Something the Lord Made: Film Critique

Roy Davis

Gonzaga University

ORGL 530 A2, Servant-Leadership

Instructor: Larry Spears

October 10, 2013

 

 

Something the Lord Made: Film Critique

 

Struggle

 

Something The Lord Made, is a film testifying to the strength of the human heart.  Starring Alan Rickman as Alfred Blalock, co-developer of a surgical treatment for heart malformations in newborns, and Mos Def as Vivien Thomas, African-American janitor, lab assistant, and co-developer of the same.  The film, opening scenes in Depression Era 1930 Nashville, is an inspirational biopic of Thomas’ desire to further his education and career beyond the confines of the time’s prevalent racism.  Even more, it follows Thomas as he transitions from what he thinks he wants from life to what he, his family, and his co-workers recognize as his true calling. 

 

Blalock and Thomas would forge an unlikely and fragile relationship that would many years later break the last barrier to operating directly on the heart.  Vanderbilt University, where Thomas is hired by Blalock as a lab assistant only to realize he is expected to perform janitorial duties, sets the scene for a career-long endeavor to save dying Blue Babies through surgically correcting a congenital heart defect.  Thomas' extraordinary manual dexterity and intellect are quickly recognized by Blalock. 

 

The congenital defect referred to as Blue Babies is a condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot.

 

This defect is a combination of four (tetralogy) heart defects. The four defects typically are ventricular septal defect (VSD), pulmonary valve stenosis, a misplaced aorta and a thickened right ventricular wall (right ventricular hypertrophy). They usually result in an insufficient amount of oxygenated blood reaching the body.

 

Complications of tetralogy of Fallot (fuh-LOE) include cyanosis — sometimes called "blue baby syndrome," since the lips, fingers and toes may have a bluish tinge from lack of oxygen — as well as poor eating, physical inability to exercise, irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias), delayed growth and development, and stroke. Surgery to repair the defects is required early in life (Staff, 2010).

 

Blalock, whose research on blood loss and traumatic shock led to volume-replacement treatment which saved countless lives during WWII (Alfred Blalock, 2013), was hired as Chief of Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1941.  Understanding Thomas’ indispensability, Blalock takes his African-American phenomenon and protégé with him to the new position.  However, at Johns Hopkins, blacks are not allowed to enter through the front door.  Blalock offers minimal resistance to the treatment of his unofficial colleague.  This gives the viewer a first real glimpse into Blalock’s professional obsession and usury of Thomas’ talents. 

 

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, managers have tended to view people as objects; institutions have considered workers as cogs within a machine” (Spears, p.2).  Blalock’s machine was his myopic (taken in every sense of the word) preoccupation with remedying the Blue Baby Syndrome.  Conversely, Thomas was the precision cast cog within the machine. For good or bad, racism fueled the machine.

 

Development

 

In critiquing Something the Lord Made, it is useful to draw correlations between Thomas’ struggle with self and Hall’s phases of human development, as described by Horsman in Chapter Three: Human Development Theory and Leadership [Course notes].  The following is Horsman’s synopsis of Hall’s theory from Chapter Three: Human Development Theory and Leadership [Course notes]:

 

Phase I in Hall’s model; this is the Phase where the tribal Autocratic and Benevolent Autocratic styles of leadership prevail, Phase II is where the contemporary Administrator and Manager-Leader prevail. The Communitarian style of leadership is depicted as a transitional style embracing some Phase II and some Phase III values. Phase III is the realm of the Collaborative and Servant-leader. Phase IV reflects the values, skills and dispositions of the Servant and Prophetic Leader.

 

Phase I

 

Machines must advance if they are to keep step with this revolution.  Transformation is promulgated through both inward and outward influence.  The first step in Thomas’ transformation was as all first steps must be – the beginning, whether he is aware and accepting or is unaware of what drives him inward and onward in his journey toward enlightenment.  For this moment, Thomas bathed “in a worldview in which the Self is struggling to survive and has a limited view of anything beyond personal physical satisfaction and needs” (Horsman, 2013, p.6).  He could not see beyond his desire to attain those skills that he perceives as absolutely necessary in moving beyond social injustice.

 

The film quickly passes through the years spent at Johns Hopkins in researching the Blue Baby Syndrome.  During these years, Thomas is portrayed as a man acutely aware of the prejudice holding him back from equal pay and recognition.  Every scene is a struggle for acknowledgement and respect.  The film teeters for a moment toward Thomas finally receiving some recognition after he surgically creates in dog’s a heart abnormality that mimicked the Blue Baby syndrome.  He worked with Blalock to develop a shunt which bypassed the abnormality and provided greatly improved oxygenated blood flow.  Once Thomas successfully utilizes the shunt in the lab test specimen, Blalock utters the films namesake.  Thomas’ work was like Something the Lord Made – a reference to the flawlessness of his surgical skills.  It was to be an adulation for his ears only.

