1st July 1999
Dear Kathryn,
Wednesday nights (when ER is on) begin with scepticism and end in rapture. I can't believe that the programme is going to meet my exigent, art-critical standards, but it does. The traumas and dramas, the jokes and intimacies of Cook County General Hospital emergency room-the ER in question-sweep me up. The series knows its limitations-it is not Ingmar Bergman-but it is all the better for that. It is art of a very high order indeed.
I don't have to take sides in the elite versus popular culture wars to champion ER. It is enough to draw attention to its excellence. It has evolved a distinctive aesthetic, a distinctive feel and vision. Beautifully filmed in long sweeping shots and superbly acted, the characters are drawn both boldly and subtly. It moves through a wide array of moods-from farce to romance, from pathos to high drama. Sometimes it is clever-witness the allusions to Reservoir Dogs in the episode directed by Quentin Tarantino. It flirts with kitsch, it dabbles in parody, but it knows when to stop.
Characters like Romano or Jerry may come close to caricature but art has a place for these-and here they are brilliantly done. And the central characters-Mark Greene, Carol Hathaway, John Carter, Jeanie Boulet, Elizabeth Corday, Lucy Knight, Peter Benton-with their all too human struggles, foibles and flaws, their imperfect beauty and life-saving zeal, draw us in. The minor characters, too, who turn up in the hospital-the television evangelists, wrestlers, perfume sales women-are alternately witty or touching and invariably played by the strong character actors so common in the US. ER takes us out of ourselves and, like the best fiction, gives us contact with a heightened reality. I marvel at the professionalism of the writers, the skill of the sound and camera crews, the stamina of the actors. Certain episodes stand out, such as the recent one in which the electricity fails, casting the hospital into darkness. The use of torches added to the moody chiaroscuro and the sense of urgency which are features of the series as a whole. I wish British television could offer anything half as good.
You have written about George Eliot and I would hesitate to compare ER to her infinitely subtle, imaginative, complex novels. Yet the series has some of the qualities of the 19th-century novel. Both are characterised by dramatic plots, comic minor characters and keen social observation; and both are marked by the same moral seriousness. Didn't Dickens's novels first appear in serial form? If ER is sometimes sentimental, wasn't he?
America is a funny place. There is a side to it that is crass, corrupt and unfeeling-the side depicted by Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, where rich and poor live in separate worlds. But it remains in many respects the most democratic of countries. Status counts for little. Its citizens believe in the republican ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity; and the rich give much of their wealth away-to churches, to schools and, yes, to hospitals. This is the aspect of the country which finds expression in ER. It depicts men and women, black and white, working together; and it sets out quite consciously to drive home certain lessons-about health and violence, but also about fairness and respect. Its enemies are not the feckless poor but private health insurers. In the US, where broadcasting has become ghettoised, it is almost the only drama or comedy watched by blacks and whites. Blacks don't watch Friends, whites don't watch Moesha, but both tune in to ER.
To me the interesting question is not whether ER is art-obviously it is-but how it comes to be art of such an old-fashioned kind. We are told that we live in post-modern times. Old polarities are slipping away. We are more individualistic, more ironic. We no longer produce things; we produce information. The real has given way to the simulated; grand narrative to little stories. ER, though, does not fit this scheme and its appeal shows that times have not changed so much as is sometimes claimed. I admit that its "private" stories could only be written today. Its leading characters are all somewhat dysfunctional (none are in happy relationships). Yet they labour together in the industrial city of Chicago, united by an old-fashioned work ethic. They redeem themselves in their work; their labour takes the rather retro form of saving lives. The emergency room is where all the divisions of American society are overcome. Doubtless Dr Anspaugh takes home rather more than Nurse Hathaway, but we aren't reminded of that. When they walk through those swing doors, it is: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Socialist artists-Fernand Leger, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera-would have understood ER.
Of course art does not have to serve progressive causes. But it adds to its power when it does. George Eliot's novels condemn the subjection of women and Jews, they take aim at religious cant, moral hypocrisy and commercial greed. In the end, Middlemarch and ER move us in much the same way.
Yours,
Ben Rogers
2nd July 1999
Dear Ben,
Your Wednesday nights sound a lot like mine. I share that same disbelieving rapture that television could ever get this good. For an hour a week County General emergency room becomes the shape and colour of my life. The proof of its greatness: when George Clooney/Doug Ross left (and he did it slowly, badly, like most of us do) I minded terribly for a moment-but soon plunged back into the other stories and the other lives. Now I wouldn't have him back, even if he asked nicely.
