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April 07, 2009

ThisAbility #23: House Call

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 02:26 PM ET

That air rocker on the right, with the sunken face, is one-half of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, British actor Hugh Laurie, but that's just in real life. He is better known to North American TV watchers as Gregory House, the brilliant, cantankerous, Vicodin-addicted, prostitute-purchasing, don't-give-a-shit, diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

House's biting wit, deductive skills and drug-seeking behaivor brings to mind Sherlock Holmes for most, but for me he also represents an aggresive push-back against the way people with disabilities are depicted in popular culture.

I would even go further and say that like Murderball before him, the character has provided an antidote to the saccharine apologist attitude people choose when relating to people with disabilities in their community. Like Murderball, House has put people on notice and has become another reactionary answer to a society that still struggles to take disabled people seriously. However, while Murderball responds with physical aggression, House responds with aggressive intellectualism.

Obviously, House can't ever fully be a catalyst for a shift in the way able-bodied society relates to people with disabilities because Hugh Laurie is not a disabled actor. I recognize that this will always impede the beacon the character otherwise represents, but Laurie should still be given mad praise for losing himself in the character so fully that, in the moment of the show, it doesn't really matter.

Putting that flaw aside, House reprsents a "Finally" I've been waiting to yell at my TV for a long time. I delight in the disabled prick. When I first saw Murderball at the Hot Docs Festival in 2005, someone offered to hold the door open for me as we left the theatre and another audience member shouted, "You better do it, or he might hit you with his chair," refering to the aggressive, "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" attitude the wheelchair rugby players in the film display.

The film worked. The realization that disabled people aren't all quiet little lambs had started to sink in. Sure, he was joking, but the first place people go when they're slightly uncomfortable is humor and hopefully through humor, the absurdity of their previous assumptions dawns on them and change happens.

House holds this mirror up to people as well, using biting wit and sarcasm to play on his co-workers assumptions about weakness, frailty and the traditional gently P.C. bedside manner we've all come to expect from doctors. He is disarming and it's in the "Oh my god, I can't believe he just did that!" moments that real realization occurs. The, "Oh right, not all people with disabilities are soft, sympathetic and positive all the time; they can be assholes too."

It's 'assholedom' driven to showing you how ridiculous your assumptions about capability can be. House doesn't pick sides either, it's not like the disabled are completely infallable and everyone is screwing them over. This is explicitly represented in the season 3 episode Needle in a Haystack when House takes on a wheelchair-using hospital employee so he can get his handicap parking spot back. The crux of the episode has House trying to convince his boss, Dr. Lisa Cuddy, that use of a wheelchair has no bearing on parking spot priority because "using a chair is easy and not limiting in the slightest." He decides to illustrate this by betting her that if he can get around in a chair for a week, she must give him the parking spot.

See a few clips from the episode below:

Not only does Needle in a Haystack play on the tendency of instituitions to avoid relating to people with disabilies on an individual basis, (instead choosing to staunchly stand behind legislation and mandated requirements beyond all logic) but the episode also plays on the unspoken beefs the able-bodied population has with disabled people who exploit their circumstances for personal gain — "Did that bastard in a wheelchair just cut me off?"

House is a catharsis for me. Most of what the good doctor says is probably what I would say to you if the inhibitors in my brain were completely shot.

Aaron is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Financial Post Business, Investment Executive Newspaper, and TV Week Magazine, along with Askmen.com. He is a regular contributor to Abilities Magazine and is currently plotting a weekly web comic called GIMP, with artist Jon Duguay, about a handicap school bus driver who wakes up after a crash to find he's the last able-bodied person on earth — and he's being hunted.

More entries on: ThisAbility

Previous: Queerly Canadian #9: House-proud?
Next: Eco Chamber #1: Past and future at the far end of the world

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Reader comments:

great analysis!

Posted by: tj at April 13, 2009 09:10 PM

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