Confessions of a Theme Whore

It’s a big relief to me that the television season has drawn to a close—particularly that there will be no new episodes of House to miss. I’d been having a terrible time since the show moved to Monday nights. I guess I’m not television conscious that early in the week. I did my best. Nearly every Monday a point in the day would come when it would occur to me that it was Monday, and that I had to remember to watch House that night. But something would always come up—even if I knew perfectly well at six o’clock or at seven that it would behoove me to finish whatever I was doing by eight, it would always slip my mind, and suddenly I’d look up and it would be twenty or ten or four or seventeen past the hour.

It’s not as though it wasn’t important to me. I like the way House episodes begin the same way I used to get a kick out of the old teasers for Law & Order. Remember those? The pleasant anticipation of waiting first for the gruesome moment when someone would stumble across a corpse and then for the tasteless crack that Jerry Orbach always made over the deceased? House teasers are formulaic in the same way. A knowing snippet of contemporary life leads us to expect that a particular person is about to fall writhing to the floor. Then someone else entirely falls writhing to the floor.

I don’t think I caught a single House teaser this season. Instead, I seemed to keep coming in on scenes between Chase and Cameron, and they bore me. Well, she bores me. Well, she bores me now. So I’d swear and sigh and promise myself that the next week would be different. And then the following week it would happen all over again. It reminded me of a phase I went through where I was trying to develop an alcohol addiction. I’d pour myself a drink and then put it down somewhere and forget all about it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t motivated. I just couldn’t focus. I couldn’t commit.

The season finale of House, as it happened, was about precisely this phenomenon—about a guy at war with himself because the right and left sides of his brain couldn’t communicate with each other. Of course, tuning in late, I didn’t know this; and having missed the show the week before, I had no idea that House and Cuddy had had sex in the previous episode after she’d helped him through a grueling night of Vicodin withdrawal. So the revelation that Cuddy and House had not actually had sex, and that all of it—including the detox session—had been an opiate-induced hallucination didn’t have the impact on me that it seemed to have on everyone else.

I’m not sure it would have in any case. More than any television series I can remember, House seems to me not to be about what happens in the story. Or maybe it’s just that what characters have to say about what happens in the story is always much more interesting—just as the metaphor, analogue, or association that ultimately leads to House’s diagnostic epiphany is always more interesting than the actual solution to whatever medical mystery is haunting him and his team.

Anyway, catching up on the series later, I couldn’t help noticing how much of the season past seemed to be taken up with this notion of The Divided Self.

At this point, I should really come clean about a condition I suffer from. It’s probably congenital—I know I’ve had since I was a small child: an impulse toward over-interpretation. It’s really more of a compulsion. I see patterns and motifs everywhere. I can’t stop seeing them, and even though I know they’re probably not there, probably don’t exist, I can’t stop finding them. I guess it’s like any other addiction: the truth is I don’t really want to stop.

Which is why, when I headed over to the online episode guides for House and began reading synopses to see where my viewing deficiencies lay, I seemed to see The Divided Self everywhere. I saw it in parts of the series I’d caught all or part of—in the episode about the teenage mother who changes her mind about letting Cuddy adopt her baby, and the one about Cuddy’s mixed feelings over the baby she does eventually adopt, and the one about her ambivalence over the continued need for her presence at the hospital.

Putting away the winter clothes, I caught up on episodes I’d missed and continued to see elements of psychomachia in various forms: in Cuddy’s attempt to have Cameron become more like her, taking over Cuddy’s job; in the incessant mood-swings the series seemed to be having over Chase and Cameron’s impending marriage; in the episode about the guy with “locked-in” syndrome, who was brain-dead to all outward appearances but very much alive and alert, albeit unable to communicate. I saw it in the episodes where House began hanging out with an apparition of Wilson’s dead girlfriend, Amber, which turned out to be the embodiment of his unconscious. And, of course, when I finally saw the episode that began with the suicide of the character played by the actor Kal Penn, I saw The Divided Self there, too—particularly given the way the script seemed to harp on no one’s having had any idea there had been anything wrong.

Some of this, of course, is legitimate; I understand that. (I saw there was even an episode called “House Divided.”) But some of the things that ran through my mind were just plumb crazy—certifiable. Like the thought I had during the scene after Kutner’s funeral and cremation, when everyone was standing around watching the smoke rise into the sky: I had the fleeting notion that the show had artfully managed to induce a state of schizophrenia in us, because we were simultaneously sad (well, sad-ish) and amused, knowing that the real-life circumstance necessitating Mr. Penn’s departure from the series had been his well-publicized decision to take a job in the Obama administration.

So, as you can see—and here we are back at The Divided Self—I’m of two minds about all this. There’s a part of me that wants to point out that the series creators could have chosen any number of ways to get rid of Kutner. They didn’t have to engineer it in such a way as to raise the specter of inner conflict. But there’s that other, more rational, side of me that knows that a television series like House is written by a committee of people, some working on one episode and some on another. And I ask myself how likely it is that they sit around plotting ways of making me smile and tear up at the same time. Or structuring a season so that a bunch of episodes that one character spends talking to a figure who responds but isn’t really there are balanced by an episode that a bunch of characters spend talking to someone who is there, even though he can’t respond.

