House Season 4 Trailer by Fox Estacado

"House Season 4 Trailer", edited by Fox Estacado

Length: 01:56 minutes

Format: Windows Media (.wmv). Preferred player is Windows Media Player. VLC player will also play this format, but video playback is not optimal. I am endeavoring to get this video encoded in Quicktime. If you would like a Quicktime copy of this video, please email me at foxestacado@gmail.com

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Warnings: This "trailer" is not appropriate for anyone who has not seen Season 4 of House in its entirety. Not spoiler-free!

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Distribution: Please do NOT upload this video to any video streaming site, including YouTube and iMeem. Feel free to link to this site, but do not HOTLINK or attempt to stream from this link. Please do NOT use any part of this video in your own vidding projects. If you would like help getting started in your own vidding project, please do not hesitate to ask me for help.

Copyright disclaimer: All parts of this video belong to Fox and Universal Studios. I did not and do not intend to make any profit off of this material.

Date of Original Debut: June 15, 2008

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ABOUT THE VIDEO (warning: contains spoilers)

This is the first video I have edited after a two-year hiatus (see my other videos). This has also been my most time-consuming video, spending over 50 hours on just the editing (not including an additional 10+ hours encoding and cutting clips).

This 01:56 minute video was an exercise in minimalism, my attempt to encapsulate the series (medical adventure thriller) with what I believe to be the core themes of this season: House's attempt to control his own life, and by extension, his pain, by controlling others in playing his new game: hiring 2-3 fellows out of 40+ applicants. (Wilson accuses House of "playing games because you can control them" in a brilliant exchange that culminates in "dying's easy, living's hard." Sadly, this exchange ended up on the cutting room floor for this video. Otherwise, it ironically juxtaposes some of the drama from the season finale, 4x16: "Wilson's Heart.")

While he is infamous as a medical genius (Taub calls him as a diagnostic "savant"), he also possesses profiler-level psychological deductive skills. Figuring people out is part of the fun in the deductive reasoning package that accompanies solving medical problems. For House, it is rarely just the medicine that interests him. He exploits his medical authority to gain a nearly all-access pass to the patient's personal affairs, secrets, flaws, weaknesses, and sins. House glorifies in uncovering lurid dramas, especially those that support his worldview that humanity is irredeemable, and that true compassion, saintliness, and goodness are myths.

He can deconstruct the entire human condition to selfishness, evolutionary advantage, self-gain. It is predictable. He needs predictability. It is a kind of comfort that is devoid of meaning except the certainty that the earth and its inhabitants will always be driven by primitive motives.

His compulsion to control his world (the microcosm that is the hospital), is a response to House's unease with change. He may have accepted that things do change since last season (when all three of his fellows either quit or was fired), but we continue to see House reacting to, and attempting to curtail, uncertainty. His livelihood and sanity depends on rationality and predictability. To him, he is useless without reason, objectifying his whole sense of being and personal identity to his brain. His role as a doctor is moot without the dependability of logic to solve puzzles. In a way, House's compulsion and dependence on the truth of logic is what we desire from stories: stories impart a sense of structure that our lives do not necessarily have. Because stories make sense, they have a beginning, middle, and end, and sometimes, they reaffirm our faith in humanity, or the simple belief that there is justice or reason or truth.

Despite the fact that House believes in "reason above all else," he understands that life is inevitably chaotic, that life just "happens," there is no true underlying structure or reason behind who is afflicted and who is escapes affliction-free. His own disability, and his resignation to a life-long struggle with pain is testament to the cruel randomness of life. He was an athletic doctor who had a rather rare infarction in his thigh, and as a result, lost use of the leg, sustaining considerable nerve damage and continues to experience ill-managed chronic pain. His own experience with randomness shows him that reason is not an answer to everything.

Episode 4x15 "House's Head" had House pursuing a near-impossible feat: recovering his memories to discover who was dying. He is (rightly) convinced that he had seen a symptom before the bus crash, and he felt impulsively drawn to that mystery. House's reckless pursuit of the truth shows us that his obsession to uncover truth is greater than his sense of self-preservation. Whereas last season his lack of self-preservation was mostly due to his pride and stubbornness, this season, he shows us that his recklessness with his own life is a symptom of a larger problem: behind his ego-maniacal, misanthropic shell is a self-loathing, crippled man who sees no hope to escape his pain.

When House discovers that Wilson's girlfriend, a woman who he had spurned as too competitive and manipulative to be part of his team, is the one who is dying, he again willingly puts himself at risk to save her, not because he valued her life, but because he valued his best friend's happiness. Last season he jeopardized Wilson's medical license to feed his addiction, trying to test the limits of their friendship, to reaffirm that love is always conditional. This season, he was willing to die for him, perhaps proving that House, too, is capable of self-sacrifice.