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50:169 Doctors in Film
Film Notes
The Patriot
"The Patriot" has not even made it into the Literture, Arts and Medicine database as a doctor movie. Yet Steven Segal's physican character fits quite well into the range of genres about heroic figures in American culture. As Susan Jeffords argues in Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers, 1994), the new archetype for male heroes in the post-Vietnam era was the tough action figure who also cared for children, the hyper-masculine guy with a sensitive, nurturing side. From this perspective, the physician-as-action-hero seems an inevitable contribution to the cast of Hollywood doctors.
"The Patriot" reflects several other themes worthy of note, including bioterrorism [see also "Outbreak" (1995)] and modes of alternative healing ignored by "Western" medicine.
Questions for discussion:
- Who are the "bad" guys? Who are the "good" guys?
- How are Native Americans depicted in this film? What stereotypes are drawn on? What stereotypes are avoided?
- How is Segal portrayed as a practicing physician? How would you rate his doctor-patient skills?
- Of course action-films require that the "willing suspension of disbelief" that characterizes fantasy fiction, but how impossible is the idea of the physician as a person willing to commit violence? to kill?
- What other generic public fears and beliefs does the film draw upon?
- How does the setting (the West) contribute to the story (versus, for instance, an eastern urban setting)?
| Frankenstein | M*A*S*H |
| Arrowsmith | The Hospital |
| Young Dr. Kildare | |
| No Way Out | Gross Anatomy |
| Magnificent Obsession | The Doctor |
| The Interns | The Patriot |