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Tour of Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, first of Frederick Wiseman's institutional vivisections. "I need help, but I don't know where I can get it." "You get it here, I guess." Bow ties and party hats and pom-poms bracket the visit, a zombified soft-shoe to mock the idea of escape through art. (The emcee is the warden himself, brimming with seamy grins and limericks, practically a Cassavetes bit player.) Rants, stutters, spasms, a morose trombone, unexpectedly beatific vocals. Cells are bare and so are many of the inmates, one is a former teacher relentlessly taunted by guards, bloodied following a rough shave he stomps and rattles in his blanched room. Plain observation, calm shocks à la Resnais. Tube and funnel for the emaciated prisoner (the force-feeding is intercut with funeral preparations of the same man's cadaver, a far gentler procedure), "heavy doses" of tranquilizers for the would-be paranoid. "Have You Ever Been Lonely? Have You Ever Been Blue?" Self-described agitators debate communism and Vietnam ("America is the female part of the world, and she's sex-crazed!"), elsewhere in the yard one clings to religion the best he can, standing on his head. Amid the chaos, nurses and social workers try their damnedest—after birthday cakes and pin-the-tail-on-donkey games, a thankful letter is reward enough. Poe's madhouse, definitely Fuller's, "very interesting work," reform is the revolution tacitly recommended. (Brook's Marat/Sade is concurrent.) Wiseman's inquisitive outrage dives headlong into the snake pit, his sense of incongruous beauty locates an ethereal flash (darkened rec room, "Chinatown, My Chinatown," flickering TV set), more than worthy reasons for a law student to take up cinema. Prognosis, curtain call, censorship. "It's time to go, we had a show..." Chayefsky's The Hospital and Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are notable responses. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |