COMA (1978)
d. Michael Crichton; pr. Martin Erlichman; scr. Michael Crichton; nvl. Robin Cook; ph. Victor J. Kemper; ed. David Bretherton; m. Jerry Goldsmith; cast. Genevieve Bujold, Michael Douglas, Richard Widmark, Elizabeth Ashley, Rip Torn, , Lois Chiles, Ed Harris, Tom Selleck (103 mins)
Commencing the Medical Thriller
Director, screenwriter and novelist Michael Crichton is one of Hollywood’s recent success stories: indeed, for a generation of moviegoers from the 1970s to the 1990s, it would be hard to find one who did not recognize the name, such was his box-office clout by the beginning of the C21st.
Crichton came to prominence during the 1970s and since then there has been a steady output of films that reference his name and work. Although he is best known as a novelist whose recent works (Jurassic Park especially) have been adapted into hugely successful films, in the 1970s it looked as though Crichton was set to become one of Hollywood’s more established directors. His debut was the hit science-fiction film and now cult favorite Westworld, which he duly followed with a sprightly thriller about medical ethics: Coma. In its day, Coma was one of the decade’s most successful box-office thrillers, cementing Crichton as a bankable director. This success unfolded in tandem alongside a cycle of adaptations of his novels commencing with Mike (Get Carter) Hodges’ excellent, brooding film of The Terminal Man. For Coma though, Crichton chose not his own original work but to adapt a best-selling novel by Robin Cook who, like Crichton, came from a medical background.
Synopsis (contains spoilers)
Coma tells the story of an independent doctor (Genevieve Bujold), a woman in what the film still considers a man’s domain.
Indeed, the hospital in which she works is something of a Patriarchal institution. She has a relationship with another resident doctor/surgeon (Michael Douglas in an early role) who considers her unemotional but is determined to maintain as intimate and inter-personal a connection with her as he can. When her friend in for routine surgery lapses into a wholly unexpected coma whilst under anaesthetic, Bujold starts to investigate what went wrong. She cannot believe the official explanation, her male superiors considering the coma an unexplained though not unusual reaction to the anaesthetic. Her plight takes her to the Chief Surgeon (Richard Widmark) who recommends psychiatric counseling to deal with her repressed emotions and her mounting suspicions of deliberate wrongdoing. She nonetheless persists with her inquiries and discovers that there have been several unexplained comas related to one single operating room. Investing the follow up treatment of the coma victims she uncovers a monstrous plot (details withheld) and finds herself a wanted and hunted woman. She goes for help from just the man she shouldn’t, soon finding herself awaiting surgery in that single room.
Female Emotional Repression and the 1970s Emancipation Movement
When it was first released the film drew praise because it was a rare thriller that featured a strong, independent heroine in the lead, allying audience sympathy to her plight as a modern woman with personal and professional issues.
In that sense it extended the melodramatic foray of the independent heroine in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore into a new genre. Despite some reservations about the ending, the film is indeed remarkable in its elevation of a woman to lead status, as a woman capable of achieving change and potentially exposing the monstrous ethical terror of a Patriarchal institution. Of course, that institution will work to protect itself and keep its subordinates ignorant about its true, horrible agenda. Crichton thus gradually undermines the institution of medicine, cleverly playing on audience fears of surgeons. They are established at first as moral, professional people who nonetheless are stumped when something goes wrong. Gradually, Bujold believes that several of them may be deliberately doing something wrong and unethical. Trust becomes distrust and then outright paranoia as the film segues into a lean pursuit thriller. In its expert combination of ethical hypothesis and medical thriller, Coma has vague science fiction leanings in its speculation over coma patients.
In the process of exploring the ethical dilemma of a woman who has exposed the potential horror behind a Patriarchal order that has lost ethical perspective, the film raises issues about the gradual erosion of human values that accompanies the medical profession as it rapidly advances amidst technological upheaval: the medical-industrial complex if you will.