But is ER art? Well, no. It is a magnificent achievement, but it does not do the specific and important work of art. Unlike George Eliot's novels, which you cite as a paradigm, ER neither extends nor explores the limits of its own genre. When Eliot broke with tradition and put the "working day world" into her novels, she was doing something revolutionary. Until the opening scene of her first full-length fiction, Adam Bede (1859), the English novel had placed itself among the leisured classes, or at least among those whose labour took place outside the text.
But when the producers of ER chose to set their drama in the workplace, they were staying firmly within the parameters set by Steven Bochco in the mid-1980s with Hill Street Blues and LA Law. With good reason: the setting of the office or police station provides a geographically stable, socially stratified setting from which storylines can be compactly generated. And using an accident and emergency setting is hardly breaking new ground.
You say that ER is "old-fashioned art" and that its emphasis on shared endeavour and grand narrative represents a heroic rebuttal of post-modernism, with its small, whiny stories (were you thinking of Ally McBeal?). But ER places itself entirely in relation to other television narratives, and spends too much time playing post-modern games. Take that Tarantino episode. The allusions to Reservoir Dogs (itself generated from a web of references to other movies) undercut what little relationship ER had with social reality. The sight of Dr Lewis and Nurse Hathaway in wraparound shades broke a trust in the story-telling process which took several episodes to repair.
I agree that ER is old-fashioned, but only because it can't get enough of that 1980s obsession, "intertextuality." George Clooney and Noah Wyle (Drs Ross and Carter) turned up in an episode of Friends playing, yes, heart-throb hospital doctors. One Christmas episode of ER had Rosemary Clooney, star of the 1950s film musical White Christmas, as a batty patient wandering the corridors, singing. You are expected to know that in real life she is George's aunt. So much, incidentally, for your point about ER's skilful use of American character actors. I suspect the reason why the cameo artists seem so compelling is that their faces are pretty much unknown to us. Casualty is always spoiled for me because so many of the "patients" have instantly recoverable acting CVs. It is hard to take someone seriously as a wife-beating vicar when you remember him from a 1972 episode of Dr Who.
I agree that if Dickens were around today he would probably be writing television drama. As you say, ER is stuffed with the kinds of caricatures he liked. Kerry Weaver's physical and verbal tics-the unexplained crutch, the management-speak-is a prime example. On the rare occasions that she is granted a major storyline, it serves only to reduce her humanity further. When she found a promising management consultant boyfriend, he turned out to be after her departmental budget. She was left seeming more limpy and jargony than ever before.
But Dickens, like the directors of ER, was not producing art. George Eliot, by contrast, was-and the proof lies in the absence of stereotypes in her work. Even her minor characters have lives which begin before the novel's opening page and continue long after it is over. Her contemporary readers talked about her characters as if they really existed, fretting about whether Dorothea wouldn't have been happier with Lydgate, or how Hetty Sorrel would survive the long journey to Australia.
By contrast, when any of the characters in ER are taken out of context, they crumble into dust. Remember the episode when Peter Benton went to the deep south to work as a GP? Or what about the two hours we were forced to watch Mark Greene return to his home town and look after his ailing mother? I turned off. I suspect thousands of others did as well. And if it is a sign of Eliot's artistry that she didn't create caricatures, then nor did she create idealisations. She demanded that people look like people, with potato heads, bad skins and odd sniffs. You say that the main characters have an "imperfect beauty." But I can't see much that is imperfect about them. They look like a team of gods and goddesses descended from the sky, who have decided for some reason to don surgical gloves. True, Mark Greene has the kind of looks which in the grammar of television drama signify "dork, awkward with women." But put him in a real workplace and he would be fighting them off. And did you know that Julianna Margulies, who plays Carol Hathaway, was almost dropped after the pilot because she wasn't pretty enough? ER scarcely pushes back the boundaries of what television drama demands aesthetically of its main players.
Art is often ugly, usually difficult, sometimes boring. It doesn't care whether it pleases, and indeed it would rather not. It refuses to give up its meaning without a fight, and insists that we work hard to make some sense of what is going on. ER is brilliant television, but it doesn't have the power to make up the world in a new way. I love it, but it isn't art.
