I started watching House
in its second season. The initial
description of a cranky, drug-popping doctor treating mysterious ailments
wasn’t one that appealed to me.
Particularly coming on the tail end of a glut of medical shows ranging
from ER to Dr. Quinn. I dismissed it as
just one more doctor show.
My husband started watching it and I began catching the last
twenty minutes of it when I came home from karate class. House
hooked me with one line in particular:
Foreman: So your motto is ram the treatment down the
patient’s throat, unless it’s curing their paralysis and then we stop?
House: Yeah. It used
to be live and let live but I’m taking a needlepoint class and they gave us
these really big pillowcases.
I’ve mentioned I am a sucker for good dialogue.
I’m really going to miss watching Hugh Laurie turn what
should be a completely unsympathetic misanthropic character into something
more. House is mean, crass, hurtful and
brutally honest, with the emphasis on brutality. But Hugh Laurie managed to create a sublayer
with quiet moments and subtle facial expressions. Without saying a word, he convinced me that
he cared about his patients and colleagues, cared so deeply that he was
bleeding deep inside for each and every one of them. The sarcasm and attacks were partly because
he was absolutely convinced of his own rightness and willing to do anything to
get the patient the treatment they needed.
And partly, they were a shield against others knowing about his
vulnerability and using it to manipulate him.
Take the snippet of dialogue above. Foreman is upset because they’ve removed a
treatment which is helping their patient.
He’s lashing out at House. House
responds with sarcasm because he sees the answer as so obvious that it doesn’t
need to be spoken. The patient was on
several treatments. By withdrawing them
and doing them one at a time, the team will figure out which condition the
patient has and be able to treat it more effectively. Later in the episode, there’s what I call the
House-crisis moment. This is when he’s
no longer confident about his answers and diagnosis. The sarcasm vanishes (although the meanness
and attacks still sometimes happen). His
flippancy disappears as he gets more desperate to help the patient.
Within the show, House is often accused of only caring about
solving the medical puzzle. But if that
were true, he wouldn’t show the desperation he often does. No matter how passionately we want to solve
an intellectual puzzle, we aren’t desperate to solve it. Frustrated at lack of progress, certainly. But not desperate. It’s how the actor and writers show that
House really does care.
My favourite episode of all time is The Lecture, an episode from the first season. House is lecturing a bunch of medical
students about thinking outside the box when it comes to diagnosis. He tells them that despite what they’ve been
told, right and wrong are real and not knowing which is which is no excuse for
making the wrong decision. When a
student is hesitating over giving an answer and complains that it’s difficult
to think with him shouting and standing over her, he snarls back: Do you think
it will be any easier when you have a real patient really dying?
I hope that I can someday write a character with such deep
layers. I hope I can take someone who
would seem to be completely amoral and unlikable and show their other side in
such a way that they become fascinating to a reader.
The writers never made the mistake of turning House into a
good guy. His prickliness is a part of
him and downplaying it would have made the character into the same boring old Beauty and the Beast
interpretation. Love/affection/satisfaction/whatever
transforms the Beast into a Prince.
House is always a Beast. That’s
what makes the glimpses of the Prince inside so satisfying. But through it all, he’s still a Beast.
I love the series but I think they’re finishing at a good
time. There’s not much more they could
throw at House without venturing into the ridiculous. Ending it now makes sense. I’ll miss it, but that’s why the gods
invented series DVDs.
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