With dystopic paranoia, though not as severe as that in The Terminal Man, Crichton combines this ethical speculation with the political paranoia thriller popular in the 1970s following the Watergate debacle and the corresponding popular distrust of powerful institutions. Thus, the closer one comes to the truth, the more of a conspiracy is revealed, and the more the ordinary person has reason to fear the medical profession for its elevation of itself above morality. The medical establishment’s ultimate dependence on exploiting medical technology for financial gain turns it into a monster. Douglas’ dilemma as a Patriarch set to inherit this power structure is his love and admiration for a woman is put up against the traditions he looks set to inherit. His plight is a subtle counterpoint to Bujold’s drama, and subtly develops the idea of male suppression of women as a learned cultural practice. By making the ending less about Bujold than Douglas, however, the film falters.
The corporate capitalization of the medical profession is Crichton’s target in Coma. Indeed, the mark of the villain’s final speech is that in the future the medical establishment will need to operate without moral or ethical judgement in order to cope with demand for its services.
Supply and demand supercede ethics - this erosion of any absolute sense of ethical responsibility is in a sense, typical of post-Watergate American cinema. Crichton holds this further as a symptom of specifically patriarchal monstrousness as medical advances lead to an inhuman inversion of what the benevolent medical establishment once stood for. The true, sly surrealist horror of Bujold’s visit to the coma-center reveals the orderly, systematic devolution of ethics within the medical profession and is a slyly powerful sequence of paranoia. In implication and design, the film of Coma is as unnerving and cynically paranoid as the more widely known political thrillers of the era, fully deserving of a place alongside such classics as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. Even if Coma ultimately lacks their style, it shares their disturbing vision, though is perhaps a little more hopeful. Its concluding scenes are a tense demonstration of the sheer helplessness one surrenders to the medical profession through surgical procedure.
Designing a non-descript Medical Malevolence
The visual transfer on this DVD release is perfectly capable if undistinguished.
It is at its best with brightly-lit sequences (the bulk of the film being true to the functional flatness of the hospital interior) as there is a video-like grain that can emerge from the blacks and shadows. Indeed it is with the blacks that the transfer falters the most. In design, as one would expect from Crichton as a former medico, the film captures the authentic environs and colours of hospital life. Neon lights add their slightly greenish coloured tint to hospital corridors in some scenes and the operating theatre scenes use the antiseptic coldness for added suspense and contrast. Some scenes feel almost like a documentary, particularly those of staff and student interaction with patients. The aura of hospital orderliness and cleanliness provides a dominant visual motif throughout the film and offers a telling counterpoint to the shady moral practices contained within them. The soft focus effects reveal some grain however. The transfer captures the sly surrealism of the coma-institute sequence perfectly and so too does it evoke the labyrinthine world of shafts, corridors, boiler rooms and ducts that lie beneath and within the hospital confines to suggest movement through restricted, hidden spaces.
Naturalism & Ambient Business
The sound transfer is a perfectly serviceable mono true to the original release.
Although it is clear enough, mono itself is a letdown in the age of home theatre, however, and there are several instances in the film that would have greatly benefited from at least some stereo separation effects. In particular, director Crichton uses overlapping dialogue in several scenes to capture the authentic atmosphere of people interacting in a hospital - the busyness and tension of catering to lives under threat. Although these have a comparable feel to esteemed director Robert Altman’s use of such multi-track sounds, without a stereo distribution they feel like slightly muffled background noise rather than an indication of many people talking at once in a set space. A rich intertextuality to 1970s auditory experimentation is thus lost, though serviceable enough for at least the intention to remain. Likewise, the vocal distortion in wide, echoing corridors and shafts that lends an expressionist, subjective disorientation to select tense scenes is absent in the mono transfer. Overall, the audio transfer suggests the constancy between places rather than their individuality. The voices are always clear and there is enough distinction between them so that they do not merge into one another as happens with many inferior mono transfers.
Trailer Only in Bare Bones DVD Release
The only special feature is an original trailer. Coma is another of the growing number of WB releases of older films and shares with them a level of technical proficiency. The disc itself, like many WB releases, has a widescreen transfer on one side and a fullscreen on the other. The above review refers to the widescreen version. Without special features, the film is left to stand on its own and although it succeeds in the case of Coma, the disc again falls short of being an ideal collector’s item. The film is worthy however and it is hoped that future releases of lesser known films and even other political thrillers will duly follow.
USADVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Coma
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LAST UPDATED:
February 18, 2012 18:50