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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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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).

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