The Hospital (1971)
Diana Rigg: Barbara Drummond
Photos
Quotes
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Barbara : We could really use you down there, you know there's a curiously high incidence of TB. You would be a doctor again, Herb. You would be necessary again. If you love me, I don't see what other choice you have?
Herbert Bock : What do you mean if I love you? I raped you in a suicidal rage, how do we get to love and children all the sudden?
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Barbara : Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican Mountains. I turned in my SDS card and my crash helmet, and I followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the Apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup, ate raw rabbit and crushed piñon nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston. A hollow shell, disenchanted with everything, and dizzy with dengue. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight, entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven - had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff there. One of them a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I cracked up. One day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me. So I packed a bag and went back to join my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter. I watch over him, and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything.
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Barbara : Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, the only thing I had to come to the city with. Back at the tribe, I wear ankle-length buckskin.
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Barbara : All that's going on in there, Doctor, is a simple Apache prayer for my father's recovery. The markings he's made on my father's arms are from the pollen of the tule plant. The twigs have no significance, other than they've been struck by lightning and are consequently appeals to the spirit of lightning. It's all entirely harmless, Doctor. A religious ceremony, not a medical one.
Bock : You don't seriously believe all that mumbo jumbo's gonna cure him?
Barbara : On the other hand, it won't kill him, Doctor.
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Barbara : I fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway, upstairs. I said to Mr. Blacktree, "Who's that hulking bear of a man?" Apaches are reverential about bears. Won't eat bear meat, never skin bears. Bears are thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. Men with bear power are highly respected and are said to be great healers. "That man," I said, "gets his power from the bear."
Bock : Swell.
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Bock : What do you say, Miss Drummond?
Barbara : I expect you can call me Barbara... considering you ravished me three times last night... .
Bock : Three times?
Barbara : Oh, look at him pretending he didn't count. You were as puffed up as a toad about it. Punched a couple of holes in your crusade for universal impotence, didn't it? I think we're on first-name basis now.
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Barbara : You're a very tired, very damaged man. You've had a hideous marriage, I assume a few tacky affairs along the way. You're understandably reluctant to get involved again. On top of that, here I am with this preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains in Mexico. Utterly mad, I know. On the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as I do. You did try to kill yourself last night. So that's it, Herb. Either me and the mountains or - a bottle of potassium.
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Barbara : Sounds to me like a familiar case of morbid menopause.
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Barbara : I don't want my father in this hospital. I had a dream about this hospital. I dreamt this enormous, starched, white-tile building suddenly erupted like a volcano, and all the patients, doctors, nurses, attendants, orderlies, the whole line-staff, food-service people, the aged, the lame, and you, right in the middle, were stampeding in one hideous, screaming, suicidal mass into the sea. I'm taking my father out of here and as quickly as I can.
Bock : You're really a fruitcake, you know?
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Bock : I'm sitting here boozing and you come in and tell me some demented story about your father's religious conversion.
Barbara : You miss the point, Doctor. Not my father's conversion, mine. You see, I'd been hitting the acid pretty regularly at that time. I'd achieved a few minor sensory deformities, some suicidal despairs, but nothing as *wild* as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect. I mean, like, "Wow, man!" Here was living afflatus right before my eyes!
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Bock : You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for years.
Barbara : Rubbish.
Bock : What the hell is wrong with being impotent? Kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians. I got a son, 23 years old. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, he despised everyone.
