Awakenings (1990)

            ‘Awakenings’ is a 1990 film directed by Penny Marshall based on a book written by neurologist Oliver Sacks in 1973. This film is based on true story and acted by two legendary actors, Robin Williams as Dr. Malcolm Sayer and Robert De Niro as Leonard Lowe. One aspect of the film which captured my attention was Dr. Sayer’s unconditional love towards his catatonic patients. 

As shown in the beginning part of the film, despite his paperwork, Dr. Sayer didn’t have any experience in handling any patients before in his life and he does not like to interact much with other people due to his shyness. But after he appointed as physician in local hospital at New York City, he became very dedicated and caring towards his catatonic patients until he find out about L-Dopa and determined to take risk by giving it to his patients even without other doctors knowing this action in order to help awaken them from catatonic state. Need for achievements from ‘Maslow's hierarchy of Needs Theory’ can be used to explain his action as he was too passion and determined with his work that encourages him to took challenges. There is one scene in the film that I’m really admiring Dr. Sayer. The scene Leonard angrily pushes Dr. Sayer to fall down on the floor and other patients were laughing at Dr. Sayer. But he never get irritated and yet keep calm and understands the emotion of his patient and still tried his level best to help Leonard. This portrays his love and caring towards his patients. I admire this scene because not every doctor will understand and accept humiliations from their patients and this quality is lacking in our current generation doctors.

Attachment theory can be used to explain the relationship of Mrs. Lowe towards her son, Leonard. Her attachment style best explained in the scene where Mrs. Lowe complains to Dr. Sayer regarding her son’s sudden interests in girl. Since Mrs. Lowe spends her entire life looking after her son, she can’t accept that her son had start distance himself from her in order to send time with his love interest, Paula. She states “Leonard would die without me” but actually she is the one who can’t live without Leonard as she create her self-concept as primary caregiver to Leonard. Without looking after her son, she become useless as it was her main job to look after Leonard for more than two decades. Even when Dr. Sayer explained to her that Leonard no longer needs her attention as he used to last time, she still not convinced due to her secure attachment style with her son. 

One aspect of the film that causes change in my perception is that when all the patients who awaken after receiving L-Dopa, they starts to live as though they are normal person. Even though, for some patients there had some major events had happened in all those years such as spouse got divorced or dead in family. But, they were still accepting their fate and starts to living as normal human beings even though for short period of time due to the limited duration of the L-Dopa effects. This teaches me a lesson to appreciate all the values and time that I am having at this moment and enjoy the life as nobody knows what’s going to happens in the next minutes in our life.