House MD revisited

[lady_*nix]

So one of my friends shared this video with me, about House MD's poor handling of trans and intersex issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytF2mzbtNY8

But I haven't even gotten to the trans/intersex part. The first ten minutes of the video just cover House (and his entire team, sans the one woman on it) being an enormous creep towards a fifteen year old girl.

Back when I was in college I remember House was super popular, everyone I knew seemed to love the show. The guys in my dorm wanted to be House, and the girls wanted to sleep with him. IIRC I complained about it here, and the response I got was basically "Well he's supposed to be a brilliant asshole, so it just follows." I think I eventually filed it under "another thing I am oversensitive about for unclear reasons".

A decade and change later, watching this, I do not feel like I was being too sensitive about House. Even considering it was pre-#MeToo, this was so far above and beyond the usual media sexism and creepiness at the time, just very openly crossing the line from portrayal to apologia.

I was not a great guy in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of things I regret about what I said, did, and thought in that part of my life. Including a lot of stuff I posted here. But damned if I didn't have better taste in media than I gave myself credit for.

[SciFiFisher]

RE: House

It’s been a very long time since I watched House. But, IIRC correctly he was terrible to EVERYONE. He was even terrible to himself in later seasons when he was dealing with addiction issues. Not saying that the show should have promoted being terrible to LGTB or trans people but the allure of House was that he got to say and do all the terrible things that most of us want to say or do at least some of the time.

Having been a nurse for more than thirty years I can assure you that more than once I have wanted to look at a patient and say. “look, you are right. Nurses and Doctors just hate you because no matter what we do you are going to kill yourself any way. We just want you to hurry it up and stop wasting resources that we can use them for people who don’t want to die” I am paraphrasing something I think House would have said. But, I have had those patients that I know nothing I do or say is going to make any difference. And it kind of breaks my heart but I also realize that it is their choice to make.

Or the time I was working in the ICU and was looking at a 25 year old male on life support in a coma who had the heart of a 95 year old because of the drugs he was doing. His heart was so damaged it could only do about 10% of the work he needed it to do. He was going to recover just enough to maybe go home but chances are he was going to be dead in less than 5 years. His girlfriend, co-druggie, asked me “Is he going to get better”. Before I could stop myself I blurted out House like “No, he’s not”. I quickly added... “Well, he probably isn’t going to die” and some other reassuring words but House would have just tore her apart how about how her boyfriend had pretty much committed suicide by drugs and there wasn’t anything modern medicine could do to save him. Actually, not true. If he lived long enough and he stopped doing the drugs he might have gotten a heart transplant. Of course, the writers might have used House’ shock therapy to make the kid and his girlfriend realize they had a choice and the episode would have ended with him vowing to fly right and get a new heart.

One of the doctors I work with hated House, not because he was an asshole, but because the show was ridiculous from a medical perspective. Most of the “Genius diagnosis and cures” were bogus.

[lady_*nix]

I mean I get that up to a point. Working in tech support/other such help desk jobs isn't the same in terms of stress and life criticality, but like... I get the whole BofH thing, there have def been times when I was a couple inches from calling a user an idiot. I don't really get the appeal of a character who reifies it, but I can see how other people would, and I can see how that would be more appealing in a job where the stupidity you deal with gets people killed and worse.

But like... talking about how much he'd like to fuck a 15 year old? Nah. There's a place IMO where it crosses from being a generic no consequences fantasy to being a no consequences fantasy for a more fucked up subset of people, particularly IMO a more fucked up subset of men.

And the genius diagnostician thing... yeah IDK, that's the thing, the show hinges on not just being a no consequences fantasy but on House always being right. The best description I've ever seen of it is "a cop show but for doctors". Honestly worse than a lot of cop shows too I think. I've seen old Law & Order episodes where the show makes a point of the characters doing things that may be unjustifiable, or where there is no morally correct choice. Whereas from what I've seen of House, every choice House makes is justified in that it saves the patient. There's no room for ambiguity, he's just a supergenius who is always right, even when he's sexually fantasizing about a teenager.

[SciFiFisher]

Yeah, fantasizing about an inappropriate sexual encounter is muy tacky. Especially re: underage girls, boys, or whatever else is just too perverted for color TV. I suspect some script writers think of that sort of thing as being “edgy” or showing how the show is willing to talk about taboo subjects. And sometimes I think they cross a line, erase it, and burn it just for the shock value. Which is, in my opinion, probably just lazy writing.

If you really want to watch a show that does a fair bit of that in a way just watch “The Boys” on Amazon Prime. The main premise of the show is “What would happen if there were really super heroes and they were just as flawed and fucked up as the reset of us”? The short answer is “Something really terrible, and it isn’t pretty”. Of course, there are people with some redeeming qualities in the show but the show revolves around all of us being human in one way or another so we all can be put in situations where we make morally ambiguous choices. How we find our way to redemption or not is one of the underlying themes of the show. But, it isn’t pretty.

I say the “The Boys” engages in a bit of lazy writing because the last couple of seasons they really seemed to go for the shock value in dealing with some of the fucked up ways that people are willing to treat each other or be treated by each other.

They tend to ignore the better side of humanity in their effort to show just how fucked up we can be as humans. Which is OK since the main story is about what it would be like if some people had the power to do anything they wanted and there was no consequences to speak of. We certainly have examples of that in society without super heroes being involved so the allegory or the analogy is not missed by me at least.

[lady_*nix]

Oh yeah I know about The Boys. Apparently it's a great improvement on the comic. I couldn't watch it because waaayyy too squicky, but I appreciate the show taking the piss out of this country's totally not fascist superhero obsession, esp. given my feelings about the MCU and Disney. Alas, some right wingers apparently think Homelander is the hero somehow...

For House I think the explanation is more prosaic, TBH. I've heard that some people on the writing team later got accused of sexual harassment, so I'm guessing it was just a case of creeps writing out their creepy fantasies, like what happened with Star Trek Voyager/Enterprise and Brannon Braga.