IN DREAMS
Doctors in Discussion
Dr Kermode: There’s a line in A Nightmare on Elm Street: ‘Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.’
Dr Mayo: That could prove tricky; though not, admittedly, during A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Dr K: I love the central idea of that film: you fall asleep, and the thing that scares you most – in this case, Freddy Krueger – comes for you in your dreams. It’s absolutely terrifying.
Dr M: And is that a metaphor for the way cinema works overall?
Dr K: Well, David Lynch has always said that we live inside a dream – that life itself is like watching a movie, or dreaming a reality.
Dr M: Yes, but they don’t actually mean anything, dreams, do they? They’re just a load of random stuff your brain chucks at you during your daily period of repose.
Dr K: If you say so.
Dr M: I mean if I dream that, I don’t know, say, Mahatma Gandhi delivers a pizza while I’m having a chat with Lord Palmerston, it doesn’t have any significance beyond the fact that I’ve probably eaten a bit too much cheese late at night.
Dr K: Is that the kind of thing you dream about? Most people dream that they’re turning into an eagle or something.
Dr M: That would be great. I’d be Don Henley, definitely, but the point is dreams don’t mean anything.
Dr K: Perhaps. But watching a movie should be like living in a dream. The very best movie experiences are immersive – they drag you into the world they create.
Dr M: Even if Mahatma Gandhi rides around on a moped with a pizza-shaped box on the back.
Dr K: Even if that happens. And here’s another thing about dreams and the movies – when someone’s in the middle of a dream, or if they’re sleepwalking, they say that you should not wake them up. Apparently, the shock of being jolted out of the immersive experience can be very distressing. I find it’s the same if you come out of the cinema or out of a screening room after a particularly powerful movie experience and someone immediately asks you, ‘How was that? What did you think?’ It’s like being woken up too quickly . . .
Dr M: Particularly if you’re a Movie Doctor.
Dr K: Yes, particularly then, although I think most people want to be allowed to emerge gently and slowly from a powerful movie experience.
Dr M: So, are we saying that good movies are as immersive an experience as good dreams – of the non-violent-resistance pizza delivery or eagle-metamorphosing kind – and that you shouldn’t disturb anyone whether they’re in a dream or in their own post-movie dream sequence because the shock is too great?
Dr K: Pretty much. Unless there is a psychopath roaming around your head – in which case, just don’t fall asleep. Ever.
PSYCHIATRY
Doctors have had a raw deal at the movies. At best they tend to be portrayed as one scalpel short of a successful operation, at worst, well, take your pick. The same goes for phobia-sufferers, rarely offered even a pipette’s worth of tea and sympathy by film-makers. The good news is that whatever the anxiety, real or imagined, the Movie Doctors are here to help. Nurse Ratched, please show the next patient in, mwah ha ha . . .
MAD DOCTORS IN THE MOVIES
A Clinical Examination
The poster for the 1981 rock musical Shock Treatment tells us much about cinema’s essentially suspicious attitude toward medicine: a still of a crazed-looking Richard O’Brien leering at us through bottle-top glasses, with the tag line, ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’ O’Brien plays Dr Cosmo McKinley, an utterly unscrupulous (and very likely unqualified) physician who, along with his equally dubious sister Dr Nation McKinley, is engaged in a scam to send poor Brad Majors to their own private funny farm. Duped, drugged and duly ‘diagnosed’, Brad is summarily strapped into a straitjacket and thrown, bound and gagged, into an isolated cell, while fast food tycoon Farley Flavors conspires to steal away his life, his identity and (most importantly) his wife.
The film is a very modern comedy (it pretty much predicted the rise of reality TV), but like its predecessor, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), it pays cine-literate homage to a grand heritage of cinema – a heritage in which movie doctors (as opposed to ‘The Movie Doctors’) have been repeatedly portrayed on screen as little more than licensed psychos.
One source of inspiration for Shock Treatment was Robert Wiene’s 1920 chiller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which used expressionist sets and shadowy lighting to conjure a vision of a sinister sideshow hypnotist who sends his somnambulist patient out into the world to do his darkest bidding. In a surprise twist, Caligari turns out to be an inmate’s imagined evil version of the director of the asylum wherein he is confined, and the film ends with the director announcing that he can now cure his delusional patient. Yet more often than not, movie doctors are anything but curative. In The Mad Doctor (1940), Basil Rathbone plays a medic who murders his wives. In The Abominable Doctor Phibes (1971), Vincent Price is a music and theology specialist who murders the medical doctors he blames for killing his wife. Starting to see a pattern here?
MEDICAL TOP TRUMPS
Who Would You Like to See by Your Bedside?
Think
