dumb & dumber 2 — i watched it in the waiting room
dumb & dumber 2 — i watched it in the waiting room of the doctor’s office on visit 2
dumb & dumber 2 was playing on the waiting room screen at the doctor and i watched it like a documentary. the supermarket nightmare came back to me in flashes. somebody could have emailed me about my appointment. the whole waiting room is a meeting that should have been an email.
i was at the doctor’s office. the second visit this season, which is one too many by my own ledger. the receptionist’s screen was tilted enough that anyone in chair three could see the credits roll on a movie i had not, in fairness, planned to see this morning. i was there for a thing on my elbow. the elbow waited. the movie did not.
writing this from the desk now. carla took a pen and a long pad into the all-hands, which signals at least an hour. doctor’s note is on the corner of the desk, folded in thirds, looking like it knows something.
so. dumb & dumber 2. the 2014 sequel. fifteen full years between the original road movie and this one, which is, in industry terms, the kind of gap that usually means the people involved had to be talked back into the bowl cuts. they were. and the talking-back-into-it shows. that is, mostly, the post.
on the desk: the doctor’s note, an unopened envelope (red corner, again), and an airpod. the other airpod is somewhere in the apartment. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford.
dumb & dumber 2, the screen above the receptionist
here is how the morning went. i checked in at 9:47am. they said it would be twenty minutes. it was, by the time my name was called, an hour and eleven. in that hour and eleven, the screen above the receptionist looped, on mute, with subtitles that lagged about half a beat behind the lips. the movie playing was the 2014 sequel, the one with the ampersand, the one that nobody at the bar ever brings up unless they are losing an argument about the original.
i watched it from the chair. for the broader category of which this film is the satellite, see the pillar i drafted at the desk on the meaning of dumb; this is not that piece. this is the piece about watching the second one in a room where someone is going to take your blood pressure in an hour.
the first thing i noticed, on mute, with lagging subtitles, is that the sequel does most of its talking with its face. jim carrey’s face is, on a doctor’s office screen, almost unreasonable. it does the work of three pages of script. jeff daniels does the smaller, sadder thing — he stands beside the face and lets it happen. it is, on this screen, a kind of friendship i recognised. the friendship survived twenty years and a lot of bad reviews. it would, i suspect, survive a waiting room.
EVERY. WAITING. ROOM. IS. A. SUBTITLED. MOVIE.
i mean that. the modern medical waiting room is, structurally, a film with the sound off. you sit, you watch, you don’t know the plot, the captions are wrong, the running time is unannounced, and at some point a woman in scrubs calls a name that may or may not be yours. the doctor’s office is the cinema. it just bills more.
the supermarket scene that hit too close to mine
roughly forty minutes into the loop, the film hits a scene in which lloyd and harry are in a store, holding objects they do not need, with a budget they do not have, while a sensible person tries to redirect them. i could not hear the audio. i did not need to. i have lived this scene. i lived it on a sunday, and i have, on a quieter morning, written about it: the diary entry from the desk about my own dumb week, which devotes a full page to a tuesday the trolley took me hostage at the supermarket.
the rules of the supermarket failure are simple and the sequel knows them. you go in for one item. you exit with seven items, none of them the one item, and a magazine about a hobby you will not take up. it is the same plot as the doctor’s office, in different lighting. you go in for an answer. you exit with a referral, a leaflet, a follow-up appointment, and a vague new fear about your liver.
i wrote that down on a corner of the doctor’s note. the doctor’s note now has, in the bottom-right corner, the words the trolley is the briefcase, which i, sober, two hours later, still endorse. lloyd and harry are carrying a briefcase across a country. you and i are pushing a trolley around an aisle. the moral arc is the same. the lighting is worse.
the doctor’s office, the second visit this season
this is the second visit this season. the first was about a thing in my shoulder that turned out to be, in clinical parlance, “probably nothing, come back if it changes”. it changed. so here we are. or, rather, here i was, at 10:14am, on a tuesday, watching the sequel, with a paper gown folded on my lap that i had been instructed to put on but had not, yet, because the timing of paper gowns is its own science.
doctors, in my experience, are kind, careful, and almost always unable to tell you which thing on their leaflet you have. that is not a complaint. that is a feature of the genre. like a road movie, the doctor’s office is mostly about the road. the destination — the diagnosis — is decorative. what matters is the ride: the chairs, the screen, the receptionist’s quiet competence, the woman in scrubs, the dumb sequel, the magazine table.
