ahem . . . so this is the first of what one perhaps hopes will be many future posts about mostly movies, probably, but undoubtedly also some books and other interesting topics. Please feel welcomed to comment or make any suggestions. I would also like to mention and thank my friend and colleague Brandon for his encouragement and advice (oh yeah, read his blog too, he's a pretty perceptive fellow). In any event, enjoy.
There is a certain strain of English satirical cinema, exemplified in the films of Lindsay Anderson as well as Peter Medak's adaptation of Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, that seems almost paradoxical in the way the films give in to every temptation for the farce to stray into the realm of the ridiculous and yet seem all the more brilliant for it. This tendency reached its apogee in my mind with Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982).
The ostensible story told in Britannia Hospital concerns the preparations for a visit by Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth to celebrate the hospital's 500th anniversary. At the same time, in the hospital's ultra-modern Millar Center, Professor Millar, who can be said to be the film's chief villain as well as, perhaps, its protagonist, readies for the demonstration of a discovery he describes as "man remade." Not to be undone, enterprising television journalist Mick Travis, played, as he was in Anderson's If . . . (1969) and O Lucky Man! (1973), by Malcolm McDowell, schemes his way into the hospital in order to film a documentary about the goings on therein.
A key point to understanding Britannia Hospital that could easily be missed or just misconstrued is that it is, while unswerving in its satire, an anti-political film. As the opening credits roll, shots of the hospital's facade are intercut with scenes of shouting demonstrators marching on the hospital grounds holding placards proclaiming "No Privilege in Pain" and otherwise protesting the hospital's admission of well-to-do private patients. As an ambulance speeds up the drive, demonstrators stop it, reminding the driver that there are to be "no admissions except by union dispensation." When it becomes the clear the patient has but minutes to live, the ruffians begrudgingly allow the ambulance to pass and as the dying man is wheeled into the emergency triage area, the workers and nurses at the gate allow the patient to perish when they realize it is time for their mandated break. That the hospital is a metaphor for the dying British Empire hardly needs to be said, however, that filmmaker seems to bear equal contempt for the forces socialist "revolution" (can it really be a revolution if you are simply replacing one class of elites with another?) as for the decrepit remnants of the imperial past .
Britannia Hospital is also a movie about movies and amply shows Anderson's love for films, even when he is lampooning them as ruthlessly as he does in this one. The conventions of the horror genre, particularly its Frankenstein mode, are held up in the scenes of the birth and subsequent dismemberment of Professor Millar's reconstituted man. Further, the casting of Mark Hamill as the journalist Red, a hashish smoking proto-Beavis, seems to be no accident. The set design and staging of the scenes inside the Millar Center were pulled right out of George Lucas's Death Star playbook. Moreover, Hamill's shouts into his remote microphone when realizes that they have lost contact with the now-dead Mick Travis recall with great hilarity Luke Skywalker's frantic paging of his droids from the depths of the Death Star's trash compactor. And in what is perhaps Anderson's most salient statement of his own thoughts on the cinema, as Red's partner Sammy realizes that the city is exploding around their broadcast van, he responds by picking up a camera and climbing out of the van while exhorting to Red, "Come on . . . Let's make movies!"
It is both a supreme irony and utterly fitting that the film's defining moment is the speech delivered by the malevolent Professor Millar in preparation for the unveiling of his "revolution in mankind." As the forces of revolution burst through the doors of the Millar Center in a manner reminiscent of the blood pouring forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, they take their seats amongst the gathered luminaries (Her Royal Highness not excluded) to hear Professor Millar adumbrate the technological achievements of the human race while he laments that "alone among the creatures of this world, the human race chooses to annihilate itself." He continues:
Man breeds as recklessly as he lays waste. By the end of the century the population of the world will have tripled. Two-thirds of our plant species will have been destroyed. Fifty-five per cent of the animal kingdom and seventy per cent of our mineral resources. Out of every hundred human beings now living eighty will die without knowing what it feels like to be fully nourished, while a tiny minority indulge themselves in absurd and extravagant luxury. A motion picture entertainer in North America will receive as much money in a month as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred years. We waste, we destroy and we cling like savages to our superstitions. We give power to leaders of state and church as prejudiced and small minded as ourselves who squander our resources on instruments of destruction while millions continue to suffer and go hungry, condemned forever to lives of ignorance and deprivation . . . it is because mankind has denied intelligence . . . Only a new human being of pure brain can lead man forward into a new era.
