Film: On earth as it is in hell
Authors: L. Brown
Journal: BMJ (2000)

Broken Vessels Directed by Scott Ziehl

A-Pix Entertainment, on worldwide general release

Bringing Out the Dead Directed by Martin Scorsese

Touchstone Pictures, on worldwide general release

Two recent films, Broken Vessels and Bringing Out the Dead, portray the lives of those who work for the emergency medical services in urban America. Or at least they claim to. 

Broken Vessels tells the story of Tom ( Jason London), an emergency medical technician who arrives in Los Angeles while trying to escape his past in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He lands a job as an ambulance driver and is teamed up with Jimmy (Todd Field), a senior Los Angeles paramedic whose best skill seems to be snatching his sunglasses off his face and trying to look cool.

Ten minutes into the movie the two are drinking alcohol, picking up women, having sex, buying heroin on the street corner, and getting high. All of this happens while they are on duty, mostly in the ambulance. Then they start stealing from their patients to support their drug habits. Eventually, they try to rip off a drug dealer, who in turn tries to shoot them. As they speed away in the ambulance, they crash quite spectacularly. Jimmy is killed, and Tom decides he has to become more responsible.

Bringing Out the Dead tells the story of Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a New York city paramedic haunted by the ghost of a young girl named Rose whom he was unable to resuscitate following a severe asthma attack. He sees her face on nearly every woman he encounters, and he is certain that all he needs to do is save one person's life to move beyond the memory.

When he does resuscitate the elderly Mr Burke (Cullen O Johnson), he also falls for his daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette). Unfortunately, Mr Burke's recovery is minimal, and as he is only kept alive by life support he becomes an additional burden to Frank. There is hope for absolution when Frank and his partner Marcus (Ving Rhames) deliver twins from a woman while her boyfriend stands by and swears that they are both virgins. But one of the babies dies, and so Frank's haunting continues. Ultimately, he overcomes the ghosts by disconnecting Mr Burke from the ventilator and allowing him to die peacefully.

Broken Vessels is a movie about partying, drinking, and drug taking, and the main characters just happen to be paramedics. That the movie is set primarily in an ambulance adds nothing to the storyline, but it does allow some cool cinematography involving flashing red and white lights and blurred images. The film focuses on drug addiction, rather than the life and role of paramedics, so I doubt whether it will have much impact on the public's perception of these professionals.

Martin Scorsese, director of Bringing Out the Dead, also uses striking images, casting a glowing aura around Cage's character. In contrast to Broken Vessels, however, Frank Pierce's job as a paramedic is central to the film's plot. Indeed, through the first half of the movie, we get to know him as both a compassionate and a competent provider of emergency medical care. 

It is therefore more disappointing when he and Marcus have a drink in the ambulance to celebrate the “virgin birth,” when he follows Mary to a drug den and indulges in its offerings, and when he and another paramedic go hunting for someone to beat up in order to vent their frustrations. Unfortunately, the audience is likely to accept Cage's portrayal of a paramedic and to extend their perceptions of his character to the profession as a whole.

Both these films have glimmers of reality, mostly in their depiction of the emergency scenes and the interactions between paramedics, law enforcers, firefighters, and bystanders. They also go some way towards portraying the frustrations of the work schedule and the divergent segments of society encountered by ambulance crews. Even some of the more despicable traits of the paramedics might not be that far fetched. But the difference between true life and these films is that in reality—for the most part—no single call, no single shift, no single patient, and no single paramedic manifests all of these characteristics. Not even in Los Angeles or New York.

These films are just about saved by their moments of humour, like Tom vomiting into his roommate's exotic fish aquarium after taking heroin. But they do not accurately describe the life of the paramedic in big city America. Urban legends—or perhaps urban myths—make for better stories. The real lives of us paramedics can be, in contrast, rather mundane.