i did, at one point, briefly look up the film’s reviews on my phone. i did not read any specific source. i looked at the rating, i closed the tab. on the relevant cultural index, the 2014 sequel’s listing tells you most of what you need to know — that it exists, that it stars who you remember, that it ran longer than it needed to. a doctor, in the same way, is a man with a job whose job is, partly, to confirm that you exist and that you ran longer than you needed to. a doctor. a man with a job.
writing this from the desk. carla cruised back past — toner, training, possibly both — and i tabbed away on instinct.
the third yoga mat, in the bag, for support
the third yoga mat was, that morning, in the canvas bag at my feet. i had brought it because the bag was already by the door and the mat was already in the bag, which is the real reason i bring most objects most places. the mat has not been used. the mat is, by my count, nine months old and has logged zero downward dogs. it is, however, an excellent waiting-room cushion.
this is a small piece of advice from a man who is qualified, and by qualified i mean has-attended-twice-this-season. bring a third yoga mat to the doctor’s office. sit on it. nobody will ask. the receptionist will assume you are recovering from something the chair cannot accommodate. they will give you, if anything, slightly more grace. the mat does its first useful work in nine months. you reduce the lumbar damage from the chairs. and you, in a small and silent way, reclaim the morning.
the sequel, by the way, has a scene with a backpack. the backpack is, at one point, used as a pillow, a weapon, a chair, and a delivery vehicle. the canvas bag with the third yoga mat in it is, in spirit, that backpack. anything that survives a road movie can survive a doctor’s office.
the meeting could be email take, briefly, since the doctor’s could be too
here is the part that arrived, fully formed, on the cab ride back. i had walked out with a referral, a leaflet, and the bag. i had not, technically, needed to be in that room. the appointment had a name. the name was on a screen. the result of the appointment was a short conversation that, on any reasonable telecommunications platform, could have happened in two paragraphs.
which is, mostly, my position on most of the rooms i sit in. every meeting could be a 3-line email. i quote the take here because it is, quietly, the take of the morning. the doctor’s appointment could have been a 3-line email. the all-hands carla is in could be a 3-line email. the sequel itself, in some places, could be a 3-line email. there is a version of the entire morning — appointment, follow-up, this post — that arrives in your inbox, takes ninety seconds, and does not require a paper gown.
here is the thing about the medical waiting room, and i’d like it on the record before the elbow forgets.
the modern doctor’s appointment is, in most of its mass, theatre. you arrive. you wait. you sit on a chair. you read a leaflet about a thing you do not have. you fill in a form you filled in last visit. a woman in scrubs takes your weight and writes it on a clipboard that does not, you suspect, talk to any other clipboard in the building. then a doctor, calm and tired, tells you the news, which, on most visits, could have been delivered by text. the elbow, in my case, was the same elbow it has been since february. the news could have fit in a text. the room could have been, structurally, an email. the waiting room could have been, frankly, no waiting room at all.
i rest my case.
this is the take that powers most of my mornings. an email is small, civil, and has no chairs. an email does not require a paper gown. an email does not, between message and reply, force you to watch a movie about two men driving from rhode island to aspen with a kidney.
verdict — the waiting room is the cinema, and i’d like a refund
here is where we end up. the sequel, on a doctor’s office screen, on mute, with subtitles half a beat off, is — and i am as surprised as you — better than its reviews suggested. or possibly the doctor’s office was so bad that anything on the screen looked, by comparison, redemptive. those are difficult to separate. i will not try.
here is the closing case.
i went to the doctor for an elbow. i came home with a referral, a leaflet, the third yoga mat unmoved in the bag, and a fully revised opinion of a 2014 sequel i had not asked to see. that is, on balance, more than most mornings deliver. the appointment could have been an email. the sequel could have been a short film. the waiting room could have been a corridor. each of those redactions would have made the morning shorter and, in my view, kinder. but each of them would also have removed the small accidental cinema that the doctor’s office, on a tuesday, keeps performing for the rest of us. so i am, on this, conflicted. i would still like the email. i would also, with one eye, watch the sequel again, on mute, with the wrong subtitles, in a chair that is not designed for human spines. that is a posture. that is, for now, my posture. the elbow, separately, will be fine.
i’m not saying i’m right. but i’m not not saying it.
for the longer ride on the same theme — being on the road, the country between you and the goal, dave’s volvo somewhere in the rear-view — see the notes from the desk on the long dumb road, which is the next satellite in this orbit.
the new microwave is coming thursday. the seventh. i will, between now and the appointment in june, try not to bring it any forks.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
the man on chair three at 10:14am with a paper gown folded on his lap and a 2014 sequel on a tilted screen
P.S. the third yoga mat performed, in the canvas bag, the only useful work of its nine-month life as a waiting-room cushion. i will not be telling it. praise corrupts a yoga mat.
