Starting with E1: Everybody Lies. Analysing House MD S1’s approach to disability and ableism within its narrative.
House MD is one of the most shows ever made, and I love it, I think it’s great, I think it’s really fucked up.
House MD, if you are not familiar — or, more likely, if you’ve seen it posted about online but never actually watched it — is a modern day reimagining and adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
Mr Holmes, rather than being an esoteric and blatantly autistic genius consulting detective, is reincarnated in the form of Gregory House — a just as esoteric and blatantly autistic, chronically pained and irascible genius doctor, who rather than seeking out and solving general mysteries instead solves medical mysteries.
The show takes on a case of the week format, with each episode focusing on a patient or patients and their medical issues — after a few false diagnoses and unfolding drama, most episodes end with the case being solved, and along the way we see not only House’s pathos, his self-loathing and his flawed relationships, his dark and offensive humour, his tendency to self-destruct, but also those of his coworkers.
Firstly, Doctor James Wilson — where Holmes becomes House, Watson becomes Wilson, and James Wilson is House’s closest compatriot, his homoerotically intimate partner, his counterbalance, the man so insane (and yet so affable in his insanity) that he makes the genius seem almost normal at times in comparison.
Then, Doctor Lisa Cuddy — Cuddy is in some ways House’s Lestrade, although she actually has authority over the man that Lestrade never does over Holmes: Cuddy is the administrator of Princeton Plainsboro Hospital, the hospital where House is employed as a diagnostician, and many of her struggles involve trying to limit the amount of malpractice House can commit in the course of an episode.
And finally, House’s team — in the initial seasons, House’s junior coworkers are Doctor Robert Chase, Doctor Allison Cameron, and Doctor Eric Foreman, although in later seasons his team changes and evolves — and House’s team not only assist in diagnosing patients and administering treatments, but also have to deal with House’s hijinks, limiting his malpractice or joining in with it, and often engage in non-medical nonsenses in order to help solve this week’s case, whether that be breaking and entering, cooking up their own drugs, stealing, conning, or whatever delightful crime seems most fun this episode.
It’s a ridiculous premise, and just as ridiculous a show — the show itself is often glib on many levels, with House himself being edgy and making comments designed to offend as many people as possible, whether via personal insult or calling in some bigotry or other. Despite that — and in part because of that — it’s a show that actually has some really complex character writing on a lot of levels, and is a show that stands out to me as having some of the most impactful writing on disability in television that I could name.
This piece is going to focus on Season 1 of the show and delve into the ways in which Gregory House stands out as a disabled character, and how the show’s writing of his disability and his experiences being traumatised by and because of his disability speak to me as a disabled man myself. It’s not that House is a role model, because God knows he isn’t — but what he is, at many times, is relatable.
A lot of disabled people wish they could be as much of an asshole as this guy is, because frankly, the ways in which disabled people are constantly policed for their negative feelings about both disability and the ways in which people pathologise and treat disabled people, is infuriating. You’re meant to constantly be grateful for the crumbs people forget to put out for you, not considering your access needs, muttering about your “quality of life” as a euphemism for effectively wishing you were euthanised so they won’t have to deal with you any longer.
Gregory House is a prick, but his behaviour doesn’t come from nowhere, and seeing the ways in which his relationship with pain and trauma play out in his ability to connect — or not — with people is endlessly fascinating and entertaining to me on rewatch after rewatch.
First things first: how is Gregory House disabled?
I would argue that House has 3 different definitions to his own disability across the length of the series, loosely defined as they are:
- House’s leg. House had a significant piece of necrotic muscle tissue removed from his thigh prior to the show. This has left him chronically in pain due to the scar tissue, and as there is no longer sufficient muscle tissue to fully support his weight, his mobility is significantly affected. Subsequently, House walks with a cane, and takes medication to manage his chronic pain.
- House’s neurodivergence. Gregory House is autistic. I’ll talk more about the whys and wherefores later — the show tries to say that he’s “not autistic, just an asshole,” but in fact, he’s both. I would probably argue that House is coded ADHD and autistic (much like the original Sherlock Holmes), as his constant sense of understimulation and boredom being so painful is relatable as Hell, but House also has significant childhood and adult trauma, and this also impacts the ways in which he thinks, emotes, and relates to others.
