Hard-boiled Greg

To an appropriate soundtrack of Radiohead B-sides and the start of the Asian rainy season, I've been thinking about Dr Gregory House again, and what he represents. It's partly prompted by a thought MA Peel had at the Museum of Television and Radio blog (a blog for people who get paid to watch telly - none cooler, surely?), linking our favourite cantankerous medical genius with Rick Blaine, Bogart's character in Casablanca (still the greatest movie of all time, and no argument will be brooked on this one); and also by something Realdoc (our favourite lovely medical genius) said about most TV doctors being utterly divorced from reality (Green Wing and Cardiac Arrest excepted).

Yay, four sets of brackets in one sentence. This blog ought to get a Parenthetical Advisory sticker. Munch on that, L Brent Bozell III (who, incidentally, looks like the mutant offspring of Chuck Norris and a hairdresser I once knew).

The thing is, House sidesteps the whole issue, by not really being a show about medicine, any more than Fawlty Towers is about the hotel trade, or Casablanca is about Casablanca. Many critics have suggested that it's more of a whodunnit, with House and Wilson a barely disguised Holmes and Watson. (This presumably makes Foreman, Cameron and Chase the Baker Street Irregulars; Cuddy a weird synthesis of Lestrade and Mrs Hudson; Vogler is Moriarty; and Stacy has to be Irene Adler. For the violin and the seven-percent-solution, read the piano and Vicodin.)

A few months ago, I mooted a link between House and David Brent of The Office, suggesting that the difference was self-awareness and desire to be loved. On second thoughts, it's more than this. House is about men.

Dr Gregory House is the alpha male who knows that the chest-beating, knuckle-dragging mundanity of being an alpha male is beneath him. He needs the respect of those around him, but he doesn't want to need it, and certainly doesn't want the others to know he needs it. He's good at his job, but his self-image as a loner means that he's totally unsuited for a senior role within the orthodox hierarchy. And he's faced with a paradox - if he becomes too self-aware, too much in awe of his own limping, baleful majesty, then that persona becomes invalid. It's a similar situation to that in Eliot's Murder In The Cathedral. Becket knows what is right, and knows that the right action will lead to martyrdom. But by consciously seeking martyrdom ("the last temptation"), he risks invalidating that martyrdom. The only person who can't be a House fan is House.

The only way the two conflicting sets of needs can be reconciled - for the hospital to make best use of House's talents, and for House to retain his lone-wolf self-image - is for him to operate a semi-autonomous little gang within the organisation. It's what the management guru Tom Peters (yes, I have a parallel life where I have to read management books) calls a skunkworks. It has its own rules and culture and loyalty, although its ultimate purpose is to serve the overall ends of the organisation. There's no dress code, you can eat pizza at your desk, and throw it at outsiders who enter your territory. There's still a paycheque and a pension plan at the end of the day, but let's not be so crass as to mention that.

It's a classic compromise for the post-punk, post-feminist male. In his head he's Meursault, Holden Caulfield, Raskolnikov. Like Brent, he really wanted to be a rock star, and he would have been a better one, but he'd have walked away from the showbiz bullshit before he made it big. He can't be tempted with a flash car, a shiny desk, golf-club membership or a leggy secretary. (House's attitude to women is fascinating; he's self-consciously laddish and horny when confronted with a nice pair of tits, yet deep down he respects the take-no-shit stance of woman-in-a-man's-world Cuddy.) His outsidery, existentialist pose has to be stroked and stoked to get the best out of him. He needs to exasperate to feel wanted. And he needs a gang around him, who maintain unswerving loyalty (to him, not to the hospital) without ever tipping over into obsequiousness.

Damn. It's Gordon Brown. The departmental autonomy within the bigger structure. The gang of outriders, who are Brownites first, Labour second. The brooding. The fearsome intellect. The unspoken sadness (the dead child) and the disability (the dead eye) for which he will tolerate no pity.

But even those who despair at the surly snarling of Brown/House know that the alternative is worse. Brown is softening, making himself more amenable to Middle England, bigging up Blair's achievements, laying on more of that weird, lopsided smile. House's soft side resurfaced briefly in the second series, with the arrival of Stacy; and there's always the worry that the simmering sexual tension with Cuddy (modelled on Hawkeye and Hotlips?) will boil over and destroy the show (David and Maddie; Niles and Daphne). And if Brown leaves the diagnostic punk skunkworks of the Treasury for a role where he has to kiss babies and be nice to foreigners, the magic will be gone forever.

Three quotations...

...that might have gone into that bit where the Spinal Tap one sits, or maybe the Green Wing one, or possibly even the Murakami. Such is the postmodern condition. (A line I tried to shoehorn into the 3,000 words I wrote about Radiohead's 'Fitter Happier' at the weekend, before deciding that references to Baudrillard, Eliot, Joyce, Lou Reed, Nirvana, The Stepford Wives and Leonard Nimoy made it quite pretentious enough, thanks for asking. And on the subject of Radiohead, has anybody listened to Thom Yorke's Eraser album yet? Doesn't it sound a bit like how you'd imagine TY's demos to sound before the other guys have had a chance to work on them? Strange, that.)