Yours,
Kathryn Hughes
3rd July 1999
Dear Kathryn,
You say that I offer George Eliot as a paradigm. Nothing could be further from the case. You evidently see her as such, which is why you can't bring yourself to acknowledge ER's claim to art. But to do so is to take a very narrow-even, I am afraid, stuffy-view of art.
Art comes in many forms. Sometimes it is a collective endeavour (the Gothic cathedrals), sometimes intensely individual (Gaudi's Sagrada Familia). Sometimes it is autobiographical (late Picasso), sometimes impersonal (cubist Picasso). It can be extremely literal (Hogarth) or very abstract (Mondrian). It can appeal to a small group (Schoenberg) or a whole people (Greek tragedy, Elizabethan drama). You say art is "often difficult, sometimes boring." But it is, just as often, easy (Oscar Wilde's plays), and sometimes thrilling-ER. When you refer to "the specific and important work" art does, I hear echoes of all those guardians of high art, sure on a priori grounds that art cannot be too popular and cannot exist in a modern medium.
You are forcing "art" into a narrow mould, implying that it needs to "break with tradition" or at least "explore and extend the limits of its own boundaries." But you underestimate the role tradition, convention and genre play in art. From the outside, all art forms look generic and to an extent they are. It takes an insider to recognise the changes or, more often, elaborations that an artist has effected upon a tradition. You complain that when the producers of ER chose to set their drama in the workplace, they were staying firmly within the parameters set by earlier television dramas. So what? Was Shakespeare less of a poet because he "stayed firmly within the parameters" of the sonnet?
One thing I admire about ER is precisely that it knows its limits and rejoices in them. It is a disciplined and crafted working-up of a genre. Most episodes are "formulaic": the same corridors shot from the same angles, the ceaseless emergencies, the limited cast of characters. There are elements you will find in any hospital drama; they are just done much better. I agree with you that the characters-indeed programmes-collapse when they stray any distance from the hospital. But what does this demonstrate? Only that ER's makers excel in one form and fail in others. Few artists are masters of all genres, even in their own medium; many work within narrow limits. At its best, which is most of the time, ER displays a masterly control of the conventions it uses.
In any case, it seems to me incontrovertible that ER does "extend" and "explore" its own genre. Look at its lead characters. They come in as types, as they tend to in any narrative, lugging a few crude predicates: Corday the troubled English woman; Benton the angry, driven African-American; Carter the dissatisfied Wasp. Unlike most television drama, however, in time these labels fall aside to reveal real people. And because it is a series, they are given time to breathe. They aren't driven by plot or burdened with jokes or subject to the ceaseless histrionics or cod urgency of Casualty. So much British television drama and comedy depends on crude "character" played for laughs or for tears. Its protagonists have no depth. But take the relationship between Carter and Lucy Knight. It has been allowed to develop extremely slowly, in the way relationships do. Most of the time their "friendship" is just there-we see it evolve and grow, without being able to say exactly how it happened. That takes skill and self-control. Or take Kerry Weaver. You see her as all "tics" and mannerisms. But in the last part of the last series, she has been allowed to be there, just existing. That is almost entirely new in television drama. You say that Eliot's readers talked about her people as if they really existed. It seems to me that ER's characters have just this "real" quality.
I don't think that ER is "obsessed with post-modern games"; the intertextual references are few and far between. Nor does it matter that its character actors crop up elsewhere. That is what character actors have always done. More importantly, you fail to recognise quite how good, at a formal level, ER is. The speed at which the episodes move is breathtaking and innovative (don't forget, they are making 22 episodes a year). And over the course of a series there is a careful manipulating of mood. If you watch two episodes together, they tend to be surprisingly different in pace and construction. At the same time, it is not all "style, no content." On the contrary, as I have said, the series is animated by an almost socialist realist ethic. It has the buzz and energy of an artistic breakthrough-which is what it is.
Don't worry about whether George Eliot or FR Leavis would have recognised ER as art. Art has to meet certain standards-it has to be technically expert, relatively self-aware, enduring in its appeal. But it does not have to have all the qualities you think it requires.
Yours,
Ben
PS: The idea that Dickens was not a serious artist is absurd. You were joking, I presume?
