Burning Down the House MacGuffin

I was more than a little bit upset to learn, a week or two ago, that the TV drama House will end in May. I really like the show - I'd probably list it among my top three right now - despite the fact that the plot of the show is almost exactly the same (at a high-level view, at least) in practically every single episode. The plot, such as it is, almost invariably goes thus:

A patient is brought in with an illness which at first doesn't interest Brilliant Diagnostician Dr. House because it seems pretty run-of-the-mill to him; but in the first ten or so minutes of the show, the patient exhibits a symptom that can't be explained by the original diagnosis and House is thereby intrigued and lured into taking the case, which he (and his team of eager young acolytes) proceed to misdiagnose, and mistreat, at least two more times until House himself, at some point in the final ten minutes of the hour-long show, has his inevitable Aha! moment and the rare (or in some other way odd) disease is correctly diagnosed and treated and the patient is saved¹.

Reader, I can fairly hear you right now demanding: Why the HELL should I give a flying FUCK about a TV show whose plot, you just fucking admitted, doesn't vary from week to week? What, are you some kinda fucking fucktard, Glaven? To which I would respond, first: Well, fuck you, too, hypothetical Reader-like Rhetorical Construct! And, second: How long have you had these anger issues? Third would be another Fuck You, for good measure, because I have feelings, Reader, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that "fucktard" crack stung a bit, to be honest. And Fourth would be to point out that the plot - the mystery disease-of-the-week - is not what House is actually about.

In fact, the weekly disease is merely the MacGuffin², the meaning of which term you can learn either by clicking that link or, to save yourself time, by continuing to read this sentence in the course of which I intend to tell you that a MacGuffin is the thing that the people in the story are interested in but, for all intents and purposes, doesn't really matter. So if you are the type of viewer who likes to congratulate himself over the fact that he correctly figured out what disease was afflicting this week's patient before House himself managed to, Congratulations! You're (as House himself would put it) an idiot. You've figured out the meaning of nothing, which is doubly pointless because, well, fuck! It's nothing. Also? Heidegger beat you to the punch³.

There's nothing wrong with mysteries or suspense yarns that are plot-dependent. Ian, Teh 'Bride and I watched a really good one last night: a movie called Unstoppable that Teh 'Bride DVR'd one weekend when we got free HBO (or some other premium channel we'll never be enticed into paying for), which she recorded because she thought it might actually hold Ian's interest, which, Reader, it did. It's a movie about a run-away train that is threatening to derail with its toxic cargo and kill a whole bunch of Pennzers, and the characters in the movie are interested in stopping this Unstoppable Train (which - Spoiler Alert! - it turns out is not really unstoppable but, you know, who's gonna shell out 10 clams to go see a movie called Nearly Unstoppable Until the Denouement?) and that, stopping the runaway train, is really all we the viewers are interested in, too. O, sure, one of the heroes is having marriage problems (he's an accidental wife-beater, it seems) and the other is Denzel Washington and, let's face it, the presence of Denzel is reason enough to watch any movie, but his character is also a widower who's trying to bring up two college-age daughters who work at Hooters and who (talking Denzel again here, not the daughters) - O, the Irony! - has just gotten his walking papers from the railroad company and now it is UP TO HIM TO SAVE THEIR ASSES (as well as those of a few hundred thousand Pennzers), Which he does. (Spoiler Alert.)

See, they throw that other "character" stuff in there, but that's not what the movie's about. The movie is the plot, which itself is simple, yet compelling. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Whereas House really is about the characters, specifically the main character, Gregory House. Now, you don't really need to know that he's named "House" because "House" is close to "Holmes" or that his best (and only)  friend is named "Dr. Wilson" because that's real close to "Dr. Watson" or that House's address is 221B (just as Sherlock Holmes famously lived at 221B Baker street) or that the show itself is on one level a deliberate ripoff of - WAIT FOR IT!1! - Sherlock Holmes (merely transposed to a medical setting) ... it is not necessary to know any of that. All you really need to grok is that House is acknowledged to be a Brilliant Diagnostician whose basic dickishness is tolerated because of his Mad Diagnostic Skillz because if it weren't for House, literally tens of fictional characters who are currently still alive would be dead. That's right - tens! Because, let's face it, he doesn't diagnose terrorist attacks, like Jack Bauer; he basically saves one character per week. While being a total dick about it.

And the only reason you "know" any of this is not because you are a medical expert and can evaluate House's diagnoses; you "know" it because it is a given in the structure of the show.

