Wit (2001)
Although released within a year of one another, Wit and its predecessor in the Mike Nichols canon, What Planet Are You From?, seem worlds apart and form a boundary between Nichols’ long mid-career phase and a reassertion of the gravity of his early filmmaking. Lee Hill concurs that the move from trivial sci-fi sex farce to his HBO dramas signals “yet another major shift in his work.”1 The earlier comedy was initiated for the cinematic screen as a star vehicle for Garry Shandling. The later drama, which Caryn James in her review in the New York Times called “a dynamic addition to [Nichols’] ever-fresh career,”2 began life on the stage and eventually, when it reached Broadway, won its playwright Margaret Edson the 1999 Pulitzer for Drama, as well as numerous other prizes. The plot of Wit is exceedingly faithful to Edson’s play; the only significant excisions are some of the more static exegeses of Donne’s poetry. While a teacher by vocation, Edson is not, as one might reasonably assume, a professor of literature presenting Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson in the film) as a kind of avatar. Edson’s insight into the world of medicine about which she writes results from when she worked in an AIDS and cancer research hospital; she has taught various levels of grade school as well as kindergarten, undoubtedly a source of her appreciation for the timeless wisdom she gleans from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic early-childhood picture book, The Runaway Bunny (1942).
When Colin Callendar of HBO approached Edson with his desire to adapt the play for television, she worried that the filmmakers “‘would have to jazz it up, add different themes and different places and a car crash.’”3 But she hadn’t taken into account the possibilities inherent within “television’s intimacy, [which] creates such a raw, private encounter with Vivian that we seem to be peering into a soul as embattled as its body.”4 When Callendar recruited Thompson, and she in turn recruited Nichols, who had directed her in Primary Colors, Edson began to breathe easier. So, it seems, did Nichols: “‘There was no opening weekend to worry about, nothing else to worry about except the piece itself.”5 David Thomson minces no words in claiming that Wit “made so many of [Nichols’] recent movies look fussy and decorative. Wit trusted the aching iron of its subject and the steel of its players. I think it is the best work he has ever done.”6 Wit initiated an important association for Nichols with HBO, during which he adapted two late-twentieth century stage masterpieces of decidedly different scale, one a chamber drama, the other, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, nothing short of a multi-generational epic. While What Planet is, above all, silly, Wit and Angels in America deal quite literally with matters of life and death. This seeming dichotomy of tonal and thematic approach is in fact the Nichols way. While Nichols would make an enormous amount of money mounting the very silly 2005 Broadway production of Spamalot, which continues to tour around the world, he has also dedicated himself to drama of the greatest gravity. The same year he released Wit on HBO, he was reviving Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Other Broadway revivals include Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl in 2008, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 2012, and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in 2013. If Nichols’ 2000 sci-fi romantic comedy hybrid and his 2001 death-and-dignity drama have anything at all in common, then, it is because they reflect the stylistically eclectic but thematically consistent work of their director. Both What Planet and Wit use the motif of educational training as a metaphor for the liberating potential of reified anxiety.
Dr. Vivian Bearing (Thompson) is a teacher of 17th century Metaphysical Poetry, specializing in the work of John Donne. As the film opens, she is surrendering herself into the hands of another teacher, Dr. Harvey Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd), who runs a cancer research unit. John Leonard calls him “amiably remote, a tourist of suffering—patriarchy’s smiling face.”7 Both Vivian and Kelekian are eminences in their respective fields, driven almost exclusively by the desire to command “knowledge.” In Wit, knowledge is so highly prized that it objectifies all in its path, making Vivian and Kelekian stringent but one-dimensional mentors. Each will sacrifice the individual soul in front of him or her for the abstracted object; Vivian will humiliate students uncommitted to her scholarly project, while Kelekian will conveniently ignore the agony of his research subject for the “good” of what he can learn about her pain for future treatment protocols. Kelekian, a doctor of medicine, cares more for data than his patients; Vivian, a doctor of philosophy, cares more for words and their poetic application than she does for the individuals entrusted to her instruction. Each is in a profoundly humanizing field of endeavor, yet each has missed the forest for the compelling vision of this or that isolated tree.
