Deadly Choices

Deadly Choices

The Birth of Fear

Frederick Wiseman was born on January 1, 1930. After graduating from Williams College and Yale University Law School, Wiseman became a law professor at Boston University. Then he decided to make movies. For the next thirty years Frederick Wiseman was the most inventive, most reviled, most controversial, and most influential documentary filmmaker in America.

Wiseman’s first film—released in 1967—was his most powerful. Called Titicut Follies, it was a stark depiction of life inside the walls of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Wiseman showed prisoners being hosed down, force-fed, and tortured by an indifferent, bullying staff. In one scene, a physician takes a long tube and inserts it into a prisoner’s nose. Then he attaches the tube to a funnel, fills it with thick, dark fluid, and stands precariously on a chair, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A guard mockingly shouts, “Chew your food, Joey.” The viewer is at once sickened by the degradation of force-feeding and captivated by the cigarette ash dangling over the funnel.

Time magazine called Titicut Follies a “relentless exposé of a present-day snake pit.” Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that the film made “Marat/Sade look like Holiday on Ice.” And one theatrical poster warned, “Don’t turn your back on this film . . . if you value your mind or your life.” Titicut Follies was so hard to watch—so unblinking, so unsettling, so unfailingly detailed— that days before its debut at the New York Film Festival, Massachusetts Superior Court judge Harry Kalus ordered the state to seize all copies, writing: “No amount of rhetoric, no shibboleths of ‘free speech’ and the ‘right of the public to know’ can obscure or masquerade this pictorial performance for what it really is—a piece of abject commercialism, trafficking in the loneliness, on the human misery, degradation and sordidness in the lives of these unfortunate humans.” In 1968, Titicut Follies was the first and only film in the United States ever to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security. Twenty years would pass before the movie was shown to the American public.

The modern American anti-vaccine movement was born on April 19, 1982, when WRC-TV, a local NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., aired a one-hour documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Although Frederick Wiseman wasn’t involved in a single aspect of the film, his influence on the writer and producer, Lea Thompson, was apparent. Vaccine Roulette contained the sad, haunting images of Titicut Follies, except that this time, instead of inmates degraded by prison guards, the camera focused on children—twisted, withered, disabled children—irreparably damaged by a vaccine.

From the book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, by Paul Offit.  Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.  Copyright © 2011.