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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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House M.D. as a time capsule.

House was on the air from 2004-2012. I watched it when it came out and then almost never since. Now I'm rewatching it (or rebinging it) and House has turned out to be an amusing time capsule of some culture war drift over the past decade. I get that House (the show and Character) was supposed to be kind of edgy, and an anti-hero, and straddle the line between likable and unlikeable, but I still think there were a lot of plotlines and Gregory House behavior that wouldn't fly in a modern tv show. For instance:

  • House finds out that Dr. Wilson (his best friend) has an asexual female patient with an asexual husband. House says that asexuality isn't real because it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. House bets Wilson $100 he can prove that the patient's asexuality is the result of a medical disorder. House eventually finds that the patient's husband has a tumor near his pituitary gland which crushes his libido, and that the patient has been lying about her asexuality since they met because she's in love with him.
  • There's an episode where House and his team ogle and drool over a 15 year old model. In the same episode, House discovers that the girl has some rare disease where she actually has testicles in her body, at which point House insists on calling the patient "he" even though the patient hates it.
  • House is casually racist towards Foreman (a black doctor that works under him) constantly. House never actually drops the N-bomb but he threatens to do so. It's clear that House isn't actually racist but he still says racist things to get under Foreman's skin. Even still, I don't think a modern tv protagonist could get away with this.
  • Likewise, House sexually harasses Cuddy (his female boss) constantly. He makes lewd comments toward her and behind her back with colleagues. In one episode, House has a team of doctors competing with each other for job openings, and House tells them to try to steal Cuddy's panties as a game.
  • There's a scene where Wilson gossips to House about a guy in the hospital dating a transwoman. House calls her a "tranny."
  • There's an episode where House treats a dwarf, and House mocks the dwarf and her mother for being dwarfs (typical short people jokes).
  • There's a character named "Thirteen" who is revealed to be bisexual. House and his colleagues act like this is a stunningly salacious detail at a level of like... if she was a hardcore swinger. Today, I don't think anyone would be surprised that someone of Thirteen's demographics - a highly-educated, white, early 30s, liberal female - was bisexual.
  • Especially weird one: there's an episode where Dr. Chase (one of House's employees) goes to a party and ends up taking two girls home for a threesome. The next day, Chase's Facebook account is hacked and the hacker posts nude photos of Chase taken the night before with photoshop to make his penis look smaller. Chase runs around trying to figure out who the hacker is and eventually discovers it's the sister of one of the girls from the threesome. Chase confronts her, and she basically calls him a man whore and says he should stop having so much casual sex. Chase feels embarrassed and agrees with her, and then instead of calling the cops on her for posting revenge porn and hacking and maybe defamation, he asks her on a date. Note that the narrative of the episode frames this as a good outcome and a moment of growth for Chase (rather than a further extension of his man whoreness).
  • On the opposite end of "House is too edgy for modern tv" is the way the show deals with religion. There are maybe a dozen episodes were House gets a religious patient and House mercilessly mocks them. When the show came out in the mid-2000s, this was probably par for the course amidst the online religion v. atheist wars, but watching it today, House comes off as a hilariously 2edgy4 me high school atheist.

Who thinks this represents either an improvements or degredation of cultural norms? Its pop art that served its utility at the time and might not work today, but it is an interesting cultural time capsul.

  • Neutral. Maybe some people are asexual. I'll never care either way. If its caused by a medical issue, it sould be treated.

  • Improvment. Probably best not to comment on hot kids at work. Calling someone passing and living as a gender the opposite is hugely unprofessional and a dick move.

  • Improvement. Casual racism at work is a terrible idea.

  • Improvement. Similar to above. Sexual innuendo is dubious in the workplace.

  • Neutral. Euphemism treadmill. Tranny was acceptable enough at the time.

  • Improvement. Dont mock peoples inherant differences, especially at work.

  • Neutral. Its neither bad nor good that society is surprised by bisexuality.

  • Improvement. Revenge porn and hacking are serious actions.

  • Improvement. No need to overly bash the beliefs of most of society.

Weird idea that not showing behavior will somehow prevent it from happening.

US TV almost never makes show about black crime, yet it keeps happening. Do you really think e.g. The Wire contributed to gang culture in Baltimore?

I didn't make any claim about causality. I'm curious if people think these changes in widely consumed popular media/art represnet an improvement or degredation of cultural mores. Feel free to opine!

The real reason House is blatantly from 2004 and not 2023 is that there isn’t an unvaccinated dying Covid patient bearing the brunt of his rants once an episode.

Well there's a scene in either season 1 or 2 which consists entirely of House aggressively berating a woman for refusing to vaccinate her child, so.

Yeah there is, there are like 4 clinic patients that fit that type of characterization. Have you even seen House? It's unabashedly Pro Doctors Know More Than You Do What They Say.

Yeah it has been really strange watching all the progressive media coming out recently that ham-fistedly brings up the pandemic. Not a fan at all.

I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.

In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.

It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.

Perhaps the most striking example is this comedy film from 2002 about a basketball player who gets suspended from the men's league and tries to pass himself off as a woman so he can compete in the women's league.

It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.

Imagine where we might go in another 15...

The more I see of the modern political landscape, the more I want to advocate for a gradualist approach. At least for social conventions and laws, if not for technology. Then again I would sacrifice the measly technological gains we've made in the past 15 years to go back to that time period from a social and legal standpoint. ChatGPT is amazing, but not worth it.

I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.

In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.

It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.

Thirty years ago I flirted with a career in comedy/TV writing. One of the most reliable tropes, I was taught, dating back hundreds of years (at least), was putting a man in a dress. The evidence that this nugget was a steadfast laugh-generator was apparent in a continuous stream from Shakespeare to Doubtfire. Now, it's the one thing above all others that can never be acknowledged as out-of-the-ordinary.

House had two points:

  1. House had an internal contradiction. He was very nihilistic yet believed heavily in doing whatever was possible to save his patient’s life.

  2. House was very utilitarian. The kind of medicine he practiced was effectively take calculated risks. He didn’t get fired despite being an ass because he had more points in the hood column.

Mix that in with a somewhat charming cast and soap opera and you have somewhat interesting tv.

He didn’t get fired despite being an ass because he had more points in the hood column.

I'm sure this was a typo but I chortled regardless.

Doyle's core characterization managed to survive into a very different adaptation.

House had an internal contradiction. He was very nihilistic yet believed heavily in doing whatever was possible to save his patient’s life.

That is not a contradiction. Nihilism only denies objective morality, you can have your subjective one and cling on to it like a limpet, and you might as well because there isn't anything better.

I'm certainly what might be called an optimistic nihilist, but I don't let my patients die on me if I can help it, despite being no House.

Nihilism only denies objective morality, you can have your subjective one and cling on to it like a limpet, and you might as well because there isn't anything better.

My understanding is that nihlism rejects all meaning, including personal values, no?

What you're describing sounds more like existentialism.

Wiki tells me:

In popular use, the term commonly refers to forms of existential nihilism, according to which life is without intrinsic value, meaning, or purpose.

So that's what I'm going for. I see it as only applicable to objective morality anyway, since subjective ones seek no further justification.

Ahh interesting. My pedantry has been one-upped I see. This time.... >:)

I like to call it functional nihilism, because it makes me look smart.

somewhat charming cast

I think it's hard to overstate how heavily the show was driven by Hugh Laurie just being really, really good at delivering the House role. The rest of the cast does a good job too, but Laurie is perfectly cast, well written, and consistently delivers sardonic humor that keeps the whole thing running. Maybe the exact jokes don't get written that way in 2023, but the basic character would work just fine and would simply be taking shots at someone else instead.

Agreed. Laurie was by far the best part of the show. Some of the other cast members were decent. Hence the somewhat charming.

I never watched the show but ye gods, there was a ton of online fannish devotion to it back in the day.

From what I gathered via osmosis, House was meant to be an asshole (with some reasons for being a dick, but still basically even in his days of full health, being an asshole). Maybe as a deliberate contrast to all the TV medical shows where the doctors are caring, devoted, wonderworkers? I think the character of Wilson was also meant to be poking slight fun at that as well, because even though he's an oncologist whose patients love him for his sympathy and caring, House needles him about his martyr complex and wanting to be seen as Saint Jimmy, while his tangled personal life does put him on the asshole end of the spectrum as well (he constantly marries, cheats on his wife, then rinse and repeat).

I think there was also backstory as to House's disdain for religion, which pretty much was the backstory for most militant atheists: raised in a strict home, with religion rammed down his throat, and he was a very smart kid who was the opposite of the kind of son his dad wanted, so he rebelled against that upbringing hard and became "2edgy4 me high school atheist".

