Nip/Tuck and Dissecting the Real or, Hegel as a Dramatist

In honor of the upcoming fifth season of Nip/Tuck, I thought I’d post some of my thoughts on the show thus far. I think what really draws me to the show is how impeccably it manages to sway your emotions in terms of allegiances to certain characters. At the beginning of every episode, the writers always set the episode up so that the person who first appears to be the ethical agent is completely and radically undermined, and then there’s a constant ebb and flow between who you want to come out on top and who you want to get buried. A good example of this would be Episode 57 (“Reefer”), wherein Sean becomes a drunk Santa and then befriends a homeless man named Reefer. Sean complains about how his wife and family have abandoned him during the holidays, only to hear from the homeless man how thankful he is for life, despite having nothing. Out of an act of good will, Sean lets him sleep at their office, but the increasingly more maniacal and insane James ultimately ends up harvesting the homeless man’s organs to pay back her debt to what I vaguely recall to be the Yakuza.

I think what we’re dealing with is a really refined form of the Hegelian dialectic at work. This is made more explicit in Episode 5 (“Kurt Dempsey”) when, in the midst of an argument with Sean over their ongoing marital troubles, Julia screams, “The truth of the acorn is the tree, Sean!” To which Sean replies, “Philosophy class… Nietzsche?” and Julia shouts back, “Hegel!” and then storms out of the house. I think this is really meant to be more of a meta-dialogue, a dialogue with the audience. Because Sean and Christian occupy most of the screen time, we’re generally put in their shoes for any given situation. Sean’s biggest flaw is that his dialectical movement is totally off. He presupposes a world of ideals: that plastic surgery will be used to make people genuinely feel better about themselves, that he’ll have a perfect marriage and a nuclear family and that his children will all be normal (which, later, turns sour over the issue of Conor’s deformity, prompting Julia and the kids to leave him).

Throughout Nip/Tuck, then, Sean suffers from a debilitating case of panglossianism, only to have brutal reality shatter his utopian vision of the world. To some degree then, I think what really characterizes Sean in terms of his development as a character is a kind of pervasive Nietzschean ressentiment. His constant failure to act always entails a minimum of hostility and displacement onto other people, which is why he’s never willing to initially take the blame for anything. It’s always someone else’s fault, either Julia’s for not wanting the marriage to work, Matt’s for falling prey to seductive women or Liz’s for screwing up a tool count. This allows for Sean to shape his values system off of nicely crafted illusions rather than the bitterness of reality. And in the Nip/Tuck world, the reality is always the Real.

So, of course, when Julia shouts back “Hegel!” at Sean, we’re meant to understand the content of Nip/Tuck not as a kind of Nietzschean subversion of norms, that there are no such things as good or evil, that all of these signifiers lack determinacy and are therefore obliterated, but rather as a Hegelian dialectic, which should be obvious to anyone remotely familiar with Hegel and Nip/Tuck.

But in what way does the dialectic “sublate” the (usually two) metonymically parallel story lines (to invoke the simple Hegelian triad, one being the ‘thesis’ and the other the ‘antithesis’)? After some reflection, I think it does this in a very subtle, yet crucial way.

It’s never the case that the story is simply resolved. The sublation never quite fits, and I think it has to do with the nature of Kantian antinomy, that things inherently contain their opposites (i.e., as Zizek so often enjoys pointing out, the difference between what is “not living” and what is “undead”). There’s always this crack in the field of the universal that can never be solved or integrated into the Nip/Tuck-symbolic-edifice. Instead, what we’re left with is the dirty bath water of the Real, the excessive, disgusting, perverted, maniacal underbelly of existence. Nip/Tuck is all about the Real. Take, for instance, Julia’s mental breakdown in Season 1. It’s not a complete breakdown, she just flips out due to all of her stress and, lashing out at the first thing in front of her, flushes her daughter’s (living) hamster down a toilet. In any show, that would be the end of it. Let the audience know that Julia is not doing well in terms of her sanity.

But in Nip/Tuck things take on a much more frightening and radical dimension. A few weeks later (or, a few episodes later), a plumber comes to inspect their broken septic tank, only to find a dead mouse in their drain. Julia, eating lunch with one of her friends, stares at it horrified. The plumber menacingly asks, “How did that get there?,” to which Julia responds, “Oh! It.. it must’ve crawled into the toilet and I wasn’t paying attention…” The plumber continues his interrogation, stating, “That would be impossible. Porcelain lacks the adhesiveness that a mouse would need to climb. Someone must’ve killed it while it was still alive.” Julia finally breaks down and confesses, prompting all of her friends to despise her and their local congressman to come to their house, who was alerted by the plumber of their animal rights abuse, to personally chastise her because the state has too lenient of animal cruelty laws.

In this instance it’s pretty clear that, as Zizek points out in relation to Coppola’s The Confession, we’re literally watching shit. We’re watching the Real burst out and destroy our entire concept of reality. This is usually how the Nip/Tuck sublation works: it always reveals its inherent deadlock in the form of the Real.