HOUSE, M.D.: 35. "Skin Deep"
Micky DuPree
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Obviously, I don't keep up with the world of fashion modeling. I
thought the patient looked a little weird in the prologue. When she was
in the hospital, I was distracted wondering if she had ever been
involved in facial reconstructive surgery. I don't mean plastic surgery
designed to "improve" the looks of everyday people, but plastic surgery
designed to repair damage after an injury. I was completely surprised
to learn that the actress had done international modeling. I thought
fashion models looked like Cameron, only taller and younger. But then,
I'm not the target market. Fashions in people can go in and out of
style just like fashions in clothes. Another reason to abjure fashion.
Unfortunately, the actress looked her reported age of 25, not 15. I
thought the preference in fashion models was to shoot for the just-
under-18 look, but again, it's not my area of expertise. I thought the
actress didn't do a bad acting job, but since she's a former model, I'm
not sure how much of a stretch the role was.
Though it's distasteful, I don't have any moral objection to adults
sexually drooling over minors, *unless they do it in front of minors*,
as House did with the patient. It's just out of line and is part of the
problem, not part of the solution. Yeah, obviously she had experienced
such inappropriate drooling and worse before, but that didn't make it
all right for one more middle-aged guy to step up and do it. Just
because a minor isn't a virgin doesn't mean you get in the queue.
Though House's passing commentary about the cognitive dissonance of
hyper-eroticizing minors, all the while making it illegal to have sex
with them, was on point and well taken, that didn't mean House could
just blame his own face-to-face leering on society or the media.
In "Paternity," House was so concerned about the possibility of child
sexual abuse that he immediately made haste to go see the patient,
despite the fact that child sexual abuse is unfortunately not a "zebra"
condition, and the fact that he had mightily resisted taking the case
before the possibility of abuse arose. In "Skin Deep," though House
didn't indicate he would physically participate in child sexual abuse,
he just seemed to revel in the thought of it even in front of the
patient herself.
The patient's development of secondary sex characteristics in the last
year without menarche made me think eating disorder, which was one of
Cameron's differentials.
The We-Know-It-But-He-Shouldn't Dept.: Foreman made a reference to House
breaking up with Stacy. While the fellows may have suspected (Chase
said as much in "Need to Know"), none of the fellows had hard evidence
to prove that House and Stacy had had enough of a thing going again that
it would have required a breakup to end it. It sounded wildly
presumptuous to me for a subordinate to try to read between the lines of
his boss' illicit love life. He should have just stuck with the
generalized warning that personal matters shouldn't disturb professional
conduct and not tried to go into specifics.
It sounded like one of several times this season in which the characters
were given instant and unexplained access to information that the
audience knew, but the characters shouldn't have known; e.g., Cameron
automatically knowing that Chase was an ex-seminarian in "Acceptance"
when the only person we saw Chase divulging that information to was the
sick nun. Yeah, it's easy to fanwank that the fellows talked about the
subject off-camera, but it's still symptomatic of what looks for all the
world like authorial inattentiveness (or, if it had occurred in a
different context, bad fanfiction). No matter how you slice it, it's
impossible for me to imagine House divulging to the fellows that he and
Stacy had become an item again, but then they broke up again, especially
considering that they were never both on the same page at the same time.
Speaking of characters knowing things that the audience heard but the
characters didn't, House told the fellows that Daddy said he was drunk
when he had sex with his daughter. However, Daddy said no such thing.
It was the daughter who later told Cameron that she had gotten Daddy
drunk.
I was highly amused by House's conversation with "God" in isolation.
However, what did bother me in the grand scheme of things was that the
theme seemed to have a heightened level of attention paid to it.
They've conditioned me to be suspicious. Earlier they mentioned House's
atheism for no reason again too, which made me think they're going to
retcon that as well, as no longer a rational, moral examination of the
existence of suffering ("Damned If You Do," "Three Stories"), but as
just another way for House to make himself miserable. O.K., maybe I'm
jumping the gun, but they seem to be systematically undoing everything
else that was ever interesting about the character in season one.
I could buy that Cameron had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse.
In "Paternity," House gave us every reason to believe that he did too,
but I could go with his explanation here that he wanted to keep the dad
around to pump him for more information. What I didn't buy was that
neither Cameron nor Foreman could realize the practical implications of
what House was saying. Even more difficult to buy was not only Cameron
and Foreman, but also the far more seasoned Cuddy being naive enough to
believe that all they needed to do was report the abuse in order for the
dad to be hauled away. I also didn't understand why House didn't point
out ahead of time that they couldn't make the abuse charge stick. Every
other cop or medical show on TV has been through the denial-of-abuse
plot line.
Cameron ratted out House to Cuddy for dropping acid just last week in
"Distractions." Yeah, I'm sure she was just all concerned about his
health 'n' stuff, but why would Cameron worriedly assume she was in
trouble for trying to conscientiously protect a minor this week (which
Cuddy would shield Cameron for if necessary), but not show any worry
that she was in trouble for tattling on House's personal behavior last
week? So many plot points sound superficially passable in the second
season, but when taken as a whole, do not lead to coherent
characterization.
One of the many things that didn't jibe for me was that it occurred to
House to ask if sexual abuse could have made Andie the cancer kid so
prematurely sexualized in "Autopsy," but when we found out that the
supermodel in "Skin Deep" had been sleeping with everyone in sight (with
enough guys that it had to have been going on since before her quasi-
puberty last summer) and that Dad was only the last on the list, it
screamed to me that someone besides her dad had seduced her long before
to make her prematurely sexualized. But the story just made out like it
was the girl's fault after all and it was all her idea from the
beginning. I guess that fits in well with the idea that everyone's
misery is just their own fault.
