Did You Miss the Best Satire of the 1980s?
How ‘Britannia Hospital’ manages to skewer left, right, up, and down.
by Eli Zeger
Some doctors aren’t that great; others are really good at slicing up and eviscerating their patients. Director Lindsay Anderson subjects his characters to heavy scrutiny and satirization in 1982’s Britannia Hospital, namely the depraved individuals running and working in the eponymous hospital. But that scrutiny and satire isn’t limited just to healthcare workers — even the cadre of sleepless protesters camped out front of the hospital gates are commented on. They halt an ambulance with a man dying of hypothermia just to check that he’s not one of the privileged (only mildly ill) patients being transported to the glamorous private ward. And he’s not; the man truly needs intensive care. Yet unattentive staff leave him to die in the middle of the clearly unpopulated public ward. With a final croak and his right arm drooping over the bedside, cue the opening credits.
The film is part of Anderson’s trilogy encapsulating the disparate occupations of Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell. He gets ahold of artillery and wages war on his private school in 1968’s If…. Then he’s a coffee salesman, a laboratory test subject enduring immense torture, and imprisoned on account of fraud all in 1973’s O Lucky Man! (Anderson’s most extensive installment at just over three hours). This being my first Anderson film, what I gathered is that Mick Travis is not an idiosyncratic guy, which makes him a versatile plot device. The unpredictable, implausible storylines being driven seem more engrossing than the driver himself.
I’d yet to be born by the time Anderson concluded his trilogy. It took 15 years after Britannia Hospital for me to finally be conceived. Looking at the cinematic landscape that I’ve grown up in, the major satirical comedies have invariably favored bombastic visuals and comedy for comedy’s sake, rather than comedy trenchantly focused on the institutions intended to be critiqued. 21 & 22 Jump Street are less memorable for satirizing the police state or, although it was the basis, the cheeky didacticism of the namesake 90’s television drama. They’re more memorable for what they purely are: raunchy escapist binges. Same goes for Tropic Thunder, This Is The End, and many others.
Instead, Britannia Hospital reminded me of golden age satires like Dr. Strangelove or Being There — essential “gateway cinema,” the films that totally rocked your dad’s worldview so he’s now showing them to you in the hopes of provoking a similar world-rocking (at least that’s how it happened with me). In such films, commentary on whichever institution is the subject — those two mentioned examples seem to look at government from different angles — is unmistakable and unforgettable. And such an approach is executed by Anderson.
Mick Travis gets reprised in the Millar Center for Advanced Surgical Science, donated to the hospital by Banzai Chemicals Tokyo and set for an inaugural ceremony later on in the film, with Her Royal Highness marking the occasion by unlocking its doors. The center’s namesake, Dr. Millar, embodies Foucault’s notion of patient objectification to the extreme: humans are indistinct things, virtually all the same, in his view. Which is why the doctor doesn’t recognize Travis, whom he tortured in O Lucky Man!, seething behind him in the elevator. “He dyes his hair,” Travis — now a news reporter — notices and remarks to the maintenance worker, helping with his investigation of Millar.
While, contrary to what his giant, looming face on the film poster suggests, Britannia Hospital doesn’t feel like a “Travis film,” McDowell’s character is the entity unifying and undergirding the plot. Travis and his clique are, collectively, the rope at which the other character cliques vigorously tug from either end. Once Millar and his doctors capture Travis trying to hide in the laboratory, they haul him onto a bed where Nurse Persil, his romantic partner and collaborator in the investigation, is forced to inject him with a sedative. They cut him up and sew him back together with new body parts — he’s hairy in some regions, bare in others; black-skinned here, white-skinned there — and shock him back to life, Frankenstein-style. Shortly after, the new Travis chokes out Doctor MacMillan, the only person Millar seemed to have the eensy weensy-est affection towards.