It is at this point that Millar unveils Genesis, a giant, squishy, flashing brain, which speaks to the audience (a la The Wizard of Oz) until it gets stuck on its words, skipping like a scratched vinyl album as the film blacks out. Anderson seems to be acknowledging in this moment a point made by Brandon in a follow-up comment to his recent post about the HBO series The Wire in that the world is indeed a fucked-up place, one fraught with dangers, while also reminding us that none of these is perhaps so dangerous as those who believe they have the solutions to the world's problems.
There is a certain strain of English satirical cinema, exemplified in the films of Lindsay Anderson as well as Peter Medak's adaptation of Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, that seems almost paradoxical in the way the films give in to every temptation for the farce to stray into the realm of the ridiculous and yet seem all the more brilliant for it. This tendency reached its apogee in my mind with Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982).
The ostensible story told in Britannia Hospital concerns the preparations for a visit by Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth to celebrate the hospital's 500th anniversary. At the same time, in the hospital's ultra-modern Millar Center, Professor Millar, who can be said to be the film's chief villain as well as, perhaps, its protagonist, readies for the demonstration of a discovery he describes as "man remade." Not to be undone, enterprising television journalist Mick Travis, played, as he was in Anderson's If . . . (1969) and O Lucky Man! (1973), by Malcolm McDowell, schemes his way into the hospital in order to film a documentary about the goings on therein.
A key point to understanding Britannia Hospital that could easily be missed or just misconstrued is that it is, while unswerving in its satire, an anti-political film. As the opening credits roll, shots of the hospital's facade are intercut with scenes of shouting demonstrators marching on the hospital grounds holding placards proclaiming "No Privilege in Pain" and otherwise protesting the hospital's admission of well-to-do private patients. As an ambulance speeds up the drive, demonstrators stop it, reminding the driver that there are to be "no admissions except by union dispensation." When it becomes the clear the patient has but minutes to live, the ruffians begrudgingly allow the ambulance to pass and as the dying man is wheeled into the emergency triage area, the workers and nurses at the gate allow the patient to perish when they realize it is time for their mandated break. That the hospital is a metaphor for the dying British Empire hardly needs to be said, however, that filmmaker seems to bear equal contempt for the forces socialist "revolution" (can it really be a revolution if you are simply replacing one class of elites with another?) as for the decrepit remnants of the imperial past .
Britannia Hospital is also a movie about movies and amply shows Anderson's love for films, even when he is lampooning them as ruthlessly as he does in this one. The conventions of the horror genre, particularly its Frankenstein mode, are held up in the scenes of the birth and subsequent dismemberment of Professor Millar's reconstituted man. Further, the casting of Mark Hamill as the journalist Red, a hashish smoking proto-Beavis, seems to be no accident. The set design and staging of the scenes inside the Millar Center were pulled right out of George Lucas's Death Star playbook. Moreover, Hamill's shouts into his remote microphone when realizes that they have lost contact with the now-dead Mick Travis recall with great hilarity Luke Skywalker's frantic paging of his droids from the depths of the Death Star's trash compactor. And in what is perhaps Anderson's most salient statement of his own thoughts on the cinema, as Red's partner Sammy realizes that the city is exploding around their broadcast van, he responds by picking up a camera and climbing out of the van while exhorting to Red, "Come on . . . Let's make movies!"