This was the first time I could remember House getting gratuitously
violent, when he whacked Wilson with his cane. He needed to be reported
to Cuddy, but since I'm sure Wilson wouldn't do that, he should have
thwacked House on the head since pain was obviously the only thing House
would listen to and, "Ma! He hit me first!" That was just beyond the
pale, and I don't think it does anyone any favors to let him get away
with that shit.
I was talking back to the screen (second-season _House_ has turned me
into one of those people) during House's squeeze-the-tube test.
Everyone knows that in order to eliminate the placebo effect (and
outright faking), you can't let the patient know when you're giving them
real medicine and when you've stopped the real medicine. The medical
aspects of this show used to be way over my head. Now it's sometimes
embarrassingly easy to outdo the doctors, which creates a suspension-of-
disbelief problem when all of the doctors are supposed to be smart-on-
toast and in particular, House's only excuse for breathing these days is
his fiatted brilliance.
I was also dubious and even confused that the twitching started
immediately when House pinched off the flow of IVIg. I thought his
later idea of hanging saline and telling her it was just a fresh bag of
medicine was a lot better. When Chase did exactly that, he explicitly
said that it would take a little while for the remaining IVIg in her
system to clear before the symptoms might return, which made sense to
me. So how come the symptoms returned immediately when House cut off
the flow before? The PTSD "getting away from it all" theory looked like
it was completely barking up the wrong tree when the patient turned out
to be cool with all of her sexual encounters, and it turned out she
really did have cancer, so the instantaneous return of the twitching
when House pinched the tube seemed like pure bullshit staged for a
dramatic visual.
I also called hermaphroditism when Wilson said the ovaries were
undersized. It really shouldn't be easier for me to get on the right
track than it is for House.
Considering what House went through in extremis to deny to Cuddy that he
was an addict in "Detox," I didn't buy for a second that he would prefer
to let her -- his *boss* -- know that he wanted to significantly ratchet
up his reliance on opiates, rather than turn to Wilson even if it meant
enduring the psychoanalytic nagging that would accompany Wilson's
compliance with such a request. Cuddy could *fire* his ass or make
rehab a condition of continued employment. Wilson was just a nudzh.
Wilson was the only one House admitted his addiction to in "Detox."
Cuddy had to hear about the admission from Wilson, and in confidence.
The begging-for-morphine scenes in "Skin Deep," though touchingly played
by Laurie and especially Edelstein, completely undercut the dynamics
between House and his senior colleagues as depicted in "Detox." The
only consolation was that Cuddy retained control of their exchanges and
didn't manifest any guilt, which was more in keeping with season one
than season two.
Great believable leg mutilation shot. CGI? I still don't know how they
did the shots of the withered polio legs on Kenneth Branagh when he
played FDR, but I couldn't see any "seams" there or here.
Another thing that didn't follow for me. They said that it's the
proto-ovaries that turn into testes and descend in utero in males.
Based on what House said, the patient didn't have both ovaries AND
testicles. He said it was actually pseudohermaphroditism. She should
have had only one set of gonads. Cameron said that Wilson had already
ultrasounded the patient's ovaries and pronounced them to be small, but
tumor-free. Then they MRIed them, only this time, House pronounced them
to be testicles with a tumor on the left one. How could the same organs
produce both of those visual interpretations? Wouldn't the left
"ovary," with a tumor, and the right "ovary," without a tumor, have
looked suspiciously lopsided relative to each other, irrespective of
their absolute size?
And while I'm on the subject, if the doctors were as determined to rule
out cancer as they sounded, wouldn't they have done a whole-body CAT
scan? They did one on the senator last season when they were a lot less
certain that cancer was what he had. I think that was a CAT scan Wilson
was performing and looking at earlier in this episode, so why stop with
the upper body?
I really don't get why House insisted on calling the patient "he" to her
face when she had lived her whole life as female, never developed male
sex characteristics, self-identified as female, and would continue to
self-identify as female in the future. That just seemed like a
pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor who had already been through
enough to warrant a serious hypothesis of post-traumatic stress
disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS pointlessly callous, even to
the underaged, apparently.
The whole psychosomatic resolution to House's subplot was repeatedly
telegraphed to the point where I felt like I was being hit over the head
with it. House brought up the subject of psychosomaticism twice (for
himself, which he rejected, and for the patient), Wilson brought it up,
Cuddy concurred, and Foreman indirectly alluded to it.
I tried to give them more credit than that, but by all means, let's be
certain to leave no ambiguity that we're retconning House's pain to be
all in his head and all his own fault now. I considered the possibility
that Cuddy had given him a placebo shot, after House brought up the
possibility of the placebo effect working with the IVIg on the model,
but I rejected it because 1) I foolishly thought they still retained
their old respect for chronic pain sufferers and weren't going to go the
"it's all in your head" route, and besides, 2) the patient wasn't
responding to a placebo effect after all, so I thought they were going
to maintain the parallel when it got to House. More fool I.
I thought that the great brave and compassionate feature of "Detox,"
especially for a broadcast network show in the current American climate
of moralizing about other people's drug use, was that it showed chronic
pain sufferers as being in a permanent bind of tradeoffs. On the one
hand, chronic physical pain is debilitating and interferes with everyday
functionality. Painkillers help with that. On the other hand, the
painkillers exact their own price. There is no happily ever after for
them, only tradeoffs. "Detox" seemed to be telling Americans to stop
being so reflexively judgmental and intrusive about what other people do
with their bodies, as long as those people continue to function and meet
their contracted obligations.