The rest of it (including House harassing Foreman and Cuddy) was all part of the "yeah he's an asshole but he's also a genius, which is why the hospital doesn't just bounce his ass out the door; he's the only one who can diagnose what that illness is that's killing you and the lives he saves makes up for the horrible human being he is" characterisation.

The idea of the show was "Sherlock Holmes as a doctor". So instead of Holmes and Watson you have House and Wilson solving medical mysteries. By the time it aired Wilson ended up as his old friend and House mostly works with his team of younger doctors.

House's personality is pretty close to what we got in shows like BBC's Sherlock. It's probably true to the Holmes novels, but I haven't read them.

It's probably true to the Holmes novels, but I haven't read them.

It's true to a version of Holmes character, but House is much more of an asshole about things. Holmes is very smart, at the start not very sympathetic to human failings, and quite prepared to break the law in some instances (that's where House's burgling and breaking into patient's houses comes from). Most of it came from the first novel, "A Study in Scarlet", and the character was softened a little as Conan Doyle developed them:

As we made our way to the hospital after leaving the Holborn, Stamford gave me a few more particulars about the gentleman whom I proposed to take as a fellow-lodger.

“You mustn’t blame me if you don’t get on with him,” he said; “I know nothing more of him than I have learned from meeting him occasionally in the laboratory. You proposed this arrangement, so you must not hold me responsible.”

“If we don’t get on it will be easy to part company,” I answered. “It seems to me, Stamford,” I added, looking hard at my companion, “that you have some reason for washing your hands of the matter. Is this fellow’s temper so formidable, or what is it? Don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.”

“It is not easy to express the inexpressible,” he answered with a laugh. “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.”

“Very right too.”

“Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.”

“Beating the subjects!”

“Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.”

“And yet you say he is not a medical student?”

“No. Heaven knows what the objects of his studies are. But here we are, and you must form your own impressions about him.”

But he is also able to be polite and even sympathetic to clients, and is mostly brusque to the rich and important who think they can just order him around. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder about the world. BBC Sherlock upped the arrogance (for the younger version of Holmes which he was) and made him a bit more of an asshole than the Conan Doyle version, and House was just out-and-out arrogant and unpleasant, even with the excuse of the constant pain he was in.

House was meant to be an asshole (with some reasons for being a dick, but still basically even in his days of full health, being an asshole). Maybe as a deliberate contrast to all the TV medical shows where the doctors are caring, devoted, wonderworkers?

It wasn't specific to medical dramas, a lot of media had that "quirky genius gets to be a dick" trope. If anything it was more popular in police procedurals (with the whole "consultant who gets to break all of the rules" gimmick). Though House itself was influenced by Sherlock and maybe the genre it spawned.

I remember reading Why We Love Sociopaths as a teen precisely because I liked shows like House. I think it captured something real, even if the specific diagnosis was wrong: House was the product of the triumph of narcissism + the Golden Age of TV and its focus on anti-social types.

House clearly fits the mold of the asshole-genius from that genre.

It's understandable: it feeds people's fantasies of being special (which we're all supposed to be) but, of course, House also has to be tortured to provide some sense of cosmic balance. Multiple times in the early series there's a legitimate discussion of "could House be as good if he wasn't miserable/a drug addict?" (this is a common talking point of extreme narcissist Kanye West, for example: "name one genius that ain't crazy")

That's the deal: we live vicariously through them, they get punished in the end and we are doubly sated.

I think David Chase was quite right in his diagnosis for why The Sopranos ending was badly received. It was blue balls for cosmic justice, he broke forming genre conventions:

There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob. The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ”justice.” They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years.

Honestly, I don't think the moment for narcissists has ended. It's just that you can't have white males like House pushing unPC takes and "punching down" - his treatment of Cuddy, his boss, was funny, but, post #MeToo, it does look very different . But I think the underlying desire isn't gone.

Nowadays you'd probably be more likely to see a less overtly grandiose minority narcissist claiming the mantle of victim while behaving like an asshole (e.g. characters like She-Hulk). Or maybe a more gelded white male that has similar characteristics but stays on the right side of the "line" (which is of course less fun).

I think there are two points. Firstly, House was always written as an asshole, and secondly, yes, there was a big shift around 2013 when “punching down” became unacceptable.