 

What was absent during these years was the true essence of Thomas’ existence, the catalyst that should have bound him to his work instead of to his struggle.  Remembering that in a chemical reaction a catalyst is not consumed, though it may share in multiple chemical transformations, Thomas has to endure a long transformation before the catalyst, unaware of its forceful nature, brought him to a cognizance of the tie that binds.

 

Phase II

 

Two of the more poignant moments in the film occur when Blalock receives public recognition for his surgical advances.  Thomas attends one of Blalock's parties as a bartender, moonlighting for extra income, instead of as an honored colleague.  Here Blalock’s colorless staff physicians speak openly of Blalock’s great successes, without mention of Thomas’ hands (literally) assisting in the accomplishments.  This happens while Thomas looks on.  Blalock is next honored for his Blue Baby work at the Belvedere Hotel, where Thomas is not among the invited guests and again not recognized for his contributions, yet looks on from behind a potted plant.  Here, “we begin to move into the worlds of other people.”  Thomas perceives “the need to belong to groups” but, has yet understood the need “to develop the skills” required “to succeed with other people” (Horsman, 2013, p.6).  However, the transformation has begun.  Thomas now understands that he needs more than to solely overcome racial bias in clearing the pathway to his success.

 

Phase III

 

It is not until Thomas leaves Blalock and Johns Hopkins, due to the failure of both to recognize his contributions to what the medical community deemed an insurmountable surgical procedure (heart surgery), that he begins to identify servant hood as the catalyst for his life.  Horsman tells us: The next phase in human development and leadership “occurs when we begin to develop an independent sense of ourselves as separate and distinct from our family and other important groups” (Horsman, 2013, p.7).  Thomas finds the world outside of Johns Hopkins and his research unfulfilling.  With the help of his family, he discovers that self-actualization is not found in the struggles he faces (racism, segregation, failed leadership), but in his own personal accomplishments.  Success begins not in how others see you as much as in an honest evaluation of how you view yourself.  Who am I?

 

Phase IV

 

From the realm of self-pity and engrossment in his own racial struggle, Thomas emerges as both servant and leader.  Spears (2002) tells us that all of us are both leaders and followers in different parts of our lives (p.226).  For many, these transitions come at moments where they seem most vulnerable, where service and leadership collide - a cataclysm.  Thomas’ service as a follower went unrecognized for most of his career.  It was not until he understood the unified power of his struggles and his service that he emerged as a leader. 

 

Horsman explains: The interdependent “we” responds to the common call to work for global harmony, to care for and renew the earth (custodian-stewardship)” (2013, p.7).  It is the coming of age for the servant-leader, the top-step before the gradient pathway where leaders stand before the world (neither below nor above) with a genuine desire to “enhance global harmony through communal action and collaboration” (Horsman, 2013, p.8).  Thomas found his interdependent “we” in the common good resulting from not his struggles but his call to vocation and service.  His skills revolutionized the field of cardiac surgery.  

 

In 1968, Thomas’ portrait was hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building, the same lobby where Thomas was denied entry in 1941.  Eight years later, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary Doctor of Laws and appointed him to the teaching staff at the School of Medicine as Instructor of Surgery.

 

The film raises questions, such as: At what point would Thomas have been considered a servant-leader; and, if Thomas had been influenced by a servant-leader, would his growth through the four phases have been the same laddered results or perhaps accelerated learning? 

 

To answer the first question, we should look to what Greenleaf referred to as entheos.  “Entheos, from the same roots as enthusiasm, which means ‘possessed of the spirit’” (Greenleaf, 1998, p.71), or as he more specifically redefines it, “the power actuating one who is inspired” (p.78), delineates Thomas’ growth toward servant-leader.  We know that Thomas possessed the spirit of a true servant-leader.  However, the spirit that would deliver him from his lack of self-awareness sat motionless while he waited for the world to change instead of initiating those changes in the world.  He then took the step toward servant-leadership the moment his spirit was called to action.   

     

The second question leaves my heart saddened.  For, if Thomas were forever in possession of the spirit, what a gross injustice Blalock was guilty of in failing to nurture its presence.  Following this reasoning, Thomas did not so much suffer the wounds of intolerance and racism as did he suffer of his own stifled spirit. 

 

 

 

References

 

Alfred Blalock biography. (n.d.). Bio.com. Retrieved October 02, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/alfred-blalock-9214695

 

Greenleaf, R. K., & Spears, L. C. (1998). The power of servant-leadership: Essays. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

 

Horsman, John H., (2013). Chapter Three: Human Development Theory and Leadership [Course notes]. Retrieved from https://gonzaga.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-1169010-dt-content-rid-6953744_1/courses/ORGL530_A2_12032_FA13/M2%20Human%20Development%20Theory%20%26%20Leadership%202013a.pdf

 

Spears, L. C., & Lawrence, M. (2002). Focus on leadership: Servant-leadership for the twenty-first century. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.

 

Staff, M. C. (2010, November 18). Congenital heart defects in children. Mayo Clinic. Retrieved October 02, 2013, from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/congenital-heart-defects/CC00026