In season 3 of the American series The Wirea Baltimore police officer decides, as he approaches retirement, to transform empty buildings into an area where drug trafficking will take place in a controlled manner. It is a question of reducing violence, crimes, diseases… Except that the police officer – the unforgettable “Bunny” Culvin – did not warn anyone that such an experiment is illegal and that it will end immediately. discovery. In the meantime, the results obtained will still have been much greater than those of several decades of the “war on drugs”.
In season 3 of the French series Hippocratesa former doctor turned director does the same. Faced with the now apocalyptic situation in our hospital system, Thomas Lilti imagines that some caregivers are undertaking to reopen, under the boarding of the hospital in the Paris region where they work, disused rooms which will be occupied by patients who are not up there. wants, or rather can no longer, welcome and even less care. There too: attempt to save a system in ruins by a clandestine operation; back and forth between legality and moral imperative; risks being discovered, denounced and fired, or worse.
In The Wirethe area is called Hamsterdam, in reference to the Dutch capital where certain drugs are notoriously over-the-counter. In Hippocrates it is called California Hospital. This is a reference to the song « California Dreamin’ » – it is indeed a dream, or perhaps a nightmare – but also « Hotel California »an Eagles hit about a place you can never leave.
What happens when enclosed spaces turn into sieves, jobs into system D and basements into dying rooms? When entire sections of society have become disused zones where light does not enter?
Hippocrates would therefore be a remake in France and in another environment of David Simon’s masterpiece? Or worse, plagiarism? Exactly no, even if there are other similarities – the quotes at the top of each episode, for example – between the two series. The interesting thing is not only that Lilti adapts the hypothesis of The Wire. The interesting thing is that Hamsterdam works at full capacity before being dismantled, while Hotel California fumbles, fails, then succeeds without ever quite establishing itself. What is interesting is therefore the resumption of Hamsterdam, but also the reluctance with which this resumption is taking place. It remains to be seen what this reluctance reflects. Politically and morally, but also with regard to the evolution of a genre, the TV series, which is undoubtedly doing less well today than twenty years ago (date of the appearance on the screens of series 3 of The Wire).
Morally, it is quite simple: such an initiative, if it can be seen as heroic, is irresponsible, and a few rooms reopened in haste cannot constitute a service in its own right. Running Hotel California at full capacity would mean saying goodbye to the public hospital. However, Lilti does not intend to resolve this – we understand –.
There is another reason. It is in truth the public hospital as a whole which, as described by Lilti, resembles a “California”. Understaffed services, closed or half-open emergencies, defective or obsolete equipment, patients sorted at the entrance, EHPADs where negligence becomes abuse, ophthalmologists retrained as nurses, etc. So many gaps and shortcomings that the series summarizes with an unfortunately appropriate name: “fast medicine”. Not without specifying that one word is too many. Which ? Medicine.
That a series elects a profession assuming both a closed place and dedicated professionals, nothing new: it is even a possible summary of the genre. Whether it is a question of describing how an a priori regulated environment, where neither the unexpected nor affects have their place, is forced to let in a little life – of “humanity” –, nothing new no more: three out of four series tell the progressive incursion ofalive in thein vitro. (A series is often nothing other than that: a program that learns to deprogram itself). Whether we go down to the basement or the cellar to shed a light on the darkness that reigns there revealing certain hidden or poorly known aspects of social organization, it is also classic.
But until now these places and these trades, these basements, fulfilled a double function. On the one hand, they offered, on a reduced scale, a faithful image of society. And on the other hand they indicated how it could possibly be reformed. Gender, in this sense, has always served a therapeutic function. All that was yesterday. It seems that today we have moved on to something else. What actually happens when enclosed spaces turn into sieves, jobs into system D and basements into dying rooms? When entire sections of society have become disused zones where light does not enter?
This is where Hippocratesnot content with offering a convincing inventory of the current health disaster, doubles as an inventory of the series as a genre. For a while, the viewer gets annoyed by the signals by which Lilti wants to tell him that he knows what he is talking about, that he has mastered medical vocabulary as well as the little “tricks” – for lack of a spoon turning his fork to eat the compotes with the handle, for example –, and ultimately wants to guarantee that we are not, or not really, in a fiction, that everything here is true. This annoyance even reaches a peak when, coming across the actor of yet another hospital series filming nearby, a character points out to him that his outfit lacks plausibility.
It would be painful, it would even be rude if Lilti stopped there. But no, the fiction within the fiction makes a second appearance. And this appearance has nothing to do with the first. This time, it is so that the “Californians” can urgently borrow the equipment they need from the film crew, and it is to see – very briefly – the silhouette in a white coat of Vincent Lacoste, to whom Lilti confided ten years ago a role in his first film, already titled Hippocrates.
Gag? Wink? Ease of mise en abyme? Of course. But not only that. Way of saying that “reality” – that of which the series prides itself a little too much on being an almost direct transcription – is nourished by fiction, even by this fiction that it once was, a decade earlier. And also a way of saying, conversely, that when reality turns to disaster, the fiction itself – in this case that of the series – can only have the greatest difficulty. ••
Hippocratesseason 3. France, 2024. Television series by Thomas Lilti. With Bouli Lanners, Louise Bourgoin, Karim Leklou, Alice Belaïdi, William Lebghil, Zacharie Chasseriaud. 6 episode of approximately 50 minutes. Broadcast on Canal + since November 11.
