The Drilling Fields

An oral history of Hollywood's unfair depiction of a tragically downtrodden minority-dentists.

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Several months back, a good friend phoned and said that I absolutely must rent a new video titled Captives, starring Julia Ormond as a dentist doing pro bono work on Tim Roth's recidivist teeth in a London prison. As this sounded like exactly my kind of movie, I immediately repaired to my local video store and asked the proprietress, "Do you have that new film about a dentist?" to which she replied, with an equanimity so blithe I still find it disconcerting, "Which one?"

At that instant, I realized I was living through one of the most unique eras in all human history, that rare, precious and beautiful moment, perhaps never to be repeated, when better video stores everywhere would be offering not one, but two just-released films about dentists. With the virtually simultaneous appearance of Captives and The Dentist, the dental profession for the first time in decades, nay, perhaps in its history, had reached the point where the movie industry was finally sitting up and taking notice of its deceptive glamour.

True, dentists still did not find themselves in the same ballpark as the medical profession, about whose exploits films keep appearing in staggering profusion, nor even in the same league as architects, whose craft--for no good reason--was recently canonized in a half dozen films during one three-year period. Nevertheless, with the release of Captives and The Dentist, it could be safely argued that the dental profession was finally showing up on the cultural radar screen, after years of cruelly uncaring submersion.

And yet, despite the euphoria that dentists everywhere must have felt when word got out that such esteemed thespians as Julia Ormond and Corbin Bernsen would soon be appearing in dental roles, the release of the two films has not been an unqualified triumph for the profession. In Captives, Ormond commits the one unforgivable sin cited in the dental catechism--falling in love with a patient who has bad teeth--and ends up conspiring with her patient to smuggle contraband into the prison. And in The Dentist, Bernsen plays a sadistic general practitioner so obsessed with his wife's infidelity that he subjects her to the most hideous oral-surgical torture ever filmed, mutilating her lovely face beyond recognition. And after this he kills two dental assistants and his pool man. Just for the record, he also tortures and mutilates an IRS auditor.

Thus, at the very instant that the dental profession seemed poised to enjoy its greatest cinematic triumph, victory was snatched away by the lurid and repellent elements in these two films. Just when dentists seemed ready to take their place in the sun, after too long an eclipse by heart surgeons, trauma specialists and even osteopaths, Hollywood saw fit to release not one, but two films, depicting dentists as dangerous sociopaths. And so, a profession unjustly perceived as being riddled by low self-esteem, chronic drug abuse and a terrifyingly high suicide rate once again found itself the butt of a cruel joke.

"I couldn't sleep the night I saw The Dentist," says Dr. Peter Zegarelli, who happens to be my dentist in Tarrytown, N.Y. "It was the most disgusting picture I've ever seen. Why do people make these things?"

As someone who has always had great respect for dentists, and most particularly for the unfailingly professional Dr. Zegarelli, I too was perplexed and infuriated by the unsavory portrayal of dentists in these two films. I too would have preferred something more upbeat, perhaps a dental version of Sling Blade or Shine--_Forrest Gum_, if you will. And yet, one need only glance at the profession's long, unhappy celluloid history to see that this new case of cinematic abuse was simply par for the course.

Ask the average person to name a movie about doctors and he'll probably cite something epic like Doctor Zhivago. Ask the average person to name a movie about dentists, and he'll almost certainly cite Marathon Man, in which a completely over-the-top Laurence Olivier plays a fiendish Nazi who uses macabre dental techniques to extract information from bug-eyed Dustin Hoffman, the archetypal reluctant patient. Anyone who has seen the film will agree that Olivier's hair-raising performance is not fair to dentists. It may not even be fair to Nazis.

The negative image of dentists in motion pictures did not begin with Marathon Man. Almost from the industry's birth, the dental profession has been the object of derision and contempt, not to mention revulsion and fear. The legendary Erich von Stroheim kicked things off with his 1925 epic Greed, which focuses on a do-it-yourself dentist named McTeague whose life is destroyed by a miserly wife and meddlesome bureaucrats who strip him of his livelihood just because he never went to a recognized dental school. With its grim portrayal of Wild West dental techniques, coupled with a telling scene in which McTeague smooches his future wife while she is under anesthesia, Greed introduced two themes that would characterize dental films for the rest of the century. One, dentists are butchers. Two, dentists are always looking to cop a feel.

Dentists fare no better in the controversial 1932 short The Dentist, starring W.C. Fields. As was the case in Greed, Fields qua dentist is a complete hatchet man, mouthing inanities like, "Hand me that 404 circular buzz saw, will you?" He is also a full-blown lecher. As he pulls a tooth from a female patient's mouth, she gyrates so lasciviously--actually wrapping her legs around him--that she appears to be having an orgasm. The film caused a bit of a furor when it was released, due to outrage from dentists all across America who quite understandably objected to being portrayed as sex-crazed boobs. Alas, 64 years later, with the release of Captives, the only thing that's changed is that the sex-crazed dentist has boobs.

In 1933, audiences were subjected to One Sunday Afternoon, in which Gary Cooper played a dentist tormented by the thought that he has married the wrong woman. The woman he thinks he really should have gotten, Fay Wray, has been stolen from him by a man who is not, needless to say, a dentist.

In his 1934 thriller _The Man Who Knew Too Muc_h, Alfred Hitchcock introduced a creepy, bespectacled dentist who is clearly in the employ of some malignant, fascist Central European government bent on crippling democracy. Working out of a run-down London suburb, in an office signposted by an illuminated set of choppers, the dentist first extracts a molar from a man whose tooth does not need to be extracted, then gets overpowered by his next patient, who gives him some of his own gas. The aggressive patient then poses as the dentist and manages to extract vital information from sinister visitor Peter Lorre. In creating the character of this dentist, Hitchcock clearly sought to devise a symbol for the parlous state of British dentistry in this century. That is, in a country where the local dentist is an incompetent sicko who hangs out with people like Peter Lorre, is it really all that surprising that the citizens are so reluctant to come in for regular checkups?

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