→ Inspiration. Tragedy overcome. Insurmountable odds…surmounted? This Scottish biopic is a deeply inspiring tale of courage and people taking care of people.

→ Weeping. Or sitting next to someone weeping. My wife, she audibly wept through the first forty-five or fifty minutes of the film.

→ When the olds help the youngs. There’s just something about it. When an older, more experienced man or woman ties the shoe of a kid they have no responsibility or obligation to help. It can be such a soul-stirring dynamic.

→ Curse words. The lead character obviously utters quite a few rather inventive phrases. It can be very funny, and the film gives you permission to laugh through some of it without hiding from the seriousness of the condition.

→ Underdog stories.¹ Above all else, I Swear is an underdog story. The tale of someone overcoming vastly unfair odds to accomplish something great. I have a friend named Tyler that writes about underdog stories in sports every single week, and this felt like the perfect place to mention his newsletter. I read it every week and it is so incredibly inspiring. I asked him to share his favorite stories below.

Well, shit.

I Swear has every single key ingredient you might expect in a heart-wrenching, moving biopic about someone overcoming a tough diagnosis. But the familiarity of it all never once triggers the ennui that other films like it often do.

Many films try to replicate the magic of pictures like I Swear, but so few are actually memorable. In fact, most are chalked up to typical, down-the-middle “Oscar bait”.

Your author can’t deny the raw power of John Davidson’s story, and why would I? The man has made lemonade, to say the least. The truth behind his story is a huge part of what makes I Swear so potent. Also contributing are profoundly moving performances from the cast, including Robert Aramayo, Maxine Peake, and Peter Mullan.

This is a movie that will break your heart into a million pieces. And also one that will make you laugh your little tushy off. It’ll have you clawing at the bottom of a Kleenex box, looking for one last tissue to soak up tears that just won’t stop. And, most of all, it will lift you up.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."

→ Robert Aramayo shadowed the real John Davidson to prepare for the role. His words: “I immersed myself in his life, to try and get some understanding of what he was like when he was younger.”

→ John Davidson was made an executive producer. Davidson, initially apprehensive about the film, told Times, “the Tourette’s community has traditionally not received a great level of respect from the media…we are often invited on TV shows to be laughed at, instead of understood.”

Committed to getting it right, writer-director Kirk Jones sent Davidson the script in 20-page increments so he could make sure it was true to his experience with tics and other symptoms of Tourette’s, like OCD.

→ About a third of the film’s cast (~30 people) have Tourette’s. “We invited as many people as we could from the Tourette’s community in Glasgow. We wanted to reassure them that we’re making a film that won’t make fun of them…” writer-director Kirk Jones recalls. One such cast member, Andrea Bisset, was so impressive that, after filming, Jones and Aramayo helped her get an agent to pursue a career in acting.

Last week, TNMN community members from all around the world submitted their favorite crime movies. Now you can see every submission, and decide whose is the best.

Every other edition, we conclude with a special feature — an original work of fiction completely unrelated to this week’s film.

By Blake Levy

Hospitals and that one night nurse who’s seen it all. Chuckling and saying things like “Look at those little sausages”, pointing to black and blue, swollen vaginal lips. “Labia majora, emphasis on the majora,” she cracks herself up, that night nurse.

Mia’s labia, recently torn apart by the miracle of life, now essentially plump hot dogs in the mind of some tired, overweight night nurse. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

The night nurse giggles at Mia’s swollen, sore vagina, and Mia, her thighs spattered with dried blood, sticky with leaky urine and discharge, her deadened eyes stare back blankly. Unflinching and angry and not-in-the-fucking-mood. The nurse takes notice and her grin disintegrates.

Mia lies on the stiff hospital bed sheets, her light brownish hair resting onto her shoulders, a few strands darkened and caked together with sweat. The night nurse asks, should we wait to get started until Dad is here? Mia says he’s not coming.

The nurses never know how to respond to this. They all wear the obvious question right under the bags in their eyes. Is there…another mother? Or, has the father tragically passed away before the birth of his first child, leaving Mia to fend for herself and their child? Or, is she one of those empowered feminist types who froze her eggs and solicited a sperm donor, dead set that she could raise a kid all on her own, that she didn’t need some man to help her?

Mia has her fun with it. Sometimes, the father is a firefighter, summoned on call for a critical emergency. Other times, he’s dead, passed away in a tragic car accident. Some teenager stumbled, drunk, into his RAV-4, t-boned him going 85 on a 30 through a red light. Her favorite fiction: she’s part of a collective of women who share the same Daddy. Some call it a cult, but it isn’t what it looks like. It was her turn to have Daddy Cane’s baby, and she’s positively honored. Blessings to Daddy Cane, she’d say sarcastically.

The stories, all fiction, a way for Mia to get an edge, an upper hand. To laugh and see how quickly she can make medical staff sweat through a viscous discomfort. The truth is far less interesting. Knocked up during a drunken one night stand. The father, some nameless prick she’d never see again.

