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Some of you may know that I´m studying cultural studies which is basically nothing more than gaining the abilty of brooding about Life, the Universe and Everything all the time.
Huge fun. I figure it´s a bit dialogue-heavy but there you go with an incredibly long verbiage aboutthis week´s some time ago´s (See: they don´t teach us working morale or techniques, though.) episode of Monk (Season 6, Episode 1). Practically this episode was all about fangirls and it cracked me up several times because I was (sometimes painfully) reminded of many things I´ve come across in the House fandom since I stepped into it. Don´t worry, I will go into squeeing-mode again at the end and I don´t agree with everything that´s brought up against fannish behaviour. If you like you can watch the episode here for free. It also seems, just what I needed to get me this stuff finished was the metatastic House fanboy episode of this week.
At the moment everyone in the House fandom, or at least on the
house_wilson ship, is either about bashing or embracing the whole Amber idea. I count myself to the latter, and not because I think it´s highly immature to swear like a trooper against a character so full of similarites to the one we all love unconditionally. (No, I think being allowed to act immature and say inexplicably irrational things is one the reasons why most of us are fangirls... and it´s fun, too.) No, I simply love their triangle, there´s so much potential in it. But actually that´s not what I wanted to discuss here.
I wanted to move away a little from the character side (because others already make so much better character analyses than I ever could) and look onto a different aspect of the show.
savemoony, in her own way made an attempt ( here) to descibe the process of reception and production, the interaction between fandom and the writers. I couldn´t agree more with what she said and would like to take up on that by analyzing the depiction of reality in TV show episodes which deal with the issue of fan reception downright.
The plot of the Monk episode is rather simple. Wrongheaded and psychologically disturbed Mr. Monk (Tony Shalhoub) is under the hammer for a police benefit, so that his colleagues get the feeling that he can socialize. Which, apart from fighting his innumerous phobias, is probably one of the things he needs to prove to get back into police service. None of the women wants to pay much for him but he has prepared, just in case, that his assistant Natalie (Traylor Howard) bids, so that noone else could purchase him in the auction. Unfortunately he´s too avaricious (again) and so his biggest fan Marci portrayed by the hilarious Sarah Silverman, who has been introduced as Monk´s manic stalker earlier in the show (Season 2, Episode 12) snatches Monk for full six hours.
The meta discourse of the episode evolves around the question of having or not having a grip onto reality and this motive is extended to the fields of work and human relationships by the two other man being purchased in the auction, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) and Lieutenant Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford).
"Don´t worry, not crazy. Just a fan."
When entering the Marci´s fanon world Monk can hardly believe his eyes. "Yes, this is your rug. And yes, that´s your lamp. And yes, these are your pants.", states Marci, admitting that she had collected memorabilia from Monk´s trash. She is spending unreasonably much money to indulge in her obsession, is making music and poems, even makes candid photos with her mobile phone camera. Even the circumstance that some fans are transferring sexual desires into their fictional idols, which must be an extraordinarily awkward experience for writers and actors, is taken into account in a short scene. The viewer learns that this fan "as obsessive and compulsive as [Monk himself]".
But Monk is not safe entirely from feeling flattered my Marci´s worshipping behaviour. He´s accepting tissues Marci has hand-made with his intials although they´re not sterile. He´s pleased about the way Marci prepares his collocutors for his particular needs. At one point he honestly considers her offer of working for him for free, although his avarice was one of the reasons he got into this precarious situation in the first place.
"It´s her.", he complains to Natalie. "I´m flustered." "You´re flattered." This leads so far that Marci is practically taking up the position of Monk´s assistant trying to help him solve the case.
"There´s a chance, she´s not crazy. Uhm, she´s crazy but she might not be wrong."
The fan has a certain ability to abstract character traits or motives of action. She is able to make connections to older episodes, trying to prove her point by giving "canon" reference as proof and knows how to analyse the formula of an episode. (When the police thinks the case is "cut and dry" Mr. Monk comes, findes his clues and solves the case.) "It was like in "Mr. Monk and the astronaut" or "Mr. Monk goes back to school". Oh, you remember that one?", she asks. "No! Where are you getting those names from?", a confused Monk asks.This episode doesn´t just feature a small meta comment here and there. In a Brechtian way the writers blurr the lines of reality and fiction, leaving the viewer in an obscure place between these two worlds which cannot be tracked down by logical deduction.