Two secondary characters bear witness to these single-minded servants of knowledge. One, Dr. Jason Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward) is in the unique position of having studied with each. The other, Susie Monahan (Audra McDonald), is the only one of the narrative’s four central characters not holding the terminal degree in her particular discipline. Edson’s play identifies her as having earned the credential of R. N., the baseline health-care qualification of Registered Nurse, as well as the B. S. N., the liberal arts undergraduate degree in the field. Jason is Kelekian’s star pupil, already thinking out beyond the bounds of his current appointment to when he will have his own lab, his own research projects. He typifies his mentors’ application of knowledge—not only Kelekian’s, but also Vivian’s—in that he is an exceptional academic performer with tunnel vision. He lacks a sense of what medicine and literature are actually for. Each seems to him a purely intellectual challenge, a “puzzle,” in which, as he describes it to Susie, “The puzzle takes over. You’re not even trying to solve it anymore.” Neither literature nor medicine originates in the vacuum of pure abstraction, however. Each is an art meant to bring order to human dilemma. Each is meant to deepen our humanity, not marginalize it.
The physical metamorphosis Dr. Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) must undergo in her battles with cancer, with experimental treatment for cancer, and with the men conducting the experimental research on her body moves her from the rarefied, cap-and-gown world of university life to the ballcap-and-gown humbling of hospitalized weakness. What matters as much to Thompson and Nichols, who co-adapted Margaret Edson’s stage play Wit for HBO, is a spiritual transformation, in which a woman isolated by her superior intellect finally sees the dangers of living among abstractions, as well as the value of “kindness.”
In this sense the hero of Wit is its “lowliest” character in terms of credentials and qualifications but whose quotient of humanity far exceeds any of her professional or intellectual superiors. Susie ministers to Vivian when knowledge fails. Jason illustrates to Vivian what she has failed to teach him when he was on her roster in college, because she has first failed to learn it herself. Susie helps Vivian find the dimension she’s been missing in Donne’s poetry, what Vivian’s own brilliant mentor, E. M. Ashford (Eileen Atkins), calls “truth,” confounding Vivian by telling her that the term paper she’s been laboring over is “not the point.” The reified striving and the objectification of all knowledge by Vivian and Kelekian and their talented pupil Jason is put into the balance against Susie’s competent compassion and found wanting. “Now is not the time for verbal swordplay,” Vivian concludes, commencing her slide towards death. “Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.”
* * *
Wit is, without question, the simplest of Mike Nichols’ twenty films. A long, one-act drama on the stage, it has a similar, virtuosic chamber intensity on the screen. Emma Thompson, as Dr. Vivian Bearing, addresses the audience just as Kathleen Chalfant had in creating the role on Broadway. The narrative is thus a kind of “Last Lecture,” which Nichols and Edson accentuate by having Vivian, desperately receding into her own head for refuge from the twinned tortures of toxic therapies and even more toxic doctors, lecture a hall of students in hospital gown. The lecture is actually an inquiry: Vivian remains a student until the last, and only in the clarifying simplicity of her intimacy with onrushing death does she finally learn the wisdom that Donne (and her mentor, Professor Ashford) have long offered her.
Her cancer aside, Vivian and her physicians (Dr. Harvey Kelekian and his most able current research fellow, Jason Posner) all suffer from the same disease: commodification. The scientists are a classic case of scientific alienation: in their pursuit of therapeutic solutions, they have inverted the objectives of medicine. Ideally, medicine is an art meant to minister to human need; in Dr. Kelekian’s practice, medicine has become an end in itself, and the patients the means to that end. Kelekian’s greatest praise (“Excellent”) is reserved for those stouthearted patients like Vivian courageous and “tough” enough to undergo the rigors of his indicated regimen at “full throttle.” There is an unspoken understanding to their relationship: neither Kelekian nor the patient expects the outcome to be bright, but it may constitute “a significant contribution to our knowledge.” The opening images of the film offer the close-up shot/reverse shot intensity of an Ingmar Bergman existential conversation, as Vivian and Kelekian parry language to negotiate the power dynamic of their brief future relationship. His condescension as a scientist never wavers, but when she draws a parallel to her own condescension towards the inadequacies of students, the two eminent intellects briefly but unmistakably meet on something like common ground. In the subsequent humiliation to which she is assigned as an objectified specimen during the clinical “Grand Rounds” of the research fellows, she retains this dual relationship to Kelekian: a piece of cancerous meat to be palpated and quantified, but also the rare person who shares his overwhelming frustration of living among one’s intellectual inferiors. Understandably, this is no basis for meaningful bonding. They admire each other, distantly, as disciples of “knowledge” in its distinct forms, but Kelekian also appreciates her, abstractly, as a patient yielding maximum data. As his protégé Jason plaintively observes, “I wish they could all get through it at full throttle. Then we could really have some data.”
