Circularity In The Movie Wit

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The made for TV HBO Production movie Wit (2001) is a tale about Dr. Vivian Bearing, a prolific writer and English teacher that has fallen ill with advanced Ovarian cancer. She then has to adapt to losing her autonomy and being a living experiment to doctors who only see her a petri dish. The story is based on a play written by Margaret Edison that debuted in 1995. Characters include Dr. Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) the pretentious Teacher, Dr. Jason Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward) the stunted student, and Dr. Harvey Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd) the distant doctor. Wit is a film that directly relates to Mike Nichols’ life and is extremely interpersonal, which is what Nichols likes to explore in his films. Wit is a classic Mike Nichols film because …show more content…
The central idea of a catch-22 is the idea that Y needs to happen before X, yet simultaneously X needs to happen before Y, or circular reasoning. This same circularity can be found in Dr. Vivian Bearings’ life with regard to her teaching practices. Dr. Vivian Bearings’ academic life has been all about strict rules and she has lacked compassion for her students throughout her teaching career. Íñigo Marzábal Albaina, a Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising factulty member at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) states that, “She [Vivian Bearing] is revered by her students and admired by her colleagues. She has lived just as she has wanted to. Consecrating her life to knowledge, she has sacrificed her emotional life to intellect; she has replaced the establishment of personal relationships by conceptual excellence, but has no qualms about this,” (Rimmon-Kenan, …show more content…
Vivian also has to deal with doctors asking questions with obvious answers, like when she is clutching her body and trembling in agony and Kelekian asks Vivian, “Are you in pain?” When it is visually clear that she is in pain. Vivian also always is asked how she is feeling, which she always replies with “I’m fine.” Vivian realizes the audacity of these questions in the movie, saying, “I have been asked ‘How are you feeling today?’ while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, ‘How are you feeling today?’ I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I’m a little sorry I’ll miss that,” (Rimmon-Kenan,

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