But now they've established scientific physical proof that House really
is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for it but
himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical pain. Maybe
he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they just retconned
away everything that was bold and generous about "Detox," and I'm
torqued off that they not only want to degrade both the show and the
character in the second season, but they're determined to retroactively
rewrite, drag down, and piss on everything that was good about the first
season as well.
They continued the second-season trend of painting House as the cause of
everything bad in his life. This time we learned that House attended
only one session of rehab and didn't even finish the session. For all
we know, then, House might even be able to get around without a cane if
he would only work at it. But rather than doing everything in his power
to decrease his mobility problems, which was the impression I got off of
first-season House, we can now see that revisionist House refuses any
avenue that might let him get better because, as Wilson never tires of
reminding us, House wants to be miserable.
They've also continued to conventionalize House. He used to be a
complex person who was off the beaten path and difficult for other
people to read because he didn't want the same things in life that other
people did. Other people insisted on misreading him as being just like
everybody else except that he was willfully determined to make himself
and others miserable. Now the surface misreading has been turned into
the fiatted truth.
I wish I could have enjoyed the piano playing more, but I was in a
pretty sour mood by the end. They changed the piano, too. Maybe
product placement for Sohmer fell through. They moved the windows in
House's living room. I'm pretty sure he's had the exact same fireplace
and wall lamps all along, so continuity on the rest of his residence,
inside and out, has simply been nonexistent.
--
Laddy
with Season 2 as some of the rest of us are?
dr...@cornell.edu
Well, more "gaunt" seems to be popular in models. And Cameron is more
"normal" than that (although that is just relative to the TV world --
she's
undernourished compared to most women in real life.)
[snip]
> In "Paternity," House was so concerned about the possibility of child
> sexual abuse that he immediately made haste to go see the patient,
> despite the fact that child sexual abuse is unfortunately not a "zebra"
> condition, and the fact that he had mightily resisted taking the case
> before the possibility of abuse arose. In "Skin Deep," though House
> didn't indicate he would physically participate in child sexual abuse,
> he just seemed to revel in the thought of it even in front of the
> patient herself.
Hypothesis: As a general rule, House says things in front of patients,
particularly when just meeting them, to see how they react. In this
case,
perhaps to test a tentative idea of sexual abuse..
[snip]
> The We-Know-It-But-He-Shouldn't Dept.: Foreman made a reference to House
> breaking up with Stacy. While the fellows may have suspected (Chase
> said as much in "Need to Know"), none of the fellows had hard evidence
> to prove that House and Stacy had had enough of a thing going again that
> it would have required a breakup to end it. It sounded wildly
> presumptuous to me for a subordinate to try to read between the lines of
> his boss' illicit love life. He should have just stuck with the
> generalized warning that personal matters shouldn't disturb professional
> conduct and not tried to go into specifics.
Well, 1) Gossip is rampant! :-)
2) They're catching House's "diagnosis" bug.
[snip]
> I was also dubious and even confused that the twitching started
> immediately when House pinched off the flow of IVIg. I thought his
> later idea of hanging saline and telling her it was just a fresh bag of
> medicine was a lot better. When Chase did exactly that, he explicitly
> said that it would take a little while for the remaining IVIg in her
> system to clear before the symptoms might return, which made sense to
> me. So how come the symptoms returned immediately when House cut off
> the flow before?
Chase is just being conservative. She might not be in quite the same
"state" as she was when House was standing over her.There have been
several times when an effect was supposed to occur in a particular time
interval, and it didn't quite conform. Probably like real life.
[snip]
> Considering what House went through in extremis to deny to Cuddy that he
> was an addict in "Detox," I didn't buy for a second that he would prefer
> to let her -- his *boss* -- know that he wanted to significantly ratchet
> up his reliance on opiates, rather than turn to Wilson even if it meant
> enduring the psychoanalytic nagging that would accompany Wilson's
> compliance with such a request. Cuddy could *fire* his ass or make
> rehab a condition of continued employment. Wilson was just a nudzh.
>
> Wilson was the only one House admitted his addiction to in "Detox."
> Cuddy had to hear about the admission from Wilson, and in confidence.
> The begging-for-morphine scenes in "Skin Deep," though touchingly played
> by Laurie and especially Edelstein, completely undercut the dynamics
> between House and his senior colleagues as depicted in "Detox." The
> only consolation was that Cuddy retained control of their exchanges and
> didn't manifest any guilt, which was more in keeping with season one
> than season two.
Don't we know, from "Three Stories", that Cuddy was (belatedly)
involved
in House's leg treatment? If so, showing her his leg would be playing
off
residual guilt.
[snip]
> Another thing that didn't follow for me. They said that it's the
> proto-ovaries that turn into testes and descend in utero in males.
> Based on what House said, the patient didn't have both ovaries AND
> testicles. He said it was actually pseudohermaphroditism. She should
> have had only one set of gonads. Cameron said that Wilson had already
> ultrasounded the patient's ovaries and pronounced them to be small, but
> tumor-free. Then they MRIed them, only this time, House pronounced them
> to be testicles with a tumor on the left one. How could the same organs
> produce both of those visual interpretations? Wouldn't the left
> "ovary," with a tumor, and the right "ovary," without a tumor, have
> looked suspiciously lopsided relative to each other, irrespective of
> their absolute size?