Anyway:

"Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object."
(Theodor Adorno)

"...and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody..."
(Zadie Smith, from On Beauty)

"Do I get bonus points if I act like I care?"
(Dr Gregory House)

Saturday night (and a decent chunk of Sunday morning) at the movies

As I've explained before, living out in the back of nowhere means that my access to Hollywood's finest product is sometimes out of kilter with everyone else's. The best way to catch up is usually to pay a visit to my friendly neighbourhood dodgy DVD man, no questions asked, you didn't see me, right, and scoop up the best of the last few months. With Small Boo out of the country and thus unable to entertain me with her guitar heroics and Björk impressions, I hunker down in front of the widescreen with the remote control and half a bottle of Calvados. This is the result. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Dir: Shane Black) Everything here pointed to a disappointment; Black made his name as a screenwriter with movies (The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight) that must have sounded great on paper but didn't quite come off. But, hey, call me a sucker for obvious postmodern japery, when Robert Downey Jr. is on his best terrified-but-still-sardonic form, you've got a winner. And, no, this is not just a case of the Keith Richards effect (dumbstruck admiration that the man is still alive and functioning). Incidentally, while we're on the subject, I really hope that I'll be climbing trees when I'm 62, or however old he is in Keef years. Anyroad, the schtick here is that Harry (Downey) is a very petty NYC crook who finds himself caught up in some rather less petty dirty deeds in Hollywood. The stylistic tension comes because Harry is a real crook who finds himself to be both an innocent and a fake; Harry-as-narrator, by contrast, is an omniscient pomo smartass. Thanks to Downey's rumpled charm, however, we take a detached view of the self-referential nods to thrillerdom, and still care about what happens to the doofus - a double whammy that Tarantino's not yet managed to pull off. Add Val Kilmer as a gay PI, Michelle Monaghan being feisty in a Santa suit and Shannyn Sossamon in a pink wig and you can't really go wrong. Possibly the appearance of Lincoln and Elvis at Harry's hospital bedside is just a wee bit too Naked Gun, however. A History Of Violence (Dir: David Cronenberg) On the other hand, I came to this with major expectations, and felt a bit let down. It's as if someone put together a pretty ordinary family-in-peril narrative, then asked David Cronenberg to add a few, well, David Cronenberg bits (inscrutable male lead; clumsy sex; uncomfortable silences; mutilated body parts). Which he did, efficiently and (almost) anonymously. I did start questioning my own responses, though, which must indicate some sort of aesthetic value: the bit where the guy gets his nose smashed into his face left me unmoved; but when the little girl lays the table for her daddy, I felt pretty damn sick. Jarhead (Dir: Sam Mendes) For the last 35 years or so, American war films have rarely been about what they claim to be about. M*A*S*H was meant to be about Korea, but it was really about Vietnam. So were The Year Of Living Dangerously (Indonesia) and The Killing Fields (Cambodia). All the films that were supposedly about Vietnam were usually about something else, usually America; the exceptions were Platoon, which was about Oliver Stone; and Apocalypse Now, which was about masculinity, and the fact that Francis Coppola had read a Conrad book, albeit a short one. By the time they did a new version of The Quiet American, which was purportedly about Vietnam (although not quite about "Vietnam" in the sense that it was set in a time before the country became a geopolitical concept, and Jimi Hendrix got involved), it was really about Iraq. That's Iraq II (the current fuckup), which is also the real subject matter of the excellent Three Kings, although that's nominally about Iraq I (the Kuwait thing). Jarhead is also apparently about Iraq I. You can tell this because not much happens, except for Jake Gyllenhaal guarding some oil fields. Geddit? See, that's what Iraq II was all about as well, only we thought it was about terrorism. Glad we got that one cleared up. Just in case the whole guarding-oil-fields thing gets too dull (which it does, but that, it seems, is the whole point), Mendes throws in a few nods to Vietnam classics, notably the bootcamp brutality of Full Metal Jacket; and Apocalypse Now, which the grunts watch and don't quite understand (they sing along to 'The Ride Of The Valkyries'). They obviously didn't read Conrad. Gyllenhaal does read Camus on the toilet, which is terribly existential of him. But then grumpy old Staff Sergeant Jamie Foxx chucks it in the bin. So, if nothing else, Jarhead carves out a new niche in the Hollywood war-is-hell genre: it's not actually about a war, not even a war that it's not literally about. It's a war movie about war movies. Which, in a way, makes it closer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than anybody might have expected. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Dir: Andrew Adamson) Apparently, Christian groups in the States have been arranging coach parties to this, thinking it was going to be Passion of the Christ II. Bad move, I reckon. It might be overstating the case to compare CS Lewis with Milton, but they were both damn good at writing villains. Face it, you'd far rather be eating Turkish Delight with a tyrannical, dreadlocked Tilda Swinton than getting a piggypack from dull old Liam Neeson in a pussycat costume, yeah? Capote (Dir: Bennett Miller) I'm a great admirer of Philip Seymour Hoffman as an actor, but sadly I was unable to watch him or listen to him in this film without a mental image ofblotting out everything else. Sorry. House, M.D. (First Season) If I might be allowed to reiterate the critical consensus for a moment, yes, Hugh Laurie is as good as everyone says, finally stepping out of the capacious shadow of you-know-who. And I so want a muscular infarction so I can emulate his sexy-limp-and-popping-Vicodin-like-they're-Smarties routine. The show overall, though, is just an ungainly coagulation of CSI and Doogie Howser. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang they could have characters watching old clips of LA Law, and it was funny. Here, characters watch General Hospital and you're playing spot-the-difference. And losing. Two thoughts: as a boss with ultimate self-knowledge and no desire to be loved, is Dr Gregory House a dramatic inversion of David Brent? And, as it has a compelling, funny performance at its centre, surrounded by dishwatery bores, is the show also a dramatic inversion of Ally McBeal, the supporting cast of which (that man Downey again!) could have made it one of the greatest TV shows ever, were it not for its profoundly slappable title character. And the shit music, of course. Well, we can at least thank House for provoking this gem, from the IMDb discussion board: "Do Americans really have a recognizable/specific accent, like English, Australian, etc.? I'm American so I can't really notice that we have one." You know, that gets better every time I read it.