“For the ransom of life is costly and can never suffice, that one should live on forever and never see the Pit.”
— Psalm 49:8-9 (New Revised Standard Version)
Trying to understand the modern age, Walter Benjamin arrived at a surprising juxtaposition: the physician and the cameraman. Medicine and cinema meet, for Benjamin, as particularly modern forms of perceiving and governing the body: “The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body…he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body.” So too the cameraman, who brings the viewer as close as possible to the filmic event, employing mechanical means to generate an image more palpably real than any painting. Leaving behind older practices, distanced from reality by the mystifying mediation of superstition or tradition, the surgeon and the cameraman enter, quite literally, into life, to claim total mastery over it.
Ninety years after Benjamin’s essay, as another fascist regime of aestheticized politics contours and constrains the everyday experience of most Americans, this proximity of medical and cinematic perception is enjoying a resurgent popularity. Each week, millions of viewers tune into The Pitt, an HBO drama structured around a single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department. Each episode chronicles an hour of work time, featuring both serialized plots that stretch over the course of the season, as well as episode-specific patient storylines whose abrupt arrivals in the emergency department momentarily disrupt the medical and interpersonal dramas that make up the season’s broader arcs. This structural interplay between the episodic and the serialized suggests the parallel between medical work and televisual perception that converges to form The Pitt’s mediation of contemporary social crisis. Just as the doctors and nurses on the show are beholden to the unpredictable flow of nearby traumas through their doors, so do viewers experience disruption in the resolution of specific storylines as unfamiliar figures delay the disclosure of what ails our favored patients and doctors alike.
Featuring a clear hierarchy of health care labor, from nurses and social workers to doctors at various stages of training, The Pitt is concerned with how the form of secular perception (and power) that Benjamin identifies is developed. “This is a teaching hospital,” we often hear; as we watch attendings teach student doctors procedures of all kinds, we learn, in turn, how experience supplements book learning to establish the sovereign medical gaze. Yet The Pitt is, for that very reason, full of characters who falter in the medical mastery the physician is expected to wield, whether because they are students in the process of learning it or because patients under the sway of some superstition or other reject its dominance. Like Benjamin’s portrait of the surgeon emerging against the backdrop of the magician, The Pitt’s pedagogy of mastery over life and death constantly unfolds in relation to figures that fail, for one reason or another, to reach this aspiration of total mastery.
Across The Pitt’s reckonings with medicine as a medium of social repair, a figure repeatedly appears that has yet to be recognized among the show’s central concerns: religion. Like a magician who persists despite the “tremendous shattering of tradition” that Benjamin associates with the surgical penetration of film, religion appears on The Pitt when secular work fails to master life and loss—which is to say, constantly and repeatedly. While religion rarely takes center stage, the frequency of its appearance at the margins of The Pitt reveals a deep anxiety about its secular form of intervention. Dramatizing the dream of medical mastery in a social world saturated with death, The Pitt sounds a lament for the inadequacy of secular knowledge to grieve its losses and limits. Beneath The Pitt’s much-vaunted reputation as a “woke doctor show,” then, lies a much more pessimistic assessment of both our social world and the capacity of secular reason to repair it. This is, in the end, the show’s greatest virtue in an age of catastrophe: to deny its viewers the consolation that anything will be ok.
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At the climactic moment of season one, our central character Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinovich (Noah Wyle), who remixes the stock image of male medical swagger on TV with a somewhat softer edge, loses his grasp on the sovereign control—of himself and his workers, his patients and their bodies—with which he is professionally tasked. Another idiom of life and death irrupts: as Robby sinks into the corner of a pediatric examination room repurposed as a morgue, confronted with the limits of his powers of intervention, he whispers in untranslated, almost unconscious Hebrew: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Baruch shem kvod malkhuto l’olam v’ed—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom, forever and ever. In the Jewish tradition, the recitation of this prayer, called the Shema, requires what the ancient rabbis call “accepting the yoke of the kingdom of heaven”—the daily work of subjecting yourself to a commanding god. Robby’s moment of prayer marks a departure, to say the least, from the show’s typical action, and the show seems not quite sure what to make of it. Later he will describe this to a medical student as “a declaration of faith in God,” repackaging Judaism’s emphasis on obligation in the Christian idiom of individual belief. He grew up reciting the prayer with his grandmother, he explains, and so the words returned as a childhood comfort surviving from an era long gone. The viewer is presumed to encounter the Hebrew words as babble, a sure sign that Robby, after hours of coworkers worrying about his mental state, has finally and fully come undone.