The contours of Vivian’s reification are subtler than that of the scientists. After all, she is a distinguished humanities professor, and may thus be expected to have a more sophisticated grasp of the human condition than a scientist addicted to the minutiae of research. Yet Vivian’s cold prickliness (as portrayed by Thompson using her precise, nasal elocution to savage the technicians at the hospital as she’d once skewered her students) soon reveals an intensely isolated person, one who has taken her cues from her father (Harold Pinter), who by his own admission hadn’t suffered well fools and their boring after-dinner conversation. In the stage play, one actor plays both Kelekian and Vivian’s father, conflating detached, patriarchal authority8 (Nichols separates their casting to eliminate cinematic confusion, but imperious patriarchy attaches to both roles). Words, and their artful arrangement in literary form, become in the Bearing household a walled defense, or the “verbal swordplay,” of “wit.” The title of the film bears witness to the ambiguous complexity of this concept: Vivian has used “wit” as an island from which to gaze impassively at the world and at herself, intent only upon the meritocracy of knowledge. Jason’s admiration for her, as he attests to Susie, is that “she was a great scholar. Wrote tons of books, articles, was the head of everything.” He concludes, “Enzyme Kinetics was more poetic than Bearing’s class.” Of all the indignities Vivian is made to suffer by her illness and its aggressive experimental treatment, this must surely be the most painful of all: Jason was an excellent student who learned nothing, because, as Vivian comes to understand, she herself lacked the humanizing perspective within which to impart Donne’s true “wit,” what Professor Ashford calls “truth.” (Her professor may have felt as frustrated with Vivian as Vivian feels with Jason—maybe more so, since Jason makes no pretense to being an expert on the Metaphysical Poets.) Vivian’s humbling insight as she dies is that her career as a scholar and teacher has been, until its final moments, lost in empty striving.
For all her contempt for Jason (reflexive once she knows he was once a student of hers, then grounded in the unfeeling ineptitude of his bedside manner), what Vivian comes to recognize is that they have much in common. Her introduction, via flashback, of her own failed relationships with students comes after an exchange in which she tentatively seeks empathy from one of her doctors. Kelekian, she has long since determined, is a lost cause, far too full of himself and his research to understand the cruelty of his persistent challenge to keep going “full throttle.” Having just completed the ideal specifications for treatment, the eight “full doses,” she announces, “I have broken the record. […] Kelekian and Jason are simply delighted. I think they see celebrity status for themselves” when they publish the results her life and death represent. Her reified anxiety as a commodity expresses itself most eloquently in the reduced realization of what her “significant contribution to knowledge” will be: “I flatter myself. The article will not be about me; it will be about my ovaries. It will be about my peritoneal cavity, which, despite their best intentions, is now crawling with cancer. What we have come to think of as me is, in fact, just the specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paper that bears the little black marks.” Her physicians have failed to see her in much the same way as she has failed to see her students, or, for that matter, the “truth” in John Donne’s “wit” as expressed in something as otherwise pedantic as the preference for a comma over a semi-colon (her professor’s strident distinction in Vivian’s flashback to studying with Ashford).
