Word: dentist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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STROHEIM shows the same tension between his characters' aspiration to virtue and their weaknesses in Greed (1923). Its plot follows a young dentist and his wife as they decline from security to poverty. Stroheim, directly equating their material situation with their moral states, places them in real settings. At the same time he floods the early scenes with light, expressing in extraordinary art their wish for purity...
...usual standard. His four-color, monthly Miracle Magazine (circ. 350,000) reports even more spectacular cures. In the current issue, a teenager named Yodonna Holley from Globe, Ariz., testifies that "I received fillings in my teeth" during a camp meeting. ("Why not let God be YOUR dentist?" suggests the story.) A young man named Charles Embrey, of Hayward, Calif., testifies that he prayed with Brother Allen and got new spinal disks. Only in the small print can a reader find the careful demurrer: "A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. assumes no legal responsibility for the veracity of any such report." Naturally...
...patient opened his mouth, he thought of taking off his glasses to avoid looking at the steel glint in the dentist's eyes. But before he could, the rapid-fire, machine-gun-bullet orgasms of pain were exploding in his jaw. Jab! Jab! Jab! The patient jammed his eyes shut. His whole body was tight, as time after time he felt the needle piercing deep into his gums, driving its payload of novocaine into his bloodstream. "Just relax," he heard the nurse saying. The injections were done. He slumped back into the chair...
...worst was not over. The dentist returned, and the patient, having taken off his glasses, could only see him dimly. "How does your mouth feel now?" the dentist asked matter-of-factly. Then without waiting for the patient's reply, he took a long dull instrument from his cabinet and, with it, gently pocked the patient's reply, he took a long dull instrument from his cabinet and, with it, gently pocked the patient's upper tooth. Feeling nothing, the patient relaxed and then, in an instant, realized the dentist was pushing harder and harder at the tooth...
...more," the patient wanted to shout. "There is only one more wisdom tooth left in my mouth, and it will be gone in a minute, and I'll be free." But even as he thought these thoughts, the patient felt the dentist begin to push at the last tooth. Harder and harder the dentist pushed, as he had pushed before. Only this time something was wrong. The tooth did not crack. "Jesus!" the patient screamed in his mind. "Jesus, make it crack. For the love of God and Norman Mailer and all the greasy hamburgers eaten in all the dirty...