"What do you think, I´m a nut?"
Hysterical behaviour stultifies the fangirl. When being confronted with the accusation of having killed her own dog to protect herself from prosecution she indignantly states: "I don´t kill things I love!" "Well, that´s reassuring.", Natalie remarks with unease, looking over at the ghoulish picture shrineof Monk Marci has arranged at her living room wall.
She does not only mix up reality, here self-referential as this episode was the show´s canon with her fanon world, by stating that something was just like in "Mr. Monk and the dragon´s lair", later admitting that this was a fanfiction written on her own. She also takes up a position outside the actual real life situation at several occasions.
In the first encounter of Monk and the husband of the murdered woman Marci gives away that she suspects him. When Monk says that he believes that there´s an actual murderer, she´s full of glee and anticipation instead of anxious. The actual threatening situation when she´s being faced with the armed killer displeases her so much that, like a TV viewer who can switch off when story arcs or characters don´t develop the way he wants it to, she steps out of her hiding space asking for a "pause".
The suspect owns a lumberyard which Marci had simply forgotten about from the sheer excitement of "working" for Monk. All her fannish efforts to please him and make him comfortable didn´t help him in any way. "I´m not a perfect person.", she sulkily admits and from the moment on he made her see that, her admiration for him diminishes further and further until she doesn´t "even like him anymore" and in the end even chooses another actor which she decids to worship.
It´s probably highly hypothetical but I think that a critical point is made by that: the fans are not crucial to the character development nor the way the stories are constructed. They may discuss and metadiscuss their way through the episodes, even may live their own fantasy world of the show, may write stories and the like but they are not the writers. If they had influence the Marci-effect would take in. Everything would work after the canon rules they had learned by heart but they would attach elements just because they love to and for no other reason (e.g. exposing someone who is afraid of physical contact to "clue-hugs") but the stories would probably be shallow and logical steps necessary to create and solve mysteries could not be manged by them. Constructing (on the side of the producers) and solving murder cases (the characters themselves) is not a game but it may appear like that to the outside. Critique in the fandom can often be harsh and derogatory, and cruely so as it sometimes doesn´t take the efforts into account which have been made to produce the show.
The sideplot featured notoriuosly ridiculous sidekick Lt. Randy Disher who has been purchased by a mother of a boy who once did but not anymore wanted to become cop. So Randy ends up playing some sort of Jenga game with the boy, being completely sucked into the game even when the boy has already left. He dismisses tasks at work, even doesn´t recognize a colleague when he´s spoken to. Randy´s story ties in with the mainplot about obsession and disturbed relation to reality. But he, unlike Marci, manages to abstract something from his earlier obsession and knocks out the murderer in a Jenga-fashioned way with a lumber pile in a home-imrovement market.
The third storyline is the one of Stottlemeyer and his girlfriend. He was being auctioned by her, so she would be able to spend more time with him. "Do not beep me. She´ll kill me." he askes Randy before he goes on his date with her and yet when the case becomes more intricate, he leaves her and puts the work over his personal life. As it turned out some episodes later, it wasn´t that bad he left her alone. Although heartbreaking for Stottlemeyer who claimed she was his last chance for a functioning relationsship, it turned out she was a murderer. Nicely foreshadowed by her asking in that episode what a girl had to do to get a bit of attention from him "Kill someone?" (YaY! More psychopaths on TV.)
The criminal mystery was quite plain this time but the writers did an intruiging job in employing an extreme epitome of fangirlishness to discuss their issue. Aside from the fact that representation of the issue was extremely funny, it was also alarmingly scary. For I´m not following the show as close as I follow others, I can´t tell what exact circumstances drove the writers and producers to adress the fangirls and their attitude towards the show so explicitly but I deem it well that they made such an important point.