Having despaired of invoking Kelekian’s humanity, Vivian makes a tentative inquiry into Jason’s. He has just condescended to Vivian yet again, when she inquires about the current function of her kidneys. Admitting to “simplifying” the concepts so she can grasp them, he admits he’s “supposed” to do so: “There’s a whole course on it in med school. It’s required. Colossal waste of time for researchers.” Implied in this last aside is an entire philosophy of the practice of medicine, one that so entirely objectifies the patient as a commodity to be bartered with death for knowledge that he can’t see the irony in his confessing his perspective to one of the patients as he turns her into data. Nonetheless, she pursues her line of inquiry, asking him to explain his vocational impulses, and he makes what in any context is an extraordinary declarative utterance: “Cancer’s the only thing I ever wanted.” His sheer ignorance of the connotative power of words is absolute: there are no circumstances under which such a syntactical arrangement should be constructed. The very best interpretation one may allow is that he invites the challenge of this physiological assault on the species, because only knowledge can lead to a cure. Faced with a confrontation with his words, Jason would surely align himself with this interpretation. But in his level of alienated abstraction from the realities of his life amidst epic human suffering, he blunders on, speaking with undisguised admiration for the insidious, adversarial intelligence of “the malignant neoplasia.” Her cancer, and that of the other patients in Kelekian’s lab, is about Jason, in his battle of wit and wills with malignancy. Searching for a word adequate to his admiration for cancer, he’s momentarily at a loss, and Vivian’s sardonic suggestion is “awesome.” He accepts it gratefully and without noticing her invitation to self-knowledge. He tells her of his dream of running his own lab, “If I can survive this … fellowship.” Beyond the ironies of his use of the word “survive” in the presence of Vivian, who is being made with every passing hour to understand that she will not survive, Wit, through Jason’s and Vivian’s very distinctly, profoundly alienated characters, shows us the ironies of “fellowship”: the word connotes collegiality, a union—what Vivian sarcastically refers to in the next line as “The part with the human beings.” Jason, still tone-deaf to everything but what harmonizes with the song of himself, simply accepts what she has pejoratively inserted, saying, “Everybody’s got to go through it. All the great researchers.”
Vivian has already quoted to us, at the beginning of this scene, from a 1609 poem of Donne: “This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint/My pilgrimages last mile”; she has begun to reveal to us, beneath the cool, clinical scholarly distance of the relationship she has maintained with the world, the terror of a soul at the brink of its mortality. To haughty, non-ironic Jason, she poses this question: “And what do you say when a patient is … apprehensive … frightened?” He can only see himself reflected in the question, and so he does not make the patient-centered response, “Of what?” to locate the source of the patient’s emotional distress. Instead, Jason’s response to her question is the question, “Of who?” It seems he is finally prepared to understand the insult she’s been trying to deliver all along, inferring from her question that patients might be scared of him and his ghoulish treatments. “I just …” she begins, then, knowing that he has already failed her test, relents: “Never mind,” she says, a cue indicated in his clinical pathology for patient disorientation. Unable or unwilling to recognize her quite-lucid distress signals, he instead interprets them as onset dementia. He cannot be taught any more than Kelekian, and at this late stage she lacks the stomach it would take to overcome his objectifying density.
When Jason leaves (out of sight of the patient, he begins combing his hair, a monster of youthful narcissism), she’s left alone with us, her mute witnesses to their joint failure, teacher and pupil. “So,” she begins. “The young doctor, like the senior scholar, prefers research to humanity. At the same time the senior scholar, in her pathetic state as a simpering victim, wishes the young doctor would take more interest in personal contact. Now I suppose we shall see how the senior scholar ruthlessly denied her simpering students the touch of human kindness she now seeks.” What duly ensues are flashbacks to her unfeeling cruelty and intolerance as a professor whose first and only duty is to reverence for her subject matter, not those subjected to her instruction. With her own students, Vivian assumes a bullying status: “I’ll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with football.”