Later still, he will characterize his moment of prayer in terms that buttress this psychological reading. “I broke,” he tells his friend and fellow attending physician Dr. Jack Abbott (Shawn Hatosy), processing the day’s events from the hospital roof, “I shut down. The moment everybody needed me the most, I wasn’t there. Couldn’t do it, I choked.” The unwilled devotion that gripped Robby in that moment metamorphoses here into personal failure, a lapse in what ought to have been an unshakable dominance over the vulnerability of both his patients’ bodies and his own. By returning, however momentarily, to a childhood affirmation of divine sovereignty, Robby commits heresy against another disposition towards the management of bodily life and death. What Robby’s remark to Dr. Abbott evinces is less a critique of religion itself than regret to have slipped in his devotion to the medical reason whose reparative promise is central to the show. Like a surgeon turning back into a magician, the Shema marks Robby’s incomplete achievement of secular mastery.
To call The Pitt secular does not suggest a rejection of religion; rather, the show codes religion as good or bad, according to its acquiescence to the dominance of secular discourse. Good religion, on The Pitt, offers consolation in the face of loss which secular reason proves unable to prevent or grieve. As two parents spiral into panic over their young son in episode three of season one, a nurse—who knows that he is going to die—comforts them, saying that she believes in God and will pray for their boy. Later in the season, as two adult children struggle to face the impending death of their father, Robby recommends an indigenous Hawaiian prayer, consisting of four repeated affirmations: “I love you, thank you, I forgive you. Please forgive me.” The second season takes place on the day Robby is to leave for a sabbatical (a term itself resonant of religious temporalities) to “an aboriginal UNESCO heritage site in Alberta.” “What is this, some kind of spirit quest,” snarks Robby’s onetime prodigy Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball). “Something like that,” Robby (unamused) replies. Dr. Langdon himself will later disclose that he’s reading a book of blessings by John O’Donohue, an Irish priest credited with introducing Celtic spirituality to an English-language audience. Without prior indication of any religious inclination, we are meant to understand Dr. Langdon’s turn to spirituality in the context of his recovery from drug addiction; “physician, heal thyself,” it seems, requires another idiom of healing.
The Christianizing explication of Robby’s Hebrew paired with the sarcasm directed at his sabbatical plans suggest a truth almost too banal to need stating: The Pitt presumes that most of its viewers consider “religion” to name something done by people either less enlightened or more desperate than themselves. The repeated association of religion with the “primitive” and/or the indigenous imagines that “religion” is somehow older and other than “our” world, where surgeons and cameramen reign. Potentially valorized as therapeutic for that very reason, religion in such examples reiterates a racialized distinction between those who wield secular mastery over the body and those, like Benjamin’s magician, presumed to lack it. Religious practices can be legitimated, then, only if they are translated into “our” secular idiom. In episode three of season two, for example, a young nurse is bemused to hear that a Russian Jewish patient has used honey to treat a severe burn, until Robby, whose lack of Jewish observance has just been highlighted, reports that honey “can have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.” As he delivers the medical jargon, the camera pans to the nurse’s look of surprise. She (and presumably we) did not expect to hear seemingly irrational folk practice legitimated by an authoritative source of secular truth.
That plot’s conclusion is surely the cringiest of The Pitt’s depictions of religion, but also, for that very reason, telling. When the Jewish patient, whom we learn was walking into the Tree of Life synagogue when a gunman opened fire on October 27, 2018, encounters nurse Perlah (Amielynn Alawi), she reacts with gratitude. “After the shooting, it was the Muslims,” she says, “who paid for all the funerals.” True or not, this anecdote is a perfect emblem of not only The Pitt’s vexed attachment to religion, but also the terms on which religion can be valorized within the secular gaze that structures the show: religion is good when it helps people get along, which in this case is surely shadowed by the unarticulated (and ahistorical) presumption that harmony between Jews and Muslims is surprising. Religion is good, above all, when it brings comfort to people in mourning. Religion, The Pitt suggests, might make sense of loss more effectively than secular biomedicine, and figure, however fleetingly, the dream of a liberal tolerance that has never yet been achieved. Yet for all that, it cannot be a viable alternative to secularism. The patient’s Jewishness, figured as comparatively rooted and authentic, brings into sharp relief the incapacity to escape the secular impasse that is palpable in Robby’s inability to mourn.
But ultimately, that is all religion does. Her folk wound-care and synagogue attendance is the foil haunting his strained Shema. Consider that Robby’s ever-deferred sabbatical this season has been widely understood by viewers as a metonymic figure for suicide, an absolute exit from the secular whose melancholia The Pitt intensely knows. Being secular is unbearable, but one cannot be otherwise; religion, in the most positive formation the show can give it, is at best something we remember fondly. Figured as a fleeting and archaic palliative, religion makes the devotional subjection to the secular thematized on The Pitt legible as a crisis of survival.
