Adrian Monk is the central character in the eponymous TV series, Monk, a comedy-drama mysteries series that ran from 2002 to 2009. Jerry Espenson is a character in Boston Legal, a comedy-drama series that ran from 2004 to 2008. Monk is a brilliant detective who is beset by a bewildering plethora of compulsions and phobias (312 by his count). Espenson is a brilliant attorney with specific expertise in financial law. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and possibly Tourette’s, making it difficult to interact with others socially.
That is to say, both men are professionally brilliant but pathologically weird in a way that makes it difficult for them to practice their profession. Monk has to have a companion with him at all times to drive him around, hand him wipes so he can wipe his hands whenever he touches anything, including being subjected to hand-shaking from others, and, in general, coach and cajole him through the day. Espenson gets around by himself, but often walks in rectilinear patterns, such as before the judge while arguing in court, emitting spontaneous popping sounds, and taking little hops into the air. Both men have been bullied at various times in their lives, and are so in the present.
As his series opens, Monk is an ex-detective for the San Francisco police who now works as a consultant for the police force and occasionally takes other clients. While he was on the police force his wife, Trudy, was murdered by a car bomb. As a result Monk lost his job and refused to leave the house for several years. But his nurse, Sharona, is finally able to coax him out and he begins work as a consultant. He dreams of being reinstated on the police force and is haunted by his wife’s death, working on and off to solve her murder.
His apartment is extremely neat and orderly, although he keeps the coffee table in his living room at an oblique angle like it was when he found out about his wife’s death. He wears the same outfit every day, insists on drinking only his favorite brand of bottled water (the name of which escapes me at the moment), touches lamp posts, telephone poles, parking meters, whatever, as he is walking along, and on and on. He’s afraid of heights, which is common enough, no? But what about “milk, ladybugs, harmonicas, heights, asymmetry, enclosed spaces, foods touching on his plate, messes, and risk” (from the Wikipedia article)?
At the same time he has superior powers of observation, a mind for detail, a sense of pattern, and superior deductive and reasoning skills. This man who is himself so disordered, while insisting on maintaining an idiosyncratic sense of order, is able so, analyze, and describe patterns in events that elude others. When he’s on the crime scene he wanders slowly and apparently randomly around, his torse often at an angle, his arms moving around, almost as he is conducting an orchestra, with his hands open and his fingers spread wide. It’s as though he becomes and antenna absorbing the vibes lingering at the scene after the crime’s been committed. He’s a brilliant detective whom the San Francisco police force consults on particularly baffling murder cases and on high-profile cases. Only Monk can do the job.
Brilliant and weird. His weirdness makes it difficult to work with others and yet, paradoxically, is a necessary condition for his doing so. Why? Because people are frightened and put off by his brilliance. His plethora of oddities is the beard he must wear to be a functioning member of society.
Adrian Monk is not the only such character in fiction. There are many. Sherlock was a brilliant detective, but also a bachelor (with an unhappy love affair in his past), a loner, who scraped away on the violin while thinking and who was probably addicted to cocaine as well. Moving out of the detective genre and returning to the present, we have Commander Spock of Star Trek, a brilliant alien who can communicate telepathically with others, of various species – the famous Vulcan mind-meld, but who has to keep his emotions rigorously suppressed. He was succeeded by Commander Data, a brilliant android, who was constantly wondering what emotion is. And then we have Abe Maisel, Midge Maisel’s father. He’s a brilliant mathematician – though not so brilliant as he imagines himself to be – who is rigid in his routines, demanding, and obtuse. While not pathologically weird like Adrian Monk, he nonetheless is a representative of the type. And, wouldn’t you know, Tony Shalhoub played both characters.
The world of fiction is littered with such characters. ChatGPT, itself the oddest of odd ducks, has kindly listed various types of such characters – I dread to think what it would have done if I’d asked it to name and characterize examples of each time. How many examples could it have given me?
Jerry Espenson is another example of the type, an individual so brilliant that others are reluctant to work with him, but will do so because he is also beset by oddities for which they ridicule him behind his back, though sometimes to his face. He’s not a primary character in Boston Legal. He didn’t appear until episode ten of the second season, when the litigation department was working on a case requiring his expertise. So Denny Crane, one of the firm’s founders (played by William Shatner) says that should call in “Hands.” That’s Espenson’s nick name, referring to his habit of walking rigidly erect and taking small rapid stripes while his hands are pressed firmly to his thighs.
I have the impression that there was no intention to use him as a regular character in the show. But he had become one by the third season and remained so through the end, in season five. He becomes good friends with Alan Shore, who had been a central character from the show’s beginning. Shore had his own kind of brilliance, particularly in delivering long, sometimes convoluted, but always effective summary arguments in court. And, while he was a compulsive womanizer, he had no off-putting oddities.
In one set of episodes Jerry dated a woman with Asperger’s. She dumped him for, I believe, a clock radio. Objectophilia it’s called – look it up (I wonder what the Chatster would say). In another set of episodes Alan introduces him to a sex therapist who tries to get him used to physical closeness – not sex, just touching and holding. Alas, they were raided by cops. After a bit of therapy of some kind or another Jerry adopts a wooden cigarette as a prop. Once he stuck it in his mouth, he undergoes an instant transformation into an obnoxious fast-talking wise guy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If, for example, his friend Alan takes the cigarette out of his mouth, the wise guys disappears and shy involuted Jerry reappears.
And, yet, by the end of the series Jerry has begun dating an attractive young associate at the firm. [See my earlier post on Boston Legal.] Who knows what the future brings?
For them we’ll never know. The series is over. More generally, though, we’re going to see more such characters in our fictions. They are one aspect of what I have begun calling an ideology of intellect. To repeat myself from an earlier post, the term "ideology" is generally used in the context of political or social believes, e.g. Marxist ideology, that's not (quite) how I'm using it here. Here I mean a fixed set of beliefs and ideas that are more or less impervious to contrary evidence. In the case of the ideology of intellect this means, among other things, the reification of intelligence and, in particular, the reification of IQ as intelligence itself, rather than being simply a measure of cognitive capacities. In the case of characters such as Adrian Monk and Jerry Espenson, superior intelligence is treated as a disability originating in the mind and expressing itself, both in brilliant arguments and assertions, but also corporeally in acongeries of compulsions, ticks, syndromes, and phobias.
It is as though the body is unable to contain the force of that inner brilliance and, in consequence, expresses it in movements that warn others of the brilliance within while at the same time protecting them from it. They are assured that, as long as they keep their distance, they will not themselves be afflicted by that awful power.
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ADDENDUM: This just came to me and I haven’t had time to think it through. Is it also, perhaps (and above all else?), a protest against the Cartesian dualism that separates mind from body? The brilliant mind and warped body are one and the same.
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