OR THE BROTHERS Karamazov.
You will remember the scandalous goings-on of the best known family in the glory that was Greece, adultery being the least of it for Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and Cassandra, Orestes and Elektra. Incest, infanticide, patricide, matricide, cannibalism, and other gaudy dysfunctions were almost all that Aeschylus ever wrote about, as if to hype his ratings. Nor do the soaps have anything on Sophocles. I mean, Oedipus murdered his father and married his mother, after which he was visually challenged. These are behaviors as lurid as Caligula’s, who tried to marry his sister. Or Claudius, who, when it didn’t work out with Messalina, had her tried for treason. Or Nero, who wasted his mom. Byzantine family life specialized in stranglings of heirs apparent in their bubbly baths, as well as many lopped-off hands. The best of their emperors, Justinian, married Theodora, the daughter of a bear keeper and a circus acrobat, who, before she showed up in Ravenna mosaics, is said by Procopius in his Secret History to have indulged in “bestial practices [and] unnatural traffic of the body,” afterward complaining that Nature had short-changed her with only three apertures for intercourse. (Moreover, as if for pay cable: “Often in the theatre, in full view of all the people, she would spread herself out, and lie on her back on the ground. And certain slaves, whose special task it was, would sprinkle grains of barley over her private parts; and geese trained for the purpose would pick them off one by one with their beaks….”) Richard III! Borgias! Romanovs! Medea and Catherine the Great were both Mommie Dearests. St. Augustine deserted a wife and two mistresses. Rousseau dropped off each of his five children by Thérèse at a foundling hospital. To get on with physics when times were tough, Einstein abandoned his baby daughter and never gave her another thought unless we count the theory of relativity as a sublimation. What Susano-o did in the cave of his Japanese Sun-Goddess sister Amaterasu was not only unspeakable but also bad for matriarchy. The Bible is a how-to manual on abusive sex and crazy violence in a sun-stunned, goat-munched desert.
Or the Mafia. There was an episode of The Rockford Files on NBC in 1977 called “Requiem for a Funny Box.” Like many Rockfords, it involved the Mob. It took James Garner most of the hour to figure out that the Mob had been responsible for the murder of a comedian because the comedian had been conducting a homosexual affair with the son of a Mob boss. Confronted by his outraged capo father, the son with chilling dignity explained that he had felt this way about men since age seventeen and had even tried to talk about it to a father who refused to listen. This son also pointed out that, considering the deplorable nature of the family business, putting on high moral airs about anything was a bit thick. So the father ordered the son shot, too.
As old as any family value is the family curse. Most of our violence, like most of our sex, is domestic. But we think about both more than we do either, which is why we’ve got novelists, playwrights, poets, movies, and television. Naturally, gathered around the burning storyteller log in our home-entertainment centers, there is a part of us—kind, dutiful, thrifty, hygienic, repressed—that we’d like to see affirmed. But there is another part that is trapped, sad, and furious. This part seems to enjoy seeing all the bad stuff acted out by somebody else in public, as if the bloody fate of kings and queens were a caution; and the bad luck and hurtful sex of the undeserving rich, unfairly talented, and callously handsome were a comfort; and the punishment of the boring and the blameless by random evil and dreadful chance were somehow emancipating, an opportunity to start over after decks are cleared and worlds collapse—as if we were fans of excessive behavior. Who knows which kind of television is better for the domestic tranquility? Or what it means that TV itself, that sleek console full of contorted faces, is the most domestic of our distractions? Perhaps how families present themselves to the box is as important to think about as how those families are presented on the box. We are since the fifties more fluid in our homes, floating in and out of rooms like ghosts, according to the rhythms of spectacle on demand; more episodic and discontinuous, like impatient vagabonds, choosing to tune in to fictitious lives and counterfeit experiences on the shape-shifting menu at the electric Automat; deritualized, as if no longer grounded in our kitchens, dining rooms, front porch, backyard, or stoop, as casual about eating as we are about relationships, zapping emotions in a microwave for a quick thaw or a loud pop; vertiginous, from a lightness of being.
