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Five weeks in New York City's Metropolitan Hospital Center, Frederick Wiseman enters mid-incision. The staff is at first faceless, concealed behind surgical masks or in the shadows, the patients have the floor—one man has his genitals examined and weeps in shame, the aged woman turned down for health care due to diabetes comes to resemble the doomed witch in Day of Wrath in a rough close-up. The sensitivity of doctors and nurses quickly crystallizes, the hospital is a leaky vessel with a compassionate crew, emergency-ward treatment is merely palliative gauze applied to wider systemic gashes. Alcoholics, drug addicts, injuries and illnesses, lost children and adults, "the sort of thing we see all the time." Wiseman's sense of the visceral here surpasses even Titicut Follies, he locates human fragility equally in the physical indignities of the patients and the concern of frazzled staffers. (A neglected child blankly licks ice-cream after having tumbled out of a window, a concerned nurse offers to care for him and is promptly advised not to "get involved with something like that.") The "schizophrenic" teenage hustler's slurring monologue about "normalcy" is framed against a Life magazine poster, though the chief metaphor for troubled societal intestines might be the student from Minnesota who, handed an ipecac to flush out a batch of putrid mescaline, keeps vomiting and vomiting until the connection to Alice's Restaurant is inescapable. To stay alive "at a certain level of civilization" is the challenge, medicine helps only so much. The edifice is a churning organism, who listens to its beating heart? The sermon in the chapel exalts God's creations, a reverse zoom is followed by a pan to a busy highway, the hymn in Spanish is just another sound in the city. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |