The Stunning Cinematography of “House MD”

Television shows don't often have much going on by way of cinematography, and with good reason since their runtime doesn't consist of two or three hours, it is actually closer to a hundred. So it's fairly understandable that the vast majority of the episodes are shot with a clear pragmatism in mind, it's all about filming the scenes, most of which tend to be fairly expository, as fast and as cheaply as possible, because the budget is as fleeting as the deadline. I think you'll find that if you catch an episode of most TV shows halfway through, your takeaway from it will essentially be that all the characters ever do is talk. And in some ways movies are the same, at the end of the day, a story is a conflict between people, and since most of the conflict is dialogue, the rest might as well get cut. It's like a chess game, you don't really need to see the pieces actually destroying each other in order to understand that the game can be a real massacre. And yet, House MD, despite being such a verbal show, a quality that it mastered very early on in its run, also managed to capture and hold our attention with the beautiful cinematography of its shots, regrettably not in all episodes, but in quite a few of them, sixty-seven according to my calculations. But for the purposes of this article I plan to present five very specific examples and I hope that they will be enough to explain why this show so completely stole my heart when I first discovered it, some eleven or twelve years ago.

But before we get to that I'd be remiss if I didn't share some thoughts on the show as a whole. At its core it is a procedural show, which means that the vast majority of the episodes follow the same basic structure – House and his team have to treat a main patient, House alone treats a secondary and often comedic patient in the clinic, and then there's all the character drama interwoven throughout, usually a mystery of sorts. I admit in general I'm not a huge fan of these types of shows, they can be fairly entertaining to watch every now and then, often during a meal or just when bored, but the show overall becomes repetitive and tiring, the same old beats start to become annoyingly noticeable, and it becomes almost impossible, except for very hardcore viewers, to know just what happened in each episode. In many ways they are TV shows that you can “watch” in the sense that you can have the TV on in the background as you do some other task and only pay attention every now and then. So, having said all that, though I'm not a fan of these types of shows, I am a fan of House MD, and the reason for that is because I'm a huge fan of House as a character.

Ironically, the medicine is sort of irrelevant. House could have had any other profession and the show would still have worked. The character drama though, albeit initially quirky, gets old fast. This recurring plot device whereby a character performs some meaningless action that House picks up on and becomes more nosy than my aunt Patty until he finally discovers the shocking truth, is actually, for lack of a better word, lame. But House himself is brilliant – the misanthropy, which could well be a defense mechanism, the instant analysis of everyone he meets, the rhetoric skills equally powerful in getting him out of trouble as they are at getting him into trouble, and most of all, his brutal quest for truth. Actually, as a teen I kinda wanted to be him, I'd always try to analyze people, trying to find out information about them just from making deductions, or rather, inductions, about their details. I even had a cheap cane that I'd use to throw a ball around while thinking... But anyway, the title of the show is thus rather appropriate because House really is the main draw, but it's a bit sad that, in watching the show from beginning to end as I recently have, the other characters and side stories tend to fall a little flat and don't quite stand on their own. But when House is truly challenged, when his true addiction sets him on an unceasing chase, when a patient really challenges him into a philosophical debate, then the show is brilliant.

But now, having said all that, this show, unlike a whole lot of TV shows, is actually visually striking, it often catches and holds my attention, even with just a brief glimpse of the screen, and it does so now as it did a few years ago when I first discovered it in my teenage years and watched it in between rounds of Counter-Strike 1.6... I suppose I'm getting a little too nostalgic and sentimental, so, without further ado, let's analyze some cinematography.

