With its final film of the semester, The General Education Film Series: Reference a Different Frame, allowed students to peer into yet another vantage point of the human experience previously fairly unexplored.
This time, we enter the harsh, fluorescent waiting room of an emergency room. “The Waiting Room” is a time elapsed illustration of one working shift in a typical urban- American emergency room.
The film presents the plight of the unemployed characters that populate the waiting room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., exposing the dysfunction of the jumbled health care system. Despite the efforts of a particularly empathetic hospital staff to provide a safety net, the overpopulated emergency room is in a constant struggle to provide timely aide to uninsured patients whose well-beings depend upon an “institution of last resort”.
The stories chronicled at Highland scope the intensity of human emotion. It is at times uplifting, reaffirming the vitality of the human spirit, while at other times it is unnerving, unveiling the helplessness and desperation at the heart of the overwhelmingly large percentage of Americans without access to care.
We meet a man, homeless, rejected by a pastor after lapsing back into substance abuse once again, a little girl with an untreated strain of strep throat whose father’s backstory becomes a testament to the tenacity and love of a father and a 20-something free-spirited couple who seek access to a procedure to remove a testicular tumor.
The doctors and nurses of Highland Hospital do not seek to just treat and discharge, but to ensure a healthcare plan for outstanding patients. In between the compelling exploration of the lives of the sick and those who love them, there are cuts to the mundane yet beautifully simplistic aspects of the waiting room; whether it be an array of magazines creating a collage of varied human interests, or the slow, methodic movement of a bag of chips departing from its receptacle in the vending machine, these moments bring the audience into the restless exhaustion of the harsh, fluorescent waiting room on the other side of the hectic and often frenzied shuffle of the emergency room.
Interspersed with these distilled pictures is the exposition of characters who will never be revealed – an elderly woman rocking as she prays on a wooden rosary, a toddler passed out on his mothers lap, shown from afar, reemphasizing the countless lives which will make their way through the automatic doors of the waiting room on a given day.
The background, never quite silent, is always buzzing with the sounds of medical machinery and the murmur of private conversations. Music is introduced with nuanced subtlety providing melodic transition without dramatizing the unfolding of the character-driven narrative.
The chaotic frustration perpetuated by a constant flux of patients is mildly relieved by the remarkable disposition of one nurse, highlighted in her realistic optimism. She is able to ease anxious and agitated people as she adds them to the endless spreadsheet – responsible for marking the degree of severity and immediacy of each case she is presented with. Her candor, while not necessarily a universal portrayal of the overworked nurse, is inspiring. She plays a pivotal role in the determined, uplifting nature of the film, which might otherwise take on a desperate, helpless tone.
The film takes on death as the staff of the hospital does with a desensitized detachment that is a necessary part of emergency department functioning but shockingly impersonal.
“The Waiting Room” offered Longwood students a reality check on the current state of affairs in the health care system and how ordinary Americans hit by financial crisis or circumstance navigate their way through the red tape to receive treatment.
