Help a fangirl out?

[rivkat]

I'm looking for pop culture examples (TV, movies) of professionals doing their jobs because they're professionals, even though they know -- or strongly believe -- that there's no point to it. An example would be the final episode of Angel. (That might be an example of "the point is that this is all there is," but I hope you get the idea -- you treat the patient because that's your job, not because you think it will help or because you think it makes you especially noble. You investigate the crime not because you're doing justice or because you have a personal stake but because that's what it means to be a cop. Greg House and L&OL's Jack McCoy are, therefore, counterexamples.)

Specific episodes/arcs, please! The point is to have some examples to show students, so the more specific, the better.

Comments

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

I think the detectives who work with McCoy are examples of this. Of all the ones we've seen on the show, I think Reynaldo Curtis is the only one who's ever come close to making any sort of pronouncement about the nobility of what they do and even his comments to that effect were really vague. But Mike Logan, Lenny Briscoe, Anita Van Buren, Ed Green, Frank Fontana and the characters played by George Dzunda and Paul Sorvino (whose names escape me at the moment) all did their job because it was their job. In this regard, they do differ from their brothers and sisters on L&O: SVU and L&O: CI. Stabler & Benson (on SVU) talk a lot about the justice of what they do and I think Gorem (CI), at least, finds a certain nobility in it. But the detectives of classic L&O do what they do because their job calls for it.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. The trouble is that we get so little of the detectives as people -- precisely because they are disappearing into the job -- that it's hard to figure out what to show students to make the point. Then again, most of them are probably already familiar with the characters, so maybe that's not an obstacle. Thanks!