But House, while a dick, is an interesting dick, which is a good thing, because if you don't find House-the-character interesting, engaging even, there's very little reason to watch the show⁴. O, also, I should mention, he's funny. Very funny. Even while being a dick, House is incredibly funny, which is attributable in part to the way Hugh Laurie plays the character. Which is somewhat surprising to me for the following reasons:

My exposure to Hugh L. came basically through the show House. I'm not the totebag-owning type⁵ so I wasn't exposed to Laurie in, e.g., the Blackadder series on PBS; and I never saw Laurie's "comedy" work with Stephen Fry until after a few seasons of House, when Teh 'Bride happened to notice a Best of Fry & Laurie dvd at her library and took it out and we started to watch it and it was just utterly fucking awful. I'm talking "comedy" sketches that were last-55-minutes-of-SNL bad. We stopped watching after about 20 minutes - and this was the best of Fry & Laurie! If that was the "best", you could probably scrub your toilet with their "second best", though personally, if I saw the second best of Fry & Laurie in my toilet, I'd promptly flush it down whilst praying I didn't catch whatever disease it was that the person who laid that sickly turd had.

But as House, Laurie is really quite good. House himself is a pretty complex character, but is essentially nothing more than a pretty decent manifestation of a recognizable and venerable Type: viz., the Former-Romantic Turned Misanthropic Cynic By The Mistreatment He Has Experienced Firsthand In This Cruel Uncaring World Of Ours.

What makes House so compelling is, not only is he this Type, he thinks everyone else should be, too, and if they are not, they're saps. And so the episodes are often really about House's assholish attempts to Enlighten The Saps Around Him Using This Week's Illness As His Main Tool Of Enlightenment.

For example, in the last episode of House, this dude (the guy who used to play Medium's long-suffering husband) falls ill. It doesn't matter with what - that's just the MacGuffin, remember? (Jesus! Pay attention, Reader!) He's this motivational speaker whose topic is marital advice and it seems his advice is mostly for men and apparently that advice consists of telling men to stop being macho, knuckleheaded fucksticks; embrace your feminine side, and learn the art of compromise. You will grow as a person and everyone wins!

Nice, huh?

Turns out, the dude used to be a motivational speaker on business topics and his message was, Nut up, pussies! In business, you're either a winner or a loser and if you're not a winner you are by definition a loser. Which is a slightly different message.

Well, House figures out (in the exact same improbable way that Sherlock Holmes used to "deduce" things that were incapable of being "deduced" in reality) that the dude had been kneed in the nuts; turns out the guy must've been as much of an asshole as House is, because he got his ass, and, incidentally, his testes, handed to him in a bar fight three years earlier; he thinks the nut-crushing beatdown was a mere catalyst leading him to his change of heart. Turns out, it was the cause; he became girlier as a result of the  post-nut-injury drop in his testosterone level; when they replace his testosterone, he becomes a full-fledged Gordon Gekkoish prick again and his wife (who married him post-injury) can't stand him anymore and House is all, "People don't change. This is who he always was: A selfish dick. And the girly-man he's been for the past few years  was the true aberration which we just remedied with those testosterone injections"  - though he never actually sez this to the wife.

But he does successfully turn three out of the four members of his team against each other as they compete for a promotion (with a $50-a-week raise!) none of them really wants ... or, they all claim not to want.

As for the one who refuses to compete?

He gets the job when he offers to split the $50 with House.

And House sees that, once again, his cynical view of Mankind and The Cruel Dog-Eat-Dog World has, yet again, been validated.

He does this every week.

And we, the viewers, know the reason he keeps doing it week-in and week-out is ... he longs to be proven⁶ wrong.

This is a large part of what makes House pretty unique and this is also why I'll miss the show when it goes.

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¹ There are occasional deviations from this norm where, e.g., the patient is finally diagnosed with a fatal disease and ultimately either dies or the show ends with the pronouncement of the death sentence, but these deviations are not as significant as they may at first blush appear because House is, quite simply, not about the plot (see subsequent paragraphs above for the reasoning behind this assertion).

² Bonus footnote-al elucidation of the term "MacGuffin" because I just love this explanation from Hitchcock, which, if you don't click that link above, you'll  miss, which would be a damn shame, so I'm including it here:

It [i..e., "MacGuffin"] might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh, that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

³ And in case you're wondering what The Nothing does ... it nothings^3a. [<-- Spoiler Alert!]

^3a As John said to Ringo in Help! when Ringo was told that the only way to pacify the Bengal tiger that was threatening him was to sing Beethoven's famous "Ode to Joy" (in D minor) to it: "Yeah. Why didn't you think of that, ya twit?"

⁴ This is a bit of an oversimplification, because many of the other characters are also interesting and fleshed out, just not nearly as much as House.

⁵ I'm really more the douchebag-behaving type.

⁶ Or, as the Brits would put it, "proved wrong".