Some spoilers, but for a documentary I don’t recommend watching anyway.
CoaGS is a self-made/directed documentary by, and starring, Penny Lane[1] (PL) where she records her experience in altruistic living kidney donation, also called Good Samaritan (GS) donation, and covers some of the history surrounding donation. It was made by Sandbox Films, with funding from a lot of sources, including Longview Philanthropy - a fact only appearing momentarily in the credits of the doc, and didn’t appear anywhere online, to my brief searching.
I hosted a watch party at my EA chapter, as it’s also something I’m planning on doing, and this is a review and summary of it.
The film opens with some undulating lights and colours, which brings to mind a haze that might be from general anaesthetic. It’s a fine introduction. Then breaks in some slightly discordant music that wouldn’t be out of place both in an avant-garde spa, or a low-key rave. It’s a tonally confusing start - after, PL talks us briefly through who she is, some history of kidney donation in general, and her journey towards this donation, including interviews with other living donors, and her medical team.
Throughout the doc, PL uses a lot of typing on a PC screen to show her diary entries. I don’t mean footage of her at a laptop, thoughtfully looking before hammering in a few words. I mean it’s a screen recording equivalent of her typing into a Notepad.exe file. This happens probably about 8 times in the film, and ends up with us reading her emotions in quite a detached way. Yes she was feeling anxious, she writes, with lots of exclamation marks, but it landed worse than if she was talking to the camera, and expressing herself orally.
Similarly, to show her journey, there’s a screen recording of her dragging the yellow Google Maps Street View guy (he’s called “Pegman”, as it turns out) to the hospital she would have the surgery at. I couldn't deny that it was, technically, visual story telling, but it was so on the nose it took us out of what we were watching. Similarly throughout the documentary she has a representation of her PC desktop with folders called things like “Closing Video Clips”. Which has the effect of helping us feel like we’re seeing behind the scenes a bit, it feels like it would be better suited in, I’m not sure, a documentary about documentaries? It also has the trope where the camera is rolling while the microphone and other equipment is set up on the subject before the interview starts proper - may be personal taste but I find this very overdone, though in 2022 when released it could have been fresh and original.
There’s a clip of a Dutch (?) gameshow where someone is choosing who out of 30 candidates to give a kidney to, which was bizarre, and equally engaging and shocking - I wish this had been broken up and shown throughout the doc. The resolution to this is buried as a clip in the middle of the credits, and could easily have been missed - the broadcast resulted in several thousand people signing up for kidney donation. Leaving this in the credits where many people will miss it waters down a lot of the message it’s trying to tell.
The history of kidney donation was competently done, although with an overabundance of stock footage. Again, this is an issue with the documentary, I couldn’t escape the feeling that a majority of the run time was whatever free stock footage was available. There’s one section where PL envisions how she guessed she might be treated in the hospital, with videos of doctors applauding as she goes in. She uses some stock footage of doctors clapping, and it works - everything is superficially bright and the staff are diverse, and you get the joke she’s going for. But it’s hugely undercut by one reel of footage where it’s medical staff clapping, and they are wearing badges reading VOTE - did PL or the studio just grab whichever footage had clapping doctors and didn’t watch it again? Unfortunately this questionable imagery was fairly common.
However, her saying that actually it was just like any experience in hospital - staff being busy and not having time for every patient - was one of the few bits of the documentary that helped understand the process, and her experience. Another was her reading her laptop in the bath and looking thoughtful, with what she was reading being relayed to us worked well, but it was again undercut by how close the laptop was to the bath!
Interviewing some previous donors, PL shares some light on how other people found it, though all of these were very positive about the experience, almost too much so. Some justified why they did it in ways I hadn’t heard before; paraphrasing one of them: “running into a burning building to save someone, everyone would treat you like a hero. But you have this option here, with lower risk to yourself, and higher chance of saving a life. Why wouldn’t you take it?”. PL has an interesting discussion about how she had the experience that giving a kidney is like having a child, in terms of intimacy and you’re saving/creating a life. It’s another of the strong points she makes, and it might convince a few people about GS donating - more so if it was expanded upon.
PL goes under for surgery and we’re treated to the same undulating lights and colours, and slightly in-your-face trance music from the start, which works, but again goes on too long. Then it heavily suggests that PL died during the surgery, which hits emotionally and then undercuts itself by her being fine!
One element I had heard about pre-watching, and was excited to see, was PL waking from surgery, breaking into tears, knowing that she lost a part of her body. This scene was in the film, but because PL is coming around from general anaesthetic, her words are slurred and the meaning is hard to tell. It’s maybe not fair to criticise a doc when the star is literally waking up from surgery, but it was something that could have been shown in another way. It wasn’t even clear that’s why she was crying, and I was grateful I had heard her explanation for it before watching. The last investigation in the doc is the results of a brain MRI - it shows PL has a larger than average amygdala, which an expert says earlier in the doc, is often associated with GS donors. It’s presented as a slightly unclear point; it’s interesting that GS donors and PL have larger amygdalas, which makes them empathetic and at the opposite end of psychopaths, but PL uses this as a sort of validation about herself.
The doc doesn’t quite end on a position of whether living kidney donation is a good or bad thing to do, which is fine - but so many parts are given undue weight where it feels like the doc does want to have an opinion, but can’t express it. PL finds the experience fulfilling, as did all the past-donors did also, and I think the general thrust of it was that it’s worth doing, but as a Letterboxd review stated, at least a part of this doc is PL turning a very selfless act into something narcissistic and all about her.
I can’t recommend this quite, either as a documentary or as an event for an EA group. The film making style pulls you out of it too much, and for such a selfless activity, PL does end up making it about her in a way that isn’t quite narcissistic but definitely could be mistaken for it. And so it’s hard to encourage other people to watch this film because they might get the wrong impression about GS donation. But then again, it is a documentary made with some budget and people that broadly know what they are doing, and that could make it a good resource for someone who knows nothing about it. It never mentions EA, and for someone who might be in the “no publicity is good publicity" camp currently for EA, that might be a good thing.
I haven’t looked but I would wager there will be enough collections of youtube videos that would be more real, and more representative of what someone’s experience might be. Or head to Astral Codex Ten and read Scott’s experience
- ^
Yes, it's in your head now as well