Sounds like a good point. Certainly, House is one up on the Head of
Oncology on this one.
> I really don't get why House insisted on calling the patient "he" to her
> face when she had lived her whole life as female, never developed male
> sex characteristics, self-identified as female, and would continue to
> self-identify as female in the future. That just seemed like a
> pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor who had already been through
> enough to warrant a serious hypothesis of post-traumatic stress
> disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS pointlessly callous, even to
> the underaged, apparently.
Yes, it seemed designed to lead to the "flashing"; so it was more
writer-driven than character-driven, I think.
> But now they've established scientific physical proof that House really
> is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for it but
> himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical pain. Maybe
> he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they just retconned
> away everything that was bold and generous about "Detox," and I'm
> torqued off that they not only want to degrade both the show and the
> character in the second season, but they're determined to retroactively
> rewrite, drag down, and piss on everything that was good about the first
> season as well.
No one? Why does it have to be absolute? What if *part* of the pain
is psychosomatic, but part isn't? For instance, couldn't the stress of
getting/sending away Stacy have exacerbated the *real* pain?
-Doug Elrod (dr...@cornell.edu)
Tony Calguire
>
> Spoilers for "Skin Deep," 2/20/06.
>
> .
> .
Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknolwledge THE RETURN OF
8:50 JACK! Cool!
(And how much cooler/creepier would it have been if the model had been
played by Meg? Or even Bratty Patty? :-))
>
> I really don't get why House insisted on calling the patient "he" to her
> face when she had lived her whole life as female, never developed male
> sex characteristics, self-identified as female, and would continue to
> self-identify as female in the future. That just seemed like a
> pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor who had already been through
> enough to warrant a serious hypothesis of post-traumatic stress
> disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS pointlessly callous, even to
> the underaged, apparently.
>
That's exactly it. Fox has decided that "House" is "the show about the
asshole doctor", and so, House has to behave in requisite fashion. I
used to affectionately refer to the show as "Asshole Doctor", but now,
it's getting old.
>
> But now they've established scientific physical proof that House really
> is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for it but
> himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical pain. Maybe
> he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they just retconned
> away everything that was bold and generous about "Detox," and I'm
> torqued off that they not only want to degrade both the show and the
> character in the second season, but they're determined to retroactively
> rewrite, drag down, and piss on everything that was good about the first
> season as well.
>
House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain is
a result of his injury.
David Johnston
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
>Spoilers for "Skin Deep," 2/20/06.
>
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>Though it's distasteful, I don't have any moral objection to adults
>sexually drooling over minors, *unless they do it in front of minors*,
>as House did with the patient. It's just out of line and is part of the
>problem, not part of the solution. Yeah, obviously she had experienced
>such inappropriate drooling and worse before, but that didn't make it
>all right for one more middle-aged guy to step up and do it.
Nah. That one was legit "House provoking the patient and their next
of kin to see what makes them tick".
>The We-Know-It-But-He-Shouldn't Dept.: Foreman made a reference to House
>breaking up with Stacy. While the fellows may have suspected (Chase
>said as much in "Need to Know"), none of the fellows had hard evidence
>to prove that House and Stacy had had enough of a thing going again that
>it would have required a breakup to end it. It sounded wildly
>presumptuous to me for a subordinate to try to read between the lines of
>his boss' illicit love life. He should have just stuck with the
>generalized warning that personal matters shouldn't disturb professional
>conduct and not tried to go into specifics.
I agree with that one, though.
>Speaking of characters knowing things that the audience heard but the
>characters didn't, House told the fellows that Daddy said he was drunk
>when he had sex with his daughter. However, Daddy said no such thing.
But not that one. It was clear to me that the conversation continued
after the camera cut away. The whole point of skewering Daddy was to
get him to spill, and he'd only started by the end of the scene.
>I could buy that Cameron had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse.
>In "Paternity," House gave us every reason to believe that he did too,
I still think he does. I'm pretty sure he would have have ratted out
the father after he was done with the patient.
>Cameron ratted out House to Cuddy for dropping acid just last week in
>"Distractions." Yeah, I'm sure she was just all concerned about his
>health 'n' stuff, but why would Cameron worriedly assume she was in
>trouble for trying to conscientiously protect a minor this week (which
>Cuddy would shield Cameron for if necessary), but not show any worry
>that she was in trouble for tattling on House's personal behavior last
>week?
I don't remember House bringing up the subject of what Cameron had
done on that occasion, but he did this time.
>screamed to me that someone besides her dad had seduced her long before
>to make her prematurely sexualized. But the story just made out like it
>was the girl's fault after all and it was all her idea from the
>beginning.
Well House's case solving insight this time, was that a hormonal
imbalance (in that she had even less testerone than a real woman) was
the source of her screwy personality.
>Another thing that didn't follow for me. They said that it's the
>proto-ovaries that turn into testes and descend in utero in males.
>Based on what House said, the patient didn't have both ovaries AND
>testicles. He said it was actually pseudohermaphroditism. She should
>have had only one set of gonads. Cameron said that Wilson had already
>ultrasounded the patient's ovaries and pronounced them to be small, but
>tumor-free. Then they MRIed them, only this time, House pronounced them
>to be testicles with a tumor on the left one. How could the same organs
>produce both of those visual interpretations?
Wilson reach the conclusion that she didn't have cancer on the grounds
that a tumor would make them larger than normal ovaries, not smaller.
>But now they've established scientific physical proof that House really
>is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for it but
>himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical pain. Maybe
>he never was. It's all in his head.
It is not all in his head. What this episode claimed was that having
real pain doesn't preclude also having psychosomatic pain.
Art Vandelay
that way I don't feel so guilty drooling over her.
Stan Brown
<rgo...@block.net>:
> It is not all in his head. What this episode claimed was that having
> real pain doesn't preclude also having psychosomatic pain.
Psychosomatic pain _is_ real, it's just not caused by any
identifiable malfunction of the body.
There's a common misperception that people with psychosomatic pain
are "faking it", and their pain is "not real". Psychosomatic pain
_can_ be quite genuine, just like pains people feel in a limb that
was amputated some time ago.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"You may be the Universe's butt puppet, but I'm its right-
hand fist of fate." -- /Wonderfalls/
Rob Jensen
<calg...@tcfreenet.invalid> wrote:
>House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain is
>a result of his injury.
It's now a wide-open debate as to whether or not his original pain is
all in his head, too.
-- Rob
--
LORELAI: In the movie, only boy hobbits travel to Mount
Doom, but that's only because the girls went to do something
even more dangerous.
GIRL: What?
LORELAI: Have you ever heard of a Brazilian Bikini Wax?
Ian J. Ball
Rob Jensen <Shut...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 01:23:27 -0600, Tony Calguire
> <calg...@tcfreenet.invalid> wrote:
>
> >House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain is
> >a result of his injury.
>
> It's now a wide-open debate as to whether or not his original pain is
> all in his head, too.
Maybe he should just let Cameron "take care of him" afterall...
--
"Read less. More TV." - Dr. Greg House, "House"
http://homepage.mac.com/ijball/TV-Blog/
Stan Brown
> On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 01:23:27 -0600, Tony Calguire
> <calg...@tcfreenet.invalid> wrote:
>
> >House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain is
> >a result of his injury.
>
> It's now a wide-open debate as to whether or not his original pain is
> all in his head, too.
Did you _see_ his thigh when he showed Cuddy? I can't imagine that
not hurting pretty badly.
David Johnston
<the_sta...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:25:17 -0600 from Rob Jensen <Shut...@aol.com>:
>> On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 01:23:27 -0600, Tony Calguire
>> <calg...@tcfreenet.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> >House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain is
>> >a result of his injury.
>>
>> It's now a wide-open debate as to whether or not his original pain is
>> all in his head, too.
>
>Did you _see_ his thigh when he showed Cuddy? I can't imagine that
>not hurting pretty badly.
>
That's probably why they had that visual, to remind us that House has
a very physical reason to be in pain.
Micky DuPree
<laddybo...@hotmail.com> writes:
: Wow, Micky, that was a dissertation. :)
A natural tendency towards long-windedness encouraged by occasional
intersections with academia. :)
: I take it you are as disappointed with Season 2 as some of the rest of
: us are?
Perhaps more so of late. They're not just changing House for the second
season, but retroactively rewriting the first season as well. Makes me
angry. It's theirs, of course, so they have the right. But they still
shouldn't do it. They also shouldn't have turned a superior drama into
_As General Hospital Turns_, and from there into "Teenage slut
supermodel hermaphrodites and the daddies who love them, next on _Jerry
Springer_!"
-Micky
Micky DuPree
dr...@cornell.edu writes:
: Micky DuPree wrote:
:: I was completely surprised to learn that the actress had done
:: international modeling. I thought fashion models looked like
:: Cameron, only taller and younger.
: Well, more "gaunt" seems to be popular in models. And Cameron is more
: "normal" than that (although that is just relative to the TV world --
: she's undernourished compared to most women in real life.)
Cameron looks pretty damn thin to me, especially this season, and
especially when she wears something short-sleeved. She's less padded
than the fashion model character, anyway.
:: In "Paternity," House was so concerned about the possibility of child
:: sexual abuse that he immediately made haste to go see the patient,
:: despite the fact that child sexual abuse is unfortunately not a
:: "zebra" condition, and the fact that he had mightily resisted taking
:: the case before the possibility of abuse arose. In "Skin Deep,"
:: though House didn't indicate he would physically participate in child
:: sexual abuse, he just seemed to revel in the thought of it even in
:: front of the patient herself.
:
: Hypothesis: As a general rule, House says things in front of
: patients, particularly when just meeting them, to see how they react.
: In this case, perhaps to test a tentative idea of sexual abuse..
To cross the line into sexual inappropriateness with a *minor* to test
an idea that had no prior indications? Ludicrous. They were painting
House as sexually intrigued before he went in the room ("You had me at
'teenage supermodel'"), before he knew who the patient was. Normally he
doesn't even go in the patient's room if he can possibly help it. He
has subordinates to do that.
:: The We-Know-It-But-He-Shouldn't Dept.: Foreman made a reference to
:: House breaking up with Stacy. While the fellows may have suspected
:: (Chase said as much in "Need to Know"), none of the fellows had hard
:: evidence to prove that House and Stacy had had enough of a thing
:: going again that it would have required a breakup to end it. It
:: sounded wildly presumptuous to me for a subordinate to try to read
:: between the lines of his boss' illicit love life. He should have
:: just stuck with the generalized warning that personal matters
:: shouldn't disturb professional conduct and not tried to go into
:: specifics.
