End-of-week braindeadness
Apr. 22nd, 2005 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonThere's a thing floating around about character archetypes, or which types of characters you're usually drawn to, etc. My own meagre contribution: the characters I *like* are pretty wide-ranging (e.g., Giles, Ray Kowalski, Frank Pembleton, BobbyHobbes!, C. J. Cregg, Krycek, Joe Dawson, etc.) but tend to have in common the traits of (a) competence and (b) a certain degree of painfully-acquired life wisdom (which is to say, they are not shiny kids, they've been smacked around by life and hauled themselves up off the mat and struggled on).
But the characters I *love*--the ones who've compelled me enough to make a serious effort to move into their heads and write from that vantage point--are three in number: Mulder, Methos, Fraser. And what these three have in common is -- they're aliens. Not the overt sort of pointy-eared or be-tentacled aliens, but rather human beings just like us (well, leaving aside the Immortal aspect, with Methos), who look like us, walk and talk and suffer like us, but who are essentially *different* in their understandings of life, love, work, and the various daily-bread conventionalities that hold most of us together. Their passions are not our passions, they're not about happiness or security or a reasonably fulfilling marriage or living a "successful" life or whatever. But their alienness is not about "Oh, I'm going to be an unconventional rebel, tee hee," it's just them being who they are, who they have to be. They are *different.* They're my people.
I'm late to the party here, having only just successfully torrented and watched the latest episode. And my problems with how the show handled the Vogler arc are pretty similar to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thete1's; they could have done so much more here. *sigh* See, here's my thing; if they'd wanted to bring on someone who was House's Worthy Opponent, who really was on a credible mission to bring House down, the most effective way (I think) would have been to go to the weakness we've already seen in him, which is--for all his incisive brilliance as a diagnostician, he is really terrible with patients in many ways, and often acts very unprofessionally, unethically, in ways that do emotional harm. If Vogler had attacked him on those grounds--if he'd been a decent and principled guy representing, say, a version of the argument that Sherwin Nuland makes here, saying "For all your brilliance and acumen, you treat people like shit, you're arrogant and dismissive, emotionally abusive, and we will not put up with that"--it would have been much less a black&white matter, the viewing audience would have been forced to confront the monster that is part of House's makeup, and to make a decision about--how much does that really matter? Has House redeemed his assholedom by his competence? What's really most important, when lives are on the line?
And it would have given some genuine weight to Wilson's choice. See, my other main issue with House is that I've never gotten a real *sense* of Wilson as a character--OK, nice guy, good doctor, really bad luck with women, likes House, but who the hell *is* this guy? He usually feels to me like **placeholder for House's boyfriend**, and I usually go away feeling (as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland) that there's no *there* there. But if he'd had to make a genuine decision--not about my loyalty to House and his brilliance vs. the money, but rather I recognize the damage and the monstrousness in my friend's soul, that he has done harm to people while healing them, I *acknowledge* that, but--kindly people-pleasing guy though I am, I affirm that other things are more important, that his way of being a doctor is perhaps even more worthy than mine--I really feel like it would have done a lot to cut against the conventional niceness of Wilson's persona, raised the stakes in some really interesting ways.
And I realize this is whole argument is an odd one for me, Kat-the-realist, to be making, because I know that medicine in the 21st-century US is a business, all about the money; but House-the-show is really (I think) a backhanded morality fable, it's about when push comes to shove, intellect and competence trump warmth and empathy, but by detouring the storyline toward money and power they lost some golden opportunities to *push* that theme.
And it has been a very very long week, and I'm wobbling off to bed.
But the characters I *love*--the ones who've compelled me enough to make a serious effort to move into their heads and write from that vantage point--are three in number: Mulder, Methos, Fraser. And what these three have in common is -- they're aliens. Not the overt sort of pointy-eared or be-tentacled aliens, but rather human beings just like us (well, leaving aside the Immortal aspect, with Methos), who look like us, walk and talk and suffer like us, but who are essentially *different* in their understandings of life, love, work, and the various daily-bread conventionalities that hold most of us together. Their passions are not our passions, they're not about happiness or security or a reasonably fulfilling marriage or living a "successful" life or whatever. But their alienness is not about "Oh, I'm going to be an unconventional rebel, tee hee," it's just them being who they are, who they have to be. They are *different.* They're my people.
I'm late to the party here, having only just successfully torrented and watched the latest episode. And my problems with how the show handled the Vogler arc are pretty similar to
thete1's; they could have done so much more here. *sigh* See, here's my thing; if they'd wanted to bring on someone who was House's Worthy Opponent, who really was on a credible mission to bring House down, the most effective way (I think) would have been to go to the weakness we've already seen in him, which is--for all his incisive brilliance as a diagnostician, he is really terrible with patients in many ways, and often acts very unprofessionally, unethically, in ways that do emotional harm. If Vogler had attacked him on those grounds--if he'd been a decent and principled guy representing, say, a version of the argument that Sherwin Nuland makes here, saying "For all your brilliance and acumen, you treat people like shit, you're arrogant and dismissive, emotionally abusive, and we will not put up with that"--it would have been much less a black&white matter, the viewing audience would have been forced to confront the monster that is part of House's makeup, and to make a decision about--how much does that really matter? Has House redeemed his assholedom by his competence? What's really most important, when lives are on the line? And it would have given some genuine weight to Wilson's choice. See, my other main issue with House is that I've never gotten a real *sense* of Wilson as a character--OK, nice guy, good doctor, really bad luck with women, likes House, but who the hell *is* this guy? He usually feels to me like **placeholder for House's boyfriend**, and I usually go away feeling (as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland) that there's no *there* there. But if he'd had to make a genuine decision--not about my loyalty to House and his brilliance vs. the money, but rather I recognize the damage and the monstrousness in my friend's soul, that he has done harm to people while healing them, I *acknowledge* that, but--kindly people-pleasing guy though I am, I affirm that other things are more important, that his way of being a doctor is perhaps even more worthy than mine--I really feel like it would have done a lot to cut against the conventional niceness of Wilson's persona, raised the stakes in some really interesting ways.
And I realize this is whole argument is an odd one for me, Kat-the-realist, to be making, because I know that medicine in the 21st-century US is a business, all about the money; but House-the-show is really (I think) a backhanded morality fable, it's about when push comes to shove, intellect and competence trump warmth and empathy, but by detouring the storyline toward money and power they lost some golden opportunities to *push* that theme.
And it has been a very very long week, and I'm wobbling off to bed.