- House’s addiction. Some people might argue that addiction isn’t a disability — those people are presumably comfortable being wrong, so let them live their lives in ignorance. Apart from the physical and psychological ways in which pharmacological addiction wreaks havoc with one’s ability to manage pain and the side effects of one’s medication as one becomes accustomed to it, the social model of disability — namely, the idea that many issues disabled people experience are not necessarily caused by our disabilities themselves, but by additional barriers put in our way by society and people’s responses to our disability — addiction is most certainly disabling. House is in many ways more disabled by his addiction precisely because of the US’ “War on Drugs”, the politics of which greatly impacts both individual and medically institutional responses to addiction. While many other characters heavily pathologise and demonise House’s addictive tendencies and specifically his vicodin addiction, I do agree that House is an addict — but him being an addict is far less a problem than people’s desire to cure him of addiction, thereby rendering him “good” again.
1×01: Everybody Lies
As House’s character is established in the pilot episode, we can infer that his leg injury was relatively recent in life, and isn’t something that he’s dealt with forever — in 1×21: Three Stories, he mentions that it’s been five years since he last saw Stacy, so presumably the infarction that led to his permanent injury was about then. House has had long enough in this time to regain sufficient mobility to move with his cane, to avoid many of his clinic hours, and also to develop the Vicodin addiction we see introduced in the first episode.
With House’s introduction in 1×01: Everybody Lies, the episode actually starts post-credits with an exposition-heavy conversation with Wilson, introducing the immediate crux of House’s pathos throughout the show:
HOUSE: See that? They all assume that I’m a patient because of this cane.
WILSON: So put on a white coat like the rest of us.
HOUSE: I don’t want ’em to think I’m a doctor.
WILSON: You see where the administration might have a problem with that attitude…
HOUSE: People don’t want a sick doctor.
WILSON: Well, that’s fair enough. I don’t like healthy patients.
House presents the problem present in medical institutions and in broader society: people see sickness and disability as, to some extent, a moral failing. The sick and disabled are perhaps worthy of pity if not glancing distaste, but are generally less respected in their positions, and seen as less desirable than anybody else.
There is often an assumption that chronic pain or illness is merely an issue of lacking discipline or focus, that a person is weak-willed, that they haven’t done enough yoga or played with enough crystals or “put in the work” to not be sick; there’s a holdover from Victorian ideals as well, that a deficit in the body is indicative of a deficit in the character. To be sick is to have something wrong with you — to have something wrong with you in one area is to call your virtues or abilities into question.
House is the same doctor he was before he was visibly physical disabled, but now that he is physically disabled, people see him differently, respond to him differently, respect him less, desire him less as a doctor — not to mention, they desire him less as a man, and House is cognizant of this, and sensitive to the fact.
To live as someone who is visibly disabled is to constantly be seen as a patient with an illness or injury in need of treatment, regardless of whether you’re seeking that out, and House at this point in the series is relatively new to being seen in this way. We see a lot of his bitterness at being perceived as lesser because of his injury, and the self-loathing he feels as a result.
Wilson, of course, jokingly treats it as a binary, that doctors and patients are mutually exclusive from one another with their identifying traits being their health and their lack thereof respectively — that Wilson engages with House with humour he gets is a central part of their relationship; that Wilson is lying to House in their initial conversation about who the patient he’s offering is is naturally another part of it.
The fact of the matter is that House has been a doctor for a good many years of his life, and for his part has likely fallen to some extent into thinking in this binary manner himself — it’s only now that he’s visibly disabled that he’s thinking about it more intently, and this introspection evidently isn’t leading him to tremendously happy places.
FOREMAN: Isn’t treating patients why we became doctors?
HOUSE: No, treating illnesses is why we became doctors. Treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable.
FOREMAN: So you’re trying to eliminate the humanity from the practice of medicine?
HOUSE: If we don’t talk to them, they can’t lie to us. And we can’t lie to them — humanity is overrated.
House’s mantra — as in the episode title — is “Everybody Lies”, and it’s established throughout the series as a continuous philosophy he’s held since childhood.
One of the facets of autistic experience that many allistic people have trouble with is the relationship that autistics have with honesty and truthfulness. Many autistics think extremely literally, and autistic children often take longer than allistics to understand and interpret concepts such as sarcasm and dishonesty — even in adulthood, not every autistic finds it easy to distinguish tonal differences between jokes, sarcasm, and direct communication, and may have difficulty understanding the reasons people lie.
This is not to say that we’re incapable of understanding deception, small talk, different forms of humour, because many autistic people actually become particularly fixated on or interested in these things, and House is an example of the latter. His continuous frustration is not actually to do with people lying: it’s people denying that they lie, or ascribing a moral value to deception whilst partaking continuously in it. His frustration with this is less to do with the deception itself, and more to do with how much additional labour or time it adds to any potential task or diagnosis.
For someone who lies all the time — to himself, to coworkers, to patients, to friends and lovers, to everybody in the world — House does regularly position himself as someone opposed to lies and deception. It’s noteworthy here that he doesn’t just express frustration in this initial conversation with the idea of a patient distracting him and his team by lying to them — he specifically mentions not lying to the patient, either.
House doesn’t trust others; he doesn’t trust institutions or protocol; he doesn’t even trust Wilson half the time, Wilson being established as his closest friend, and given that their first conversation in their introduction is Wilson deceiving House in order to get him interested in a case, House shouldn’t take Wilson’s statements at face value.
The fact that House and Wilson lie to one another and spend so much time poking at each other’s statements — true or false — is part of the reason they’re able to reach such intimacy: they meet one another on the same level, despite the fact that Wilson regularly claims not to want to.
“Humanity is overrated,” House says, and in part, he says that because he’s used to not being treated with humanity himself. Not merely because of his recent physical disability — we know in the course of the series that his father was abusive to him, that he had a lot of interpersonal issues with his family in childhood, and that the man himself is blunt, brisk, and frankly, off-putting.
A lot of people automatically distance themselves from autistics whether they know we’re autistic or not, as they have an instinctive reaction to the traits in neurodivergent people they might dislike — the plain speaking, the literal nature, under or over expression, et cetera, as well as in the broader scheme of neurodivergence, indicators of “psychopathy”, hallucinations, obsessive tendencies, emotional instability or intensity, tonal or expressive issues, even tics like echolalia. Neurodivergent traits are often expected to be masked if they can be, and if they aren’t, people tend to respond with hostility or disdain — even in the event people don’t jump to ostracising the person with those traits, it can be difficult to begin and maintain relationships with others who either don’t have those traits themselves, or who don’t value them or see them as appropriate.
House lacks virtually any intimate relationships outside of his longstanding platonic partnership with Wilson — he is estranged from his family, he’s not particularly close with any of his team or any other coworkers, he’s not close with Stacy or any other previous partners. He is isolated, and he is alone, and this lack of interpersonal support is a contributing factor not only to his experiences of his chronic pain, but also to his addiction itself.
He of course becomes closer with Cuddy later, but in the initial episode, Cuddy and House are at odds as she tries to get him to do his job — and it’s evident that at least some of House’s hostility toward her, apart from his obvious avoidance of her, is in how he expects her to treat him because of his disability.
[House sees Cuddy approaching from the side of his eye, and presses the button of the lift more urgently whilst averting his gaze and pretending not to have noticed her.]
CUDDY: I was expecting you in my office twenty minutes ago.
HOUSE: Really? That’s odd, because I had no intention of being in your office twenty minutes ago.
CUDDY: Do you think we have nothing to talk about?
HOUSE: No, just can’t think of anything I’d be interested in.
CUDDY: I sign your paychecks.
HOUSE: I have tenure.
[The lift door opens, and House steps forward, but then turns back and looks back at Cuddy expectantly.]
HOUSE: Are you going to grab my cane now, stop me from leaving?
There’s something in the way Laurie plays it here, his eyebrows raised, his lips parted, his eyes focused on Cuddy, as well as in the tone he uses and the way he phrases the question, the use of the word now, that comes off as if she — or someone else — has done that to him before.
There’s a lot of agency attached, as a disabled person, to our mobility aids, the ways in which we use them to operate, to support ourselves, and, you know, to just walk, but many abled people see mobility aids and other disability aids as privileges, or otherwise feel confident in taking them away or laying their hands on them in a way they wouldn’t feel confident laying hands on someone’s actual leg or their actual body. People might take away someone’s cane whilst claiming it might be a weapon, or to better impound a disabled person, but they wouldn’t do an equivalent act to an abled person — they wouldn’t take someone’s arm away because they might use it to throw a punch, or shackle someone to impound them in the same scenario.
What House is communicating here is pain and in my opinion a genuine anxiety, if not fear — and Cuddy’s response, implying she wouldn’t do such a thing, is to say, “That would be juvenile.”
She doesn’t say she wouldn’t do it.
Obviously we see compounded in this moment that House has been avoiding taking on cases in his diagnostic department, building on what we learned in how Wilson had to wheedle with him to get him to take a case; we also learn here that House is significantly behind on his clinic hours and has been for the past six years, which matches up roughly with the timeline for when he injured his leg — if he was about a year behind when he got injured (assuming he ordinarily avoids doing his clinic hours and leaves them to pile up and get out of the way at the end of the year, when his obligations come due), and then has avoided them entirely since his injury because of his anxiety in being in a room with patients who might judge him for his disability, ask questions about it, and so forth, then six years behind sounds about right.
House doesn’t bother to lie convincingly to Cuddy in the course of their argument about it, just flatly refutes many of her talking points with very obvious deceptions, until:
HOUSE: It’s five o’clock. I’m going home.
CUDDY, lowering her voice and looking like she’s bracing herself to say it: To what?
HOUSE, blinking a few times, muttering sarcastically: Nice…
Cuddy, like Wilson, has noticed that House is spiralling to some extent, and is obviously now trying to force him into working, but it’s interesting that she goes from making this very personal comment to calling him “Doctor House” a moment later, enforcing the professional distance between them again.
House is unprofessional and Cuddy tries not to meet him on his level, but right from the beginning, we see her do so.
A minute later we see House come into Cuddy’s office and shout at her — it’s a power move for her to stay sitting at her desk and respond flatly as he yells and shows his temper, and in a lot of situations this would be a powerful gender dynamic in that like, much of the time men will try to shout and scream at women and show aggression in an attempt to get their way, and one of the ways to undercut this behaviour is to stay calm and rational whilst implying they’re being overemotional.
Except that Cuddy explicitly doesn’t make it about their genders here, she doesn’t imply this is misogyny on House’s part or make this a matter of his gender.
Why is he yelling? He tells her: because he is angry. She’s pulled his privileges and authorisations without warning, and he’s angry that this has potentially endangered his patient, but also, his ego is wounded.
HOUSE, limping forward: You showed me disrespect, you embarrassed me, and as long as I work here, you have no —
CUDDY: Is the yelling designed to scare me? Because I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be scared of.
[Cut to House narrowing his eyes and still looking pissed at her, his lips pursed.]
CUDDY: More yelling? That’s not scary. That you’re gonna hurt me, that’s scary, but I’m pretty sure [half-laugh] I can outrun ya.
And here we see House look honestly hurt and further embarrassed, his expression dropping — he breaks her gaze and looks down instead, and a moment later we see him stop and take a Vicodin for the third time in the episode, the other times having been with his team and with Wilson in the beginning of the episode.
House does have a problem with misogyny, and I don’t want to downplay the issues he has with women in this or in any other episode, including the ways in which misogyny overshadows his relationship — professional, personal, romantic, sexual — with Cuddy particularly, but in this moment she undercuts him not merely as a man versus a woman, but as an abled woman versus a disabled man.
The relationship between physical disability and emasculation of men is obviously a factor here — many people view men who are physically disabled in some way as inherently less masculine, less attractive, or less worthy of humanity as men, as sexless or without sexual capacity (and therefore less human), or, as in here, less potentially a threat. House was a constant athlete prior to his injury, was consistently and continuously engaged in different forms of sport and physical exercise — I would argue in fact that part of the reason for his Vicodin addiction is because his addictive tendencies in the past were largely managed with extreme exercise in conjunction with his special interest in medicine and his varied passions and hobbies— and whilst he’s not generally violent in the first instance, he was no doubt used to being able to at least fill a room with some sort of righteous anger.
The impotence Cuddy implies of the threat here isn’t wholly because House is not a physical threat to her, and I’m not saying she’s not right to call him out for screaming in her office, but House’s emotional response to it isn’t to do with her pointing out the unprofessional or inappropriate tack he’s taking to approaching her.
He’s hurt because he’s made to feel like the reason him yelling is impotent or worthy of derision is because he’s now physically disabled, and thus less valuable as a human being, something he already loathes about himself without being told so explicitly by his direct superior.
This is an intersection of their respective experiences of bigotry in their careers: the difference is that Cuddy has experienced misogyny the whole of her life, and the whole of her journey up to this position as hospital administrator. She deals with it in meetings, with underlings, with board members, with patients, with anybody and everybody — House yelling at her because he’s mad a woman is telling him what to do is par for the course.
The fact that he’s not actually mad about her being a woman, but about his own pathological avoidance of the reality of his own disability and its being perceived by others is irrelevant. He’s not expressing that: he’s trying to express that he’s a big scary man and she should be scared of him, and she’s got a tried-and-tested technique for that.
He’s making offensive comments about her being a woman: why the Hell shouldn’t she make offensive comments back about his cane?
House, in contrast to Cuddy, has always been able to fly by whilst being perceived not as disabled but merely as zany, weird, and obsessive — “high-functioning” autism in men in the sciences is often accepted in a way it isn’t in women, especially when combined with certain social graces, charisma, and/or humour — but he is very new now to navigating the ways in which his physical disability is treated and discriminated against within the workplace, by both coworkers and patients. He is not practised at it, and furthermore, he has a pretty thin skin when it comes to certain attitudes and comments, especially when they’re about his manhood, ergo, his desirability, his attractiveness, his worthiness.
House has only ever been friends with the similarly insane, like Wilson, and he doesn’t care about receiving medical accolades or awards and adulation in the field: his social connections pre-Stacy seem largely to have come through his attractiveness to and his short-term sexual relationships with women. His jokes about hookers aren’t just about a high-flying, partying lifestyle: he no longer considers himself as desirable enough to attract women for dates or casual sex without paying them, let alone to do all the time in every environment, which as a highly paid, handsome, intelligent, and breezily assholeish doctor, he was likely very used to doing.
After his outburst in Cuddy’s office, we see House emerge and declare to his team, half-smirking as though he’s won some victory over Cuddy and not the other way around: “Do the MRI. She folded.”
Only to Wilson does he quietly admit the horrible capitulation he’s made, doing four hours of clinic duty a week — and when he says “You’d better love this cousin of yours a whole lot,” we see Wilson smirk, satisfied with his continued deception of his best friend.
Vicodin #4: “Truth begins in lies. Think about it.”
When House goes to the clinic for his duties, we see him repeatedly imply that his issue with the work here is that it’s too boring and too menial, making jokes about Cuddy giving out the aspirin instead of him and wanting to kick back and watch General Hospital, because, you know, it’s not like he’s going to admit to the real reason for his avoidance of the clinic.
And Cuddy knows that she can hook this autistic and reel him in by using his special interest against him: a medical mystery?
HOUSE: Painkillers.
PATIENT: Oh, for you? For your leg?
HOUSE: No, ’cause they’re yummy.
With this guy, he’s obviously amused at the absurdity of the situation whilst being pleased he gets to deliver the clever diagnosis of the real problem, but much more revealing of his character is the second patient.
The mother of the little boy brought into the clinic expresses anxiety about her son using his inhaler because she feels it’s a very powerful medication to be giving a young child. The fact that he’s ten years old and more than old enough to be in command of his own inhaler — I was in control of mine by the time I was seven or eight, and carrying it with me, the idea of a ten-year-old, only a year off from middle school, not carrying his rescue inhaler with him and having it controlled, let alone rationed, by a parent is insane — is irrelevant to this woman.
“What happened to your leg?” the boy asks through mild wheezes, fixated on his cane and his limping gait, as House says, “Your doctor probably was concerned about the strength of the medicine too. She probably weighed that danger against the danger of not breathing. Oxygen is so important during those prepubescent years, don’t you think?”
He is angry as he begins to explain asthmatic inflammation to them both, because this is a chronically ill child being denied lifesaving medication due to a mother who isn’t trusting medical professionals — and yet at the same time, he’s more distracted by his bigger medical mystery than he is this child’s autonomy or his health.
Rebecca’s view of House through the blinds is almost angelic, shrouded and silhouetted as he is — and we see her gaze slowly pan down to the dark shadow of his cane before she settles back in bed.
No angel has a limp, right?
I love House’s frequent distractability and the way that he multitasks conversations and medicine with shitty medical TV shows is so real. I too love my favourite garbage medical soaps and watch them while working — this essay series is a real match made in Heaven for me.
Classic House detail-oriented silliness whilst trying to mentor his employee into breaking the law, and revealing that he knows Foreman’s secrets: and at the same time, doing so in a racialised manner, with all that implication on “street smarts” in conversation with him. Foreman, up to now, has been the most engaged with House’s philosophy and interrogating it most keenly, whilst at the same time seeming to like him most — nastiness like this ensures that Foreman is kept emotionally at arm’s length, and that Foreman resents him rather than seeing him as a friend or anything warmer than professional.
In the next scene, we see Cuddy want to override House’s medical decisions based on the lack of medical reasoning, in her mind, behind his diagnosis — he’s treating the patient with steroids based on a guess, and after saying that she’s going to change her back to the original course of medication, she walks away.
Big power move, making the cripple chase you — she did say she was pretty sure she could outrun him.
House later on shows a lot more confidence and assurance when arguing with Cuddy, but in this initial episode we don’t see that laissez-faire attitude. He is genuinely aggrieved and emotive as he limps after Cuddy:
HOUSE: She isn’t an experiment. I have a legitimate theory about what’s wrong with her.
CUDDY: With no proof!
HOUSE: There’s never any proof.
He tries hard to undercut her in a way that might have worked with somebody else, appealing to Cuddy’s sense of ego whilst talking up his own assumption that he’s always right: “Why are you so afraid of making a mistake?”, but that doesn’t work, because Cuddy isn’t going to fall into an ego-for-ego strut-off about medicine… and in the meantime, House has to wait for the elevator. She can just jog up the stairs, and he can’t follow at pace.
“People used to have more respect for cripples, you know!” he calls up the stairs, and then when he turns and sees a patient in a wheelchair, he says in a dry aside, “They didn’t really.”
Truer words were never spoken.
HOUSE as Cuddy comes out of the patient’s room, where she’s eating and looking healthy: Should I discontinue the treatment, boss?
CUDDY: You got lucky.
HOUSE: Cool, huh?
But Cuddy is smiling, and so is he.
Interesting that we then see Rebecca asking about House and who he is, if she’s going to meet him, asking both Cuddy and then Wilson: she saw his cane through the window when seeing him speak earlier, and her lying back down was her dismissing the possibility that he might be her doctor.
In discussing potential diagnosis in the next scene, we see House coldly suggest that all forms of medication are removed so that they can observe the patient — based on the pace of her degeneration, they will be able to tighten their diagnostic criteria and figure out what’s wrong with her. The other doctors are all horrified, because what if she dies too quickly? Isn’t it better for them to take a punt on a random method and do something, rather than be passive and observe?
House says he has no better idea, and they’re all frustrated by his apparent lack of humanity…
And yet. And yet. What beautiful mirrors of Gregory House we see burgeoning in Cameron and Foreman.
FOREMAN: Oh, Cameron, I need you for a couple hours.
CAMERON: Why?
FOREMAN: When you break into someone’s house, it’s always better to have a white chick with you.
CAMERON: Adler’s house? Why don’t we just ask for her keys?
FOREMAN: For all we know she could be running a meth lab out of her basement.
Two things about this exchange: in the first instance, that Cameron has a complete lack of concern with the moral or ethical concern of breaking into a patient’s house.
I’ve stated before and will likely be of the opinion forever, unless a properly strong contender arises, that Allison Cameron is one of the scariest characters to ever grace my television. She is self-serving and amoral, and is largely concerned with how any issue makes her feel personally over any actually established moral code — she cares about rules, and particularly the appearance of breaking or following those rules, but this is largely about her relationship with power structures and authority rather than a particularly honed internal sense of what she feels is right or wrong.
In that way, she parallels House quite well. House does have a keenly honed sense of what he personally believes is right or wrong, but he regularly tosses it out of the window in order to embarrass a stranger or annoy people — and he owns up to the fact that he does that, at least.