:
: Well, 1) Gossip is rampant! :-)
And frequently wrong. Would you imply to your boss' face that he had
had an adulterous affair even if you had proof to that effect? And how
much less likely would you be to do such a thing without any actual
proof? For all the fellows know, House may have only *thought* he was
about to get back together with Stacy, only to be shot down by her. To
leap to the conclusion that there was a "breakup" involved is a huge
presumption for anyone except Wilson and Cuddy, who were confided in by
the principals. Even if Foreman somehow knew it for a fact, he doesn't
have that kind of personal relationship with House to throw it in his
face. He could have scolded his boss for letting personal matters
interfere with his professional judgment and just left it at that.
: 2) They're catching House's "diagnosis" bug.
The fellows could speculate with one another all they wanted, but
Foreman took it way beyond that. And as I said elsewhere, this isn't
the first time this season the writers have let information "leak"
across character boundaries just because the audience already knew it.
It's sloppy writing if they don't include some rationale for the
information crossing those boundaries. Yeah, if we in the audience do
the writers' work for them, we can fanwank almost anything into oblivion
but, after all, how it was revealed to Foreman that House and Stacy did,
in fact, "break up" would make for an interesting scene, don't you
think? Or even when Cameron found out that Chase had once attended
Catholic seminary. You can claim that anything happened offscreen, but
if that's what we're meant to believe, then some important parts of the
story are no longer being told IN the story. I'd even have to wonder
why House, in his detective-like fashion, didn't suspect Wilson or Cuddy
of saying more than they should have to Foreman about the Stacy affair.
But since I'm convinced that it's mere writer sloppiness, I don't wonder
any such thing. Foreman just magically knows without Wilson or Cuddy
saying a word to him.
:: I was also dubious and even confused that the twitching started
:: immediately when House pinched off the flow of IVIg. I thought his
:: later idea of hanging saline and telling her it was just a fresh bag
:: of medicine was a lot better. When Chase did exactly that, he
:: explicitly said that it would take a little while for the remaining
:: IVIg in her system to clear before the symptoms might return, which
:: made sense to me. So how come the symptoms returned immediately when
:: House cut off the flow before?
:
: Chase is just being conservative.
No, I was right. What House did didn't make any sense. The
immunoglobulin already in the patient's system shouldn't have just
magically disappeared the instant he stopped the flow of more IVIg. The
head of the International Paraneoplastic Association had this to say
when responding to a doctor's review of the episode:
"Fifth, while it is true that IVIG can IN RARE CASES temporary
[sic] stop the worsening of paraneoplastic syndromes, it NEVER
has an 'instantaneous' effect like the show indicated, and it
does NOT, in and of itself, result in the total cure implied on
the show."
-- <http://politedissent.com/archives/1124>
The way it was depicted later, when Chase swapped saline for the IVIg
and they had to wait for the added immunoglobulin that was already in
the patient's system to clear before the twitching returned, was the
realistic and more conceptually sensible response (unless the hypothesis
about the twitching being psychosomatic the first time was true, which
they disproved).
(And Chelsea Christenson was right about the missing uterus, which was
another thing that Wilson should have caught when he went fishing for
cancer. There were a lot of other medical problems with the episode
according to the site, but lately I've mostly just been sticking to the
things that look fishy without medical training.)
:: Considering what House went through in extremis to deny to Cuddy that
:: he was an addict in "Detox," I didn't buy for a second that he would
:: prefer to let her -- his *boss* -- know that he wanted to
:: significantly ratchet up his reliance on opiates, rather than turn to
:: Wilson even if it meant enduring the psychoanalytic nagging that
:: would accompany Wilson's compliance with such a request. Cuddy could
:: *fire* his ass or make rehab a condition of continued employment.
:: Wilson was just a nudzh.
::
:: Wilson was the only one House admitted his addiction to in "Detox."
:: Cuddy had to hear about the admission from Wilson, and in confidence.
:: The begging-for-morphine scenes in "Skin Deep," though touchingly
:: played by Laurie and especially Edelstein, completely undercut the
:: dynamics between House and his senior colleagues as depicted in
:: "Detox." The only consolation was that Cuddy retained control of
:: their exchanges and didn't manifest any guilt, which was more in
:: keeping with season one than season two.
:
: Don't we know, from "Three Stories", that Cuddy was (belatedly)
: involved in House's leg treatment?
Yes. Cuddy was the one who would have had to sign off on the surgery
that removed some tissue from House's leg once Stacy made her wishes
known.
: If so, showing her his leg would be playing off residual guilt.
"Humpty Dumpty" notwithstanding, Cuddy has never before shown the
slightest bit of guilt nor even pity over House's leg. In early season
one, she even made jokes at the expense of his leg.
CUDDY: [To House] Is the yelling designed to scare me? Because
I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be scared of.
More yelling? That's not scary. That you're gonna hurt
me? That's scary, but I'm pretty sure I can outrun you.
At which point House finally calmed down because he realized he couldn't
rattle Cuddy. And this from "Occam's Razor":
HOUSE: So how are we doing on cotton swabs today? If there's an
acute shortage, I could run home --
CUDDY: [Looks at his right leg and smiles.] No, you couldn't.
HOUSE: Nice.
And Cuddy's attitude towards what she and Stacy did to the leg, from
"Three Stories":
STACY: Give me the forms you need signed.
CUDDY: You're saving his life.
Cuddy didn't even demonstrate any guilt over the leg when she was
pretending to shoot him up with morphine, just pity, and even then, it
was pity over his mental state, not over the leg.
