Having recently given a study club presentation titled "Your mouth at the movies: Lessons about dentistry from filmmakers," I enjoyed the analysis of dentists’ depictions in motion pictures by Dr. Edward Thibodeau and Ms. Lauren Mentasti, "Who Stole Nemo?" (
JADA 2007; 138[5]:656–60
). My own studies have brought me to some other conclusions about dentistry on the silver screen.
In pop culture, dentists symbolize pain, power, healing and routine.1 Movie dentists following old literary tropes either as vehicles for humor or schadenfreude2 are only a subset of dentistry’s pain imagery. While some depictions of dentists clearly fit into the pain, power and/or healing categories, I see most current images of dentists heavily slanted toward representations of routine. The public associates dentistry with rituals of habitude and commonplace: brush twice a day; see the dentist twice a year. By extension, dentists themselves have become strong metaphors of stability and normalcy—the modern everyman.
Examples abound. In "Hair," the exasperated parents of an irresponsible hippie ask why he can’t be like his brother, a straight-arrow dental student. "The In-Laws" shows a regular-guy dentist dragged into the zany life of a secret agent. The dissolute poet of "Reuben Reuben" faces the end of his life with words from a kindly dentist. The killer housewife of "Serial Mom" requires the irony of marriage to a bland dentist-husband. The suffering girl-friend of Tom Hanks’s "Cast Away" character, in desperate need of security, marries an endodontist. The plot of "Reign Over Me" depends on a solid-citizen dentist to take in the unhinged Adam Sandler character.
Most dentist characters play supporting roles. McKee’s3 script analysis explains why. Reflecting the technical demands of a storyline—which call for the symbolic ascension of imagery from the particular to the universal—police, physicians, teachers and lawyers are the professions most likely to be represented as movie heroes.
Dentists, as symbols of the quotidian, are agents of neither life and death nor profound change. So the oral surgeon in "M*A*S*H," rebuilding faces but not perceived as saving lives, plays his role in the shadow of Hawkeye and Trapper John.4
Regardless of which dentist metaphor Hollywood storytellers tap, they rarely get dentistry right, for at least three reasons:
Right is boring. A good story is about conflict, and there is no conflict to be resolved in a great day at the office.
Hollywood doesn’t know what right is. Moviemakers live in an isolated subculture populated by quirky egomaniacs, far removed from real life. What’s more, movies have long lead times, so they make poor barometers of reality. In development for years or decades, movies are rarely depictions of life as we live it, but instead play out anachronistic visions of the world. Portrayals of dentists reflect notions of dentistry as much as 50 years out of date.
As McKee3 likes to say, truth is not what happens. That’s fact. Truth is what someone thinks about what happens, which allows for mountains of artistic license. So while a movie may take the pulse of pop culture, the heartbeat is not reliable.
The public realizes as much. My office production did not decline after the release of "Marathon Man." Patients, for the most part, understood it was only a movie.
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