What Was Up with Kutner’s Funeral?
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 4:52There is a little bit of a trend on TV to answer the criticism that minorities, and in this case South Asians, are portrayed stereotypically by removing some of their ethnic/racial markers.
There is Kal Penn’s former character Lawrence Kutner on House. Kutner’s Indianness does not figure into the show much at all. We know that his last name used to be Chaudhury, and when he was six, his parents were shot. A white couple adopted him.
And if you have been watching this fantastic show on NBC called Kings, you will have noticed two familiar faces: Ajay Naidu from Office Space fame and Sarita Choudhury from Mississippi Masala. The show takes place in some unnamed future, and according to its vision, the future will continue to have Indian doctors (Naidu) and Indian women in the role of the seductress. Choudhury plays the king’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child. Her ethnicity has not yet been explicitly been discussed.
I am all for the trend of having characters who are not so closely tied to their Indian identities, but there are moments when things just don’t make sense.
I finally got around to watching the episode where Penn’s character gets killed off. There is a fantastic scene in the middle of the episode where House is visiting Kutner’s parents and suggests to them that he may have killed himself because he changed his name from Chaudhury to Kutner. And as a whole, I liked the episode’s unwillingness to give clear meaning to the suicide.
But what I found utterly confusing was the funeral scene at the end. There is a man in a white salwar-kameez leading the ceremony. He could be Hindu or Muslim. The body is in a casket and when it is carried out, we learn that the service was in a building that may or may not be a mosque. It has the archways to at least suggest Muslim influenced architecture. The final scene shows another religious place that could be a mosque, or even some type of Russian Orthodox Church. There is a smoke coming out of it, to suggest that Kutner has been cremated.
What is going on here?
Aesthetically, it all looked good. But I think this is the danger of decoupling a character from his cultural background too much. When the time comes to show his cultural background, one ends up picking and choosing random things. Perhaps the suggestion here is that Kutner was a hybrid character and his funeral reflects this hybridity.
John DeMajo says:
August 27th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Dr.Kutner’s cremation scene had some practical issues as well. The height of the crematory smoke stack shown would have been inconsistent with the design of crematoria in the United States. One would assume that since the location of the show’s medical center is supposed to be Princeton, NJ, that the Hindu temple or Mosque, and the crematory, were also located near there. From an engineering standpoint,it is not practical to employ tall chimneys on forced draft cremation equipment as would be code mandated for use in the Western world today. Drafts caused by sucb a tall chimney would result in excessive oxygen entering the cremation chamber, which would make the process dangerous because of the high retort and stack gas temperatures that would result. in refractory damage and overheating of the equipment.. I would be interested to know if the pictures used were of an actual crematory located in the United States.
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