You don’t even need to go back to House in 2004 to see it. Modern Family’s run is fascinating from this perspective. The first two seasons (2009-2011) have a huge number of Asian jokes, Hispanic jokes and gay jokes (the Asian woman doctor is a terrible driver which is played for stereotype laughs, the Asian child’s (adoptive) uncle asks “will she even be able to pronounce her own name?” (its ‘Lily’). The show isn’t mean spirited but sometime around Gamergate it became unacceptable to have otherwise ‘good’ characters use ethnic/gender/sexuality based humor.

I recently rewatched seasons 1 and 2. One that jumped out for me was a season 1 episode in which a black politician is running for President. House scoffs at the idea that a black man could ever be elected President, and by the end of the episode the man himself admits that he doesn't expect to win, but thinks it's worth it in hopes that the act of doing so might inspire change.

In the second episode of season 2, there's a nine-year-old girl with terminal cancer who asks Chase (a thirty-year-old man) to kiss her, as she doesn't want to die without having been kissed. He's reluctant, but eventually does it. His colleagues tease him about it, but it's presented as an essentially compassionate act.

In the third episode of season 2, the cause of a Mexican day labourer's illness is a disease he contracted from a rooster at the underground cockfighting ring he works in. One suspects that this plot point would be decried as promoting harmful stereotypes against Hispanic people if it happened today.

There's a season 2 episode featuring a couple who practise consensual RP and BDSM. It's eventually revealed that the wife is trying to murder the husband for undisclosed reasons. You could argue this is stigmatising people with kinks.

I think there's a distinction in this list between 'wouldn't fly' and 'wouldn't make sense'.

Like, the point of House's characterization wasn't that he's a Republican, but that's all you'd be saying if you had a character do some of these things today. That's just because the culture war has currently picked them up as shibboleths; it's like if he was calling people 'feminazis' back when the show aired, it would be a clear political reference, which wasn't the point.

And yeah, culture has moved on from internet atheism and being scandalized by bisexual women... it's not like those would be 'too scandalous for tv', they'd just be boring and not consistent with the characterization of someone like House living today.

Like, the point of House's characterization wasn't that he's a Republican, but that's all you'd be saying if you had a character do some of these things today

Not really. The whole "Bernie Bros"/"Dirtbag Left" thing shows that modern progressive mores are totally fine with extending the title of racist/sexist/whateverist to people who would otherwise code as being very anti-Republican (like House probably would be)

My wife and I recently binged this show and absolutely loved it. Hugh Laurie is a treasure.

We had similar feelings to what you have articulated here. Also: this show is where I learned that “gypped” was a derogatory reference to Gypsies. The later plots where the cop is trying to get house in trouble is very reminiscing of The Shield in that it portrays a Good Man who is willing to do Bad Things in service of Good and is surrounded by dumb fake good people trying to stop him.

Here’s some fun trivia: house’s motorcycle when first introduced is an Aprilia RSV Mille, but is later is Honda CBR 1000RR with a “repsol” graphics package. Both absolutely bad ass bikes.

The later plots where the cop is trying to get house in trouble is very reminiscing of The Shield in that it portrays a Good Man who is willing to do Bad Things in service of Good and is surrounded by dumb fake good people trying to stop him.

Um...that's not what I got from The Shield...

Lol I thought something similar - maybe firmamenti meant Forest Whittaker's IA guy? Or Dutch? Vic and the boys all struck me as close to irredeemable (except poor Lenny.)

meant Forest Whittaker's IA guy?

Ah, that makes more sense. IIRC he was stopped by the "good" people. Whose ineptness led to the finale we got.

Mackey himself...the whole point of the most infamous scene in the show (in the very pilot!) was that he wasn't just another anti-hero cop. Though he tries.

My wife and I recently binged this show and absolutely loved it. Hugh Laurie is a treasure.

Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster are strongly recommended. Just don't watch the last episode of season 4 of Blackadder. It is the best piece of television ever made.

Much of House's behavior was intended to be unacceptable when it was made; what's changed isn't so much that as the idea that you can portray a character with such unacceptable behavior, especially if he gets away with it (shades of the Hays Code).

Or at least that you can't depict a character behaving like this if they're intended to be a likeable anti-hero the audience can sympathise with (up to a point). Nowadays a character could only be depicted behaving like this if they were an out-and-out villain without any redeeming qualities.

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