Though Nichols and Thompson substantially elide Edson’s classroom flashback, with its long dialogue about Donne’s “complicated” use of “wit,” the most significant subtraction from Edson’s stage play in the completed film is a reference Vivian makes about Susie, shortly after the academic flashbacks are over, but very much in the same key of objectifying dismissal. The flashbacks have, notably, left the professional connoisseur of language short of an adequate alibi: “I don’t know. I feel so much—what is the word? I look back, I see these scenes, and I …” she trails off, knowing full well her failure of humanity in her humanities classroom. Then she gets Susie to come to her room. She finds, after all, that what she needs is company, an ear to listen, and soon she is making unprecedented confessions to her compassionate nurse, through tears: “I can’t figure things out,” and “I don’t feel sure of myself anymore.” Susie listens; she pets Vivian’s arm; she proffers first a tissue, then a popsicle. (While Susie is fetching the popsicle, Vivian provides us with a therapeutic rationale for its useful physiological effects for her system, self-conscious about the child-like display of yielding to the simple pleasures of a frozen novelty.) As the two women subsequently share the popsicle, Susie addresses what the doctors have not: Vivian’s small measure of sovereign control over her own death. “I wanted to present both choices,” she tells Vivian, “before Kelekian and Jason talk to you.” Vivian has already prided herself earlier in the conversation about her ability to “read between the lines” of the doctors’ pep talks to the dire truth of her condition. Now she does the same with Susie, acknowledging Susie’s unspoken antagonism to the doctors’ desire to prolong their patients’ lives. Susie is too professional to say it directly, but we, too, can read between the lines to understand Susie’s disapproval of her superiors’ commodification of illness: “[T]hey like to save lives,” she begins diplomatically, but immediately reveals her horror at their mixed motives: “So anything’s okay, as long as life continues.” “Life” is the linguistic abstraction the lab has adopted to keep the patient’s misery at bay. Susie’s interpretation grows darker still: “But they always … want to know more things.” Rallying to this default of her own, Vivian says, as if in the doctors’ defense, “I always want to know more things. I’m a scholar.” Susie, exquisitely attuned to her patients, respectfully backs away from the line of critique she has initiated; she interprets the first-person vigor of Vivian’s response as a desire to cling to what still remains of her diminishing, anguished life. She circles back to her original line of inquiry: Vivian’s empowerment in her own end-of-life decision. Vivian adamantly expresses her desire to be DNR, “no-code,” free to die when her body is ready, and Susie carefully reviews the choices with her several more times; the repetition would seem patronizing were it not for the utter gravity of what they are discussing. Susie collects their popsicle sticks and turns to go, but Vivian can’t help herself: “Susie? You’re still going to take care of me, aren’t you?” Susie responds warmly, “‘Course I am. Don’t you worry, sweetheart.”
When Susie exits, we encounter the single largest break Nichols and Thompson’s adapted screenplay makes with Edson’s original stage script. The alteration is largest not because it elides the greatest volume of original material, but because it is the one most central to the interpretation of Vivian Bearing’s evolution as a character. When she is alone again, Vivian instantly sets to a meta-reflective recasting of her self-betraying performance of weakness: “Well, that certainly was a maudlin display. Popsicles? ‘Sweetheart?’ I can’t believe my life has become so corny.” Her last lines exchanged with Susie—indeed, the entire scene, the longest and warmest depiction of human intimacy in the film, has been self-betraying in two very different ways: in Vivian’s own mind, she has treacherously betrayed her commitment to the absolute independence of her personhood; but to Susie and us, she has revealed her vulnerability, the humanity so long held in check by an abstract devotion to language and idea. In Edson’s stage version, she goes on to explain this breakdown in “tone” as a product of simple minds: “my brain is dulling, and poor Susie’s was never very sharp to begin with.”9 Coming as late as it does, with only a fifth of the play remaining, the condescension is particularly awkward and unsympathetic. It suggests Vivian remains unreconstructed in her defensive isolation until the final vision, before her death, of her beloved Professor Ashford cradling her. But in fact Nichols’ film version, by leaving this demeaning slur out, renders Vivian as a more convincingly gradual learner, moving from the extreme of her painfully arch treatment of her students (including Jason, with whom we are at times so exasperated that we are tempted to believe he deserves it) to allowances for human imperfection, her own and others.’ Removing the insult while retaining her self-consciousness of this chink she has displayed in her armor raises the possibility of her character beginning to recognize the crucial role Susie has by this point come to play in Vivian’s denouement. Her monologue grudgingly indicates as much; the screenplay eliminates the slur on Susie’s intellect but keeps the spirit of the speech as a whole, which moves from self-mockery of her “maudlin” turn to a dismissal of her life’s work as a source of comfort and finally, on to her call for “kindness.”
