USC School of Medicine - Asklepiad Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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That could be simply bad digestion. Once we are dead, we are but a handful of dust, and if some small bone does remain, we ' d better watch out for the dogs. Go swimming, buy yourself a horse and take it jumping. But, above all, tell your husband to make love to you more often. Ah, against the spirits and against toothaches, there is no better remedy than making love. Bhisma is the first analyst, and Juliette can sense the fraud intuitively. Bhisma is the hermaphroditic impressario of sex, an international con-artist, and his-her reply to Juliette ' s mental question begins with an extemporaneous recital of the love- bites and yelps from the Kama Sutra (Art of Love) Sounds to be uttered to procure pleasure are the Hin! The great sigh! The sound Put! The sound Pat! The sound Plat! . . . Plat, Plat, Plat, Plat! ( . . . siezure). It is significant that a stethoscoped phyisician is in constant attendance as Bhisma rolls in and out of epileptic seizures. The young physician is a symbol of the healing claim in Bhisma. Love is a religion, Juliette. Your husband is your God, and you are priestess of the cult. Your spirit, like this incense, must burn and smoke on the altar of your loving body ... (another siezure). The second fraud is Lynx-eyes, the private eye who dresses as a priest, representing the Western approach (as opposed to the Indian) to pleasure. He is the voyeur, armed with camera and boasting the most modern techniques — a cynical peeping- Tom who never actually Involves himself, but loves to watch others. In this category Fellini puts Juliette ' s closest friends and family; Sylva, the regal mother, Valentina, the visitor Jose (the ideal tranquillizer), and the scoptophilic sculptress ( God has the most beautiful body. ). Lynx-eyes believes that his candid bouduoir spying on husband Giorgio will work the idea! catharsis in Juliette and by a complete laundering reunite husband and wife. At least he proves the errant Giorgio not impotent. Susy is not only a highly sophisticated synthesis of Eastern and Western views, but is the living embodiment of Dr. Miller ' s theory: love thyself and especial ly thine own neuroses. The curious inhabitants of Susy ' s erotic mansion are presented like a tour de force through Baron von Krafft-Ebing ' s Psychopathia Sexualis: a Russian fetishist, the hebephrenic sister, Momi the Farouk-figure, a satyriatic Egyptian seducer, six assorted lesbians, two nymphomaniacs, monks, sadists, masochists, transvestites, and homosexuals. The spontaneous orgies last indefinitely, therapeutically. Juliette flees this House of Usher, brought to her senses by a seducer ' s pass. Juliette, by a series of bold emotional decisions, quite independently of this medical and psychiatric (symbolically if you wish) fiasco, rescues herself from the psy- chological striptease of her environment. She discovers ironically that the real hallucination is this very environment. She sequesters herself from it in a final act of personal triumph and catharsis. ' a» .. 45

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I Timothy Leary called Fellini ' s Juliette of the Spirits, the first LSD film, since we never know where Juliette is perceiving or hallucinating. And rightly so, since Fellini ' s theme is the psychology of reality— and his subject is Juliette, a bored, middle-class, middle-aged housewife suffering from suburban syndrome: an intolerable anxiety that she is losing her husband. And, like any modern, distressed housewife, she seeks help— spiritual and psychiatric. The search comprises the action skeleton of the film and brings her into contact with 5 charlatans: Bhisma, the Indian faith-healer: lynx-eyes, the private eye disguised as a priest: Susy, the instinctual, sexual witch; Dr. Don Raffaele, the lecherous mainstay of Julliette ' s beach and parasol society: and Dr. Miller, the celibate, breast- less, blond American psychiatrist. Each of these persons is a satire on the modern forms of psychiatric theory and treatment : and Fellini has a notorious opinion on the contemporary effectiveness of this form of medicine. The artist ' s quarrel with the psychiatrist is based upon a strong feeling in the artist ' s mind that age-old insights conceived by the most supreme minds in rare depth and understanding have been taken up by a Pickerbaughistic clique of less gifted men in order to be applied, like aspirin, as a popular remedy for spiritual and mental suffer- ing. He is, perhaps, a simple case of the purist, intolerant of the pragmatist ' s attempt- mg to drive out old devils with old remedies under the guise of a new scientific approach. Detectable in this quarrel is the artist ' s reluctance to formulize the work- ings of the human mind. The artist believes that a complete elucidation is a form not of spiritual release, but of spiritual suicide. And there may be something in his complaint. At any rate, Juliette is an ideal Freudian case study, a victim of childhood suppres- sions and conflicts engendered by an autocratic mother and a father who was banished from the household for