Maybe it’s because of the fact that I put my back out recently. Or it might be because I did a talk on (and drawing of) Dorian Gray in Ballymun Library, and in an attempt to engage the minds of those cagey teenagers, 
I spoke about how we age and how, even in our teens, life has already left its mark on us; from the fillings in our teeth, to the scars we pick up from silly little injuries we don’t think twice about. But whatever it was that had me in that frame of mind, I found myself in the cinema the other day watching ‘Iron Man 2’ with a critical eye.
First let me say that it was a brilliant film – cracking cinema stuff, and I highly recommend it. Robert Downy Jr. doesn’t quite let Mickey Rourke steal the show and neither of them are eclipsed by the action and special effects – which takes some doing. I don’t watch this type of film looking for any serious realism. It is a superhero film, after all, so the violence and the science are going to be of a certain flavour.
But I kept looking at the impacts, and thinking ‘No way. He’d be dead.’ Mickey Rourke gets crushed (a few times in quick succession) between a crash barrier and a very large car and is hearty and healthy only hours later. He doesn’t have any armour on at the time. Even when the guys are flying about in their armour, they hit the ground a number of times at speeds that would liquefy them. It doesn’t matter how good your armour is – you can’t go from two or three hundred miles an hour to zero in an instant and survive. You need room to slow down. 
The crumple zones and airbags in cars are built on that principle.
Which sounds a bit daft, when you’re talking about a film where a guy has a miniature nuclear reactor implanted in his chest and can blow up tanks with his hands. It’s just a film, Oisin . . . Jeeeeezus! But even so, that stuck out a bit at me. It shook my willingness to suspend disbelief. It’s funny what can bother you about a story, and how that changes depending on how you’re feeling at the time. No matter what the creators do, immersing yourself in a story will always be a subjective experience.
Interestingly, before the trailers ahead of the film, I saw the first plastic surgery consultancy ad I’ve ever seen on-screen. The imagery was a slow panning shot of an ageless, Renaissance style marble statue (simple and cheap). There were kids at this film, (even though it was on during a week-day). I wonder, were the surgery people trying to say: ‘well, you can’t have the super-powered suit of armour, but we can hoover the fat right out of that bulging gut of yours for a little less money’?
Speaking of manipulating bodies, I got to a school early a few weeks back and was checking my emails to kill some time, when I came across a link sent by my brother. The speaker in the video starts by telling a story I’d seen re-enacted in a documentary a few years ago.
It was an astounding tale of a woman named Anna Bågenholm, who was training to be a surgeon in Narvik in Norway. She was skiing in the hills beyond the city with two friends, and fell head-first through the ice covering a fast-flowing stream, where she became trapped. She was jammed in there for eighty minutes in sub-zero temperatures, with almost no air. Her body shut down after forty minutes, as her body temperature dropped to 13.7 °C. No one had ever survived at that temperature in such a situation before. She was eventually pulled out and given CPR until the rescue helicopter arrived, and she reached the hospital an hour later with no heartbeat, and no brain activity. But because she was still so cold, they thought she had a chance.
Over nine hours, a large team of medical staff brought her slowly back to life. She was paralyzed for over a year, and still suffers from some nerve damage in her hands, but now works as a radiologist in the same hospital.
The world of medicine has learned a lot from her experience, but this latest development takes the biscuit.
It’s one of the many fascinating talks given by an organization called TED (people brought together from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design) and this talk, by researcher Mark Roth, is about how close we are to being able to achieve suspended animation. Not the space-travel type (although this development means that may soon step out of the realm of science fiction), but the type that allows the medical services to put someone into a state of hibernation to give ambulance crews or surgeons a chance to save the life of someone who’s dying. They have started human trials already. This is an absolutely extraordinary development.
So here’s a question for you: If you could put yourself into suspended animation for a set period of time, how long would you stay under, and why?
