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Ben Harper
Fear, Loathing and Humour: The Dentists of the Reel World
Popular media, especially films have always portrayed the dentist in two extremes. He is either a comic character for laughs like Norman wisdom in a stitch in time or as an aloof, uncaring and sometimes sadistic character that inflicts all kinds of torture on the protagonist, like Laurence Olivier in the marathon man, attempting to torture and “extract” information from an unsuspecting Dustin Hoffman, by removing his teeth without anesthesia.
Even thought dental treatment today has greatly progressed, the association of ‘pain’ has not left the profession. Dressed in a white smock and holding a barbaric tool of torture continues to be the dentists’ trap. Like Corbin Bernsen in the Dentist who unable to cope with his wife’s infidelity starts torturing his paitients with brutal dental routines.
If not psychos, dentists are at the very least depicted as misanthropes, devoid of human contact like Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town who dies only to be revived in a few minutes and realize that he can communicate with ghosts.
Having a dentist in a film is considered to be comedy gold like the character of Matthew Perry in the whole Nine yards where is shown to be unhappy unfulfilled and the murder list of just about everybody else in the film. Then there is that of Bob hope in ‘The paleface’ where he plays the cowardly ‘painless potter’, a dentist of questionable competence.
The number of dentists depicted as psychos or having psychotic tendencies is far more than those shown for laughs. Be it the 1986 dark comedy film, The Little Shop of Horrors or the Helena Bonham and Steve martin starrer Novocaine. These films show the dentist’s life as glamorous as that of a CIA agent or as gruesome as that of a serial killer. In either case, the depiction is misleading and definitely not a regular day in the life of a dentist.
Another British television show, My Family depicts its main character, Ben Harper as a misanthropic dentist with little compassion for his family, patients, partner or anyone else. Such depiction further propagates the already existing negative image of the Dentist among viewers. In the Prison Drama Series OZ, Dr. Tariq Faraj is shown as a prison dentist with a warped sense of humor who transplants gum tissue from a dead black man onto a white supremacist’s receded gums as revenge against his racial slurs.
It’s not surprising then that many people still have a negative view of the dentist and avoid the dentist’s chair. Of course, the viewer is smart enough not to believe everything that they see but then repetition does have an impact.
So now, the question is why don’t we ever see regular dentists in films? Who might be Counterparts of the lovable Dr. Doolittle in the dentist world?
Why isn’t the dentist a handsome young doctor like the one’s in Grey’s anatomy?
We all have our dentists who we see every few months for a check up and sometimes they may even give us a sweet something if we have been good. He is not a psycho who ties one end of a string to our tooth and the other to the door to extract them. He has sophisticated tools and uses them well. He is real but for this reality to transcend into the reel realm might take some time.
About the Author
Perfect Smile Spa offers the best quality cosmetic dentistry treatment in Essex and London.
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