running off with a young circus girl. Juliette, in siding with her mother against her father, has felt a life-long guilt, for which she attempts to atone by devoting herself to her husband, Giorgio, as a priestess of his domestic life. Giorgio, like her father, is a ladies ' man. Yet. somehow, she is unable to develop her sexual role sucessfully enough to interest him. She is basically an esprit naturel. a sincere, introspective personality, normally inhibited, in a society where only an artificial attractiveness and a flaunted sexuality count. She is the only character who feels a mature emotion of love that is spiritual and full of affection. However, the arbiters of her society are liberated , that is, they have become ob- sessed with an unabashed expression of their sexual desires, their consensus is that it is a livmg kmd of healthful therapy, a dynamic exercise that will unwrinkle skins, restore vitality, and conquer death. Fellini ' s point is that this attitude is supported by the physicians and psychiatrists who minister to the members of Juliette ' s society. Dr. Miller organizes an afternoon garden party psychodrama to encourage an ex- hibitionism thinly disguised as group therapy; and Dr. Don Raffaele, enthroned on a beach chair, scoffs at Juliette ' s account of her visionary mental life: 44

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In Redbeard Kurasawa presents a masterpiece study of the elements in the physician ' s character which ennoble his profession above all others. Redbeard is a stalwart Robin Hood, grotesque, cunning, hirsute and the chief doctor of a poorhouse clinic. Central to Redbeord ' s character is o firm conviction that the body and the soul are inextricable in health and in sickness. The clinic itself appears as a horrendous vision of Hell stuffed with Dantesque forms, human ghosts writhing each in the pain of some unforgivable sin, some invisible emotional agony. Inscrutable fate compels a rebellious young intern to enter the clinic services. This intern possesses a modern Dutch Medical education of which the gist is ironically contained in four thin notebooks. Redbeard digests the notebooks in two days, alienating the intern who intended to use the private knowl- edge to become wealthy. The plot of the film romanticizes the emotional reunion between the young and the old doctor. The young disciple learns in short order that the truly effectual physician is not the selfish technician. Redbeard is terse, but behaves as if the physician is essentially a humanitarian who must harness the skills of the magician, the cunning politician, the teacher, the scientist, and the Father in his practice. All the mechanical manipulations ultimately fail since they do not destroy the effective cause of disease; The will to die. Kurosawa conceives the will to death as abreoction to stress, to emotional tragedy which dissipates the patient ' s own resources of defense. Too often Redbeard and the disciple find themselves powerless recorders, able to temporize with disease, scarecrow it over a fence, but inexorably death conquers the patients of the contagious words, one by one. Five or six depth studies of the history of physical afflictions are related in the film, related with such a priestly tenderness. sympathy, and understanding of human passion and foible that the young intern begins to respect the Angel of death. Death is dignified, grumbles Redbeard to his disciple, and you must watch this old man die, you and he alone in his chamber. The disciple recoils in horror, the old man coughs away, his life cut short by a cancer that seems to derive from the grief of losing his family. Again and again the intern witnesses the dignity of dying, and wide eyes narrow with wisdom. He feels himself shrink and dwindle into a hum- bleness that saps his pride and defiance, and thereby falls seriously ill himself. Not drugs nor all the knowledge in his four notebooks restore him, but the compassionate care of a previous patient. Through this episode the intern becomes resolved to devote his life to Redbeord ' s theory of medicine and to abandon a wealthy practice. Behind every illness is some overwhelming grief or misfor- tune counsels Redbeard; and the physician ' s responsibility is to understand the nature of the emotional stress preceding the clinical signs. In this respect, Kurosawa recalls to mind Plato who banished from his Republic all physicians save those with illnesses themselves. An intriguing set of commentaries from our film directors! In one cose the archetypic isolation of the intellectual, in another i the danger of the enthusiastic but untalented, and in the third j place the nobleness of the physician who seeks along with his ! i technical skills the wisdom of life ' s stubborn riddles. The j observations are no less pertinent to the theatre public than to j us in our introduction to medical careers, and as our stage | i resolves itself into the simple question of how much we are to behave as if Medical Training is a trade school or a true University experience — on experience penetrating and ques- tioning all for the precious little truth the gods, masters of j disguise, afford us. by Jason Berger v 46