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The Knick
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The Unkindest Cut
I don’t often rewatch TV series. But in 2025 I am happy to report that The Knick holds up well to a re-view, and impresses even more deeply than first time around 11 years ago. Given talk of a 3rd series potentially incoming (with Barry Jenkins as showrunner – apt in that the 1st season compares a secret basement clinic for black patients to an ‘underground railroad’!), reacquainting oneself with the first two seasons is highly recommended. The outstanding scripts by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler and Steven Katz seize the potential of long-form TV narrative to bring into the foreground something usually relegated to the background: social history. In many respects, although the individual characters are vivid and driven by various demons, it’s that history, in its crisscrossing determinations, that powers plot events – rather than the other way around. It’s the beginning of the 20th century in New York. Signs of modernity gradually appear, especially in everyday technology: from steam to electricity (which, at first, kills people) and gas, the motorised vehicle in place of horse-and-carriage, and all the diverse apparatuses of image and sound recording or transmission – gramophone (Edison has a cameo!), telephone, camera, X-ray. Medical progress dovetails with technology when Thackery uses celluloid in surgery! But there is also rampant contagion, such as a typhoid/Bubonic Plague infection that proves hard to trace (linked to scandals in the administration of immigration), and sexually transmitted diseases galore. The series’ central concentration is on the evolution of medical treatment: diagnosis, surgery, laboratory research. The hospital known as The Knick (short for Knickerbocker) is not in a salubrious part of town; it has problems raising necessary finance, especially with an administrator who steal from the coffers and involves himself in various arrangements of credit and debt with the criminal underworld. So, the institution faces not merely a problem of maintaining its standards; it also requires a brisk trade in corpses (both animal and human) to experiment on. And then there’s the matter of doctors needing to keep themselves (like Fassbinder at work) awake and energised 24 hours a day – cueing massive addictions to cocaine and/or heroin, substances that are still unknown quantities and/or novelty snake-oil ‘miracle cures’, not yet illicit drugs. And – for almost everybody except for the very rich – money’s too tight to mention, and manipulative, secretive scams (at many levels) are rife. The Knick dramatises a period of medical transition in which little is concretely understood and much is improvised – directly on the operating table, where death can, at any moment, visit either staff or patients. The practical comprehension of bodies, minds, symptoms, illnesses and cures is wildly in flux. The insides and outsides of the human body are equally mysterious. These only dimly understood realities are open to every new (rational) or old (faith-based) interpretation – and every abuse of economic, political and cultural power. Surgeries at The Knick frequently play out ‘in the round’, in the presence of a silent audience of spectators (like today’s Internet lurkers) grimly looking on; the operating theatre is often compared to a circus – or, less elegantly, a sideshow of freakish attractions. (In one elegantly satisfying reprise, that audience is a bunch of gangsters with their guns at the ready.) There are sections when the level of defamiliarisation/estrangement created by this return to a murky but gruesomely fascinating past is as vivid as Michel Foucault’s books Madness and Civilisation (1961) and Birth of the Clinic (1963), or Noel Sanders’ 1985 essay on ‘watery Utopias’. Or, indeed, Walerian Borowczyk’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). A recent film that delves into these matters, via the inspiration-points of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), is Magnus van Horn’s The Girl with the Needle (2024). And remember: this is, in the USA at least, the pre-Freudian era. It’s only in the 2nd series that Dr John Thackery (Clive Owen) even begins to speculate that the brain may, at times, be at the centre of what happens within the body. But that thought is framed by the neurobiology of his time – and Thackery mixes it, willy-nilly, with hypnosis. The unconscious is still, here, an idea in the future – except for the clever preview of a ‘talking cure’ therapy, and the very final line of the 2nd season, triggering an ‘interpretation of dreams’. Will the ‘birth of psychoanalysis’ be the thrust of season 3, picking up this chronicle in 1919, just after the end of the Great War and its legacy of traumas? (That’s also the timeframe of The Girl with the Needle.) All of this (modernity, medicine, work practices, sex) in The Knick is intersected by divisions of race, class, gender and religion. And plain old sex, as well, transgressing every barrier – in the family, at work, in the brothels and opium dens, in popular entertainment. Hence the presence of syphilis – which drives the plot of Abigail (Jennifer Ferrin), Thackery’s ex-lover, whose nose has become a gaping hole, and whose surgical cure demands that she walk around with her arm harnessed above her head, with its skin attached to her