The Citadel (1938)
All art is persuasion. I have been persuaded, and now I will try and persuade you. I doubt I will succeed. (With that, I provide the required humility that facilitates my message.). You may not agree with what I say here. (More humility). You may not agree with the message of this movie. But the only reason this film persuaded me is because it’s damn good. The Citadel is about a doctor with a moral dilemma: should I heal the sick or should I make a pile of money? The question may seem shocking as presently we are under the spell of doctors -- and the shifty-eyed Antony Fauci, who tortured us during the AIDS epidemic with lethal drugs, promising us a vaccine that never materialised — is now literally running our lives. Suddenly doctors tell us whether our businesses are open or closed, whether we can see our friends, and whether or not we will simply go mad from enforced isolation. Moreover, we must assume that every public health official — all doctors and persons with a bunch of friggin’ letters after their names — are efficient — nay, brilliant — saints. Well they’re not. Robert Donat is a young doctor treating coal miners in a small town in Britain. He manages to slap a dead baby alive, and when he does so, the music swells. He says to himself “I’m a doctor.” Later he begins to explore tuberculosis in miners. But his research threatens the medical establishment and is soon shut down. He flees to London to treat rich old ladies. He finds that mink stoles for his wife, new cars, and many a golf game, can be funded — not by researching radical theories about illness in miners — but by flattering old ladies —who are not even ill — into imagining they have been cured of a disease they don’t have. When his crazy, drunken, doctor friend Ralph Richardson dies under the knife, he accuses the surgeon who operated on him of murder, and realises that he himself has become an immoral quack. Could all this happen to any one person? Donat manages to convince us that he has changed from a completely earnest man to a charlatan and back again — due to the fierce belief that fires his performance. (I had to say that because The Citadel is pure propaganda if one looks at it from a distance — and it’s because of Donat that we are pulled in.) So let’s say that we are pulled in, what does the movie have to say? Well, The Citadel goes to great lengths to assure us — at the outset (right after the credits in fact) — that it means not to be critical of doctors: “This motion picture is a story of individual characterisations and is no way intended as a reflection on the great medical profession which has done so much towards beating back those forces of nature that retard the physical process of the human race.” Right. But Donat’s words at the end contradict this, with a stinging relevance to our situation today: “Every man fighting a disease who hasn’t got his name on the register isn’t a knave or a fool” and “If we go on trying to make out that everything is right on the inside, and everything is wrong on the outside -- it will be the death of our profession.” Apparently — Louis Pasteur (remember him?), Waldemar Haffkine (bubonic plague vaccine), and Elie Metchniikov (the father of natural immunity), were -- none of them -- doctors. The message could not be clearer. The doctor is not always right. I am not a doctor. Lionel Shriver (the British novelist who shares my opinions about COVID-19) is not a doctor. Just because we are not doctors does not mean we are wrong. The public health officials we have entrusted with —not just our lives -- but much more importantly our livelihoods, have been warning us that we must (literally on pain of death) socially distance. But suddenly they are silent. We see image after image, daily, of thousands of protestors, marching neck and neck to mark the death of George Floyd. Many protesters are not practicing any sort of social distancing. What’s going on? Please don’t misunderstand me; I see the historic magnitude of their cause. George Floyd was brutally tortured and killed by evil, racist, policemen, who deserve nothing less than to be executed for his crime. And yes, I see the hope in the eyes of the young people who want change — and I want to be inspired — but I’m not sure, because I am so very old. So I wonder -- if even after all this -- will anything change at all, or will Trump be re-elected by the idiots who elected him in the first place? But I am not talking about George Floyd here. I am talking about how our lives have been ground to life-threatening halt, and we are prevented from hugging each other, prevented from getting proper medical treatment for non-COVID-19 illnesses, and prevented from being with our loved ones on their deathbeds — because, we are told, if we try and do these things, we will die or cause others to die — of COVID-19. And yet when a thousands of protestors hit the streets pressing against each other, and yelling their germs directly into each others faces, doctors and scientist are utterly, confoundingly mute. Why? Could it be that COVID-19 is a fiction? Yes, it is — just the way AIDS was. And when I first said that years ago, people wanted to kill me. ‘Are you denying that people have suffered and died of this horrible disease?’ No — but the world does not care about AIDS ‘the disease.’ The world cares only about AIDS ‘the metaphor. ‘AIDS meant one thing alone: that gay men and other perverts had to stop having sex. Whatever human suffering there was -- was dwarfed by a social message that changed all our lives, permanently, irrevocably. What does COVID-19 mean? That you must love your fellow man (the old folks, the immune compromised, the disadvantaged). If you do not care about COVID-19 then you do not care about love. This all has nothing to do with science. If it did the George Floyd protests would be shut down. But, hey its not about the facts. It is about alluring, seductive passions -- metaphors, feelings, dreams, nightmares and fantasies. I know that almost no one wants to hear this, but I’m going to say it anyway. Maybe it takes an artist to stand outside of a disease that has become a work of art. I call out COVID-19 for what it is: a giant, stunning, paralyzing fiction. At the end of The Citadel a disapproving doctor tells Robert Donat: I don’t recommend this kind of talk.” Donat replies: “Of course you don’t recommend it. It’s the truth.”
