A Brokeback Opera
Brokeback Mountain apparently ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
The New York City Opera has commissioned an opera based on the 2005 Oscar-wrangling flick about closeted cowboys that starred Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger.
In a statement, the opera house says American composer Charles Wuorinen will take his cues from both the Ang Lee film and the original short story by Annie Proulx about the tragic, forbidden love between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, a pair of ranch hands who just can’t quit each other.
The Brokeback Mountain opera will have its world premiere during the company’s 2013 spring season.
House: Living the Dream
[S04E14] “You don’t deserve to be happy.” House to Wilson.
“And yet I am. You?” Wilson to House
House treats the symptoms, but he doesn’t treat the whole person. He doesn’t even claim to. He often makes a clear point that he doesn’t care. House likes medicine because he likes to solve puzzles, and what greater consequences can a puzzle have than a human life? But ultimately, even someone dying doesn’t matter unless House can’t figure out the puzzle.
So, if the above paragraph is true, then why does House go out of his way to kidnap a soap opera star he believes to be dying in order to save his life? Is it really because he can’t stand the idea of not watching his soap? I don’t think so; he even encourages angsty actor Evan Greer (Sex and the City’s Jason Lewis) to quit if he’s not happy… well, sort of. But, back to the question: If House doesn’t care, then why bother? Because it’s a puzzle he can see daily, right in front of him, and he has to solve it. Apparently he has made multiple calls about it, because the actor knows who House is, so House simply takes matters into his own hands because that is what House does. House lives a life without consequences.
In continuing with the show’s theme of light and dark, happiness versus misery, the soap opera star House kidnaps is miserable. He keeps saying that he wants to do something that matters, but he hedges every time one of the doctors tells him that if he is so unhappy doing daytime television, he should just quit. Unlike last week’s episode, because the patient isn’t happy, House doesn’t think the mood is a symptom. However, something neurological is going on: the actor is pausing before saying his lines, indicating a problem with either his peripheral vision in reading the monitors, or with his tongue in saying his lines. House thinks he has a tumor in his occipital lobe and that he will die before House can finish watching Dr. Brock Sterling’s storyline.
Of course, Greer doesn’t have a tumor, but before he can harangue Cuddy for allowing House to kidnap him, he stumbles in the lobby. It’s either a hell of a coincidence (as Cameron wants to believe, as she sits in House’s office doing his files because of the hospital inspection going on around them) or House is right and something is wrong with Evan Greer.
House gets to live the dream: He visits the set and hangs out in Greer’s dressing room, eats his sunflower seeds, and talks to his sexy co-star. He’s living in fan heaven. The co-star complains that Greer is both a non-drinker, squeaky clean, and too perfect of a gentleman. This leads to a flurry of new possible diagnoses: Too many sunflower seeds and B6? Problem with his thyroid! The patient is impotent! He’s not impotent, but he’s having a heart attack! In the maelstrom of symptoms and decreasing bodily capacity, Cameron sits calmly working on patient files and offering differentials. House repeatedly offers to fire 13 so Cameron can have her job back until she looks him straight in the eye and admits that although she misses the job, she doesn’t miss him. Raise your hand if you think she is lying.
In the meantime, Cuddy is worried that her job is on the line with the inspector in the hospital, so there are some great funny scenes in which House has his team watching the soap opera to check the actor for symptoms. One of the best moments of the episode is when 13 leans forward to inspect the hotty co-star in her underwire bra and says,”I think I dated her.” She studies her for a long moment before leaning back with a, “Nope.”
House bargains for the doctor’s lounge flat screen television in return for not causing trouble for Cuddy, which is a fool’s bargain. House is going to do whatever he wants, “like a monkey in a banana factory” 52 weeks out of the year. House will always have a job. The inspector tells Cuddy that there are rules because 95% of the time, people need them. “The other 5%?” she counters, and he points out that the rules are there because everybody thinks they are in the other 5%. Cuddy doesn’t point out that House is in that 5% who actually don’t need to live by the rules: she doesn’t have to.
After Greer slips into a coma with a life-endangering 106.4 fever and starts spouting lines as Dr. Brock Sterling, the gang starts looking for an infection or a fungus. House goes to talk to Wilson and think and sees a picture of a Chrysanthemum on a pillow in a bed store and determines that Greer is allergic to the flowers in his dressing room. He gives him what could be a toxic does of a steroid (100 mg) because he is sure he is right and there isn’t time to conduct the tests that would confirm his diagnosis.
All of the tests come back negative for allergies to any kind of flora. House was wrong, but the patient gets better. Does he really get better, though? He’s miserable and wants meaning, but House tells him that nothing has meaning. Nothing creates lasting meaning. That could be true, but Sisyphus still pushes that rock up the hill. Kutner and 13 are discussing Greer’s misery, and she tells Kutner a fundamental truth: Greer doesn’t quit because he knows it’s not just his job making him miserable. Case in point: Kutner once had a miserable job with abysmal pay, but he was still happy. 13, on the other hand, is not particularly happy. Neither is House. Wilson, however, is happy.
Does this mean we can boil down happiness simply to luck of the draw of human nature? It’s a compelling question. I am not sure I am buying it: I have had a horrible job and been unhappy and then happy again once out of it. Then again, I think it’s pretty much in my nature to be happy, so what do I know?
Absolutely loved the bed-buying with Amber. Why does Wilson still take relationship advice from House? The next best moment in the episode was when Wilson says, “What, take care of you?” and Amber says, “Have you met me? I can take care of me. I need you to take care of you.” She is right: Amber, aka Cutthroat Bitch, does not need coddling from anyone. So, when Wilson gets his water bed and hates it, they both know that he got what he really wanted, so when she gets the mattress she wants, they will both be happy with it. She either really cares about him, or she is just supremely confident that eventually she will get her own way because she is right.
Ultimately, even though House was wrong about what caused Greer’s allergy, he does figure out the answer to the puzzle: he calls Cuddy in the middle of the night to tell her that Greer is allergic to quinine, because he is drinking real tonic on the show. We didn’t see this at first because the character Brock Sterling was drinking out of a flask. House had to see the bubbles in his glass to figure it out. And we know that Greer is a non-drinker, so of course he wouldn’t have triggered the allergy until he started drinking tonic on the show.
Cuddy and House both got to keep their jobs; the patient lived; and the hospital paid a $200,000 fine for House’s rashness, even though the patient lived. Once again: a life without consequences. Is it going to take someone whom House actually cares about for him to really care? Or will that just be the biggest puzzle of all?