Wider Screenings column #3 Dec-Jan, 2008-9
Faith in the Benevolence of the Medical Establishment
Trailer for Young Doctors in Love
There is a saying: “at least you have your health”. Behind this is the belief that fitness is paramount. In accordance with this sentiment, the medical profession is culturally elevated to something approaching divinity. The status of a beneficent medical professional, however, carries with it complex ambiguities and absurdities in those feature films that have dealt with such as a whole and the type of people who seek to practice it rather than merely receive the benefits of its wisdom and technology.
The unquestioned nobility of the medical establishment, and the figure of the surgeon, was invoked in the Douglas Sirk melodrama, Magnificent Obsession. Here, an arrogant man is responsible for an accident in which a woman is blinded. Feeling responsible, he falls in love with her and goes to medical school in the hope that one day he can operate on his love and cure her. The film being a “weepie” of the kind so popular in the 1950s, he manages to do just that – the surgeon here becomes a romantic hero. Although that sense of passionate conviction was appealing to audiences and made the film a smash hit of the day, even if the critics felt it a trivial so-called “women’s picture”, subsequent films have been infected by an almost viral cynicism regarding this selfless benevolence.
This is evident in two films directed by former doctors turned filmmakers. First, there is Australia’s own George (Mad Max) Miller, who used his Hollywood connections to set up Lorenzo’s Oil. This film, based on a true story, concerned a couple whose very young son is infected by an incurable disease. The medical establishment is powerless to help the boy and urges his parents to accept the inevitably short and limited life the doctors consider is the boy’s lot. The parents reject this hopeless medical “realism” and do their own research, soon uncovering a breakthrough which results in a treatment for their son’s condition. Second, is best-selling author Michael (Jurassic Park) Crichton, who used his science-fiction thriller Coma to turn against his own profession and depict a callous world of high-powered surgeons who deliberately make patients comatose in order to harvest their organs for high-paying buyers: the medical profession was controlled by market forces.
Market forces indeed exert tremendous pressure on the medical establishment. In addition to truly questionable ethics is the simple business of running a hospital. Satirist Lindsay Anderson tackled this in the biting Britannia Hospital, in which a British hospital is beset by union strikes amongst its kitchen staff during a planned Royal visit, much to the annoyance of the hospital’s private patients; even though the Frankenstein-like chief surgeon is pre-occupied with his own experiments to create life. In contrast to the doctor above the everyday operations of his hospital was the depiction of George C. Scott in The Hospital, so besotted by the blunders of the hospital over which he presides (including the surgeons under him operating on the wrong patients due to stuff-ups at the processing level) that he is now impotent, not helped by the male menopause which propels his sense of inadequacy.
Medicos clowning around in The Doctor
A characterization thus emerging was that of the doctor as victim or monster, the latter segueing into horror movies about killer doctors (such as Dr. Giggles), whilst in the case of the former, the allegorical overtones remained highly suited to a variety of dramatic and comedic interpretations. One of the most harrowing was that in Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris, a success of the renaissance in Australian film in the 1970s. In this black comedy, a small town purposely causes traffic accidents and plunders the booty that results from such. The inevitable human casualties are taken in by the local doctor, who experiments on them, effectively creating an entire underclass (whom the locals call “veggies”) of diseased and disabled people who depend on his benevolence in order to live what is left of their lives. On a more solemn level, the real political power of the medical establishment to keep patients dependent in order to validate their funded existence was explored in another Aussie drama, Annie’s Coming Out.
Yet not all doctors were monsters and a number of films explored the realistic issues affecting hospital staff. Hence William Hurt in The Doctor becomes more empathetic towards patients when he faces a throat cancer scare, and medical student Mathew Modine in Gross Anatomy realizes that no matter how good he may be, it is natural human empathy alone that will transform him into a truly good doctor rather than his impersonal, proficient training. Thus, although the public hold generally to a view of the importance of the medical profession, films have been both supportive and sceptical about the ways in which our society elevates such to paramount importance and in the process almost deifies it.
MUSIC TO BROWSE THIS COLUMN: with DJ Drifter
(courtesy of YouTube embedded video)
"One places one's trust in all sorts of institutions, from Parliament to the Hospital to the Church. And whilst one can gain rewards for such, "faith" in any such institution at the expense of humanist self awareness is a fundamental betrayal of self-actualization. Faith is the enemy of humanity. As Steve Maraboli wonders in No Limits magazine (Aug-Sept. 2008), "Today, many will open their eyes (and ears) to the beauty that surrounds them - why not you?" For this drifter, its a beauty without God, a beauty fit for funk - Funky Deux (Richard Wright)."
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