Another example of how I can go haywire over a theme was what happened with The Sopranos. Early on, I’d taken it into my head that the series was about art on some very profound and interesting level—or about Tony’s relationship with art—and I wrote about this around the time the second season was about to air.

There was a certain limited validity to this. Tony certainly had issues with the artwork in Melfi’s office, for instance. The opening shot of the series showed him sitting in her waiting room framed between the feet of a life-size bronze—a nude that he was eying with hostility and suspicion. In another episode he took umbrage at a harmless painting on one of her walls—a landscape dominated by a large red barn. Catching sight of it, he frowned, walked over, and examined it more closely, zeroing in on a darkened doorway that, when the camera zoomed in, seemed to yawn eerily. In the next scene, he accused Melfi of having “a trick picture” in her office.

There was also an early sequence where Tony, dragged his bratty daughter into a church and waxed sentimental over the fact that his grandfather and great uncle had built it. When she was skeptical about their having built it alone, just the two of them, Tony was patient. No, they had built it with “a crew of laborers,” but the point was they’d known how to do it. In the next scene, we watched one of Tony’s “crew” blow up a restaurant.

I became a little obsessed with the theme of Art in The Sopranos. Then I decided that there was something going on with nature, too. Tony and his pals seemed to have a difficult time with art and nature both. They had artistic and idyllic yearnings, but whenever they got involved with art or nature, things seemed to go badly.

The fifth season included a sequence in which Tony commissioned a rather vulgar portrait of himself posed with a horse he had acquired a financial interest in. When the horse came to a bad end, Tony had asked Paulie, another subordinate, to destroy the painting, but instead Paulie had kept it and had the figure of Tony touched up to resemble Napoleon. Like everyone else, I thought that was hilarious, but I also pondered on how it figured in the art-and-nature schema.

Later that season, the painting came up again when Tony paid a visit to Paulie and saw it hanging in his living-room. He proceeded to have a rather complicated series of reactions: rage, indignation, bewilderment, something verging on awe, and finally a sort of lingering nostalgia as he gazed at the painting a last time before leaving it in the trash.

That was the episode in which Tony decided that his favorite cousin (played by Steve Buscemi) was going to have to get whacked and ended up doing it himself. In fact, in the very next scene—right after the one with the portrait and right before the one where Tony blew his cousin away with a shotgun—we saw Buscemi drive onto a property dominated by a large red barn and into the dark spooky doorway of another barn, which the camera lingered on as it had lingered on the dark doorway of the barn in Melfi’s painting.

Well, I went completely nerts, leaping up and gesticulating, shouting that it was the same scene. And my husband and the friends we were watching the episode with were all very kind. Because, of course, it was nonsense, sheer nonsense. As if David Chase and his crew of writers sat around mapping out complex systems of imagery, saying “We’ll put the scene where Gandolfini whacks Buscemi right after the thing with the portrait of Tony; oh, and let’s have the farm where the hit takes place look just like that painting way back three seasons ago.” I mean, really.

And yet…and yet. Not long ago, we started watching some of those late episodes again. I’d forgotten how unequivocally horrible everyone becomes in that last season. I’d also forgotten how Tony’s relationship with Melfi ends. Her own analyst (played by director and film historian Peter Bogdonavich) shames her into realizing that she has merely been enabling Tony all these years. (He draws her attention to a study suggesting that “the talking cure” simply gives sociopaths a chance to sharpen their skills rather than leading to insight.) Soon after, she terminates Tony’s therapy, offering to refer him to someone else.

Revisiting all this, I began to discern—or thought I did—a solution to some of the questions that the opening season of the series had left me with: about art and its importance in the series, about Tony’s relationship with it, about David Chase’s takes on psychoanalysis and on Melfi’s clinical skills, and even about the connection between psychoanalysis and art.

It seemed to me we ended up with a realization that the self-awareness that “talk therapy” engenders in the ordinary patient has merely offered Tony the tools and material with which to construct a false version of the truth and reinvent his own image of himself, and that this is the only kind of creative endeavor that people like Tony can every really successfully engage in. And I even found myself wondering whether David Chase might have read that Robert Warshow essay about the movie-gangster’s connection with the city and if there could be some validity to the uncomfortable relationship with nature that I’d wanted to ascribe to Tony and his crowd.

I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know which is less likely, that someone as steeped in American popular culture as Peter Bogdanovich would not know the Warshow essay about the gangster-movie genre, and wouldn’t at some point over the years have brought it to David Chase’s attention, or the idea that the twenty-some-odd people it took to write the series could fashion and sustain a thematic structure that complex over a period of six years.

I’m reminded of the only time I ever went for a tarot reading. There was this guy that I couldn’t seem to break up with, and a friend of my mother’s, tired of the situation, finally sent me off to see this psychic she swore by.

I took a taxi down to Mulberry Street. The psychic was waiting for me on his stoop. And right off, while I was still coming up the steps, he started telling me that the moment he’d seen me emerge from the cab he’d had this very strong, very clear feeling…I had an aura…he sensed that I was involved with a guy who was no good, who was trouble…he thought his name began with an R…“Robert”…or “Richard” perhaps…

The session was a disaster: I didn’t respond to the psychic’s inept guesses in a sufficiently helpful manner, and he ended up throwing me out. All the same, afterward I couldn’t decide which was more implausible: that my mother’s friend had actually gone to the trouble of calling him up and tipping him off about my boyfriend’s name, or that the guy really was magic.