Much of the incidental dark humour in the early pages of Joseph Heller’s brilliant novel, Catch 22, comes from the protagonist Yossarian’s realisation that you can spend weeks on end in a hospital and never meet the same doctor twice. One white jacket appears, oversees a few tests, listens solicitously to your complaints, makes a list of things to be done next…and is then never heard from again; you have to repeat the process from scratch with another doctor soon after. And so on.
There is, of course, satirical exaggeration in this portrait of a medical ward as a purgatory for confused souls, administered to by angels whose faces keep changing. But having spent a great deal of time in hospitals recently (this column is being written — in old-fashioned longhand — in one), I’m not sure that satire outpaces reality in this matter. Having just seen a fast-moving flash of white through my peripheral vision, and turned my head to find nothing but an unoccupied, door-less corridor, I am mulling the theory that hospitals contain secret portals where doctors and nurses disappear when they are in danger of being cornered. And that a special tracking system helps them avoid anxious relatives. (If, after waiting by a patient’s side for hours, you take exactly five minutes off to rush down to the cafeteria and pick up a cookie, an alert will sound, the doctor will emerge from a hidden cranny, say a few authoritative-sounding sentences to the dazed patient, and then vanish.)
Throw in the doses of red-tape, the opaque billing procedures, the miscommunications between doctors and their subordinates, and the fact that even compassionate people can become apathetic when surrounded by sufferers around the clock, and it is no surprise that many filmic black comedies have been set in hospitals; the places are, after all, microcosms for the grand theatre of life and death. The first few that spring to mind include Robert Altman’s Korean War comedy M*A*S*H* — much more acerbic than the popular TV show that was inspired by it — and Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital, in which the inauguration of a new hospital wing becomes a pretext for political gamesmanship. And no, I’m not including movies like Patch Adams and Munnabhai MBBS which, for all their flashes of grimness, are essentially optimistic and life-affirming: I’m not in that sort of mood just now.
My vote for the film that best captures the nihilistic moroseness that can set in when you’ve spent many days in a hospital is Arthur Hiller’s 1971 The Hospital (a title as sterile and personality-less as a freshly disinfected ward). This hard-hitting comedy has George C Scott — every bit as good here as he was in any of his more famous roles in films like Patton or Dr Strangelove — as the depressed Dr Bock, searching for some meaning in his job as a healer, but finding that everything around him is unspooling. First a deadpan voiceover informs us about a patient whose ailment was wrongly diagnosed and further misinterpreted by an intern, so that what should have been a routine examination ends in tragedy; this is followed by the intern himself being found dead in the same bed in the morning (he was taking a post-coital nap when another nurse came in and administered him an IV, thinking he was a patient).
The thing is, while all this sounds overblown and slapsticky on paper, it is played completely straight. The film is shot in TV-drama style, the narration is austere, and the other doctors and administrators are concerned about these goings-on, and about finding ways to improve matters. Dr Bock has lines like “What am I going to tell this boy’s parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn’t tell the doctors from the patients?” and “Where do you train your nurses, Dachau?” but he says them wearily, with genuine sadness. The tone isn’t the absurdist one of Catch-22 or M*A*S*H* where the characters are unconcerned with such silly things as improving the world; here, people do care a great deal, and it still doesn’t matter.
None of this is a surprise if you know that the script is by Paddy Chayevsky, a cutting social observer who also wrote Sidney Lumet’s Network, a 1976 satire about network television that seems more prescient than ever in the reality-TV age. As with Chayevsky’s other work, the humour in The Hospital isn’t so much black as a dull shade of grey. This isn't the sort of film that will make you chuckle out loud so much as smile wanly at the TV screen, nod in recognition while thinking to yourself, “True, true, things often do seem this hopeless. And that’s funny.”
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
