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СКАЧАТЬ treatment desire. His insistence upon the medical possibility of maintaining the leg and his life appears irrational—at one point she asks if he’d cut off his leg to save her, which he acknowledges he’d do—but his faith in medicine proves wise. The suspicion with which House regards self-disclosures begins to make more sense in the context of this tale in which his closest confidant betrays his clearly expressed desires.

      The writers of House, including, notably, series creator David Shore, who penned this episode, use unconventional techniques to provide more than the morsels of character development commonly offered in each episode, thus helping to compel the audience to take an ongoing interest in the series beyond the short-term gratification of seeing the case of the week solved and whether the doctors are able to save the patient. But despite this structural variation, the episode perpetuates the general beliefs and outlook of the series.

      The question for the critical analyst, then, is what is the consequence of this unconventional treatment of character? Throughout most episodes and seasons, the origins of House’s bizarre actions are commonly attributed to “House being House.” This phrase, used most often by those who have a long relationship with House, such as Doctors Wilson and Cuddy, refers to House’s monomaniacal and socially unacceptable behavior, often to suggest that abnormal behavior is consistent with what characters can expect from him. Some characters know his story, which is presented as a defining cause of his behavior. Yet knowing the origin of House’s injury does not change how his team approaches him. Moreover, other characters who join later and never learn the truth do learn how to “treat” House nonetheless. To handle the situation of House—to deal with a friend and coworker who suffers constant pain—it makes no difference whether that pain originated from a rare infection, a stabbing wound, or an aneurism. The series’ handling of House’s truth thus affirms the series’ principle that understanding a history doesn’t help understand an illness—knowing why House has pain doesn’t help in dealing with or helping him. “Three Stories” illustrates the need to look beyond plot structure in assessing the simplicity or complexity of narrative and character. Although the staid features of episodic structure might allow for repetitive act structure and enforced conclusions, this episode illustrates the creative possibilities in character development and series outlook that can still be incorporated.

      FURTHER READING

       DuBose, Mike S. “Morality, Complexity, Experts, and Systems of Authority in House, M.D., or ‘My Big Brain Is My Superpower.’” Television and New Media 11, no. 1 (2010): 20–36.

       Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

       O’Sullivan, Sean. “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2 (2010): 59–77.

       Pearson, Roberta. “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character.” In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, edited by Michael Allen. London: Tauris, 2007.

      NOTES

      1  1. Episodic shows have an industrial advantage because their ability to be viewed out of order and haphazardly yields larger audiences and thus license fees in syndication.

      2  2. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 97.

      3  3. Roberta Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,” in Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen (London: Tauris, 2007).

      4  4. Ibid., 49.

      5  5. Just as this essay was first completed, House aired episode 807, “Dead and Buried,” in which it disregarded its usual opening structure for no apparent narrative reason.

      6  6. For example, audience members could hardly shun House if his pain resulted from an injury suffered while saving a child or performing some other similarly heroic act.

      4

      Looking

      Smartphone Aesthetics

      HUNTER HARGRAVES

      Abstract: Throughout the 2010s, a number of series branded as “quality” began to adopt a range of new aesthetic practices that simulate those of smartphone photography, manipulating color and saturation to produce something akin to the “Instagram effect” for television. Hunter Hargraves examines one such series, Looking, which focuses on a group of gay men living in San Francisco during the height of the city’s Silicon Valley transformation, and questions how such aesthetic techniques speak to the series’ ability to represent authentic queer life in San Francisco. Smartphone aesthetics, he contends, may curtail a series’ potential to develop nuanced political critiques relating to the representation of cultural minorities, much like the social media platforms they attempt to emulate.

      In the pilot episode of HBO’s Looking, a dramatic comedy about three gay friends navigating professional and personal relationships in San Francisco, two of the leads try to make sense of how technology has helped—or hindered—gay urban dating. Patrick, a twenty-nine-year-old videogame developer, sits with his roommate Agustín, a thirty-one-year-old artist, in their kitchen. Patrick, introduced by the series as relationship-challenged, observes that “Instagram filters have ruined everything, and I can’t tell if this guy is hot or not” before soliciting Agustín’s opinion. Agustín chalks up Patrick’s inability to notice the guy’s lazy eye to his naivete before the two conclude that maybe a lazy eye can be “kinda hot.” What is most striking about the scene, which otherwise documents a rather banal conversation between two close friends, is how composition and mise-en-scène coordinate with content. Illuminated by his laptop, Patrick sits at the table in focus with the background showcasing the soft green colors of plants and soft white colors of natural light: in essence, mimicking the very process of photographic filtering made popular by smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, and Infinicam.

      FIGURE 4.1. The “look” of this shot from Looking mimics the photo filtering popularized by smartphone apps.

      If Instagram filters have indeed “ruined everything,” they also establish the dominant aesthetic of Looking, which was cancelled by HBO citing the second season’s poor ratings, with the series’ storylines more or less tied up in a 2016 film. Audiences, and some critics, found the narrative too ordinary and slow moving, and the series incited many debates within its representational demographic of urban gay men surrounding the authenticity of its plotlines about sex and relationships. Watching Looking as an urban gay male might elicit a number of affective reactions: nostalgia for sunny days in Dolores Park or for sweaty dance parties at the Stud; irritation toward characters who desire homonormative relationships; aesthetic satisfaction from the lush colors of Northern California; and anger at how privilege and money anchor the narrative. In this case, these affective poles of displeasure and pleasure represent the conflict that often appears between a text’s politics and its aesthetics. But how might this ambivalence between politics and aesthetics reveal the impact of smartphone technology on contemporary television storytelling?

      I highlight these tensions within Looking because the series interestingly stitches together its content with its form. It is set in a San Francisco that has undergone a number СКАЧАТЬ