This is around when Travis’s crew-workers get thrown out of their van by protesters — of whom, by this point, there are hundreds. They were supposed to be managing the footage he was furtively gathering from inside the center and transmitting to the van. Instead, the two crew-workers decided to hotbox, do shrooms, and watch TV all day; as soon as Mark Hamill’s character rolls a phat blunt, Travis and his investigation are doomed.
They watch a march on the television, of people in opposition to the dictatorial President Ngami (likely a comment on Idi Amin) who happens to be one of the privileged patients staying in the private ward. Travis’s crew-workers follow those protesters, who soon converge with the people protesting the private ward’s obsequious benefits; all happening right in front of the hospital gates. But as the cameraman Sammy hops onto the roof to film this convergence, the people take it as exploitation, shaking Sammy off the top of the van and seizing Hamill through the broken windshield, because why not. Anderson seems pretty into climactic scenes that involve his main cast members getting grabbed and tugged at by hordes.
The heads of the hospital and Her Royal Highness’s security staff are satirized in the most obvious archetype: as conniving, snobby, humorless prudes. What’s interesting and less obvious, though, is how Anderson chooses to poke fun at all those protesters. Britannia Hospital’s intro highlights their confused anger, when the protesters halt the ambulance in order to feel a sense of power — except it’s quite an arbitrary demonstration, and they end up accelerating the death of an innocent man. Later on the film highlights their ability to be easily swayed, when administrator Vincent Potter meets with the seeming ringleader of the culminated protest. You don’t hear what’s talked about before they shake hands. Although it had to do with stepping aside to let ambulances with public ward patients (it was actually HRH and her staff hiding inside them) in through the gates, the entire nature of the conversation is never revealed — commenting on how someone as seemingly steadfast as the ringleader is susceptible to a clandestine, insincere personality.
The weaknesses of the protesters indicate a latent desire: to find the definitive answer to their struggle — regardless of whomever the person is delivering that answer. “Little men, little men, do you claim to speak for the future?” Dr. Millar asks down to the protesters, who’d just broken into the Millar Center and charged up the stairs. Millar entices them by postulating that he knows “what the future means” and leads them into the dark room that houses the supposed answer: his crowning achievement, a glimmering pyramid with a brain inside. It has the formidability of Kubrick’s Odyssey monolith, and even a musical snippet reminiscent of the unforgettable rising notes in Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra plays for a few seconds. Alongside his pyramid, Millar delivers a diatribe on how “alone among the creatures of this world, the human race chooses to annihilate itself.”
Anderson’s final commentary of Britannia Hospital… is on the people watching Britannia Hospital. We’re tricked into believing that Millar deserves the ultimate speaking part, merely because his speech has a few truthful points that are relevant to the political landscape of the late 20th Century (and even today). Unlike how the storylines Mick Travis finds himself in negate Mick Travis as a character separated from those storylines, Millar shouldn’t be negated by the message — as truthful as parts of it may be — he’s harbingering.
While I was away for my freshman year of college I went to two protests in the area, which were ongoing throughout November/December. The energy and perseverance of everyone was really exciting, and all the excitement cycled back into itself fueling everyone to keep marching through the evening, then more and more people got attracted off the sidewalk and swept into the collective body of thousands caterpillaring its way down all the major streets. It felt so awesome emotionally, but intellectually it was hard to fathom the next step to this gathering of the masses. It wouldn’t have worked if the next step was to protest as much as possible, since there wouldn’t be nearly as many participants. The motivation to show up in person would’ve waned dramatically; and it did.
This open-endedness surrounding the next step couldn’t be escaped. Yet it’s people like the protest ringleader in Britannia Hospital who, in their confidence, convince others that the open-endedness doesn’t exist. In so doing, according to Anderson, they’re responsible for instigating the conversely desired next step: giving in to the villain. Of course the president never showed himself during the protests. But when a fellow madman like Millar dupes humans into thinking he’s sagacious and prophetic and looking out for them, along with maintaining a penchant for slaughter, then that madman’s brilliant villainy has no limits. Our current moment feels just as cinematically bizarre with this president and posse of his — though I think the key difference is that we can avoid a similar finale.
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