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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28113 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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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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