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As this range of examples suggests, The Pitt demonstrates how “the secular” is more than a simple absence or negation of religion; it is an ambivalence about the very idea of religion, which ramifies across discursive idioms of Western modernity. “Secularism,” writes the scholar John Modern, “is a moral force, a connective tissue, a widely shared and massively intricate set of political and epistemological assumptions.” Medicine is only one component of this vastly dispersed governing force, but the seemingly unavoidable insistence of the medical lexicon in the very articulation of the secular (“a connective tissue”) suggests its centrality. Western societies have long imagined themselves through biological imagery with a specific theological echo: the body politic as the secular afterlife of the body of Christ. Accordingly, the physician has thus been invested with a privileged role in securing the vitality of both individual and collective bodies. Clinical medicine, properly speaking, emerges from a shift in the concept of life itself. Beginning in the eighteenth-century, life began to be understood as “the enigma of a force inaccessible in its essence,” as Michel Foucault puts it, concealed within the depths of tissues and fluids that could, with learned skill, be discerned beneath the body’s surface. Medical work, then, was less about the application of an encyclopedia of knowledge than a perceptive vision trained to discern the enigmas of life and its degeneration. The doctor must exercise what Foucault calls “the gaze of an eye that has seen death—the great white eye that unties the knot of life.” At stake in the development of this perception is not only physical health and not only the individual body; rather, the doctor, through the exercise of their controlling gaze, aspires to a control over life and death akin to the religious governance of the spirit. The French revolutionaries Foucault identifies as exemplars of secular governance dreamt of “a nationalized medical profession, organized like the clergy, and invested, at the level of man’s bodily health, with powers similar to those exercised by the clergy over men’s souls.” Far beyond biomedicine’s technical elements, the clinical doctor is figured as the guardian of the collective vitality and cohesion of social life, their gaze the remainder of a lost divine power.
From the early days of clinical medicine to the postindustrial rise of the health care industry, the redemptive aspiration of clinical labor has been closely linked with the racialized surplus populations who figure the margins of capitalist societies. “Like the expansion of the prison system in the final decades of the twentieth century,” writes the historian Gabriel Winant, “the rise of the health care industry offered an economic fix to the social crises brought about by deindustrialization, channeling public expenditure and state power into the management of surplus populations, generating employment, profits, and social stability.” Or, as Robby put it in a recent episode, his job is “saving America’s tired poor huddled masses yearning to breath free,” riffing on the precise point where American Jewish culture (Emma Lazarus’s 1883 “The New Colossus”) meets a broader American mythos of immigration to present—sardonically but not wrongly—the task of the physician as ministering to the populations whom capitalism treats as superfluous. (Another doctor replies, also sardonically: “you’re a saint.”) The Pitt, like medical television more generally, foregrounds the workers tasked with repairing the bodies capitalism feeds on. In so doing, it presents the hospital as a sacramental office, where biomedical intervention is tasked with securing a social vitality that capitalism constantly threatens.
Those who have understood The Pitt as espousing a kind of saccharine liberalism—the woke doctor show—are responding to its frequent, unsubtle allusion to how thoroughly socio-economic conditions shape medical work. While resonant with this longer secular history, though, the show’s rendition of this entanglement is intensely presentist: the first season, for instance, is set on the fifth anniversary of the death of Robby’s mentor, Dr. Adamson, from COVID, unmistakably evoking the “frontline workers” who became, in the spring and summer of 2020, figures of ritual veneration. But The Pitt does not only present the medical gaze, in its uneven aspiration towards secular mastery, through its narrative. The show also formally compels the viewer to inhabit it themselves. Flashbacks to the scene of Dr. Adamson’s death, with Robby tearing off the full PPE typical of the COVID ward as his mentor flatlines, punctuate the first season. This temporal organization of the narrative disrupts the viewer’s experience of the shift’s linear temporality and reminds them, perhaps, of too-familiar images they have learned to forget. The flashback draws the viewer into the trauma whose disruptive effects the show explores.
