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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28509 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.

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.

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