The Problem with Gregory House

Thank you to everyone (trolls aside) who offered me congratulations on the last post. Now I want to blog about something which has been bugging me for awhile and can finally write about because I'm caught up on House.

[warning: this has spoilers for the series up to the most recent episode]

First I want to say that while this post is about House himself, I also have a disability critique in the works about how patients' disabilities are dealt with on the show. But this post is mostly about House. Also, while I know many people have suggested that House himself is on the autism spectrum, I disagree. He's too talented in reading and dealing with people. The man is a misanthropic jerk, period. Moreover, the show's continued existence relies on his massive jerkitude. Plus, I want to talk about House's clearly marked mobility impairment in this particular post.

Way back in season one, we found out why House walks with a cane. As it turns out, House had an aneurysm in his leg which resulted in his thigh muscle pretty much dying. Though Cuddy recommends removing the muscle tissue and possibly the entire leg, House refuses. He is willing to risk his life to save his leg. So House is obviously being ableist by thinking that dead is preferable to life with one leg and a prosthetic leg. He is also willing to suffer a great deal of agony, potentially, to save the leg. House is then induced into a coma to avoid the pain. While he is in the coma, Stacy (his girlfriend) approves a "middle-ground" surgery. House will keep the leg, but a large portion of the muscle will be surgically removed. When House wakes up and finds out about this, he gets mad at Stacy for having the audacity to save his life. In the years since the surgery, House continues to have leg pain, which he deals with by becoming addicted to Vicodin rather than doing the sensible thing, which would be to amputate the leg and become one of many amputees who are active and empowered.

Is House an ableist show at this point? Well, House himself clearly has a lot of internalized ableism and ableist ideas--but then, we're not supposed to want to be like House. Though House attributes his misery and misanthropy in part to his leg, the backstory episode showed us that he was just as much of an ass before becoming disabled.

But as I watched more House, the ableism became more and more apparent to me. House is shot at the end of season two, and after a series of trippy, drug-induced visions, House requests to be given an experimental treatment which would help ease his pain. (Remember that House would be in less pain if he had gone through with the amputation, or even if he had used Vicodin with any degree of responsibility.) The treatment works: he's not in pain. But then, the Magical TV Fairies of Retcon step in. Not only is House pain-free--he can run eight miles in no time! Apparently, the experimental drug somehow allowed his leg muscle to re-grow. I'm not Jenny McCarthy, and won't claim any medical expertise from Google. But the idea of a removed leg muscle allowing someone to run after removing the pain is...wrong. Really, really wrong.

Neverthless, the plot contrivances allow House a magical month in which House suddenly becomes Mr. Triathalon. Inevitably, of course, the pain returns and House picks up his cane again, Music of Tragedy playing in the background. At other points in this season, House spends his time at parks watching other people run and moping. Sure, he sabotages his own chance at happiness time and time again. But we're still supposed to feel sorry for him because he has to use a cane. The horror!

In the most recent episode, House gets yet another magical reprieve, this time in the form of methadone. A danger to himself? Not a problem for House. The only problem is that he treats patients and other people nicely, for once, leading him to completely screw up the case. He decides he must return to his oh-so-horrible life of a cane and Vicodin. Apparently we're supposed to believe that House's misanthropic personality completely dissipates once the pain is gone and once he can walk without a cane.

This summary of the series thus far does, I hope, illuminate the ways in which House's character is built around ableism. I'd quite happily enjoy a misanthropic progagonist--in fact, I still do enjoy the show. But when the show indicates that disability is the primary source of his misery, there is a problem. Newsflash: Most people with acquired physical disabilities don't spend half their time moaning about their own misfortune. While I cannot speak from personal experience, my research on disability rights has showed me that people who acquire physical disabilities that many consider "horrible" go on to have lives which are just fine. They often experience problems due to discrimination and poor accomodations, of course, plus the problems which all of us may experience. But the notion that acquiring a physical disability is a Horrible Thing which will Ruin Your Life is a pernicious stereotype which needs to be contested. House, despite the show's numerous virtues, perpetuates this stereotype.

Children Are Not Political Props

So, I was looking for things to keep me occupied on a Friday night--and to stop me from continuing graduate school admissions anxiety--and happened across some YouTube videos from various individuals claiming that their child had been "damaged" by vaccines. There seem to be several common elements in these videos:

1. A montage of family photos. Apparently, this is meant to show how a "normal" child became autistic. This "evidence" is rather flawed. Roland Barthes, one of the foremost theorists on photography, argues that photographs are emotionally significant to us because each photograph marks a kind of "death." The camera captures a moment which will never happen again. Only through our memories and own personal connections can we re-interpret the photographs in our family albums. Barthes would most likely scoff at this kind of presentation. Moreover, I didn't even really see much unusual in the pictures--just photos of the same kid at different times. Truly, such photo montages are Rorsach ink blots. If one is inclined to believe that evil vaccines cause autism, that's what you'll see.

2. Some such videos include family video tape, and many of the same problems with photographs persist, especially when the parent videomakers try to interpret the autistic child's social responses. Can a nine month old baby truly be compared to a two and a half year old, when the expectations are so different? And again, I didn't even necessarily see many differences. One video I saw showed a girl (supposedly "pre-autism") not speaking when encouraged to repeat words by her parents. The "post-autism" video of the same girl showed her...not speaking when encouraged to. This is supposed to be an argument?

3. Videos almost invariably had some kind of sappy music in the background, which often grew darker and more sinister when the "post-vaccine" segment of the video began.

4. One particularly appalling trend was for some (not all) of the makers of these videos to insert written dialogue written (supposedly) from the autistic child's perspective. "I am vaccine damaged." "I was born perfect and was damaged by vaccines. Help me re-gain what I lost." That's the general idea of many of these narratives, and they're pretty much beyond the pale.

This shameless, ableist exploitation of autistic children appears to be sadly common among the anti-vax movement; just see pictures from the Green Our Vaccines rally. I doubt that most anti-vaxers can ever be convinced that vaccines don't cause autism, no matter how many reputable studies say so. But I just wish that this crowd would stop being so blatantly disrepectful of their own children. I wonder if they even stop to consider how their children might feel, were they to see such videos and posters at a later date. Mostly I think the vaccine issue distracts from autistic advocacy issues, but seeing some of these videos reminds me just how appalling so much of the anti-vax movement is.