Vivian’s conclusion to her “last lecture” comes well before the film’s conclusion. After the call for “kindness,” she condemns the cult of intellect, which includes not only herself but also Kelekian and Jason, all of whom have privileged “knowledge” above the human person. “I thought being extremely smart would take care of it,” she confides. “But I see that I have been found out.” Now, in her concluding address to us, we find her, in close-up, curled against the pain wracking her insides and finally, fatally, at a loss for words. The best she can do is a final analogy, not to help us understand the pain, but to help us understand her failure to surmount it through knowledge: “I’m like a student and this is the final exam and I don’t know what to put down because I don’t understand the question and I’m running out of time.” Knowing what we know of Vivian Bearing’s life, this can’t be a familiar experience for her. What it indicates is her default resistance to grasping the “truth” that Professor Ashford had offered to her long ago, in the conference about Vivian’s meticulous but somehow still careless term paper, which ought to be “ultimately about overcoming,” in Professor Ashford’s words, “the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.” As it turns out, there were other human barriers Vivian failed to negotiate as well, creating her insuperable pedantry. As she prepares to cross Donne’s barrier between her life and what comes after, the other barrier—the one that has kept other people at bay—also crumbles; she is prepared, however “maudlin” she finds it, to surrender herself into the tender hands of Susie, who doesn’t know what “soporific” means, and who doesn’t need to in order to minister to Vivian.
Furnished her first sustaining dose of morphine, Vivian is able to laugh at Susie’s ignorance of the word Vivian’s father had taught her at five. Susie, finally getting the joke, responds in good-natured self-deprecation: “Well, that was pretty dumb,” but Vivian, significantly, does not pile on with a sardonic aside, as she doubtless once would have done, instead distinguishing “funny” from “dumb.” The moment is an extraordinarily apt evocation of Vivian’s character, mid-evolution: still pedantic in her distinctions between words, but in pursuit of what small measure of tenderness she can offer in return to her only friend in the world. Susie, ever the cancer-ward politician, as she must be in negotiating the ego air-space around men like Kelekian and Jason, allows that it is funny, “in a dumb sort of way. I never would have gotten it. I’m glad you explained it.” The last words of Vivian’s life spoken in full coherence are simply a reminder, to Susie and to herself, “I’m a teacher.” But the claim may never have been more fully, redemptively true than in this final lucid moment before the morphine and death overwhelm her. She has refused the bait of Susie’s error; she has insisted, in a teaching moment, that Susie laugh with her—rather than settling for sarcasm, in which wit laughs alone. Vivian has never seemed so happy or so kind as in this moment, precisely because she does not—cannot any longer—think of her nurse as “poor Susie.”
Nichols’ use of camera movement, music, and editing in this last moment of Vivian’s conscious life is in poetic contrast to his use of film language earlier in Vivian’s ordeal. The film, opens, for instance, with the discordant stridency of scraped strings and, as the titles play, a disorienting, soft-focus view of a cityscape (we soon learn it is the view from the office window behind Kelekian’s desk). The camera does not move in this opening scene; rather, Kelekian in close-up, hard focus suddenly invades the soft-focus frame. He literally gets in Vivian’s face, threatening and cajoling her to submit to the will of his experimental regimen. Nichols and editor John Bloom render this scene as a remorseless series of close-up shot/reverse shots, crisply corresponding to the “verbal swordplay” of these two intellects, but when she signs the “Informed Consent,” it feels like a capitulation. Nonetheless, the solitary close-ups underscore the essential alienation each demands in human encounter. In the closing of Vivian’s conscious life, Vivian and Susie are mostly rendered in intimate two-shots that underscore a newfound communion. And as they share a cleansing laugh (again, one suspects this sort of friendly shared laughter is an unfamiliar but suddenly welcome experience for Vivian), the camera tracks slowly, deferentially out of the room. Vivian’s breathing slows towards unconsciousness, and on the soundtrack, the earlier, stringed tension of the film has dissolved in a gentler, fuller orchestration, with strings that no longer grate as in the opening of the film but sustain themselves alongside the camera’s recessional flow. Susie closes Vivian’s curtain.