From the episode opening with Marci copypasting her portrait over a picture of Natalie standing beneath Monk and maintaining a webpage with the latest gossip about her idol to a hilarious shrine in her living room everything about the fan was supposed to appear extremely overdone. And it must have looked obsessive and over the top to many viewers but in fact there are fans out there which produce crochet work of their favorite actors, there are fans spending most of their time researching everything about their idols and putting it together on webpages or doing even more whimsical things. Nonetheless, I have the impression that the writers are not mocking the fans in general. I´m actually pretty sure that wouldn´t do that because they are extremely aware of how much they depend on them. What they do with the exaggerated character of Marci is demanding adequacy. Pretty bold for a show evolving around a character fearing to touch anything with bare hands that hasn´t been disinfected before and fears rodents like a child fears the bogeyman.
In a contrasting view Monk is only reacting to the weird circumstances and people stepping into his life through his cases. His character almost always stays static and it´s usually the character of Randy Disher who explicitly enacts the metadicourse in his very own storyline. In House the whole cast is enacting the main motive, which of course doesn´t mean that their personalities are constantly changing. No, the characters, and especially House, stay static in their own way. But the motives, like the whole Sex Kills-scenario (2x14), are being declined through so thoroughly they sometime pour out of every pore of the episode.
Often this leads to mind-spinning character crossings or duplicating constellations where one symbol signifies or foreshadows the dynamic of a character development which again itself signifies the conflict of let´s say the POTW. The tightness of character portrayal and different layers in the episodes has been dramatically increased in the third and fourth season but there already were similar approaches to storytelling in the first two seasons. (Magnificiently so with the Nessun Dorma motive in Autopsy (2x02)
So, the latest House episode "Living the Dream" also dealt with the fan issue. Beforehand, I had expected a lot of meta jabs on fandom, TV production and the like. There was some of that in "Ugly" before, so I wasn´t that thrilled fearing that they´d recycle ideas. I should really remind myself that I shouldn´t doubt the writers. (Ever. They´ve pratically never disappointed me but again that could be my easy-to-please brain.) It was much more than that, though.
And according to the point made above the topic is not only brought in by one transient character (like Marci) but by the main character himself.
House´s fangirlboyish behaviour may be more justified than Marci´s because we assume that he is nearly all about "solving the puzzle". (But still, folks! He was practically squeeing onscreen. I loved it!)
Unlike other people I doubt that it this portrayal of a fan was a "fanservice" in the way that TPTB were showing the fans that he´s just like them. In my opinion it was the other way round, showing the fans that sometimes they are like him. Watching someone and feeling for him is one thing but being put on one level with someone who can be mean just for the sheer sake of it (The Jerk, 3x23), well that´s a fanservice of the special kind. But that´s just my opinion.
House is obviously not as blockheaded as Marci because he has a whole different grip onto reality and sees that his soap is unreal "as opposed to shows that represent the world exactly the way it is like... I can´t think of any." He may be a little fanboy but he´s not mixing up fiction and reality. To adress the concept of reality in such a dazzling way as these two episodes, to make this construction such an unsteady ground to trod on allows the writers to give the adressed social, ethical or moral problems a validity way beyond the narrative borders of the show.
I also have some unorganized babblings on the latest episode here.
"This place is a mess." didn´t bode well as an opening statement for the post-strike episodes but I think that the writers have properly cleaned up the plotwise mess that´s been caused by having eight episodes less in season 4 than intended.
The whole "get what you want is not what you need" motive was so powerful in this episode. What I find even more interesting is the question: Would Wilson have made his first mattress buying decision if House hadn´t told him that it was a how-much-do-you-love-me-test? House was equally right and wrong in his diagnosis of both, the patient and Amber. She made a zero-Sum game out of it and Wilson ended up holding her purse (how hilarious was that?) but he didn´t really end up humiliated, did he? I simply loved Amber in this episode. While in the first scene in the shop she freaked me out a little, the rest was forceful and not phony at all.
What I hadn´t expected, though amongst other things, was a meta!Hugh somehow stating he´s unhappy with his whole life. Although House looked way better with that sunglasses than the soap stud, didn´t he? Gladly, there were some major distinctions between Brock and House. The Emmy, for instance. God, that was a good joke.
I think the season finale will make up for the missing drama and at least three missing dead patients of this season. But I won´t go deeper into that because the spoiler pics kinda let my brain implode. I will be mourning the whole summer if they kill that savoury and delicious triangle of House, Amber and Wilson already. And if they do it and someone of you goes all "Easy come, easy go" about it, I´ll sulk. ^^
There are so many things that have been left unsaid about the endless significations and symbols (and jokes) in this and the last episodes and the show´s ingenious self-referential microcosm.
And in the end some further reading for those who are interested in TV theory:
John Fiske, Television Culture
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV - contemporary american television and beyond
Mark Bennett, TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes
This may be loaded with mistakes because I worked way too long on it. I apologize to everyone for that.
Huge fun. I figure it´s a bit dialogue-heavy but there you go with an incredibly long verbiage about
At the moment everyone in the House fandom, or at least on the
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I wanted to move away a little from the character side (because others already make so much better character analyses than I ever could) and look onto a different aspect of the show.
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The plot of the Monk episode is rather simple. Wrongheaded and psychologically disturbed Mr. Monk (Tony Shalhoub) is under the hammer for a police benefit, so that his colleagues get the feeling that he can socialize. Which, apart from fighting his innumerous phobias, is probably one of the things he needs to prove to get back into police service. None of the women wants to pay much for him but he has prepared, just in case, that his assistant Natalie (Traylor Howard) bids, so that noone else could purchase him in the auction. Unfortunately he´s too avaricious (again) and so his biggest fan Marci portrayed by the hilarious Sarah Silverman, who has been introduced as Monk´s manic stalker earlier in the show (Season 2, Episode 12) snatches Monk for full six hours.
The meta discourse of the episode evolves around the question of having or not having a grip onto reality and this motive is extended to the fields of work and human relationships by the two other man being purchased in the auction, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) and Lieutenant Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford).
"Don´t worry, not crazy. Just a fan."
When entering the Marci´s fanon world Monk can hardly believe his eyes. "Yes, this is your rug. And yes, that´s your lamp. And yes, these are your pants.", states Marci, admitting that she had collected memorabilia from Monk´s trash. She is spending unreasonably much money to indulge in her obsession, is making music and poems, even makes candid photos with her mobile phone camera. Even the circumstance that some fans are transferring sexual desires into their fictional idols, which must be an extraordinarily awkward experience for writers and actors, is taken into account in a short scene. The viewer learns that this fan "as obsessive and compulsive as [Monk himself]".
But Monk is not safe entirely from feeling flattered my Marci´s worshipping behaviour. He´s accepting tissues Marci has hand-made with his intials although they´re not sterile. He´s pleased about the way Marci prepares his collocutors for his particular needs. At one point he honestly considers her offer of working for him for free, although his avarice was one of the reasons he got into this precarious situation in the first place.
"It´s her.", he complains to Natalie. "I´m flustered." "You´re flattered." This leads so far that Marci is practically taking up the position of Monk´s assistant trying to help him solve the case.
"There´s a chance, she´s not crazy. Uhm, she´s crazy but she might not be wrong."
The fan has a certain ability to abstract character traits or motives of action. She is able to make connections to older episodes, trying to prove her point by giving "canon" reference as proof and knows how to analyse the formula of an episode. (When the police thinks the case is "cut and dry" Mr. Monk comes, findes his clues and solves the case.) "It was like in "Mr. Monk and the astronaut" or "Mr. Monk goes back to school". Oh, you remember that one?", she asks. "No! Where are you getting those names from?", a confused Monk asks.This episode doesn´t just feature a small meta comment here and there. In a Brechtian way the writers blurr the lines of reality and fiction, leaving the viewer in an obscure place between these two worlds which cannot be tracked down by logical deduction.
"What do you think, I´m a nut?"
Hysterical behaviour stultifies the fangirl. When being confronted with the accusation of having killed her own dog to protect herself from prosecution she indignantly states: "I don´t kill things I love!" "Well, that´s reassuring.", Natalie remarks with unease, looking over at the ghoulish picture shrineof Monk Marci has arranged at her living room wall.
She does not only mix up reality, here self-referential as this episode was the show´s canon with her fanon world, by stating that something was just like in "Mr. Monk and the dragon´s lair", later admitting that this was a fanfiction written on her own. She also takes up a position outside the actual real life situation at several occasions.
In the first encounter of Monk and the husband of the murdered woman Marci gives away that she suspects him. When Monk says that he believes that there´s an actual murderer, she´s full of glee and anticipation instead of anxious. The actual threatening situation when she´s being faced with the armed killer displeases her so much that, like a TV viewer who can switch off when story arcs or characters don´t develop the way he wants it to, she steps out of her hiding space asking for a "pause".
The suspect owns a lumberyard which Marci had simply forgotten about from the sheer excitement of "working" for Monk. All her fannish efforts to please him and make him comfortable didn´t help him in any way. "I´m not a perfect person.", she sulkily admits and from the moment on he made her see that, her admiration for him diminishes further and further until she doesn´t "even like him anymore" and in the end even chooses another actor which she decids to worship.
It´s probably highly hypothetical but I think that a critical point is made by that: the fans are not crucial to the character development nor the way the stories are constructed. They may discuss and metadiscuss their way through the episodes, even may live their own fantasy world of the show, may write stories and the like but they are not the writers. If they had influence the Marci-effect would take in. Everything would work after the canon rules they had learned by heart but they would attach elements just because they love to and for no other reason (e.g. exposing someone who is afraid of physical contact to "clue-hugs") but the stories would probably be shallow and logical steps necessary to create and solve mysteries could not be manged by them. Constructing (on the side of the producers) and solving murder cases (the characters themselves) is not a game but it may appear like that to the outside. Critique in the fandom can often be harsh and derogatory, and cruely so as it sometimes doesn´t take the efforts into account which have been made to produce the show.
The sideplot featured notoriuosly ridiculous sidekick Lt. Randy Disher who has been purchased by a mother of a boy who once did but not anymore wanted to become cop. So Randy ends up playing some sort of Jenga game with the boy, being completely sucked into the game even when the boy has already left. He dismisses tasks at work, even doesn´t recognize a colleague when he´s spoken to. Randy´s story ties in with the mainplot about obsession and disturbed relation to reality. But he, unlike Marci, manages to abstract something from his earlier obsession and knocks out the murderer in a Jenga-fashioned way with a lumber pile in a home-imrovement market.
The third storyline is the one of Stottlemeyer and his girlfriend. He was being auctioned by her, so she would be able to spend more time with him. "Do not beep me. She´ll kill me." he askes Randy before he goes on his date with her and yet when the case becomes more intricate, he leaves her and puts the work over his personal life. As it turned out some episodes later, it wasn´t that bad he left her alone. Although heartbreaking for Stottlemeyer who claimed she was his last chance for a functioning relationsship, it turned out she was a murderer. Nicely foreshadowed by her asking in that episode what a girl had to do to get a bit of attention from him "Kill someone?" (YaY! More psychopaths on TV.)
The criminal mystery was quite plain this time but the writers did an intruiging job in employing an extreme epitome of fangirlishness to discuss their issue. Aside from the fact that representation of the issue was extremely funny, it was also alarmingly scary. For I´m not following the show as close as I follow others, I can´t tell what exact circumstances drove the writers and producers to adress the fangirls and their attitude towards the show so explicitly but I deem it well that they made such an important point.
From the episode opening with Marci copypasting her portrait over a picture of Natalie standing beneath Monk and maintaining a webpage with the latest gossip about her idol to a hilarious shrine in her living room everything about the fan was supposed to appear extremely overdone. And it must have looked obsessive and over the top to many viewers but in fact there are fans out there which produce crochet work of their favorite actors, there are fans spending most of their time researching everything about their idols and putting it together on webpages or doing even more whimsical things. Nonetheless, I have the impression that the writers are not mocking the fans in general. I´m actually pretty sure that wouldn´t do that because they are extremely aware of how much they depend on them. What they do with the exaggerated character of Marci is demanding adequacy. Pretty bold for a show evolving around a character fearing to touch anything with bare hands that hasn´t been disinfected before and fears rodents like a child fears the bogeyman.
