You're a Rabid Anti-Dentite

I rarely have nightmares. Or, at least, I rarely remember having nightmares once I'm awake. Years of excessive pot consumption have kind of killed off my ability to have super-vivd dreams and recall them the next day.

But whenever I do recall my nightmares, they're always tooth-related. Frequently, I'll have dreams in which some or all of my teeth are falling out. Other times, I'll actually be pulling my teeth out for god knows what reason. Once, several years ago, I had a dream in which I woke up to discover I had no teeth, and then my roommates (at the time) forced me to move out, because my toothlessness reflected poorly on them. I'd rather not get into the psycho-social ramifications of that dream, now that I think about it...

This may be because I grind my teeth during my sleep. Or because I drink a lot of soda and my teeth are decaying slowly month after month, and horrific toothless dreams are my body's way of warning me about the future.

When I was in junior high, we had a music class that met, maybe twice a week. We had this really odd teacher, this middle-aged guy who used to just teach us songs he'd written on his guitar most weeks. Most of the time, they weren't even original melodies, but famous songs he'd repurposed. It was incredibly lame.

One week, he was showing us how to use a tuning fork, and mentioned the old saw that, if you were to touch a vibrating tuning fork to one of your teeth, it would instantly shatter.

Is this true? I tried finding an answer on the Internet, and I found some instances of people talking about this idea, but nothing that was 100% convincing to me. I mean, I get that a tuning fork works by vibrating really quickly, and it's made of metal, but why would it neccessarily shatter your tooth on contact? Maybe it would just chip it a little. Or maybe it would just hurt a lot.

Anyway, that image, of a guy inserting a tuning fork into his mouth and shattering all his teeth at once, has stayed with me ever since. If I ever get an opportunity to write a horror film set somewhere that reasonably might house musical instruments, the tuning fork/tooth concept will find a way in there, I guarantee it.

Dental dreams are apparently quite common. I think maybe it's the odd nature of teeth. They're hard like bone, and yet full of nerve endings and immensely sensitive. They're attached to us, but loosely, through this odd fleshy material. Also, they're these sharp implements, but inside our mouths. They are a part of our body, but also capable of inflicting damage on to ourselves and others (like when you bite your tongue).

Perhaps this is why so many films have used the visceral reaction people have towards tooth pain and dental torture so effectively. Consider the following sequences and how they employ damage to teeth, or worse yet, the looming threat of damage to teeth to enhance the tension or deepen the horror.

12 Monkeys

In the film, time traveler Willis is tracked by scientists through a mechanism hidden in his tooth. When he makes the decision to stay in th e present (long story...), he has to pull out the tooth to avoid capture. It's a pretty wonderfully disgusting scene (including a long, loving shot of Willis' post-extraction tooth in the palm of his hand, wreathed in blood).

Again, I'd point to the fact that his tooth is both a part of his body, and yet something that can easily be removed. It is "of" him, but it is not him - he can pull it out and stay himself. Just as Willis' character is "of" the future, but is living in the present. Awesome.

Wild Things

I couldn't find a good image of the scene from 12 Monkeys where Willis yanks out his own tooth. Likewise, I couldn't find a good shot of the post-credit sequence in Wild Things where Neve Campbell performs her own tooth extraction. Mainly because, when you type in "Wild Things" as a Google Image Search, you mostly get pictures like this:



Those are, in fact, wild things. With fairly out-of-control dental problems themselves. But they're not the "wild things" pertaining to this discussion.

As you may recall from the film, Neve's character has to pull out her own tooth so she can then leave it behind at a crime scene, to fool detectives. Like in 12 Monkeys, the loss of a tooth equals freedom, although in Neve's case it's in monetary and not existential terms.

What is it about having a tooth pulled out that symbolizes sacrifice so efficiently? I mean, having to remove a tooth would be really painful, but it's not really hard to go through life missing one tooth. Rednecks are frequently missing scores of teeth, and they seem to be doing alright. Toes, too.

Novocaine

Again, a film in which a character must pull out his own teeth in order to win the day. In this comic thriller, Martin's dentist must remove all of teeth and insert them into a corpse's mouth, as a way of swapping identities. (Hence the title substance, with which he must inject himself in order to pull off the caper).

The scene is super-disgusting, and rather shocking as well, and it also uses the removal of teeth to represent a move forward in a life. Maybe it's that we lose our baby teeth during childhood, so teeth falling out comes to symbolize change or something? I don't know...but it's gross and weird.