Cuddy has the power to take away 1) House's job (if she thinks he can't
handle both it and whatever kind of pain he's going through) and 2)
House's opiate habit (if she makes addiction recovery a condition of
further employment). In fact, she did threaten to fire him in this
episode over the issue of compliance with sexual abuse laws, so it's not
as if she'll tolerate any kind of behavior whatsoever in order to retain
his services. The writers are making it look like they've decided to
completely ignore what used to be the biggest priority in House's life:
his work. They're making it look like House is willing to risk his job
or at the least, his long-term opiate habit, in order to get temporary
fixes of opiates, which simply doesn't make sense. He wouldn't take
those kinds of chances with the things that keep him going just to avoid
a lecture from Wilson.
Wilson is House's go-to guy. Cuddy is not. Despite Wilson's nagging
and protestations, he almost never denies House any request. (The only
exception to this rule that I can think of at the moment was Wilson
telling House to "go to hell" when House asked if he could watch Dying
Cancer Kid get the news that her death had been moved up in "Autopsy.")
House admitted as much to Cuddy near the end: "If I wanted to be
psychoanalyzed, I'd get Wilson to give me the shot." The difference
between House risking his job and House risking some more of Wilson's
amateur headshrinking is vast.
I'd also far sooner expect House to ask one of the fellows to give him
the shot than for him to gamble what's left of his joy in life on
Cuddy's reaction. I know, House claimed here that he didn't want the
fellows questioning his judgment, but he's never minded all that much
when they did so in the past. It used to be a key defining trait (pre-
"TB or Not TB") that House didn't care what other people thought of him.
He soldiered on in "Detox" despite excruciating physical symptoms and
all three fellows disbelieving both his diagnosis and his ability to
function. Hell, Foreman gave him more Vicodin in "Detox," believing it
would improve House's judgment, not hinder it.
The begging-for-morphine scenes looked like fanfic contrived just for
the sake of producing gratuitous pity scenes between House and Cuddy.
Big on "aw, poor baby," but short on sense.
:: Wouldn't the left "ovary," with a tumor, and the right "ovary,"
:: without a tumor, have looked suspiciously lopsided relative to each
:: other, irrespective of their absolute size?
:
: Sounds like a good point. Certainly, House is one up on the Head of
: Oncology on this one.
Problem is, Wilson is supposed to be the "boy wonder oncologist"
("Histories"), and this sounds like the kind of mistake that not even
first-year oncology residents would make. It's not just House that's
being dumbed down. (It's just more egregious with House because he's
supposed to be Sherlock Holmes with a medical degree.)
:: I really don't get why House insisted on calling the patient "he" to
:: her face when she had lived her whole life as female, never developed
:: male sex characteristics, self-identified as female, and would
:: continue to self-identify as female in the future. That just seemed
:: like a pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor who had already
:: been through enough to warrant a serious hypothesis of post-traumatic
:: stress disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS pointlessly
:: callous, even to the underaged, apparently.
:
: Yes, it seemed designed to lead to the "flashing"; so it was more
: writer-driven than character-driven, I think.
Exactly. I'm almost finished with a running commentary on "The Socratic
Method," and the difference between House's treatment of the 15-year-old
Luke in that episode and his treatment of the 15-year-old Alex in this
episode is striking. He was remarkably protective of Luke. Even when
he said callous things to Luke, he had ulterior good motives. With
Alex, he was just a turd.
:: But now they've established scientific physical proof that House
:: really is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for
:: it but himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical
:: pain. Maybe he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they
:: just retconned away everything that was bold and generous about
:: "Detox," and I'm torqued off that they not only want to degrade both
:: the show and the character in the second season, but they're
:: determined to retroactively rewrite, drag down, and piss on
:: everything that was good about the first season as well.
:
: No one? Why does it have to be absolute? What if *part* of the pain
: is psychosomatic, but part isn't?
The script didn't take any pains whatsoever to make that distinction.
Quite the opposite.
HOUSE: I can't ask Wilson, because he figures it's all in my
head.
CUDDY: Well, I agree with him.
It doesn't *have* to be absolute, but as Rob Jensen said, they've
undermined all the previous writing with respect to House having
physical pain. We didn't see House take a single Vicodin between the
time Cuddy went to get the syringe and when House came back for another
"morphine" shot. (He went for the pill bottle once, when the pseudo-
pregnant man and his wife in genuine labor were both yelling at him, but
he interrupted himself with his big "aha" moment of the episode and we
never saw him take any.) The pain came back after House solved the case
(reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes' completely gratuitous use of cocaine
when he wasn't mentally engaged with a case).
Obviously (they showed us the scar), House's leg must have had physical
pain after the surgery, but that was five and a half years ago. The
writers very pointedly introduced the brand-new retroactive idea that
House refused to go to physical rehab after the first visit (didn't
sound like House to me, but hey, it's a brave new world), which undercut
the idea that House is limited predominantly by circumstances beyond his
control. No, theoretically, House's pain doesn't have to be absolutely
psychosomatic, but from a thematic standpoint, that's the direction the
writers have been pounding away at this season: House is miserable, and
House causes his own misery. This season, the writers haven't cared to
depict any misery of House's that, according to them, is clearly not of
his own making (unless you count that tiresome, unfunny bit with the hay
fever back in "Autopsy").
If you work back through the logical implications of what they've been
doing, it turns the House of "Detox" from a mostly stoic, sympathetic
figure into a merely self-absorbed, self-indulgent, pathetic one.
-Micky
Micky DuPree
<calg...@tcfreenet.invalid> writes:
: Micky DuPree wrote:
:: That just seemed like a pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor
:: who had already been through enough to warrant a serious hypothesis
:: of post-traumatic stress disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS
:: pointlessly callous, even to the underaged, apparently.