4th July 1999
Dear Ben,
You've got me wrong. I can't abide the sniffy attitude which suggests that just because something is popular or pleasurable it must be second-rate. As someone who started her working life on the fashion pages of a glossy magazine, I know what it feels like to be the casualty of other peoples' intellectual insecurity. Women, I recall, were the worst offenders.
So I was delighted when in the early 1980s the cultural studies revolution burst out from a few progressive university departments and transformed the way in which we were allowed to think about popular culture. At last it was fine to admit to liking Star Trek and the RSC, the Three Degrees and Mozart, Agatha Christie and Muriel Spark. I no longer had to pretend to be only half of myself.
But now, like most insurrectionaries, I wonder if the revolution hasn't gone too far. I gave up glossy magazines long ago, re-trained, and now teach university students. The 20 year olds whom I meet in the seminar room have received their entire education in the post-modern age. They had to read bits of the re-configured canon at GCSE and A-Level, but they have never known that pang of conscience which urges them to try difficult texts just for the sake of it. I am shocked by how little discomfort they are able to bear. I long gave up expecting all but the very keenest (often mature) students to get through Middlemarch. Mostly they watch it on video and hope for the best. When it comes to making course choices, I am besieged for advice about which involves the least reading.
Occasionally, though, something wonderful happens. One year a group of students and I were shackled together for six weeks with The Waste Land. At the first seminar there were sulks and rages. The whole thing was ridiculous, they said, pure gibberish. After six weeks they were glowing with pleasure at having made some sense of one of English literature's most secretive texts. The point is that having had to work for their pleasure it allowed them to feel that they had earned and now owned their understanding.
So you see why I am edgy about elevating ER to art. Clearly I have no problem about admitting to loving it. But it bothers me that a work as comfortable, regressive even, as ER should be given the status you claim for it. For if ER is allowed to bask in this central cultural space, then what place is there for the difficult, uncomfortable or downright odd piece of work?
A few specifics. You say that the stereotypic labels soon fall away and that we are left with "real people." But it seems to me that Corday languishes in that strange never-land occupied by all British characters in American programmes. And the John Carter-Lucy Knight narrative is lifted straight from a Mills & Boon hospital romance. The increasingly heart-throbby Carter spent eight weeks being dismissive of ditzy medical student Knight, but he has now dumped his pushy saleswoman girlfriend and the way is clear for him to get together with the tender, humanitarian Lucy.
I do not, as you suggest, assume that anything that appears in a "modern medium" cannot be art. Nor do I subscribe to the view that good television begins and ends with Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett (both of whom are over-rated). There is, in fact, a US import on Channel 4 which might qualify as art. Homicide: Life on the Street is on the face of it a formulaic cop show. But it does things which ER only pretends to-it makes the everyday and the real its subject matter. Homicide once did a whole episode on what happened when the station lavatory flooded. The main characters spent their time tip-toeing on planks, trying not to gag. That, it seems to me, is taking risks. That, indeed, is art.
Yours,
Kathryn
6th July 1999
Dear Kathryn
I think the strongest case against according ER art status is simply that it is a long running, in effect endless, series. Dickens's novels were serialised, but he had conceived a middle and an end for them before he published their beginnings. Imagine any novel without its last chapters and you see how important endings are. On the other hand, this is also one of the exciting things about ER. Television drama is in its infancy, with the difficulties but also with the possibilities that implies. How do you tell a story without an end? ER shows that this can be done-through a strong house style, slowly developing characters and a skilful intertwining of storylines of different length, pace and structure. Here, the series pushes at the boundaries of its form and sets precedents. My worry is that the programme won't sustain itself at its present artistic level for ever. I hope they have the good sense to end it soon-although not quite yet.
Yours,
Ben
9th July 1999
Dear Ben,
Nineteenth-century endings are not as solid as you imagine. Dickens changed the final chapter of Great Expectations at the last minute, muffling the moral plotting of the book by letting Pip get Estella. George Eliot called endings "huddled" and hated their unlikely neatness, with all those rushed marriages, births and deaths. "Closure," as we call it now, offended Eliot's sense that art should follow life in being chancy and free. So if ER does have a claim to be art it is on the grounds of its continuous loop of narrative, which comes as close as possible to the experience of being alive. The false starts, small crescendos and fudged endings that typify its plotting are delicate and subtle. It is in this ability to show-and help us bear-the randomness of life that ER gets closest to giving us the consolation we ask from art.
Yours,
Kathryn
