So hot right now: The erotic power of extreme competence

There’s a erotic power in extreme competence. Photo / Getty Images

So, hospital drama The Pitt has officially been renewed for Season 3. Its massive global success has been a surprise because, even with subtitles turned on, most of the dialogue is completely unintelligible.

A typical episode unfolds as follows: Someone arrives at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC)
with a life-threatening injury or illness and suddenly a whole lot of medical professionals gather around yelling numbers, acronyms and abbreviations over the top of each other and everything is beeping and everyone is bleeding.

It’s enough to send the blood pressure of viewers soaring but then … Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) walks in. He calmly and quickly surveys the scene, says some different numbers and acronyms and suddenly the bleeding stops, the room goes quiet and you, the viewer – heretofore seated on your couch clenched from jaw to buttocks – feel your body relax and sink into the couch.

You release and let go and, in that moment, your experience mediated by Dr Robby’s explicit demonstration of competence, you are delivered from your worries and cares to a place of ecstatic calm.

Welcome to the hot, hot world of competence porn, where we, the audience, get off by watching people who are very good at things doing those things very well. The Pitt is the current poster child for the genre, but the term “competence porn” was coined in 2009 by screenwriter John Rogers and colleagues while working on a crime drama called Leverage.

Rogers et al had written a scene in which the characters spent far more time in a briefing room than the writers had hoped. Such briefing scenes, Rogers wrote in a subsequent blog post, were things writers typically tried to move past as quickly as possible, in a rush to get to the plot. In this case, he and his colleagues had proved unable to do so. He described it as “one of the most sedate first acts we’ve had” and said they had agonised over it. He was shocked to discover they needn’t have.

He wrote: “Ironically, this episode arrived just as we were collating feedback off the ’net and found, stunningly, you people love the briefing scenes.” He continued: “For the audience, watching competent people banter and plan was a big part of the appeal. ‘Competence porn’ as we started calling it.”

Once the term was in the world, people started seeing it everywhere, all over much older shows and movies like CSI, The West Wing, Mission Impossible, The X Files, James Bond, MacGyver, The A-Team and on and on. Leading modern-day examples include the restaurant competence of The Bear, the bureaucratic precision of The Diplomat and the diligent dealmaking of investment banking drama Industry.

On hearing the term for the first time, my first thought was of Anthony Hopkins as Stevens, the world-class butler in the movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Remains of the Day. In Stevens’ world, nothing is out of place; everything is planned, orderly and perfectly executed. His organisational excellence and remorseless attention to detail in the service of a morally repugnant reprobate is so inspiring it made me want to be a butler.

We used to want heroes. Now we want to watch competent adults doing their jobs extremely well like The Pitt’s Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and, right, Dr Jack Abbott (Shawn Hatosy). Photo / Supplied

So, why is it back now?

It’s a nice feeling seeing someone – anyone! – performing a job of work competently amidst the chaos of this terrifying world in which vainglorious tech bros with too much money and unjustified self-belief are competing to produce the most existentially threatening technology in the shortest possible time while simultaneously sucking up to a powerful man who thinks they’re all nerds.

But nice feelings do not change the fact of the chaos. Some have argued that competence porn is yet more opium for the masses, mass tranquilisation, inoculation against the inclination to action in a world that needs lots more of it.

I would argue the opposite. Yes, we can and should do everything possible to fix the problems of the world – or at least think hard about them while making our kids’ school lunches. We should of course rage, rage against the dying of the light while managing complicated household logistics under the pressure of straining budgets.

But late in the evening, when the kids are in bed and your body is once again clenched from jaw to buttocks and back and you have no fight left in you, the best thing you can do is lie back on your couch and allow the competence of Dr Robby to release you from your burden.

There should be no guilt or shame in that. Tomorrow, you will be spending another day in a world full of struggle, but now you will be doing it refreshed and relaxed; loins girded, ready to fight the good fight.

And when the fight gets hard, as it inevitably will, you will push yourself ever onward, knowing that no matter how exhausted you become, at the end of the day you will be able to offer your mind and body to the pornographically competent ministrations of Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. And you will be healed.

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