It is both a supreme irony and utterly fitting that the film's defining moment is the speech delivered by the malevolent Professor Millar in preparation for the unveiling of his "revolution in mankind." As the forces of revolution burst through the doors of the Millar Center in a manner reminiscent of the blood pouring forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, they take their seats amongst the gathered luminaries (Her Royal Highness not excluded) to hear Professor Millar adumbrate the technological achievements of the human race while he laments that "alone among the creatures of this world, the human race chooses to annihilate itself." He continues:
Man breeds as recklessly as he lays waste. By the end of the century the population of the world will have tripled. Two-thirds of our plant species will have been destroyed. Fifty-five per cent of the animal kingdom and seventy per cent of our mineral resources. Out of every hundred human beings now living eighty will die without knowing what it feels like to be fully nourished, while a tiny minority indulge themselves in absurd and extravagant luxury. A motion picture entertainer in North America will receive as much money in a month as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred years. We waste, we destroy and we cling like savages to our superstitions. We give power to leaders of state and church as prejudiced and small minded as ourselves who squander our resources on instruments of destruction while millions continue to suffer and go hungry, condemned forever to lives of ignorance and deprivation . . . it is because mankind has denied intelligence . . . Only a new human being of pure brain can lead man forward into a new era.
It is at this point that Millar unveils Genesis, a giant, squishy, flashing brain, which speaks to the audience (a la The Wizard of Oz) until it gets stuck on its words, skipping like a scratched vinyl album as the film blacks out. Anderson seems to be acknowledging in this moment a point made by Brandon in a follow-up comment to his recent post about the HBO series The Wire in that the world is indeed a fucked-up place, one fraught with dangers, while also reminding us that none of these is perhaps so dangerous as those who believe they have the solutions to the world's problems.
8 comments:
Hey!
Excellent first post! The stuff about Hamill and 'Star Wars' in particular, is interesting and presumably spot-on. Hamill's a sort of terrible actor but can be used well and some smart directors have used his Skywalker image in fun ways. Have you seen Sam Fuller's 'The Big Red One'? Anderson seems to be more playing with Hammil's image, but Fuller uses it against type too...
Maybe a look at all the Anderson films would be a good start for the blog?
brandon-
that is my intention . . . its why i picked up oh lucky man! thanks for the comments and praise.
Frankly, David-Ford, I'm a little surprised that you are familiar enough with Star Wars to remember Luke frantically paging the droids from the trash compactor.
"Threepio! Come in Threepio! Oh, where could he be?!?"
Thanks for this blog, so far so good.
Written with the quiet desperation of one whose queen is being educated by Vikings. But it did fire me up to see the movie.
i also appreciate that you didn't get into a windy discourse on the word "Dickensian".
Fuck is this guy???
colin - thanks for reading and of course i am familiar enough with star wars to remember this particular moment. remember i came up in the early eighties--the empire strikes back is the first movie for which i have a specific memory of seeing it in a cinema.
james - what can i say, i am glad at bottom that my comments piqued your interest in the film. keep reading. i will say this, there are certain sort of bullshit literary labels like dickensian and kafkaesque, which are generally reserved for the use of those who have never read the original works of the authors invoked. i once actually heard the self-consciously unsophisticated female correspondent on the fox news morning program use the term 'kafkaesque' to describe the situation of a man quarantined because of his infection with a particularly virulent strain of tuberculosis. if this isn't a shining banner of ignorance, i don't know what is. in any event, the use of such terms constitutes a major cultural crime, which should be stamped out at every opportunity. it is for this reason that i think the discussion of the use of such terms is apt.
brandon - why not?
again all, thanks for reading and your comments and keep checking back for new stuff.
I would also like to submit the word "Nabokovian" to your list of "Dickensian" and "Kafaesque" although it is a word more often applied to literary fiction rather than film.
james-
touchee . . . somehow i missed this one, but it is very apt. i saw the word nabokovian applied to the novel the egyptologist by arthur phillips--i gather the reference is to its being a sort of meta-biography, a la pale fire, but, seriously, does this somehow elevate phillips to the status of being comparable to nabokov?
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