buyers Club laws.”

Dallas Buyers Club did the impossible and it did it fast. The film brought legislators across the political spectrum together as they collaborated to pass right-to-try laws in their states. The film accomplished this feat during a time of increasing political polarization, and it did so with ease and without conflict — so much so that in 2018, Donald Trump signed the right to try into federal law.

What this film accomplished was so big, so swift, and so uncontested that it’s easy not to notice that it accomplished anything at all. We are, after all, accustomed to the idea that political achievement does not happen in the absence of an ugly, angry cage fight in which one side wins big and the other loses badly. And that is exactly why it’s so important to notice what Dallas Buyers Club did — for it not only prompted sweeping legislative change, but it did so in a peaceful, uncomplicated way. The film made it easy for people to come together across their differences to make law — law that expanded the the personal freedom, dignity, and self-determination of all Americans.

III The Brain on Dallas Buyers Club

How did Dallas Buyers Club do what it did? How did this film unite ideologically opposed people — not only in felt belief but in purposeful action? What does this story “know” about how people work, and what brings them together? And how can we learn from it?

Maurice and I have talked endlessly about these questions. Over the years, we’ve developed theories. But that’s all they were — speculations grounded in careful close reading of the film. We wanted to know. We wanted facts.

Our quest for answers is in many ways the seed of the Story Incubator Writing Lab. It drives our ongoing inquiry into the neuroscience of storytelling. It is also the question behind our first original research study.

What would we see if we could watch the brains of liberals, moderates, and conservatives watching Dallas Buyers Club? Americans are so divided right now; there is such a huge gulf between left and right. Many say, with reason, that we’re living in different realities. Which begs the question: Were people on opposite sides of the political divide even seeing the same film when they watched Dallas Buyers Club? Or was this Oscar-winning, world-changing movie actually multiple movies rolled into one?

This summer, we got our answer. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post in this series.