What makes Cameron so astonishingly unsettling to me is how she wields her own authority and ability to do just that whilst almost never owning up to it, and often hiding behind a wide-eyed false innocence, especially leaning into the way that she’s perceived as a young, white, pretty woman. It’s not that she doesn’t deal with misogyny, because certainly, she does, but her fetish for and fixation on men who are chronically ill and/or disabled, is a genuinely unnerving one, although obviously fascinating from a character perspective.
Then, that Foreman goes from insulting House to basically quoting House’s own catty retort to Foreman’s objection several scenes ago — where Cameron’s apathy and amorality are a natural parallel for House’s own, Foreman is frustrated with these traits because he leans heavily into masking his own ambition and more negative personality traits.
Especially as a Black man, he simply could not act in the way that House can with offensive impunity — this makes Foreman incredibly fixated on maintaining appearances and outwardly obeying rules and expectations, even whilst surreptitiously subverting them.
But as an ambitious man, he is absolutely drawn to the unique and incredibly secure position House has carved out for himself in the world of diagnostic medicine. Despite the way that House demurs himself as an infectious disease specialist, his position as head of a dedicated diagnostics department that’s not just a centre for diagnostic tools is almost unheard of, and Foreman craves that sort of professional stature. He may detest House as a person, but that doesn’t make him less invaluable as a mentor and as a professional role model — he considers himself perfectly able to separate his personal preferences from his professional needs.
Both Cameron and Foreman, of course, undergo a lot of development throughout the show and are encouraged and discouraged in different ways from their goals and respective relationships with House and what House represents within their broader professions.
Cut to House dealing with a hypochondriac by giving him sugar pills from the hospital vending machine (disgusting, by the way, why the Hell is there a snot machine in the room where all the snot-covered people go?) and scamming for Vicodin.
I love Foreman talking about anti-Blackness and the broader history of anti-Black racism in the USA when we know that at the same time, later on, he has a particular problem with poorer Black people than him — obviously part of this is the fact that his character undergoes significant development post-pilot, but Foreman’s complex relationship with Blackness is such an interesting part of the show, because while this is a shitty edgy show from the mid 00s, like…
It’s also a show that works quite hard to make layered and incisive commentary on various social issues and play with the inherent contradictions within the way that power and authority are structured — and therefore, legitimacy or social power — and the ones that exist within individuals and their communities, especially when it comes to people’s bigotries and biases.
After this, we get to enjoy Wilson getting caught in a lie and trying to make it about Foreman not knowing enough about Jews and Jewish people — continuing the theme of everyone’s intersecting biases and oppressions intersecting with one another and contrasting or juxtaposing in different ways, much like Cameron and Foreman’s conversation the scene before about Foreman’s position as a Black man versus Cameron’s as a white woman.
House is so pleased that Wilson got caught lying, which is obviously delightful.
I love House’s whining, “No, no, no!” about the other doctors saying they have no proof it’s a tapeworm, because as we know, for this guy, it’s about the puzzle and solving it as much as it’s about anything…
And so we see House enter and meet his patient.
HOUSE, standing in front of Rebecca and looking distinctly uncomfortable, making intense eye contact: You’re being an idiot. [His voice cracks.] You have a tapeworm in your brain. If we don’t do anything you’ll be dead by the weekend.
REBECCA, quietly disconsolate: Have you actually seen the worm?
HOUSE, after a revealing pause: When you’re all better, I’ll show you my diplomas.
It’s implied that House hasn’t had a case for a while prior to this episode when Cuddy mentions that he’s got a team that basically haven’t been put to use, and ditto through Cameron, Foreman, and Chase’s interest in working for him — up to this episode, House has been avoiding not just clinic duty, but potentially a significant amount of patients in general, which is why Wilson wanted to trick him into taking this case as a personal favour to him.
House isn’t shrouded behind the blinds this time, let alone safely settled in another room entirely: he’s standing before the patient and bathed in the brightest most anaemic light they could afford on their limited pilot’s budget.
And he is in excruciating discomfort. The patient is looking at him: he is trying to justify his decision to the patient.
Everybody lies.
The patient is asking: where is your proof?
House has no proof, only the belief that is right, and the desire to solve the puzzle. He does not offer her proof of his diagnosis, but proof of his credentials.
He is terrified that she is distrusting him not because of the horrors she’s experienced so far and her lack of faith in medicine and doctors, but because she doesn’t trust him specifically, and when he stands in front of her, he cannot lie about what he is.
