The Drilling Fields

Compromising Positions has many fine touches, including impressive diagnostics and several highly realistic patient-doctor exchanges. We learn, however, that the murdered Bruce Fleckstein was not just a competent dentist with enough self-loathing to get messed up with the mob, but also, according to Sarandon, "the Don Juan of dentists." In other words, once again, we find ourselves face-to-face with an ass bandit cursed by low self-esteem. Edward Herrmann, playing Sarandon's husband, frames the whole self-esteem question nicely when he says, "God, I'd love to kill a dentist." Hey, who wouldn't?

Though dentists appear in supporting roles in movies as varied as Brazil; Houseguest; Serial Mom; Reuben, Reuben; the Rick Moranis musical remake of_ Little Shop of Horrors_; and Pedro Almodovar's What Have I Done to Deserve This? (which features a pedophile dentist who wants to adopt the female lead's teenaged boy), none of those films need concern us here. In this study, we are primarily interested in films that deal with dentistry in some substantive way, not as an incidental plot point. And films of this nature, where dentists draw in the audience's attention, do not surface again in any memorable way until 1996, when both Captives and The Dentist appear.

But, as previously noted, what at first seemed like a cause for jubilation among dentists has now proven to be a crushing disappointment. The very fact that the fetching Julia Ormond would even consider having an affair with a convicted murderer with bad teeth demonstrates, once again, the chronically low self-esteem that seems to bedevil the profession. And even though Captives contains an edifying amount of dental footage, with Ormond clearly having diligently prepared for the role, the film cannot be considered an unqualified artistic success.

Because it is set in a London prison, and is therefore teeming with riffraff cursed with very bad teeth, it is almost impossible to understand any of the dialogue that does not pertain to good hygiene. What's more, the plot is a bit farfetched. No dentist, no matter how self-loathing, is going to voluntarily stick her tongue inside Tim Roth's mouth. It's not just a question of hygiene. It's not even a question of sex. It's a question of dental aesthetics. You might stick your fingers inside Tim Roth's mouth, or even your nipples. But your own tongue? I can't think of any dentist who would do that.

This brings us to The Dentist, one of the most uncompromisingly revolting motion pictures I have ever seen. As the film opens, suburban dentist Corbin Bernsen is clearly coming apart at the seams, fatally wounded by his wife's affair with the pool man. He now sets out on a barbaric spree, gleefully drilling into his patients' gums, strangling his assistant with pantyhose stripped from a sedated female, murdering his colleague, using a weird quasi-medieval torture instrument to mutilate a hapless IRS agent, and finally extracting all of his wife's teeth before literally cutting her tongue out.

"You don't know what it's like--the discipline, the long hours, am the lack of respect in a world that goes on ignoring dental hygiene," Bernsen declares in one of his numerous jeremiads against the American public. He has a point; we don't, and for this he has earned our compassion. But when he spares the life of a young girl after she promises to brush three times a day and never eat candy, he steps across the line and becomes the stuff of our collective worst nightmare: the dentist who takes his work way too seriously.

As the foregoing makes clear, dentists have never fared well on the silver screen. In fact, in a recently released movie called Good Luck, Hollywood's contempt extends even further down into the orally hygienic undergrowth with Gregory Hines playing a paraplegic dental technician who sets out to win a white-water raft race with a blind football player as his partner. Needless to say, the film is irredeemably stupid, and casts the entire world of dentistry in an even more frivolous light.

All in all, I was feeling pretty bad about the subject of dentistry by the time I'd finished watching all these films. As a lifetime proponent of the theory that motion pictures address the American public's deepest fears, giving cinematic expression to our darkest, most hidden neuroses, it troubled me that virtually every movie dealing with dentists should portray them as buffoons, sadists, sex addicts or outright charlatans.

Then, one afternoon when I was visiting Piermont Pictures Video in suburban New York, I had a tremendously uplifting experience. Ric Pantale, the proprietor of the best video store I have ever been in, told me that Daniel-Day Lewis had once appeared in a little-known film called Eversmile New Jersey, which actually portrayed dentists in a positive light. And, as is always the case with this amazing little store, he had it in stock.

I rushed home to watch it, and can truly say that the next hour and a half was a revelation. Eversmile New Jersey deals with an evangelical Irish dentist who travels around the world on a motorcycle spreading the word of dental consciousness. Filmed on location in South America, this dental-hygienic Easy Rider follows Dr. Fergus O'Connell as he rides around the Argentinian countryside, encouraging peasants to avail themselves of his expertise. "Cavities have no mercy on cowards" and "There can be no pity for bacteria and their accomplices," he declares.

Inevitably, his unconventional dental approach brings him into conflict with the reactionary forces of the Argentinian dental establishment, who naturally denigrate nomadic dentists, and may--the movie is not dear on this point--reserve special scorn for practitioners from New Jersey. This leads to the confiscation of O'Connell's passport and a sort of nervous breakdown. But at the end of this movie, as opposed to almost every other dental film I know, the dentist emerges triumphant, with his dignity intact. What's more, he gets the girl.

I am not going to argue that Eversmile New Jersey is a great motion picture. It has far too much pennywhistle music, a bit too much talk about bacterial growth, a few too many arty scenes of gas station attendants dressed like angels. Yet, in its respect for the practice of dentistry itself, and in its portrayal of a dentist who does not suffer from low self-esteem, it goes a long way toward redressing the imbalance caused by the leering dentalphobia of most other films in this genre.

Tragically, only those people who live dose to a store with 19,000 videos in stock are ever likely to see this film. Everyone in the hinterland is doomed to go on seeing bad dentist movies forever. That's the main reason I don't live in the hinterland. If the American Dental Association had any sense, it would make millions of copies of this exceptional film and distribute them in dentists' offices all across America. But no, Bible Belters would probably start complaining about the sex in the shower and the melon-breasted widow who likes to seduce roving dentists by luring them to her own private oral surgery. So just forget I suggested it. If dentists want to improve their public standing, they can't expect Hollywood to do it for them. And they certainly shouldn't hold their breath waiting for help from me. All things considered, I think articles like this just make things worse.

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Joe Queenan interviewed Spike Lee for the October '96 issue of Movieline.

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