The viewer is similarly invited to inhabit the perspective of the workers at its center through the images of debilitated, dying bodies with which the camera presents us. Like Benjamin’s surgeon, the camera work of The Pitt “greatly diminishes the distance between [the viewer] and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body,” until the viewer’s gaze and the doctor’s almost merge into one. We not only bear witness to medicine’s near-absolute mastery over life and death; we are encouraged, through the camera, to share the gaze through which the physician’s secular governance of the body takes place. In a typical scene, a patient appears abruptly in the emergency department; we see them lying prone on a gurney without motion, speech, or breath, embodying the ambiguous margin of life and death, reflecting the aftereffects of violence or the undetected malevolence of disease. Viewers watch, the frame cutting from wide shots of the room to nauseating close-ups of the patient’s mutilated or diseased body and the faces, often splattered with blood and other fluids, of the doctors who hurry to assess the threat. The camera hews closely to their eyes and their hands, as they cut open chest cavities or thrust tubes into a patient’s throat or suture lacerated skin. Within mere minutes of screentime, calm has been meticulously restored, marked by the serene beep of the heart rate monitor. There is something ritualistic in such scenes: medical workers confronting quasi-demonic forces with the secular sacrament of healing intervention.
In such moments, the camera offers a model of the human body specific to secular science, accentuating the body as a network of organic matter whose parts play host to disease and death. Gowns, monitors, and other instruments, not to mention the crowd of medical workers, focalize the threatening body part within our vision; the face, with its insinuation of what we call human life, is either occluded from view or, disfigured by force or fluid, projects a brutal death. The camera of The Pitt visualizes the body as a network of connective tissues vulnerable to decay, destruction, and death, forcing viewers literally inside its gory depths as the doctors and nurses seek to combat their foe. As they penetrate into the body, so as to master it, we go with them, confronting the enigmatic and gross force that life truly is. The disgust at the sight of the body, intolerable for many viewers, that such penetration makes undeniable is the flip side of the sacred value of life that medical dramas seem to solemnify. Coming, through the screen, as close as possible with what Foucault calls the “visible invisible” force of life, which is also to say its loss, viewers experience our subjection to the medical gaze insofar as we are identified, for a moment, with its sovereign, salvific force. Watching The Pitt, we are recruited into the protocols of this secularism—and its discontents—expressed most powerfully in the visualization of the body as an object of medical sacrament.
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These images of disfigured and dying bodies, viewed on screen in 2026, are inseparable from other such images that we encounter every day, on the news or on our omnipresent portable screens and social media feeds, of overcrowded COVID wards and mobile morgues, of Gaza and its destruction. This ghastly montage meets a secular world with a dearth of idioms for making sense of the scale of the losses it contains. Cognizant that the luckiest among us are those habituated to the mediated experience of mass death (rather than its material threat), The Pitt asks how we survive seeing it. Let us return, in closing, to that culminating scene, with Robby and Abbott on the roof, which shows us the secular pushed to a point of crisis. Abbott, a veteran and amputee, turns to martial metaphors to remind Robby of medicine’s salvific power: “That is what happens,” he says of Robby’s breakdown, “when you’re at war and nothing makes sense…all you can do is focus on the medicine. The medicine is the only thing that saves the patient, and your sanity.” Abbott’s articulation of what could only be called faith reflects The Pitt at its most optimistic: in an age of imperial wars and capitalist immiseration, the show here seems to be emulating another famous Pittsburgher, saying, optimistically, “look for the helpers.” Yet while accentuating, rightly, the complicated personal heroism of health care workers, The Pitt in turn disabuses us of the fantasy that the psychosocial wound of our secular society will be finally healed by it. It teaches us, in Benjamin’s terms, that the surgeon cannot do without the magician, even if the latter can only appear, again and again, as an aberration or betrayal of secular mastery. In the prayers and tears of Dr. Robby, as with the moments of religion that appear on the show with surprising frequency, we see the secular mourning, the incapacity, biological and more-than biological, of its power over life.
Across the contemporary political spectrum, a similarly acute experience of loss, and images of loss, animate various forms of discontent with the liberal order. “We are living through another great revolt against mourning,” writes the theologian Mac Loftin. “The Christian West is dying, a new world is being born, and morbid symptoms flourish.” The Pitt, making apparent how morbidity flourishes through and not despite the secular gaze that structures it, refuses to participate in the revolt against mourning. This pessimism is The Pitt’s greatest virtue; it cannot imagine an alternative form of revolt. We learn from Robby’s recitation of the Shema how The Pitt continues to view religion as heresy against the secular devotion whose limits it otherwise knows. Still, to underscore these limits, and thus deflate the optimism that often attends the “health care worker” as a figure of secular redemption, is valuable as a point of departure. Because at the moment, in one form or another, we all live in The Pitt, and we will, later or sooner, all die there.
Evan Goldstein teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where he is also a member of the Center for Social Theory. He lives with four tuxedo cats, one of whose theme songs is “FME” by MUDRAT.
Article thumbnail photo: Chaïm Soutine, Carcass of Beef (detail), 1925 via Public Domain Review