Dentistry in Cinema
By Dr. Robert Kelly, For The Mountain Times
A recent article of The Whole Tooth talked about dentistry showing up in popular movies. Perhaps in step with dentistry’s perception in society of being a scarier place in the past, the movies of many decades ago always seemed to portray dentists as sadistic, crazy, mean people. Thankfully, dental offices have become much more inviting with a much bigger focus on patient comfort than in the past.
As an example, think of the dentists in famous films “The Marathon Man” and “Little Shop of Horrors” vs the funny tongue in cheek humor of the dentist in “The Hangover” that I recently talked about. Big difference in their portrayals.
Another more recent movie that portrayed dentists a little more light-heartedly was the movie “Finding Nemo.” In that movie, the main character, Nemo, is captured in the ocean by an Australian dentist and transferred to his aquarium in his Sydney office. The ending of the film is about how the gang of fish in the tank help him plot an escape from the tank and back into the ocean to reunite with his father Marlon.
I have two funny connections to the Finding Nemo movie. The first one is the location of the dental office in Sydney, Australia, which is at a fictional address of 42 Wallaby Way with a fictional dentist of Dr. Philip Sherman. Looking at the scenery out the window of the office, you can deduce its likely location in Sydney. When I practiced in Australia before moving to Welches, I worked with an Australian dentist whose classmate and friend swears his office was that fictional office in the movie, as his practice in Sydney a similar view out his window. Whether this is true or not, who knows, but it makes for a funny coincidence and story!
My other connection has to do with the funny banter the fish in the aquarium have while the Aussie dentist Dr. Sherman is doing dental work. Apparently, one of the people working on the Pixar film had a relative who went through the Endodontic specialty program at my alma mater, Boston University. The discussion the fish have in the aquarium about dentistry is actually a 100% technical and factually accurate clinical dental conversation. When Dr. Sherman is performing a root canal on a patient, the fish Bloat and Gugle argue about the technicality of what kind of files he is using, either a K-file or Hedstrom. Bloat correctly remarks that he is using a Hedstrom file which is accurate.
Another funny anecdote is that the fish point out that Dr Sherman is utilizing the “Schilder Technique” in his root canal. Dr Schilder was a professor of Endodontics at my dental school who came up with a revolutionary way of sealing root canals with warmed filling material in a vertical compaction method, to better adapt to the canals. He passed away a year after I graduated but it is funny to think that he is forever memorialized and made it into a movie which went on to become a big hit. Also funny is that the Pixar writing team researched dentistry to make sure the fish sounded like real professionals! I would reward this movie with having the most famous and highly accurate insider dental jokes in cinema history.