Heresy again
Oct. 18th, 2009 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Having seen a couple of episodes of House last night, I find myself in awe at how brilliantly Hugh Laurie plays a character I would walk down a different street to avoid, and whom I would move to another town rather than let treat me for anything. The series shows perfectly that there is more to being a doctor than knowing how to cure every known disease.
Sorry, but I just don't care that he's got problems. I know people with problems, horrendous problems, and they manage to be bearable and even wonderful human beings in spite of it all. I find it amazing that a character who not only doesn't try to be nice, but makes an active effort to be horrible, garners so much love and admiration from the people around him. The horribleness is not in any way linked to the medical brilliance--he didn't have to give up his basic humanity to become a medical expert, unless there's something about American health care education that I haven't grasped.
I'm sure it's all very clever, and I'm probably very stupid for preferring shows with characters who at least try to get along, but I don't like it. I'll go to that nice Doctor Finlay instead. He may not recognise my epicacular philibompstering busticulitis, and I may die of it, but at least I'll die not wanting to.
(Also: medical mysteries. What's up with that? Where's the fun in waiting for the detective/doctor to pull some disease I've never heard of out of his hat and realise that the cure is--gasp--an injection of common tap water? I prefer my whodunnits with clues I can look back on and realise I should have seen.)
Grump.
Sorry, but I just don't care that he's got problems. I know people with problems, horrendous problems, and they manage to be bearable and even wonderful human beings in spite of it all. I find it amazing that a character who not only doesn't try to be nice, but makes an active effort to be horrible, garners so much love and admiration from the people around him. The horribleness is not in any way linked to the medical brilliance--he didn't have to give up his basic humanity to become a medical expert, unless there's something about American health care education that I haven't grasped.
I'm sure it's all very clever, and I'm probably very stupid for preferring shows with characters who at least try to get along, but I don't like it. I'll go to that nice Doctor Finlay instead. He may not recognise my epicacular philibompstering busticulitis, and I may die of it, but at least I'll die not wanting to.
(Also: medical mysteries. What's up with that? Where's the fun in waiting for the detective/doctor to pull some disease I've never heard of out of his hat and realise that the cure is--gasp--an injection of common tap water? I prefer my whodunnits with clues I can look back on and realise I should have seen.)
Grump.
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Date: 2009-10-18 01:34 pm (UTC)COLLEAGUE: Oh come on, you're a religious personage now?
HOUSE: No, I said Blass' Femur! It has to be Blass' Femur, look at him, he's got the beard and the little squiddy eyes and the crossed legs...
COLLEAGUE: There hasn't been a case of Blass' Femur in over 70 years...
COLLEAGUE 2: I don't think his eyes are squiddy...
HOUSE: What, you think I can't diagnose squiddy eyes now?
COLLEAGUE 3 (NONCHALANTLY IN THE BACKGROUND): They're not as squiddy as yours.
COLLEAGUE 2 (HASTILY INTERVENING): There was that case of Bludgen's Tibia last week.
HOUSE: Oh come on, next you'll be telling me it's Swiverson's Fetlock!
(Continue ad nauseum.)
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Date: 2009-10-18 01:58 pm (UTC)First and foremost, please stop beating yourself up. You are allowed to like what you like and dislike what you dislike. It's not heresy, even if other people disagree. It's just a simple preference issue, and you should not treat it as cause to beat yourself up.
Secondly: while I do like the show House itself?
I do not like Gregory House, MD one little bit. I can't stand him. He is abrasive. He is mean. He is downright cruel. He is sarcastic. He is every form of unpleasant I could come up with.
Yes, he's a very good doctor.
And what's really telling is that he's capable of being nice and sweet when he wants to. He's generally not as obnoxiously tactless and nasty to children under the age of 16. Their parents are another matter.
The thing is, it's to some degree an act. And it's an act to disguise the fact that he cares far more than he lets on. He'll sneer and tell you he won't bother with what seems to be a perfectly common case of Plantar's Warts because it bores him, but he will also offer the way to resolve that simple issue as he's limping away with his nose in the air.
But I digress.
My feeling is people like it because it's a vicarious catharsis for them. There are people in the world who aggravate, annoy, distress, frustrate and enrage us so that "we" wish we could just casually cut them down with the careless ease House seems to.
In real life, almost nobody is as nasty and obnoxious as Greg House. Nobody gets away with being that horrible. In real life, somebody would have punched him in the face or smacked him in the head with all their might using a bedpan. So it's a twisted kind of wish fulfillment -- he gets away with saying and doing things people would like to say and do to the "stupid" people they encounter.
It's still your right to dislike it, of course. Just really wish you wouldn't beat yourself up while explaining why you don't.
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Date: 2009-10-19 09:41 am (UTC)Also, I know from my reading elsewhere that preferring stories with nice characters in them is often categorised as the sign of a shallow, superficial, genre-fixated fanboy, and I have a sneaking feeling that I am just that...and the truth hurts. :)
But I think you are right (no surprise there) as to the reasons why people like it. Or him, anyway.
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Date: 2009-10-18 03:04 pm (UTC)Why should you allow other people's enthusiasm for it to make you so defensive? You have a right to your likes and dislikes, just as anyone does!
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Date: 2009-10-18 04:53 pm (UTC)Too bad. Hugh Laurie is an amazing actor. I'd just like to see him in something worth his talent.
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Date: 2009-10-19 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-18 05:32 pm (UTC)But it's not just the Bad Doctor, the whole show has a feeling of a cloud hanging over it, and any time I channel surf to it, I hit the "next channel" button instinctively.
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Date: 2009-10-18 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-18 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-18 10:47 pm (UTC)I'll take your word for it, but I'm fairly Holmes conscious and I have to reach quite a way to make that connection work.
*at least in the episodes I saw...
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Date: 2009-10-19 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 06:29 pm (UTC)But the character is always this way. There are some times where we see his humanity or how he came to be this way (he was always a skeptic, but I think that his character being in constant pain influences some of his rash behavior (he takes Vicidin all the time to combat the pain but I hear this season he is in rehab for that addiction)).
I watch the show on occasion and enjoy it, mainly more for the character interactions. Sure it's repetitive, but aren't all investigative solving shows (like CSI, Bones, Law and Order, etc)?
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Date: 2009-10-21 12:26 pm (UTC)http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/7270261.html