Don't Quote Me: House of Hatred
by Kim Ficera, November 1, 2006
“Six individuals from different walks of life, with different judgments and prejudices move into The Dr. Phil House together, in an attempt to break down the walls of hatred and intolerance … It doesn't take long for hostility to break out …”
— DrPhil.com
Dr. Phil's House of Hatred is nothing like the House of Pancakes, but a lot like the movie House of Wax, only with a lesbian and without Paris Hilton. Similar to a classic horror flick, it's predictable yet creepy, the relationship between real horror and fake horror is exploited, and the whining fat guy gets it first.
Remember when Dr. Phil “Get Real” McGraw was a voice of reason and personal accountability, not a purveyor of sensationalism and a wielder of lie detector machines? I do. I remember when he was the anti-Springer, the polar opposite of Povich, and the contra-Montel. But the canyon of rationale that once separated him from the land of garrulous hosts, piquant confessions and psychobabble has shrunk to the size of a line break in the Hippocratic oath. The doctor has become exactly what he once rose so far above.
For the uninitiated, the Dr. Phil House is the doctor's newest tool to help some of his most troubled guests become better people. “To move on, you have to move in,” his website boasts.
The current housemates that make up the recent three-part installment — what Dr. Phil shamelessly calls the House of Hatred — are six folks with deeply held prejudices who, in the doctor's words, “struggle to challenge their own beliefs and values.” And struggle they do, in ways folks under a doctor's care shouldn't.
Although House of Hatred isn't billed as a psychological thriller, I borrow the words of House of Wax producer Joel Silver to describe what I saw: “It's a rollercoaster ride that taps into our most primal fears of being hunted down and trapped, and then thrusts you into a nightmarish scenario where nothing around you is real and escape is not an option.”
OK, that's not completely accurate; you can escape by changing the channel. But you probably won't, and the six hating housemates are the reasons why.
Meet Gary, a 26-year-old white supremacist, who says, “In a perfect world for me, it would be all white people”; B., a 58-year-old African-American woman, who believes white people are “ignorant sociopaths”; John, a 600-pound 24-year-old who hates thin people and who, his housemates all agree, smells; Staci, a thin 22-year-old who thinks overweight people are “disgusting blobs”; Christina, a 22-year-old who believes “gay sex is just as bad as bestiality”; and Tessa, a 19-year-old lesbian, who believes “all straight people are two-faced” and “breeders.”
If you're thinking that these people are stereotypical to a fantastic degree, you're not alone. I suspect they were special-ordered in bulk from an obscure catalogue called Bigots R Us!
Tessa, for example, is every homophobe's lesbian. She has short hair, is overweight and not classically feminine, and the picture that accompanies her profile on drphil.com shows her in a V-neck shirt with what appears to be sports insignia on it.
Ready? Let's Go! R-A-T-I-N-G-S. What's it spell? Exploit Me! Woo-hoo!
It's obvious that Tessa's purpose in the House is not to alert the audience to the epidemic of hetero-hating in our country, or to help the few queers who suffer from heterophobia overcome their fears, but to incite her planted polar opposite, Christina, the woman who, according the site, “tries to start fights when she sees homosexuals.” Christina, too, is cliché. Typical of a rubber-stamp homophobe, she is, well — how can I put this? — possibly … maybe … perhaps … a closet fan of the Indigo Girls.