When Doctor House is a mysterious figure in the next room, ordaining your treatment and diagnosis from on high, you do not know that he’s a cripple — that he’s just a cripple. He doesn’t become the obvious flaw in his body and his health and his person. That doesn’t become the reason to dismiss his ability or his humanity.
And when he has to come into the room to beg the patient for the chance to continue solving the puzzle that is their condition, he opens himself up to the possibility that they’ll fixate on that instead of the medicine.
HOUSE: I’m not offering you a treatment, I’m offering you a cure. But because I might be wrong, you wanna die.
REBECCA, unflinchingly: What made you a cripple?
We hear a musical sting, and House flinches, breaking her gaze. That was exactly the question he was afraid of.
He stumbles, swallows, casts around the room initially as he begins to explain — this lacks the indignant fervour he had explaining asthma to the mother and son earlier.
REBECCA: Did you think you were dying?
HOUSE, meeting her gaze again: I hoped I was dying.
REBECCA: So you hide in your office, refuse to see patients because you don’t like the way people look at you. You feel cheated by life so now you’re gonna get even with the world. You want me to fight this? Why? What makes you think I’m so much better than you?
HOUSE: When you’re scared, you’ll turn into me.
REBECCA: I just wanna die with a little dignity.
HOUSE: There’s no such thing. Our bodies break down. [He begins to limp forward.] Sometimes when we’re 90. Sometimes before we’re born. It always happens, and there isn’t any dignity in it — I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It’s always ugly. Always. [Quieter, after she looks away from him.] We can live with dignity. We can’t die with it.
And then the conversation after is so good — Foreman and Cameron immediately jump to potentially overriding her records and taking her to court, lying and saying that she’s not mentally fit to make this decision, which House dismisses, because she is mentally fit enough.
Wilson breaks in and says that the reason that House won’t allow for that is because he’s seen her in person now and he’s been tricked into respecting her as a person, although honestly, we know later on that House is generally quite adherent to patient’s wishes if he feels they understand the consequences and he’s been allowed to solve his puzzle.
Chase, up to this point, has been quite quiet in the episode: where Foreman and Cameron both parallel House’s moral and ethical shittiness, Chase often parallels his creativity and his charisma, but also his genuine self-confidence.
Chase has a very firm sense of what he believes to be right and wrong and a core belief system, it’s not as flexible as Foreman or Cameron’s — we obviously later find out that it was shaped by his time in seminary and his religion, but it’s not just biblical. Like House, he has a very firm sense of who he is and what he stands for, and because of that, he isn’t constrained by the same rules or boxes as Foreman and Cameron sometimes can be — and more relevantly, he’s far less afraid than they are to be told that he’s wrong when he comes up with something strange or off-the-wall.
And now…
CAMERON: Why did you hire me?
He hired Foreman because he has a criminal record; he hired Chase because of his dad’s nepotism; he hired Cameron because she’s so pretty.
Cameron is naturally infuriated that House is owning up to misogyny here, saying that he picked her because of her looks, because she thinks that it’s about his desire to have sex with her or look at her, but it’s not that…
It’s that she’s another puzzle that he wants to solve.
“But you are damaged, aren’t you?” he asks her, because, yeah, she is.
Who isn’t, in this show?
HOUSE: You lied to a friend to save a stranger. You don’t think that’s kind of screwed up?
WILSON: You never lie to me?
HOUSE, lying: I never lie…
The pilot episode is so incredibly ugly because of the cheap lighting and awful colour-grading, but it does such a great job of setting up all the initial characters and their numerous issues, and obviously, especially, Doctor House.
In the further episode break-downs, I am likely not going to do every single episode, but I’ll break down the most interesting episodes with notes from the episodes in between, and the plan is to do this in chronological order — I think I might then do a full series breakdown.
Hope this has been an interesting read!
I love this show because it is just awful and so absurd in the way of many shows from the period, but because of its desire to be awful and edgy, it actually ends up making some genuinely incisive and hard-hitting commentary and particularly poignant emotional beats from a disabled perspective.
A lot of shows are very anxious about portraying truly flawed and awful characters, but the truth is that the real pathos of the human condition is in awful personality flaws. When you focus too much on making characters likeable, you rob them of the ability to feel truly human, and therefore, truly relatable.
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