“Ms. Rockwell,” the night nurse snickers. “I’ll be back to check on those little sausages in a few hours.”  She finishes checking Mia’s vitals and before long the door latch clicks behind her as she disappears into the hallway.

Mia turns the old hospital television on. She doesn’t bother changing the channel. With a sigh, she rolls over, the blue light wrapped around her like a warm weighted blanket.

A quiet drone of infomercial salespeople, each spouting their own one-time-only(!) offers, lulls her to sleep, muffling the piercing screams of laboring mothers delivering newborns across the maternity ward. 

Mia, she drifts off for however long until she has to go pee.

“God damnit,” Mia mutters to herself, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Mia stumbles towards the bathroom, naked, barely illuminated by the glow of the television. Her hospital gown crumpled up on the speckled tile floor like an exhausted cat.

“That’s right! Call in the next ten minutes and get three wishes for the price of one…” an infomercial booms from the television.

Mia takes her seat on the toilet, paying no mind to the unusual product offering. The noise of the infomercial, soothing like nature sounds or white noise, is the stuff of rest for Mia, who grew up sleeping underneath the glow of a cheap, 30-inch TV set in her bedroom. Her mother used to turn the TV set on just before bed, Mia surmised eventually, to drown out the arguments and the yelling, or worse.

“...three wishes? Is that for real?” a meek male voice asks with the disposition of an amazed child.

Mia’s head in her hands, hunched over, trying with desperation to get one single drop of urine out.

“That’s right! Three wishes, normally a value of fifty-nine-ninety-five. Available for a limited time for only nineteen ninety-five. Call the name on your screen now to save on your three wishes!”

“Come on,” Mia, practically sunken into the toilet. “Just one fucking drop of piss. Please, someone help me.”

“So, I can wish for…anything?” the meek man asks a follow up question.

“Not so fast, mister!” the salesperson, voice like a cheshire cat, replies. “There are a few rules we’re required by law to follow: No killing, no do-overs, and no bringing back people from the dead. And of course, no wishing for more wishes. The same rules popularized by the world famous, mildly problematic Disney film, Aladdin. Industry standard, really.”

Mia’s groin throbs in pain. Not a drop of urine. She peers over her deflated belly and her eyes grow wide.

GASP.

From above, Mia sees a few small hairs. They’re poking out from in between her little sausages. Her fingers, curious, make their way down. They meet resistance quickly, a hardened mass right inside her vaginal opening. Frightened, she yanks her fingers out, the tips of each blackened with stale blood.

It’s late, she thinks. The doctors will say what they always say. Oh, Mia, this is totally normal for a pregnancy. Expected, even. Same story, different totally normal pregnancy side effect that everyone expected except for her. It happens all the time. Get some rest, blah, blah, fucking blah.

Mia’s fingers, they return down below, to the hardened mass. They wrap themselves around the mass like forceps. She pulls and then—

FUCK.

—a stinging, sharp pain. Her other hand, covering her mouth to mute her agony. Tears halfway down her cheeks when the pain finally softens and the mass is out. In her hands, a blood clot the size of a baseball. Dripping over the white hospital bathroom floor, shiny, dark red gelatin.

“Jesus Turdburgling Christ,” she says. Mia’s eyes roll backwards and she faints with a thud onto the bathroom floor.

…

It’s cold down here. It’s cold and Mia hasn’t a clue how much time has passed since she fainted. Her left cheek on the floor, frigid, freezing, like laying on an ice rink. A few inches from her eyes, the baseball blood clot, deflated, leaking onto the floor. Beneath her waist, a small puddle of neon yellow urine. Despite the clot, she’s relieved. An empty bladder was hard to come by in the past 24 hours.

She stands up slowly and makes her way to the bathroom door. Her hands still bloodied from the clot, they turn the cold steel knob and swing open the door. It’s still dark. The TV, still on. The room, still blueish and glimmering in the dead of night.

The picture is grainy, out of focus. Centered between four thick white bezels on the old hospital TV is a man in a grey suit and thick brown tie. He stands in the center of the frame, eyes forward, shiny black hair. He doesn’t say anything.

Strange. Mia, on her way back to bed, the TV audio signal sputters back on.

“MSSHHHHHHT. MSSSHHHHT. MISHHHHHHHT. MIA? MIA? Can you hear me?”

Mia, still disoriented from the fall, turns her head, slowly. She thinks, another one of those weird pregnancy side effects. Hallucination. The TV talks to her now. Great. Wonderful.

“Jesus Turdburgling Christ,” she chuckles. 

“That’s right! That’s me. So, what’ll you be wishing for?”

“I’m sorry?” she says, wondering if she’s concussed from the fall.

“You said my name. Jesus Turdburgling Christ,” the man in the suit walks closer to the camera. “So, you owe me $19.99, and you get three wishes. What a deal, right?”