This first shot is from episode [403] 97 Seconds which more or less kick off the fourth, and in my opinion the best, season. The previous season ended with House's team completely shattering, so at this point he has to rebuild it and he does so by working with a large group of eager doctors whom he eliminates, at first in whole fistfuls, then later on he does so one by one. And in that first shot it's really interesting to see a shift in dynamics as House holds a differential in the auditorium rather than in his usual and familiar office. I think that was a very deep moment in the episode... And we can clearly see that the case files are still blue, so there's that. Also, the doctors being interviewed are initially referred to by their assigned numbers and we can clearly see how, in that scene, the numbers have been shed, but the character in that shot will still be referred to as “thirteen” all throughout the show. Thing is, it's not just a nickname. As we'll gradually learn, Thirteen is very secretive about her personal life, so the nickname essentially becoming her real name is a very deep trait to her character. And she wears a necklace which could potentially mean many things which are too complex to get in to.

Furthermore, in this second cinematographic shot, from the same episode no less, we can clearly tell that Thirteen is rather adept at challenging House. Indeed she will even become the only one who can actually stand up to him and prove more or less immune to his craziness. And the fact that this is all communicated visually through the show's ace cinematography is rather beautiful to me, it's stunning in fact... Because those eyes are deep... It hath been said that if you stare long enough into Thirteen's eyes, Thirteen's eyes stare back into you...

Now for a change in gears I decided to randomly pick episode [505] Lucky Thirteen which, coincidentally, strongly centers around Thirteen because the main patient of the episode is a woman with whom she had a chance encounter, which was actually a very cinematic moment in the episode. Initially it is believed that the woman is faking her symptoms but House ignores that in order to get personal information on Thirteen. However, when the patient's health takes a turn for the worse, Thirteen manages to connect with her, developing something of a bond in their common predicaments of incurable disease, something which may bring her back from the brink of depression and self-destruction. And that is precisely what is captured in that shot, that distinct look of peaceful longing amidst an otherwise cloudy day.

But alas, the relationship doesn't quite work out and the episode then ends with this remarkably gorgeous shot of Thirteen staring vacantly into the camera, a look which perfectly captures the character's carelessness, something which will become prevalent in later episodes as well as being a staple of the entire character of Thirteen. We then see a nameless girl appear and kiss her, signifying that Thirteen is returning to the riotous lifestyle which caused her so much trouble. The episode then abruptly ends.

Lastly but not leastly I randomly chose that shot from episode [617] Lockdown, an episode in which the hospital is in lockdown mode because of something or other, I wasn't really paying attention. Instead of the usual routine, the episode follows a bunch of characters as they are more or less trapped in the hospital until the situation is resolved – Taub and Foreman run into each other in the file room and indulge in some drug-fueled shenanigans that mark the beginning of a friendship that will continue in later episodes, House ends up in a dimly lit blue room with a patient who is dying because a mobster beat him up for dipping into his wife, Chase finds himself in some kind of green room with a woman who was presumably related to him in some way, and Cuddy was wearing a red shirt.

It's clear by now that the episode's striking cinematography comes essentially from its use of color, something which gives a beautiful contrast to all scenes, and in no scene is that more noticeable than the one that I happened to choose – Thirteen and Wilson, being trapped in the cafeteria, decide to start up a childish game of truth or dare which Thirteen completely dominates. And the cinematography captures that because of the eerie glow of an impossible sunset shining over a decidedly devilish face. And it's also interesting to note how only half of Thirteen's face is lit, perhaps denoting a wild duality to her character, a depth which one admires as beautiful and ever elusive, as all great works of art are...

So yeah, that's about it from me. I quite enjoyed this experience of going through the whole show as a sort of trip down memory lane, especially starting from the second episode of season four onward, with some movie breaks in between. I just hope I gave you a new appreciation for the work that goes into making a TV show so strikingly beautiful... I mean, is there a shot in 2001: A Space Odyssey as beautiful as any of the shots I've shown here? If so, then I challenge you to find one. I for one don't think there is, and I still distinctly remember random episodes of House MD making the wait in between Counter-Strike rounds not so bad after all...

NOTES

The initial publication of this article contained a lengthy analysis of the episode in which Thirteen, Adams and Cameron go to the beach. That analysis has since been removed because it has been brought to my attention that no such episode exists.

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