Netflix’s newest juggernaut, helmed by Chris Hemsworth, is a disturbing dystopian tale of prisoners who become guinea pigs for a shady pharmaceutical company to receive reduced sentences. So far, so Black Mirror; but the horrors of this film actually date back 12 years to a short story written by George Saunders for The New Yorker.
In his popular 2010 tale called Escape From Spiderhead, the subjects are dosed with strange-sounding drugs through a MobiPak™, a device which is surgically attached to their lower backs. Through this dark technology, these people – seen as society’s undesirables – are hooked up with yet-to-be-approved medicines like Verbaluce™, Vivistif™ and, the worst of them all, Darkenfloxx™.
The story follows a harrowing day in the life of Jeff (played in the movie by Whiplash’s Miles Teller), who is administered a bunch of these not-at-all-legal drugs; leading him to fall in love, chemically, and have unbridled sex sessions with two women, Heather, and then Rachel (changed to Lizzy in the film, played by Jurnee Smollett). But then afterwards, he’s asked by the extremely creepy head scientist, Abnesti (Hemsworth) as a test who should be given Darkenfloxx™, a drug that takes the user to a hellishly dark place in their brain. But the medical trial goes haywire, with devastating results.
In an interview with the New Yorker, the writer Saunders explained that Spiderhead, like much of his work, explores what could be the end-goal of capitalism, and where humans fit within it: “I stand by the notion that capitalism can be an aggressive and brutal machine, rolling over everything in its path...I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn’t eradicate the reality of the suffering. It’s all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.”
Why is it called Spiderhead?
Spiderhead describes the layout of the state-of-the-art penitentiary, as Jeff explains in the story: “Abnesti called me into Control. Control being like the head of a spider. With its various legs being our Workrooms. Sometimes we were called upon to work alongside Abnesti in the head of the spider. Or, as we termed it: the Spiderhead.”
Is Spiderhead based on any true stories?
Perhaps the most famous of all drug trials carried out on people who didn’t give consent is the Tuskegee experiment, which started in Alabama in 1932. The study was set up to observe the effects of the disease if left untreated and it involved 600 Black men, 399 of whom had syphilis. Despite penicillin being available for the treatment of the illness, they were not treated for this, and as a result 100 men died, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
In 1997, president Bill Clinton finally apologised to the victims for the shameful and racist trials, saying: “We can look at you in the eye, and finally say, on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful and I am sorry.”
It wasn’t the only drug trial that broke ethical codes in America – not by a long shot. In 1914, 12 Mississippi inmates were injected with a disease called pellagra, and despite wanting to quit the trial after horrible after-effects, they were forced to continue. In the 1940s, 400 Chicago-based prisoners were injected with malaria in a bid to develop new drugs to treat it during World War II, and in 1950, a doctor in Pennsylvania injected 200 female inmates with viral hepatitis.
In Europe from 1939 to 1945, the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and others performed horrifying medical experiments on those incarcerated in concentration camps. The Nuremberg trials saw Mengele and other leaders of the camp sterilise people, remove bones and nerves without anaesthetic and sew twins together.
Following the Nuremberg trials, the Nuremberg code was drawn up; ten points for human experimentation that includes such principles as informed consent and absence of coercion; properly formulated scientific experimentation; and beneficence towards experiment participants.
However, some companies side-step this even now. Filter Magazine recently reported: “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was recently informed about the testing of a naltrexone implant without clinical protections in a Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections program.” It added that, even now “the shady and exploitative procedure is far from unique.”
