I bunched these works under the name “ACA.”
As in Obamacare?
Yes. The Affordable Care Act. But more than half of these works are set before that act became law.
Let me guess: Not much has changed.
Correct. There are 50 years between Frederick Wiseman’s “Hospital” and the docuseries “Lenox Hill.” The hospital as an institution has not evolved in half a century. What I like about “Lenox Hill” is that they discuss the business of running a hospital. Talent attracts surgeons who will do procedures that will generate income for the hospital system. Caring in a capitalist society is a business, whether you’re a safety net hospital such as Metropolitan Hospital or a fancy community hospital such as Lenox Hill. So Richard Widmark’s Chief of Surgery character in “Coma” can feel justified in his shady scheme.
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| (d. Frederick Wiseman, 1970) |
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| (2020) |
Do you think Paddy Chayefsky saw Frederick Wiseman’s “Hospital” and then wrote “The Hospital”?
They’re set in the same hospital. Most likely yes. As much as I love Chayefsky (a fellow DeWitt Clinton High School graduate), “The Hospital” has not aged well.
Because of the hospital murders?
A message with a blunt scalpel: Hospitals kill because they don’t care. I enjoyed that. Also got a kick out of seeing Frances Sternhagen asking for insurance information from a patient in the emergency room. And Stockard Channing as an ER nurse. The main reason it hasn’t aged well is Diana Rigg’s character, Barbara. She’s an ex-nurse, a counterculture foil to George C. Scott’s Chief of Staff MD. She works out her daddy issues / institutional issues with him overnight.
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| (d. Arthur Hiller, 1971) |
Not a good portrayal of nursing in the media.
Nor is Elizabeth Ashley’s nurse in “Coma.”
Well, she’s scary in person.
The nurses in “The Student Nurses” are more exemplary.
Isn’t that a soft core flick?
Yes. But they were drawn better than Chayefsky’s nurses. My nursing professor would’ve probably failed me if I admitted to liking “The Student Nurses.”
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| (d. Stephanie Rothman, 1970) |
Tell me a moment when you were a student nurse. Did you fantasize about marrying a doctor?
No. “Grey’s Anatomy” had just premiered and our nursing professors demystified a lot of their storylines in class. As soon as we did clinicals, that demystified a lot of Hollywood Hospital. Believe it or not “The Student Nurses” really did remind me of being a student nurse.
Where were their preceptors?
I know, they had no preceptors! They were student-nursing on their own! Independent learning. They were assigned to different clinical areas, the way we as student nurses were. But it shows you that nursing’s purview is wide. I think the movie is so insightful about that. The student assigned to community nursing became part of a social justice endeavor. Nursing can go beyond the hospital.
That nurse falls for a radical in a poor community.
It’s a skin flick with a lot on its mind. Maybe because it was a skin flick that its director Stephanie Rothman managed to get away with a lot. Like talking about abortion honestly.
Could you imagine paying to go see this movie to get titillated and then bump into an abortion subplot?
You got a lot of sex before getting to that plot point. It showed you what an elective abortion was during that time.
If you knew a doctor who could come to your house ...
True. Abortion runs through this group of works. “Coma” has a therapeutic abortion in its plot. When the patient ends up in a coma, how you feel about her depends on whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life.
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| (d. Michael Crichton, 1978) |
If one were pro-life, one would think she deserved to be hung in wires, like the comatose patients in the movie?
I must say that was a lot of OR manpower for a therapeutic abortion.
It’s not that intense anymore. “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always” walks you through the 3-day process. 2 days if you had an early appointment.
(d. Eliza Hittman, 2020)
I thought that would be a nail-biter like “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days,” but it’s not. And then I realized we are not 80s Romania yet. Abortion is still legal in this country, but access has become difficult. There’s no shady doctor in “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.” The obstacles are also not easy.
The movie talks about the abortion procedure in a factual and non-judgmental way.
The most painful part of that movie was the questionnaire. Not the procedure.
A good questionnaire can mine the truth.
That scene is pure acting. Reminds me of some Acting I exercise when we were given the most ordinary words and act it as a scene.
If there’s a main theme that courses through these works it’s that of access. That’s what Obamacare was supposed to do, right?
Access to abortion in “The Student Nurses,” “Coma,” and “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.”
Also access to care.
Metropolitan Hospital is still around, thank God. There are two moments in Wiseman’s “Hospital” that stand out. The doctor calls New York Hospital (now New York Presbyterian - Cornell) and complains about sending a patient from there to Metropolitan’s ER. The implication is that the patient was probably not a desirable patient financially for them. The other moment is when a psychiatrist phones for help to prevent a gay hustler from ending up in an institution.
Access to the top, in the case of “The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir.”
The author of that book, Michel Harper, writes about being passed for a promotion because she’s black and a woman. Her experiences as an emergency medicine MD are similar to the scenes in the emergency room in “Lenox Hill.”
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| (2020) |
Tell me a moment when you were breaking.
Breaking as in crying? Like that neurologist in “Lenox Hill”? A night when my patient died surrounded by his family and I cried with them. I cried some more in the staff bathroom. Then I received my new admission later that night. He was a patient I had taken care of before and lost his vision because of his worsening disease. He didn’t see me cry because he was blind. But I went to the bathroom again and cried some more.
What was the beauty in that?
Michele Harper likens it to kintsugi after you piece yourself back together. You don't have access inside me - You can’t see it, but I’m mended with gold, silver, and platinum inside.
