The delayed development of hostile reactions by the subjects of Wiseman's films is one of the more revealing social responses his work evokes. Titicut Follies is, indeed, a disturbing document, but not for quite the reasons I, or presumably Bridgewater's directors, had expected….

Having gone to see Titicut Follies expecting to be shocked by the exotic horrors of the snake pit, I emerged with a much sadder sense that what I had seen differed only in degree from everyday life. These patients were afflicted, certainly, but the nature of their disorder was clear enough, very common in America, and serious indeed. They suffered from disastrously low status compounded by poverty, which had drastically lowered their resistance to incarceration….

[Titicut Follies] suggests that the hospital's social function may be useless and occasionally monstrous. The film shows quite clearly that the primary consequence of defining, and confining, the patients as criminally insane is to justify keeping the hospital running; the question of improving its services hardly arises.

What causes the authorities who first approve to later repudiate Wiseman's films and what shocks them into hostility is the tendency of his work to reveal that the institutions scrutinized are not merely defective but often superfluous: self-serving and self-perpetuating. The original conception of the medieval Ship of Fools showed the passengers as starving at a table laden with food. Each had strapped to his arm a spoon so long that he could feed his neighbor, though not himself—but this he would not do. The picture of society that builds up through Wiseman's work is just the converse, and surely no less fiendish. It appears to consist of interlocking sets of social institutions, seldom useful in themselves, which provide roles for their members and sustain one another through a system of cross-referrals which serve to validate the raisons d'être of all, using the clients who are supposed to benefit from their services as expendable counters in their own games.

The idea that official institutions exist to exploit more than to serve their clients is both valid and well-suited to the temper of our times. It is central to much of Wiseman's work and helps account for its power. When this implication is weak or absent, his films take on a different and, I think, less distinctive tone. Hospital, for example, is a study of an institution physically hardly more adequate than Bridgewater: a large general hospital perpetually inundated with the victims of urban violence and decay. But the impression it conveys is not merely of squalor but of continuous, grinding, backbreaking resourcefulness under impossible conditions. Its patients are real clients, their needs are desperate, and, somehow, they are seen, however fleetingly, as human beings; and their medical emergencies, at least, are dealt with. The result, however, is a film with very little irony; the viewer gets a justified feeling of dêjà vu, since great urban hospitals and their dedicated, overworked staffs have long been a staple of commercial TV…. [Law and Order] suffers to a lesser degree from the same difficulty as Hospital. The police as a social institution are ambiguous. (p. 20)

[Highly] essential service makes up a lot of the Kansas City policemen's job, but Wiseman's film suggests that they do it pretty badly….

But whether they like it or not the Kansas City police, like the doctors in Hospital, though in a lesser degree, are involved with and sometimes useful and responsive to the community that supports them and, hence, not quite as effectively revealed by Wiseman's apparently artless dissection. His masterworks deal with two institutions that are remarkably similar in their values, their dependence on legal coercion to provide themselves with a clientele, and their centrality to American life….

The two institutions, of course, are the high school and the military. Frederick Wiseman's High School is, with the possible exception of James Herndon's books (which are about junior high schools anyway), the most expressive and revealing document portraying these institutions—what happens in them, what they are really like, how parents as well as students respond to them, what the values reflected in their practices and conveyed through the experience of attending them must be. Much of what is shown in High School would be familiar to any serious critical observer of secondary schooling in North America. But there are two special insights it affords—one by its content and one by the response it evokes from teachers and prospective teachers—that were new to me, though they should not have been, and therefore seem worth reporting.

The first of these is the extremely hostile and degrading form of male chauvinism that pervades the high school and is taken for granted there….

The jokes [during the sex education talk] have a clearly didactic function: to teach that any real feeling in connection with sexual relationships would be a serious offense against accepted practice…. The degradation of the girl's role in High School is pervasive, suffocating—and official.

The other unexpected insight High School provides comes from the fact that audiences of teachers and prospective teachers generally approve of it. They usually compare Northeast High favorably with the schools they went to or teach in: What's wrong with it?…

[Many] teachers view this film with delighted recognition when it is shown to them. The high school is the very heart of America, and Wiseman has captured its strength and rhythm perfectly. And in doing so he has provided an almost equally perfect projective device for its viewers. (p. 21)

The films have a point of view, sometimes revealed directly in the frequent close-up shots of the cruel mouths of the pushier and more manipulative characters or in Wiseman's sensitivity to and conception of what is significant. He seems never to overlook the swift, darting glances by which petty bureaucrats reveal status anxieties when their real audience is different from their ostensible one….

Except for occasional visiting relatives, and a Louisville whore who is discussed but not depicted, there are no women in Basic Training to be degraded. But what it shows about these young soldiers certainly tells us what the institutions of American society make of sex, and what this costs…. Basic Training, though it has a cast of hundreds of young athletes, must be one of the least sexually arousing films ever made….

For a central function of Basic Training is to alienate young men from access to their own feelings and values, and to destroy their capacity for spontaneous perception and response. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated at Song My and elsewhere, and Wiseman shows just how it is done and how the process looks, in the gracelessness of the soldiers' movements and the tuneless songs—"Mr. Nixon drop the bomb;/I don't want to go to Nam!"—they sing under orders. Even a sadist would get no satisfaction here; there is plenty of verbal humiliation but nothing as human as a beating or a fight. One of the ironies underscored in the film is the fact that though soldiers are taught to shriek mechanically as they lunge at bayonet targets, they are sent to disciplinary barracks for exhaustive punishment if they get into personal fistfights. As in Dr. Strangelove, no fighting is allowed in the War Room….

[This] set of films is in itself enough to record and fully document the process of depersonalization in American institutions, and to show that this process is essential to the stable functioning of American society. The process seems essentially unrelieved. In these films freaks don't make it, as they occasionally do in real life—though not, as a rule, when that life is lived within one of those institutions…. Yet Wiseman's films do give strong grounds for hope, by their very existence and character. They could only have been made in a deeply polarized society, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, and one whose armies, God knows, are ignorant enough. The outcome of the struggle is therefore still in doubt to some degree. (p. 22)