196 - An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru), 1989, India. Dir. Satyajit Ray.
In 1987 Satyajit Ray received France's highest civilian award, The Legion of Honor. It was given to him by then-French president Francois Mitterand.
In 2017, thirty years later, Ray's most prolific collaborator, Soumitra Chatterjee, will himself receive The Legion of Honor. It was announced on June 10 of this year.
Chatterjee starred in fourteen of Ray's films. We were first introduced to him as Apu in the third installment of The Apu Trilogy. We have now seen Chatterjee in four of Ray's films: The World of Apu (1959), Chaulata (1964), The Home and the World (1984), and now An Enemy of the People (1989).
Yes, this is an adaptation of the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play.
In the play, Dr. Stockmann discovers that the town's public baths are contaminated. The newspaper editor, Hovstad, agrees to publish this information and alert the town, which will make Dr. Stockmann a hero. However, Dr. Stockmann's brother, the town Mayor, fights him in order to protect the town's economy, which depends on the public baths.
Mayor Stockmann first succeeds in changing Hovstad's mind over fears that the newspaper's readers will turn against the paper and that it will loose subscribers. Then he sabotages a meeting that Dr. Stockmann calls, which is intended to communicate directly with the townspeople. By the end of the meeting the town has turned against Dr. Stockmann and branded him an enemy of the people.
By the end of the play, Dr. Stockmann is reduced to standing alone with his family in his assertions.
Our film follows the format of the play. Dr. Gupta discovers that the water in Chandipur is contaminated. There is the beginning of an outbreak of jaundice, or what the medical community calls infective hepatitis, along with other cases of waterborne diseases, such as typhoid and gastroenteritis. He calls the newspaper editor and asks him to print an article about it, and the editor is happy to help.
But Dr. Gupta's brother Nishith gets involved. He is the head of the municipality, and he does not want a scandal. Bhargava's temple, built ten years prior, is a popular draw, and the masses who come there should not be told that their holy water might be contaminated. They would panic. Attendance would plummet. Nishith succeeds in turning both the editor and publisher of Janavarta against Dr. Gupta, as well as sabotaging the public meeting and turning the entire town against him.
The film, however, ends on a note of hope, with Dr. Gupta's family and a few close friends committing to educate the citizens through the distribution of pamphlets and the staging of dramas in the streets. The film begins and ends on a close-up of a doctor's stethoscope on Dr. Gupta's desk.
Satyajit Ray said that he chose a play, which he had never filmed before, because he had been sidelined for a few years due to heart problems and his doctors told him he could film only indoors in the studio and not outside or on location. So he looked for something that could be easily confined to a smaller space.
He had read Ibsen in college and remembered An Enemy of the People, so he reread it and then wrote the script. Filming gave him energy, and he credited his adrenaline with bringing him back to health. He also credited the performances of his actors with turning a 45-day shoot into a 28-day shoot, as he was often satisfied with the first take and moved on without shooting safeties.
An Enemy of the People is not exactly the play that most of us think we remember. We think of it as the noble striving of a good man in the face of the irrational masses--a kind of To Kill a Mockingbird for doctors. However, Dr. Stockmann's motives were not so pure; his methods were not so practical; and his worldview was not so noble.
Dr. Stockmann wanted to publish his report in the newspaper so that he would be regarded as a hero. He was driven by pride and self-serving glory. Critics have noted that he could have also recommended the use of chlorine, a solution which would have been quick, inexpensive, and effective, and which had been known for decades by the time Ibsen wrote his play, but Dr. Stockmann chose rather to take the more controversial and public route, as if to stir up the people on purpose so that he could play the martyr.
Ibsen himself was playing the martyr. He wrote An Enemy of the People as a response to the public's reception to his previous play Ghosts (1881). He took things personally. He wrote emotionally. He felt insulted and he wanted revenge. By couching his feelings in the character of the doctor, he felt he could play the trump card of science and position himself as a righteous man. However, the dialogue Dr. Stockmann uses is not always so rational and not always so generous.
He insults the people. He demeans them. He sees himself as superior and wants others to know it. He despises the common people because they are inferior to him.
What is eugenics? Breeding people the way you breed dogs, in order to improve their characteristics to create a superior man. Dr. Stockmann explicitly uses this analogy in the play, comparing humans to dogs and preferring poodles over mongrels, preferring himself to the very public he is addressing.