Jason enters the film (and Vivian’s room) twice more after Vivian has “departed” as his sparring partner. The first time, he’s with Susie. He seems much more at ease now that Vivian’s psychological state matches his emotional interest in that state. The near-actionable abuses of his earlier pelvic exam have been replaced by a cheerful recording of her continued disintegration: “Let’s up the hydration,” he says to Susie. “She won’t be drinking anymore.” Susie insists on continuing to address Vivian directly, though Jason actually mocks her for it. (If the incident still to come with Professor Ashford should be understood as a morphine dream, then it is accurate to understand Vivian’s state as Susie does, rather than as Jason does, as that of a person whose mind remains alive. In any case, as Susie reminds him, “It’s just nice to do.”) Susie and Jason talk about Vivian and Donne, Jason typically showing off, bragging about an idea from one of the papers he wrote for class. The point of the scene is a referendum on how poorly Vivian has taught Jason Donne’s work. Jason praises Donne’s “complexity” for its own sake, for “the complications of the puzzle.” When Susie asks if Jason believes in what he has termed “the meaning of life garbage,” he can’t resist another dig: “What do they teach you in nursing school?” It’s condescension worthy of his one-time literature professor. Susie is too embarrassed by her sentimentality to tell Jason why she lingers when he leaves: she wants to rub lotion into Vivian’s skin, unwilling to see Vivian as anything less than a person long after she is nothing but pure, inarticulate specimen for research.
We have encountered a series of “lasts” already in Wit’s final scenes: Vivian’s last monologue delivered to us as she lectures on Donne and death; Vivian’s last conscious exchange (her final teaching moment with Susie). In the scene in which E. M. Ashford makes her visitation, we are offered something like the surreal strangeness of Yossarian’s post-knifing hospitalization in Catch-22 or Suzanne Vale’s post-overdose hallucination of Nancy Reagan in the Hall of Overdosed Stars in Postcards from the Edge: the idyll with Professor Ashford is Vivian’s final coming-to-terms with a reality long resisted. Whether or not her professor’s appearance is literal or an unconscious conjuring,10 Professor Ashford continues to offer to Vivian what she has always offered, the simplicity of truth within the complexity of the “puzzle.” A trace of the mentor-pedant persists in Vivian’s comical projection of Professor Ashford opening The Runaway Bunny not to the first page of the story, but to its bibliographical details recorded on the copyright page. Most poignantly, she also imagines her professor making a kind of running literary commentary on the text as she encounters it: midway through, Professor Ashford has caught the pattern of the narrative hide and seek plot, and she pauses to muse: “Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Marian?” In Vivian’s earlier flashback to that failed term paper, having been counseled by her professor to postpone her revision for some time with friends, Vivian instead returns to the library to plug away at the essay, not understanding that her professor has given her isolated student a second, more vital assignment. Vivian, in her last unconscious glimmering of sentience, remains her professor’s diligent student, finally prepared to work past the “insuperable barriers” she has laid down against truth to encounter the “wit” Donne and Professor Ashford have long held out to her. And then, as Professor Ashford parts from Vivian, or more accurately as Vivian parts with this life, she quotes not Donne but Horatio’s benediction over Hamlet: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” The Donne scholar, so sniffy about Shakespeare all those years ago in her office, can summon no more soothing words or thought at life’s end than Shakespeare’s vision of solace in angelic contact and communion. The line’s appeal to Nichols and Thompson continues on beyond this film into their next work together, Angels in America. The two films dialogue with one another in substantial ways, not only through Thompson’s metamorphosis from dying woman to her multiple roles in the epic, including the literal, titular presence as The Angel, but most relevantly in the ministering role she plays in answer to Susie Monahan’s powerful presence in Wit: as the nurse Emily, Prior Walter’s metaphorical angel of mercy that helps summon his vision of The Angel. “Time to go,” Vivian’s projection of Professor Ashford announces; as she slips almost soundlessly out of her curled position around Vivian, she is a spirit departing, the spirit of Donne and Ashford and, belatedly, Vivian Bearing, at one with their Wit. A solo piano plays, and the camera again glides away, but this time it remains in the room with Vivian to witness her last, peaceful breaths. “A little allegory of the soul”: the self-imposed barriers of intellectual imperiousness are no match for the heart’s cry.