:
: That's exactly it. Fox has decided that "House" is "the show about
: the asshole doctor", and so, House has to behave in requisite fashion.
: I used to affectionately refer to the show as "Asshole Doctor", but
: now, it's getting old.
I'm beginning to wonder if Hugh Laurie himself has been lobbying in this
direction. In interviews, he seems so adamant that they not make House
into a nice guy. (Like House was "nice" last season???) It's a British
thing to look askance at traditional heroes, but I wonder if it's led
him to overreact and encourage the writers in this new direction they've
taken for House.
I also wonder if Laurie is so appalled by his new sex-symbol status that
it led to some strangely conservative performance choices on his part in
his scenes with Sela Ward. House seemed to be more turned on when he
was flirting with the Munchausen's patient than he did when he was with
the love of his life.
:: But now they've established scientific physical proof that House
:: really is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for
:: it but himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical
:: pain. Maybe he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they
:: just retconned away everything that was bold and generous about
:: "Detox," and I'm torqued off that they not only want to degrade both
:: the show and the character in the second season, but they're
:: determined to retroactively rewrite, drag down, and piss on
:: everything that was good about the first season as well.
:
: House's *increased* pain is psychosomatic. House's regular old pain
: is a result of his injury.
We no longer have any proof of that, or if House does still have
physical pain from his five-year-old wound, the door is now wide open to
the writers saying that he *could* drastically reduce that physical pain
if he would only go to the rehab sessions that we've only just been
recently told he refuses to go to.
-Micky
Micky DuPree
<the_sta...@fastmail.fm> writes:
: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:25:17 -0600 from Rob Jensen <Shut...@aol.com>:
:: It's now a wide-open debate as to whether or not [House's] original
:: pain is all in his head, too.
Yep. I can see two ways the writers may approach it with their new
revisionism in mind.
1) Over time, what with House gulping Vicodin for psychological stress,
the physical pain from the original surgery faded away but was always
immediately replaced in his mind by the psychosomatic expectation of
the same level of pain whenever the Vicodin wore off. At this point,
there is no pain left that originates from his leg. His unconscious
mind only fools itself into thinking that the pain originates in his leg
now because he doesn't want to stop being miserable, but as far as his
conscious mind can discern, it's been the same physical pain all through
the last five and a half years.
2) Or maybe there is still some genuine leg pain, but it turns out that
it could be lessened or even eliminated if House would only stop
insisting on wallowing in misery and A) go complete a course of physical
rehabilitation for his leg, and B) see a shrink about his psychological
pain.
: Did you _see_ his thigh when he showed Cuddy? I can't imagine that not
: hurting pretty badly.
At the time of the surgery, I'd agree. But five and a half years later?
It's not so clear, at least not if that's the direction the writers want
to go in.
-Micky
Micky DuPree
<the_sta...@fastmail.fm> writes:
: Psychosomatic pain _is_ real, it's just not caused by any identifiable
: malfunction of the body.
:
: There's a common misperception that people with psychosomatic pain are
: "faking it", and their pain is "not real". Psychosomatic pain _can_ be
: quite genuine, just like pains people feel in a limb that was
: amputated some time ago.
I was under the impression that psychosomatic pain was different from
phantom limb pain. In the latter case, nerves along the pathway to the
injury continue to fire, reporting confusedly to the brain as if the
limb were still there, even though they terminate in a dead end.
It's been documented that psychological stress and psychological pain
can exacerbate the unfortunate state of brain chemistry that causes
signals of actual physical pain to flourish, so it's not mere poetic
license or coddling to say that psychic pain increases physical pain.
It's not even fair to say that the psychically originated pain is
imagined, since there's a fairly clear cause-and-effect relationship
between the stress and the levels of particular neurotransmitters that
(as a rule) get lowered. So even though House has reached
inappropriately for Vicodin when someone was getting on his nerves,
going all the way back to the pilot, I've been reluctant to presume to
know what it's like to walk a mile in his shoes.
But when everyone and his sister hops on the bandwagon and makes some
kind of reference to House's pain being all in his head, this is
obviously an idea that is near and dear to the writers' hearts. House
causing his own misery, willfully refusing to be happy, has been a
recurring theme of the second season. Wilson has been bizarrely getting
on House's case for causing his own psychic misery by sending Stacy
away, despite the rationally real likelihood of more misery down the
road if House and Stacy had gotten back together again. In this episode
they even went so far as to suggest that House is stubbornly bringing
all or part of his mobility problems on himself by refusing to go to
physical rehabilitation.
It doesn't have to make real-world medical sense, since the medicine in
the rest of the second season doesn't necessarily make sense either.
It's evidently supposed to be a grand tragic flaw. Or something. (Like
he didn't have enough of those already?)
-Micky
Ian J. Ball
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
> In article <1140649777.3...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> dr...@cornell.edu writes:
>
> : Micky DuPree wrote:
>
> :: I was completely surprised to learn that the actress had done
> :: international modeling. I thought fashion models looked like
> :: Cameron, only taller and younger.
>
> : Well, more "gaunt" seems to be popular in models. And Cameron is more
> : "normal" than that (although that is just relative to the TV world --
> : she's undernourished compared to most women in real life.)
>
> Cameron looks pretty damn thin to me, especially this season, and
> especially when she wears something short-sleeved. She's less padded
> than the fashion model character, anyway.
Jennifer Morrison has been on the thin side for a while now, but she's
really pushing the envelope lately...