Just over a week ago, we learned of another sickening blow to the pro-life cause in Holland, as 41-year-old alcoholic Mark Langedijk requested and received a state-sanctioned lethal injection. He left behind an estranged wife and two children.

He also left behind his older brother Marcel, a journalist who has come forward in the past few days to speak about the day Mark was murdered. The video is chilling to watch. Marcel is visibly shaken and wipes tears away at first before collecting himself. By the end, his message is clear: The world should accept Mark’s choice. “We don’t take it lightly,” he wants to assure us. “It’s not like in Holland we go around killing alcoholics. It’s very complicated, and it’s very difficult, and it’s a huge step. … For me it’s very important to make sure everyone knows that we did everything, and some people just aren’t curable. If you don’t help them, they will eventually kill themselves.”

“Help them,” as in help them kill themselves, that is. Very helpful of Marcel to inform us that some people are just fated to despair and die. It all makes perfect sense now.

Not that he’s entirely wrong. He ponders the many bloodier ways Mark could plausibly have done the job himself, none of which sound too far-fetched given the picture we have of Mark’s will to die. It comforts Marcel to know Mark died instead in a warm, well-lit office, at the hands of a pretty nurse with cut fingernails who didn’t need to raise her voice.

Don Birnam and The Lost Weekend

This case has haunted me for days. In pondering it, I am reminded of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder’s harrowing 1945 film The Lost Weekend, which aired this weekend on Turner Classic Movies and is based on Charles Jackson’s novel of the same name. Don’s case also haunted me when I first saw the film, thereby fulfilling Joseph Conrad’s first purpose of art: to make you see.

Don, an aspiring writer, is introduced to the viewer with his physical dignity largely intact. But this dapper would-be Hemingway with a Transatlantic clip and a hat tilted just so strips away that dignity piece by piece, until he’s reduced himself to nothing more than a sozzled slob in a bathrobe. Like Mark, he calculatedly rejects every way of escape offered to him, even the literal escape offered by a vacation to the country with his brother. And like Marcel, that brother also gives up on Don. “We’ve tried everything, haven’t we?” he asks Don’s girlfriend, Helen. “How often have you cried? How often have I beaten him up? Scrape him out of a gutter and pump some kind of self-respect in him and back he falls, back in every time. Why kid ourselves?”

The script is full of frank body-blows like this, but we can’t deny that Don deserves every one of them. Don the scoundrel, Don the manipulator, Don the liar, the beggar, the thief. Perhaps for a good man, some would dare to die, but for Don Birnam?

Don’s favorite bartender is Nat, a man who minces no words with his customer even as he reluctantly keeps the ryes coming. Still, Nat is the only one Don entrusts with the secret of his artistic magnum opus, an autobiographical novel whose real-life heroine has inexplicably waited three years for him to get sober in hopes that they can be married.

“And what?” Nat asks. “How does it come out?” Don hasn’t figured that part out yet, but Nat has an idea. Several, actually. One involves a gun. In another, the hero climbs to the top of the Empire State Building and then … snap. Or he could do it for a nickel on the subway, under a train. Snap.

Don looks up with mingled desperation and hurt in his eyes. “You think so, Nat? What if Helen is right, and this guy sits down and turns out something good, but good?” “This guy?” Nat smirks. “Not from where I sit.” At this, Don slams the bar and leaps to his feet, furious. He will do it. He will write. The force of his reaction startles Nat into silence. “Maybe you will,” he murmurs, already feeling a pang of conscience.

After a heartbreaking sequence where Don tries and fails to hock his typewriter before tumbling down some stairs and losing it, he eventually does get a gun and attempt suicide. But just as Helen is trying to talk him down, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Nat, bringing back his lost typewriter. “She writes pretty good. I oiled her up a little. And I didn’t oil her up so you could hock her.”

In the end, we are not left with a guarantee that Don will never relapse. We are left with a suggestion of something that has been painfully withheld from the viewer until that point: hope. And a glimpse of that truth for which our culture has forgotten to ask.