In Wit’s final scene, we see dramatized Vivian’s earlier epiphany that “being extremely smart” can function as an ironic barrier to the sort of humanizing insight that Professor Ashford sees in Donne and that Susie sees when she looks at her patients. Intellectual gifts have driven Kelekian, Vivian, and Jason to lives of hierarchical striving. When Vivian indulges a reverie about how her death will affect her professional discipline, she imagines a feeding frenzy of her former students, who “would scramble madly for my position.” To assuage their guilt, they would perform the expected part of the aggrieved, in a tribute that “would be short. But sweet. Published and perished.” Kelekian, at the top of his discipline’s food chain, works his junior fellows until, if they are fully with the program (as Jason is), they can dream only of “surviving” to run their own boot camps. Lost in all this reflexive striving for supremacy of a subject is a sense of their professions as humanizing gifts in the world; what is left is getting, or staying, ahead. Jason comes into Vivian’s room for his latest data harvest, his rote “How are you feeling today?” met by a not-unwelcome silence, only to discover Vivian’s corpse is no longer yielding data. He defaults to the team instinct to conserve the specimen, thus violating Vivian’s express desire to Susie to “let it stop.” The ensuing battle for Vivian’s body waged in the isolation chamber is the closest Nichols’ contemplative film comes to a moment of action. Jason tears open Vivian’s gown, exposing her to the camera as she has not been exposed throughout the long, depicted ordeal of her treatment. He administers CPR and awaits the code team. Susie takes as her cause the rights of her dead patient and tries but fails to call off the code order. She finally, physically, gains Jason’s attention, and he helplessly joins her in trying to stop the further invasion of the code team. Only one thing gets their attention: a doctor’s career-determining confession that he’s made a mistake. The leader of the code team (David Zayas) pauses at this rare admission of human frailty, and Susie’s voice finally becomes hearable. Still, the team leader’s response is instantly to revert to hierarchy: “Who the hell are you?” he brusquely demands. With all her dignity summoned against hegemonic practice, she identifies herself: “Sue Monahan, primary nurse.” Jason is of no help to her, but she has the totemic power of Kelekian’s signature on the DNR form, which she brandishes like a weapon. The code team angrily stands down. In Edson’s play, Vivian rises at this point, enveloped in a flash of white light before the stage blackout, the soul’s release from its mortal prison. In the film, Nichols and Bloom transition by dissolve from Vivian’s expired form to a black-and-white photograph of Thompson as Vivian, in the full powers of her professional intelligence, as she recites a final time Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud.” Pride, it seems, must be devoured if Death is to be laid low: before Death is properly humbled on Donne’s terms, Vivian Bearing must encounter her own limits. Ironically, only in relieving herself of the illusion of independent and isolated authority does she encounter something closer to true agency, the triumph of her spirit.
Having explored in Wit a work of theater with the intimacy and compressed intensity of a chamber ensemble, Nichols would next embark on a work of genuinely epic, operatic scale, the six-episode cycle of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. What the plays share in common is their visionary exploration of “the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.” In Nichols’ hands, the critique of reified culture becomes a dialogue between the two films. Nurses are at the metaphysical center of therapeutic action in both films, serving as diplomatic agents between power and the powerless. As cast by Nichols, Susie in Wit and Belize in Angels in America are given signifying minority status via actors of color—Audra McDonald and Jeffrey Wright—further underscoring their traditional function in reified systems as marginal. Yet each asserts the moral conscience of his or her narrative, serving as the embodiment of transformative, redemptive possibility in the morass of human subjugation to hegemony. They are the heirs, in Nichols’ oeuvre, of Bradley (played by the African-American actor Bill Nunn) in Regarding Henry, whose counsel to Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) long after Henry no longer needs physical rehabilitation is a declaration of war on all systems of objectification: “Don’t listen to nobody trying to tell you who you are.” Together Bradley, Susie, and Belize offer a vision of hegemony symbolically subverted by the traditionally powerless, and with Emily (Thompson) in Angels in America, they project the humanizing power of ministering earthly “angels.” In a two-year sequence of releases for HBO that saw a major Hollywood director make a significant career shift using a new medium, Wit serves as the profound and moving overture to the grand scale Nichols would achieve in Angels in America on the themes of reification and redemption.