The titles of the long and short 2Doc documentary on Monday evening resembled a SIRE campaign. Such a commercial that deals with a social problem, the subjects fluctuate with the tides of the zeitgeist, but usually it concerns behavior that is (un)wanted. 1997: ‘Who is that man who comes to cut the meat every Sunday?’. 2002: ‘Society is you.’ And recently, that of 2023: ‘Don’t lose each other when polarization comes close.’ It was the combination of title and content that reminded me of the idealistic films, and I don’t mean that unkindly.
The long one but first. Title: What are we doing?, a film by Frans Bromet for KRO-NCRV. Subject: Violence against aid workers. Two cops, an ambulance worker, a firefighter. New to me was that pharmacists also endure daily frenzy, the emergency room nurse who gets a ram in the face, sounded familiar again. Nurse Arjan’s problem is the combination of urgency and demanding. Everyone who walks into his ward wants help now and immediately, part of Arjan’s time is spent explaining to patients that someone else’s basilar skull fracture precedes their sprained ankle.
“The work is getting more complicated, the care questions are getting more complicated, people are getting more complicated,” says pharmacist Katja. People who really have something wrong usually do wait, it is often the non-urgent patients who smash their fists on her counter. Or on her face, as happened once. She was glad she got the punch, with her 25 years of experience, and not the newly graduated assistant, because they’re so hard to keep for the job.
Pushing a firefighter off your balcony who came at the smoke in your apartment, you just have to get on it. Grabbing an ambulance worker who bends over the stretcher to help you, that’s guts. Officer Daniel lists that he was scratched, bitten, spat on, kicked, punched and grabbed in the crotch. Once someone tried to cut his throat with a knife.
What underlying problem are we addressing here? The pharmacist sees increasing impatience as the cause, but that seems to me at most the beginning of an explanation. Frans Bromet does not dig deeper into the issue either. He throws the misbehavior in our face – do something about it.
An invisible enemy
The same comment-free, think-it-yourself-what-you-think was also in the short documentary Mom is sure (Human). Social problem: polarization. Maker Max Baggerman films his mother who sees an invisible enemy in her house. Just vacuuming gives her watery eyes, a runny nose and a metallic taste in the mouth. The voltage fields of the devices in and around the house torment her so much that she first slept in her car and then in a holiday home of friends.
Max Baggerman continues to visit her, alone and with his baby. No dirt on and in the air when his mother is just a grandmother for a while. We hear him talking by phone with his brother Thomas, who called his mother a conspiracy theorist, as a result of which the previously close relationship between them has cooled. Max decides to help her, partly, in her delusions and has her house measured by one Caroline. Her meter hits frighteningly hard at the Wi-Fi router, the television, the ceiling and the smart TV of the neighbors above, she even finds ‘radiation pollution’ with an old energy-saving light bulb.
He sticks double-sided foil to walls and windows, and smears expensive graphite paint on the ceiling. It is the condition to maintain the love between mother, son and grandchild. His path is that of least resistance.