reconstructed face. (Shades of Eyes Wide Shut [1998], this confusion of medical treatment and personal libido.) When it enters the realm of sexuality (often coupled with violence or general degradation), The Knick moves, calmly, in the zone of everyday grotesquerie (while it ramps up to veritable Grand Guignol for the operating theatre disasters). Eleanor (Maya Kazan), a “hysterical woman” (who, in complete dissociation, kills the child that has been handed to her as a replacement for her dead, biological one), is treated by having all her teeth removed – because surely (as one radical yet stone-age doctor informs us) her septic “bad juices” are the cause of the behavioural problem. Black Americans fare no better than women. Season 1 builds to a historic race riot, when a black man’s inadvertent murder of a white cop stirs an angry mob into breaking into and trashing The Knick (a spectacle which carries renewed bad-vibes after the 6 January 2021 attack on the American Capitol). For a time, the endlessly humiliated (and duly exploited) Algernon Edwards (André Holland) pursues his innovative research – as well as his doctorly support for his fellow blacks turned away from public treatment – in the hidden ‘underground railroad’ mentioned above. Simultaneously, the ‘pseudo-science’ of eugenics finds white proponents who begin a clandestine program of sterilisation – and the win the support of the academic establishment. Antisemitism also factors into the general mosaic. The characters have a salutary multi-dimensionality within this panorama – by which I don’t mean only that they are psychologically rich or complex as individuals. I do mean that their drives and irreducible singularities of personality have a way of upsetting (at least for a while) the multiple ‘determinants’ that conspire to keep them in a certain narrative and social place. Nurse Lucy (Eve Hewson) goes from a docility bred by abuse to her own inimitable brand of sadism. Algernon travels in the other direction: ground down by the racism he encounters at every crushing turn (even the tiny bit of social upward mobility that Algernon enjoys is enough to alienate him from his black neighbours in the quasi-slum where he first resides), he finds an ‘acting out’ valve in a masochistic ritual of picking fistfights – all of which he loses, destroying his eyesight in the process. Thackery himself, as the central character, is very far from being an instantly sympathetic character. He is reckless, self-destructive, often professionally negligent and emotionally cruel; for a time, he reinforces the racism of his institution. The final moments of season 1 turn upon John – at the beginning of his seeming redemption or clean-up – with a black, almost Langian irony. Even those who appear, at first glance, to be the most suspect characters – such as the unlikely collaborative pair of ambulance driver Cleary (Chris Sullivan) and Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour) – turn into battlers whom you are compelled to respect (complications notwithstanding). Compromised people in a compromised world, they do whatever they can to ease other people’s pain and misery – and their own. There are a couple of cardboard villain-types dotting the periphery of the narrative – but even these staunch wheeler-dealers (such as opium den maestro Ping Wu [Perry Yung]) simply exaggerate the desires and methods of everyone at the centre of this monster-go-round. The Knick represents (to date) Steven Soderbergh’s finest work in any medium. I am not usually among his biggest fans. I find his films maddeningly uneven, one to the next, and too often immediately forgettable. Most of them, in my opinion, do not repay close, repeated viewings – even if, like Quentin Tarantino’s work, they may impress on a first look. And when I read that he drains the colour from a Spielberg movie in order to study its “masterful staging”, or I take a fearful glimpse at his whimsical re-cut of Michael Cimino’s Heaven's Gate (1980) – then I really have my doubts. But Soderbergh’s famous gun-and-run shooting style – with himself operating the camera, under a pseudonym (he also edits, under a 3rd name!) – is, in fact, extremely well-suited suited to television, which demands fast work and a consistent, overall design. He expertly lines up the elements and departments – art direction, cast, script, costume and hair, musical score (Cliff Martinez on sterling techno-duty yet again, a splendidly anachronistic touch), photographic ‘lens plot’ à la Lumet – and then lets proceedings run their course. In cinema (such as Soderbergh’s Che double-bill of 2008), this sameness can be a monotonous, sepia-toned drag. But on TV, such a ground-tone can form the basis for both familiarity and surprise as crucial strategies. Take special note of the rigour involved: almost every episode begins with a short concert of mysterious, off-screen noises before the first image begins (and sound-before-image scene transitions predominate throughout – within a more general structure of semantic compare-and-contrast transitions, some of which deliberately disorient the viewer for a moment or two). And I came to really admire a Soderberghian visual signature: those slightly warped, high or low-angle long shots that minimise the actors within a looming space. The Knick proves to be among the very best TV series that have so far appeared in the 21st century.
© Adrian Martin November-December 2014 / February 2025 |