In a contrasting view Monk is only reacting to the weird circumstances and people stepping into his life through his cases. His character almost always stays static and it´s usually the character of Randy Disher who explicitly enacts the metadicourse in his very own storyline. In House the whole cast is enacting the main motive, which of course doesn´t mean that their personalities are constantly changing. No, the characters, and especially House, stay static in their own way. But the motives, like the whole Sex Kills-scenario (2x14), are being declined through so thoroughly they sometime pour out of every pore of the episode.
Often this leads to mind-spinning character crossings or duplicating constellations where one symbol signifies or foreshadows the dynamic of a character development which again itself signifies the conflict of let´s say the POTW. The tightness of character portrayal and different layers in the episodes has been dramatically increased in the third and fourth season but there already were similar approaches to storytelling in the first two seasons. (Magnificiently so with the Nessun Dorma motive in Autopsy (2x02)
So, the latest House episode "Living the Dream" also dealt with the fan issue. Beforehand, I had expected a lot of meta jabs on fandom, TV production and the like. There was some of that in "Ugly" before, so I wasn´t that thrilled fearing that they´d recycle ideas. I should really remind myself that I shouldn´t doubt the writers. (Ever. They´ve pratically never disappointed me but again that could be my easy-to-please brain.) It was much more than that, though.
And according to the point made above the topic is not only brought in by one transient character (like Marci) but by the main character himself.
House´s fan
Unlike other people I doubt that it this portrayal of a fan was a "fanservice" in the way that TPTB were showing the fans that he´s just like them. In my opinion it was the other way round, showing the fans that sometimes they are like him. Watching someone and feeling for him is one thing but being put on one level with someone who can be mean just for the sheer sake of it (The Jerk, 3x23), well that´s a fanservice of the special kind. But that´s just my opinion.
House is obviously not as blockheaded as Marci because he has a whole different grip onto reality and sees that his soap is unreal "as opposed to shows that represent the world exactly the way it is like... I can´t think of any." He may be a little fanboy but he´s not mixing up fiction and reality. To adress the concept of reality in such a dazzling way as these two episodes, to make this construction such an unsteady ground to trod on allows the writers to give the adressed social, ethical or moral problems a validity way beyond the narrative borders of the show.
I also have some unorganized babblings on the latest episode here.
"This place is a mess." didn´t bode well as an opening statement for the post-strike episodes but I think that the writers have properly cleaned up the plotwise mess that´s been caused by having eight episodes less in season 4 than intended.
The whole "get what you want is not what you need" motive was so powerful in this episode. What I find even more interesting is the question: Would Wilson have made his first mattress buying decision if House hadn´t told him that it was a how-much-do-you-love-me-test? House was equally right and wrong in his diagnosis of both, the patient and Amber. She made a zero-Sum game out of it and Wilson ended up holding her purse (how hilarious was that?) but he didn´t really end up humiliated, did he? I simply loved Amber in this episode. While in the first scene in the shop she freaked me out a little, the rest was forceful and not phony at all.
What I hadn´t expected, though amongst other things, was a meta!Hugh somehow stating he´s unhappy with his whole life. Although House looked way better with that sunglasses than the soap stud, didn´t he? Gladly, there were some major distinctions between Brock and House. The Emmy, for instance. God, that was a good joke.
I think the season finale will make up for the missing drama and at least three missing dead patients of this season. But I won´t go deeper into that because the spoiler pics kinda let my brain implode. I will be mourning the whole summer if they kill that savoury and delicious triangle of House, Amber and Wilson already. And if they do it and someone of you goes all "Easy come, easy go" about it, I´ll sulk. ^^
There are so many things that have been left unsaid about the endless significations and symbols (and jokes) in this and the last episodes and the show´s ingenious self-referential microcosm.
And in the end some further reading for those who are interested in TV theory:
John Fiske, Television Culture
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV - contemporary american television and beyond
Mark Bennett, TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes
This may be loaded with mistakes because I worked way too long on it. I apologize to everyone for that.