“Your name,” she asks. “Is Jesus Turdburgling Christ?”

“Stage name, actually,” the man says. “The marketing team thought it’d be funny. I’m not, you know. Anyways, you called my name, and as promised, here I am. At your service!” 

“So I say Jesus Turdburgling Christ and I get three wishes, huh?” Mia, playing along in what she thinks is a strange little fever dream. “Can you fix these little sausages?”

“Just say the words.”

“Okay, fine,” Mia hesitates before laughing audibly, “I wish that night nurse’s vagina looked like these little sausages, and mine was twenty-two years old again,” 

“Voilà,” the man smiles.

Mia peers down. Instead of little sausages, a dewey, fresh twenty-two year old vagina, one that a butterfly might have no problem landing on. Beautiful, she thinks. In the background, a shrill scream. The night nurse. “Jesus moth—”

“–yes?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Mia mocks him. “So, the night nurse?”

“Plump like a butcher-cased sausage.”

Mia grinned. The black haired infomercial genie, still on the TV screen. His eyes, up and to the right looking at a newly appeared graphic: 2 WISHES LEFT, MIA! He taps his gold watch.

Mia, still convinced she was in a strange dream, stares at the hospital floor. With her eyes she traces constellations between the specks on the tile floor. Her feet, freezing. Toes, icicles. She shivers and gazes back up into the TV. 

Jesus Turdburgling Christ, he tells her he’s happy to provide some wish templates, if she’s having a tough time deciding. He says he can make sure her baby has a healthy and happy life. 

She replies, “You said I can’t bring anyone back from the dead.”

“I see,” the man replies. “I’m sorry. How about another—”

“—what the fuck is wrong with you, Jesus?” she interrupts. Mia didn’t want another baby, and the man on the TV didn’t seem to understand the kind of misery that comes with a miscarriage. Even if she didn’t want this baby to begin with. The misery was real and unrelenting and only just beginning.

“I wish you,” Mia’s eyebrows furrow with resentment. “And every other man, I wish you all could feel what I feel right now.”

“Voilà,” the man smiles. But in a moment, his smile melts into a frown. Outside, in the hospital hallways, the moans and groans and sobs of every male nurse, doctor, and surgeon. From outside, bellows and cries from men who wake up in the middle of the night with an untraceable emotional pain. A sorrow nestled deep in their guts, always there, just out of reach. A dull ache, accompanying them forevermore.

The man can barely muster a glance through his tears upwards to the graphic: 1 WISH LEFT, MIA!

He pulls his brown tie to center and looks down at Mia from the television. His salesman grin gone, replaced with a ghoulish absence. His upright posture now, sunken in.

Mia feels a hint of regret. Even if this is a dream, did all these dream men deserve this pain? Could they even bear it? Was she a terrible person for wishing such a thing? She didn’t even know any of these men. How could she decide whether they deserve a lifetime’s worth of sadness?

Before long, she’s interrupted by the click of the door latch. Another doctor’s come to check her vitals. He floats into the room like a specter. His cheeks, void of expression, caved in. His lips sputter and the words slip out like thick black muck. “So, Ms. Mia, is it?” the doctor says. “I took a look at your charts.”

The doctor, afflicted with Mia’s pain, he sullenly explains aftercare for still births. You can imagine it. You might experience vaginal bleeding. Could be up to a week after a miscarriage. Your normal periods will resume in a few weeks, probably. You’ll experience lower abdominal pain, cramps, just a few days. Your breasts may be uncomfortable. They might even leak milk. Just for a week or so. And also, pregnancy hormones will be in your blood for a few months. So you might experience mood swings. Use sanitary pads instead of tampons for the bleeding. Don’t douche. Don’t swim or get into a hot tub. Take showers, not baths. And of course, do not have any sex until you come back for a check up.

Jesus Turdburgling Christ, quietly watching from the old TV set. Mia thinks about what to wish for next. All the men in the world, sharing all this pain. The night nurse with her newly minted sausage patty Labia Majora. Emphasis on the Majora. Who was Mia to wish such terrible things on the lives of others? How could she?

Then, the doctor says one last thing. “Anyways, all of this is totally normal. Par for the course,” he explained through his weeping.

Mia’s eyebrows furrow again. She looks past the doctor, up at the infomercial genie, still sunken and hopeless with Mia’s pain.

“Jesus Turdburgling Christ: I wish I could take a long, relaxing piss. Right now.”

“Voilà,” the man cries.

Mia walks into the bathroom and lets out a sigh of relief as the sound of falling urine fills the room. The wailing of every man’s pain in the world, drowned out by a nice, long, loud piss.

In her hospital gown, she walks toward the elevator, past the men in the hallway. They stop for a moment and stare at her, green and envious, wishing she understood how broken and sad they all felt.

She sees the night nurse and gestures towards her crotch. 

“Like little sausages!” Mia laughs as the elevator dings. The doors open to make way for Mia, the miracle of life.