Daily Dialogue — July 21, 2016
BOCK: (lurches about) What the hell’s wrong with being impotent? My God, you kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians! I’ve got a son, twenty-three. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love and despised everyone. He had a blanket contempt for the middle class, even its decencies. He detested my mother because she had petit bourgeois pride in her son the doctor. I cannot tell you how brutishly he ignored that rather good old lady. When she died, he didn’t even come to the funeral. He thought the chapel service an hypocrisy. His generation didn’t live with lies, he told me. “Everybody lives with lies,” I said. I grabbed him by his poncho, dragged him the full length of our seven-room despicably affluent middle-class apartment and flung him out. I haven’t seen him since. But do you know what he said to me as he stood there on that landing on the verge of tears. He shrieked at me: “You old fink! You can’t even get it up anymore!” That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn’t racism and the oppressed poor and the war in Vietnam. The ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus. Hah! (he lurches about, laughing rustily) My God, if there is a despised and misunderstood minority in this country, it’s us poor impotent bastards. Well, I’m impotent and proud of it! Impotence is beautiful, baby! (he raises a militant fist) Power to the Impotent! Right on, baby!
BARBARA: (smiling) Right on.
BOCK: (stares drunkenly at her) When I say impotent, I don’t mean merely limp. Disagreeable as it may be for a woman, a man may sometimes lust for other things, something less transient than an erection, some sense of permanent worth. That’s what medicine was for me, my reason for being. When I was thirty-four, Miss Drummond, I presented a paper before the annual convention of the Society of Clinical Investigation that pioneered the whole goddam field of immunology. A breakthrough! I’m in all the textbooks. I happen to be an eminent man, Miss Drummond. And you want to know something, Miss Drummond? I don’t give a goddam. When I say I’m impotent, I mean I’ve lost even my desire for work, which is a hell of a lot more primal a passion than sex. I’ve lost my raison d’etre, my purpose, the only thing I ever truly loved. It’s all rubbish anyway. Transplants, antibodies, we manufacture genes, we can produce birth ectogenetically, we can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven’t even been inoculated for polio! We have assembled the most enormous medical establishment ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever! We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddam wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes! That’s what I mean when I say impotent! You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?
— The Hospital (1971), written by Paddy Chayefsky
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Accusation. Today’s suggestion by Lois Bernard.
Trivia: Writer Paddy Chayefsky performed a number of roles on the film. Chayefsky was the writer and a producer and also narrated the film at the start. Chayefsky reportedly had full control over content and casting of the movie.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Bock transforms his own personal physical condition of impotence into an accusation about the impotence of the the medical industry which cures and heals “nothing”. A monologue not as well known as several from Network, another of Chayefsky’s masterpiece movies, but equally as powerful.
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