The Less Said . . .

The most memorable thing about last night's Oscars show? For me, it wasn't Melissa Leo's use of the f-word during her acceptance speech, and it certainly wasn't who won and who didn't. It was the number of gown changes the producers put co-host Anne Hathaway through.

House Plants

Anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast might explain why so many movie references were planted in this past Monday's installment of House, M.D. The episode, built around the premise of the misanthropic diagnostician addressing a fifth-grade career day, contains explicit references to Pulp Fiction, A Few Good Men, Ghostbusters, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Thomas Crown Affair ("the Steve McQueen version," it is pointedly noted), and the 1960 Jerry Lewis vehicle Cinderfella. Also, the episode's main narrative thread, an extended quid pro quo dialogue ("You tell me something; I'll tell you something") between House (Hugh Laurie) and a couple of kids sitting in a principal's office, might owe a bit to the Anthony Hopkins–Jodie Foster face-offs in Silence of the Lambs, but the connection, assuming there is one, isn't openly acknowledged. The movie most often cited on House, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (Singer is a producer of the series), seems to have gone missing here, although House's line "I ain't no snitch" does sort of echo one of Kevin Spacey's retorts in the 1995 film. But counting that one is probably a stretch.

Sucker that I am for movie trivia, I found it to be a fun episode overall, though one colleague of mine thought it too clever for its own good. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to follow on first viewing: the story is told in multiple-flashback form with a scrambled chronology that owes an obvious debt not just to Pulp Fiction but to the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino—nonlinear in the extreme, in other words. And when you consider how crammed Tarantino's work is with filmic and other pop cultural allusions and then consider the implications of another pop culture enterprise like House referencing and parodying Tarantino . . . well, the mind starts to reel.

I'm aware that this is all symptomatic of what some critics and theorists describe, indeed condemn, as postmodern decadence: here we have, they'd say, yet more evidence of a late capitalist culture that has nowhere to go but backward, feeding endlessly on itself. But I'm also aware of counterarguments which posit that in such self-consciousness and "hip" irony lie the seeds, at least, of progressive social critique. I'm inclined toward the latter position, but maybe I'm just rationalizing my enjoyment of TV shows like House and movies like Pulp Fiction.

P.S. I hear that an even more "postmodern" episode of House awaits us—one in which various genres from film and television are evoked in elaborate fantasy sequences. Hmm, maybe there is something to this whole decadence thing.