The idea goes all the way back to Plato with his concept of "selective mating." Darwin's theory of natural selection gave it fuller scientific support, and it developed to its ultimate logical application in the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler.
"If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it." - George Bernard Shaw, On the Rocks, 1933.
Read that again.
Now try to imagine Shaw saying it. In his day, among his peers, it was common. Our memories have retained the good in their work and forgotten the other.
Arthur Miller contributed to our selective memory by adapting the play in the 1950s, eliminating this element.
And Satyajit Ray's film is completely devoid of any of this baggage. He presents Dr. Gupta as the hero that we all thought we remembered. Dr. Gupta has none of the arrogance, superiority, or bad manners that Dr. Stockmann does. Nor does he have contempt for the little man. Dr. Gupta simply wants to help people. There is one moment where he is proud, when he imagines that he will be seen as a hero and he smiles. But this thought does not drive him. He is driven by his work and by his commitment to saving people's lives.
As for the story itself, I have always wondered why we do not follow it to its conclusion. Ibsen and everyone who followed him in adapting the play end it with the good doctor stuck in his banished state, defeated by political intrigue, crushed by mob rule.
But if an epidemic is truly imminent, then will not the good doctor be proved correct and restored to his rank, even if grudgingly and out of necessity?
Think of Jor-El in Superman. He tells the council that the planet is about to be destroyed. They disbelieve him and force him to stand down. He agrees to do nothing, and he and wife Lara send their son Kal-El on a spaceship to escape this doom. Kal-El becomes Superman on Earth.
What if the story stopped right at the moment the council succeeds in forcing Jor-El to stop his predictions.
Jor-El is now an outcast. The End.
Really?
But the destruction of the planet does happen. And Jor-El is justified. And the council is destroyed. And Kal-El goes on to a life of service on his adopted planet.
The same thing is about to happen in An Enemy of the People!
The outbreak will happen. Masses of people will die. The doctor will be vindicated. They will be forced to call him back in a panic to stave off the attack. That would be the story. Ibsen came up short!
But enough about Ibsen. We are here to talk about Ray.
Ray does a fine job with this movie. While its theatrical origins limit its cinematic potential and render it more stagy, it is engaging and well played.
And Ray continues to keep us in awe and admiration.
* * * * *
Dr. Stockmann: . . . Well, isn't that true with all the rest of living creatures? Look at the difference between pedigree and non-pedigree stock. Look at the ordinary barn-door fowl: how much meat is there on a stingy carcass like that? And what sort of eggs does she lay? Any self-respecting crow or rook could lay one almost as big! But now take a pedigree Spanish or Japanese hen--or a good pheasant or a turkey--and then you'll see the difference. Or look at dogs--they're nearer to us human beings in a lot of ways. First, think of an ordinary mongrel--one of those filthy, ragged, plebeian curs that does nothing but run round the streets fouling the doorposts. Then put that mongrel beside a poodle with a pedigree going back through generations of famous ancestors--who's been properly reared, and brought up among soft voices and music. Do you really think the poodle's brain won't have developed quite differently from the mongrel's? You can be sure it will. It's well-bred poodle pubs like that the showman train to do the most incredible tricks--things that an ordinary mongrel could never learn, even if it stood on its head!
A Citizen: Do you want to make dogs of us?
Another: We're not animals, Doctor!
Dr. Stockmann: But bless my soul, that's exactly what you are, my friend--we're the finest animals anyone could wish for . . . though you won't find many pedigree animals even among us. Yes, there's an enormous difference between between the human poodles and the human mongrels. And the amusing thing is that Mr. Hovstad entirely agrees with me--as long as we're talking about four-legged animals!
Hovstad: As far as they're concerned . . .
Dr. Stockmann: All right. But as soon as I apply the argument to two-legged animals, then Mr. Hovstad stops short. He daren't think for himself any longer, or follow the idea to its logical conclusion. No, he turns the whole principle upside-down, and proclaims in the Herald that the barn-door fowl and the mongrel in the alley are just the finest specimens in the menagerie! But that's always the way, so long as the common man will stick in the muck, and won't work his way up to intellectual distinction.
Etc.
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