The Knick

A medical series after the end of which you feel the need to wash off the drying blood and scrape the residue of a large intestine and placenta from under your fingernails. Soderbergh slowly and thoroughly draws us into a vortex of systematised madness and without regard for how many viewers will abandon the show after the first five minutes, when we’ll be doing cocaine with a racist misogynist, riding down a New York street where a black horse gasps in pain, and bearing witness to the death of a mother and her newborn child. ___ In addition to the music and natural (i.e. gloomy) lighting, Soderbergh’s cinematography is particularly helpful in inducing a feeling of nausea and the impression of a time and place where death is always just a step away and where you definitely would not want to end up with any illness more serious than a cold. The camerawork becomes more agitated along with the characters and transitions from clearly arranged, carefully composed shots giving the butchery on the operating table a hint of being civilised to immediate fly-on-the-wall observation and visceral, manually filmed close-ups. The fluidity of the narrative and the impression of a constant flow of events are aided by the “relay” observation of the characters, when the camera’s attention shifts from one actor and smoothly continues with another actor in the same shot. ___ The hospital is a complex organism whose problem-free operation requires the coordination of several notional tentacles and the taming of the egos for which the characters fight first and foremost rather than for their patient’s lives. While Thackery chooses cocaine to take the edge off and Barrow visits brothels, Edwards compensates for his inability to publicly fulfil his masculine role by engaging in self-destructive brawls like the protagonists of Fight Club. Most of the characters are connected by a theme that runs in various forms through Soderbergh’s filmography – the inability or impossibility to fit into the world in which they live and the associated emotional emptiness and feelings of alienation and loneliness. Thanks to the diversity of the individual characters and the conflicts that arise between them (while Thackery directly challenges God), Soderbergh’s dissection of a morally corrupt society succeeds in covering a broad range of issues, such as racial segregation, social stratification, the intertwining of class and racial tensions, corruption, migration, drugs and the church. With its effort to maintain a balanced distribution of attention, The Knick is akin to the more documentary-style untangling of complex webs known from the works of David Simon (The Wire, Treme). ___ The fourth episode, in which the central characters go hard at each other in games started previously, is comparably as dynamic as the pilot. However, not as much happens or as quickly, and what gives the episode its dynamism are primarily the constant changes in perspective, a Soderbergh trademark that superbly utilises varying depth of field. None of the many conflicting perspectives is privileged, which corresponds to the creators’ effort not to judge anyone and to show – with a clinical view and without embellishment or prejudice – that scientific and technical development was bought at the cost of devaluation of interpersonal relationships into mere business a century ago (techno-fetishistic details of every imaginable patent are increasingly available). 90% (11.08.2014) (weniger) (mehr)