Nip/Tuck Creator Ryan Murphy Takes Surreality from Reality…or, er, Popular Mythology

Nip/Tuck Creator Ryan Murphy Takes Surreality from Reality…or, er, Popular Mythology by Roxanne McDonald

Art is a response—to political fiascos, personal dilemmas, even other art. In Ryan Murphy’s case, his art is done in direct response to his obsessions, what he’s reading, what is happening on the popular culture circuit.

The creator of Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy, grants a televised interview to film institute students, Sarah Davidson, Darren Herczeg, and Mark Stern. In this interview, titled, “Life After Film School,” he speaks to what the success of the show, Nip/Tuck, is made of, and how (or when, or why) he writes, pointing to how in the writing of the episodes he works through/out his obsessions at the time, or uses something he is reading.

Loyalists to Nip/Tuck will note the use of real-life medical cases, for example: “Escobar Gillado” centers on a drug lord’s changing his appearance with plastic surgery. An aging “Mrs. Grubman” becomes obsessed with/addicted to repeated sessions of surgery. Men get breasts and men get balls the size of kiwis; women get face transplants and women get voice modifications; seventeen-year-old petrified fetuses are removed; Siamese twins are separated.

But equally fascinating are the stories that are not completely real

but are made big as life with the perpetuation by word of mouth, which Murphy and mates turn into brilliant TV. In episode four of season four, “Shari Noble” (get the play on Chernobyl?), for instance, Liz (after being challenged for not going out or getting involved all that much), is seduced by a stunning babe in a bar. She wakes to a ringing phone and a voice pacifying her with words of how the pain will be intense for a bit…as Liz has just been the victim of black market kidney theft.

While this is for some fans a “far-fetched” plotline, it is TV after all, and it is the stellar creativity of a writer (and his writing geniuses) who has taken off on the whole urban myth of underground organ-stealing rings. But the urbanity and the mythology had to have started somewhere. Just as art takes from other experiences, so does the urban myth take from the smallest of instigated incidents: in the 1990’s, from Great Britain to Delhi to Bombay to Bangalore, post-surgery patients began accusing surgeons and other medical practitioners of stealing their kidneys (when they were in for treatments for ulcers and such).

The stories began (with, evidently, some day laborer named Velu) and as one then two then hundreds and thousands of kidneys were purportedly poached, the legend was elevated to worldwide status, spreading to and through the states as fast as the supposed thefts were. And the myths, as all good rumors turned universal do, by late 1997, were terrifying the gullible:

the emails were swearing God’s truth about such crimes as those testified to by the business traveler having a drink in a bar in New Orleans and nest thing he knows it is the next day and he is submerged in a tub of ice and aching in the place where the tube protrudes to drain the pus and blood of a fast operation he incurred in the night; as the same thing happening to a neighbor’s daughter’s husband; and as the very same crime was committed against the daughter of friends of fellow firefighters….

The phone doesn’t ring for these victims, but instead, there is a number on a notepad next to the hotel bed, and the kidney loser calls to get urgently murmured instructions on caring for the cut, etc..

And while the alerts and the emails continue to beg people to please be careful (as the ring leaders are trained doctors performing the clandestine illegal acts), Ryan Murphy, professional artist of the most revered kind, is tonguing his cheek and chuckling darkly all the way to the bank.

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