Dr. Kildare, He Dead

Dr Kildare is dead.

The actor who played him in the series during the 1960s, Richard Chamberlain–and who I met briefly on a plane ride from LA to NYC several years ago–died in Hawaii on Sunday at the age of 90.

I recall badgering him (an embarrassing recollection!)–for a photo which he agreed to pose for reluctantly, saying “please be sure there is no flash, as my eyes can no longer take the bright lights”–and I agreed quickly before he could change his mind. The flash went off nevertheless, a mistake I attribute to nervous excitement. Despite his advanced age and obvious fragility, he was, after all, still “our” Dr Kildare–the dashing, debonaire white man we teenage brown girls in Lahore oohed and aahed over, sitting glued to our parents’ black and white TV screens, imagining it was us reflected in his dreamy eyes as the forbidden objects of his obsessive love in series that followed, like The Thorn Birds.

And in a way we were. The white male gaze of a colonial and imperial power had fixed us as objects of desire, women’s bodies standing in for the land that must always already remain under the control of the conqueror. Yes, this was cultural imperialism at its best, suturing our gaze onto that of the white male actor (heterosexually virile no matter the actor’s actual sexual proclivities)–so that the Colonial Imaginary was internalized and reflected back to us our own desire for whiteness, power, and, for young women, cathecting with what poet Adrienne Rich named “compulsory heterosexuality.”

In the wake of the white supremacist, colonialist Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the lid has been blown off of any (misplaced) faith we might have had in the White Man’s so-called western civilization as a repository of secular democratic values embedded in a rules-based order. This act of denuding the Emperor has rendered the appeal of the Dr Kildare’s of this world utterly defunct, our once-colonized vision now repurposed as an amnesiac tool in the war of decolonial liberation.

So, much as Malek Alloula sent the French colonial photographer’s postcard of Algerian women back to him in a symbolic gesture of belatedness lagging behind history, I too, in penning this missive, am returning Dr Kildare’s phantasm to its owner.

My intifada, in shaking off the specter of Dr Kildare, is a gesture of refusal and reclamation. In refusing the Dare of Empire’s Kil-ling machine, I reclaim instead, the frail, diminutive man whose white PT shoes signaled the distance between the man and the Myth. It is to the man in all of his fragility, battling who knows what inner demons, that I pay my respects. To the Myth of the Man I say: good riddance. In lieu of an amnesiac gesture of subjective reclamation, there stands an image of diminishing whiteness, captured in the flashing light of a brown woman’s camera.