Marathon Man



Okay, finally a movie in which a guy doesn't actually pull teeth out, but just uses a drill on 'em. Dustin Hoffman is tortured by psycho nutjob Laurence Olivier, whose catchphrase "is it safe" is still famous even though most people don't even remember the movie that it comes from.

Here, it's really the high-pitched eerie whir of the dental drill, more so than any harm caused to actual teeth, that makes it so unsettling. The scene is a triumph of sound design, although frankly, I can't stand the sound of a dentist's drill in real life. How do dentists tolerate it in their ear all day?

My dad works sometimes out of a dental office, and he used to be a dentist himself, so I shall have to ask this question of him at some point. (Or, if he's so inclined, and reading this article, he could favor us with an answer in the comments section). How can you go to work all day and have to listen to that screeching buzzy drill noise for 8-10 hours? Do you eventually block out the sound, or is it that you begin to simply associate it with the workplace rather than the painful experience of having your teeth drilled?

Honestly, can't they come up with a different way for those things to sound? With the technology we have in the world today, you could have the fucking drill play mp3's or something. That would be way better. Instead of "wwwrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwww," the drill would feature Fergie repeating her request that you cease phunking with her heart.

Or maybe just stick with the whirring sound....

Castaway

Arguably the most memorable scene in the film finds Tom Hanks' stranded island-dweller knocking out a bum tooth using an ice skate blade and a rock. Yeow. That would suck. If I were stranded on a desert island, I'd die in about 2 minutes. Forget extracting my own teeth if they caused me pain...I can't manage walking on hot sand in my bare feet.

Oldboy

As gruesome as it would be to knock out a tooth with a rock, using the ass end of a hammer might actually be worse. Yet this is the fate of the jailer in Oldboy, when a freed inmate of his motel/prison returns for information, and pulls out 3 or 4 of his pearly whites along the way.

This scene is goddamn disturbing. The use of wet, tinny sound effects really makes it nauseating. I'd say it's the most disturbing tooth damage scene of all time if it weren't for this next entry...

American History X

By far the most disturbing tooth scene in the history of cinema, hands down. Ed Norton's skinhead makes an unfortunate black man place his front teeth on a street curb, before slamming his foot down on the back of the man's head. I'm telling you, that sound they use, of the guy's teeth scraping sidewalk, actually makes my hair stand on end.

Horrifying. The rest of the movie is kind of bogus, but there's something to be said for any piece of filmmaking that manages to create such visceral audience response without using any actual on-screen gore or bloodshed.

The Dentist

This reprehensible mid-90's "ironic" gorefest finds dentist Corbin Bernsen going insane after realizing that his wife is having an affair. So then, for some reason, he decides to torture all of his patients. There are lots of dental torture scenes, and they're all pretty repulsive. I was going to put up a picture of one of the girls from the movie whose mouth is all torn apart, but I don't want to disgust you people...I'm just trying to make a point.

People are so horrified about dental treatments, they even doubt a dentist's motives in treating them. The Dentist seems to insist that only a total sicko would choose a career in which they were rooting around in people's mouths, causing them fear, pain and anxiety. See also...

Little Shop of Horrors

which also depicts the dentist as a cruel sadist.



Here, Steve Martin (again!) plays the evil and cruel dentist to Bill Murray's masochistic patient. What's with Steve Martin's fascination with playing dentists? I guess he's just happy for the rare opportunity to play a character in a Hollywood comedy who's not a lawyer or an ad executive.

Why are the main characters in movies always in marketing? Is it because movie marketing departments have to approve ideas before they get made into movies, and all of those executives are maniacally self-involved? Or is it just because being an advertising executive is a really easy job that any buffoon can do, and all the main characters in Hollywood films just happen to be buffoons. It's a lot easier to write a buffoon advertising exec than, say, a buffoon structural engineer.

So, you get the idea. There are a lot (a lot!) of cultural images of tooth damage. It's a notion that really resonates, for whatever reason.

I mean, I can't think of a lot of horrific scenes in movies dealing with damage to someone's ear, can you?

Well...there's Reservoir Dogs, obviously...and Wrath of Khan, of course...And Benicio gets his ear blown off in Sin City...And then there's Dolph Lundgren and his necklace of human ears in Universal Soldier...Hey, maybe I'm on to something here...