Though situation comedies are now and always have been mostly about families, they didn’t start out as socializing agencies. That was what parents were for, and schools, churches, synagogues, armies, therapists, and jail. From our bygone radio days through the first two decades of network television, the best we could hope for from a sitcom, chugging along like a choo-choo on its laugh track, was a certain rueful wisdom. As in the slightest of John Cheever’s short stories, perfectly nice people, who played golf and raised flowers and never forgot to stock seed in their bird-feeding stations, might cry “at the death of a cat, a broken shoelace, a wild pitch,” but real pain and genuine suffering were “a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe.” Of course, in almost every Cheever story, something happens to darken the screen. Men drown and fall off mountains. Fifteen-year-old boys commit suicide. A wife shoots her husband as he is about to hurdle the living room couch. Someone is arrested for confusing a young woman with a Lucky Strike cigarette. Someone else is devoured by his own dogs. A killer sings commercial jingles. Innocents incinerate when a can of charcoal igniter explodes at a barbecue party. In the swimming pool: an undertow. In the liquor closet: skeletons. In the tossed green salad: lighter fluid instead of vinegar. In the snow: wolves.
But not on TV. Sitcoms hardly daring to do more than suggest coping mechanisms for such routine domestic crises as incompetence and mischief were not about to explore the mysteries of intimacy, much less promote a secret social agenda in favor of working women, class war, teen sex, racial justice, secular humanism, gay rights, and spotted owls. We aren’t talking about art or politics. Can you really imagine gag writers in New York or Hollywood trying to come up with two jokes a minute, forty-four jokes for every half-hour sitcom, with time out for commercial breaks, while simulataneously sneaking in subversive snippets from Adorno or Wilhelm Reich? Then, as now, gag writers were trying to sell a fail-safe concept to network programmers, who were selling audiences in the tens of millions to ad agency account executives, who were selling floor wax and reek to a benumbed republic and themselves to greedy clients. Then as now these gag writers read the same magazines and newspapers, saw the same movies, listened to the same music and skimmed the same reviews of the same best-selling books as everyone else. They also stole from each other. Yes, if a concept survived pilot-testing, and the public liked the actors, and the series lasted a couple of seasons, and the nation in its living room was ready to tolerate a NutraSweet version of the ideological fevers that already raged on the streets outside, then and only then, and even then only maybe, would the private pain, politics, and passion of the writer surface in a pointed wisecrack, a problematic new character, or a surprising ambiguity. And always after the culture already knew that it had major trouble on the event horizon, after the zeitgeist had already sneezed that sneeze.
For instance, the sixties: In a decade of civil-rights turmoil, the only lead character on a network sitcom who happened to be black was a high-school teacher on Room 222. In a decade of rioting on city streets, we sat down to watch The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction. In a decade of consciousness-raising and militant feminism, the small screen seethed with dreamy genies, kitchen witches, magical nannies, and flying nuns. In a decade of youthful opposition to war in Vietnam we got Gilligan, Dobie, Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Martians, My Mother the Car, and a spy who talked to his shoe. When, in the sixties, the angry and the disaffected petitioned the media for redress of grievance, we heard about it not on sitcoms but on the evening news with those images of water cannons and police dogs, or on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, from Pat Paulsen and Pete Seeger, before they were canceled in favor of Hee Haw. Only after the election of Richard Nixon did sitcoms take a turn toward the subversive, as only after the abdication of Ronald Reagan would westerns make a comeback. Does this mean that television is a counter-culture?
But I can shuffle these concepts like a pack of cards and deal out almost any hand I want to. I can toss the cards in the air and assign arbitrary meaning to a random scatter. Why did black Americans disappear from sitcom television in the sixties? (After Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah in the fifties, it was perhaps a mercy.) Why did urban working-class Americans likewise vanish, after The Life of Riley (aircraft factory), unless we count The Honeymooners (buses, sewers), till Alice (diner), All in the Family (tool and die), Laverne & Shirley (brewery) and Taxi (garage) in the seventies, after which of course Roseanne (plastics)? (We know they’re working class because they go bowling.) Why are so many sitcoms set in TV newsrooms or on talk shows or at radio stations or in ad agencies, even once at a talent agent’s, and why have so many of the male leads been newspaper columnists, usually covering sports? (Write what you know, like Herman Melville and Jackie Collins.) Once sitcoms moved out of the kitchen and into the living room, how come we always saw the same couch, directly facing the camera, as if the characters were laughing at us instead of the TV set they never seemed to look at, while we did little else? (Think of the screen as a looking-glass, with Alice on one side and Narcissus on the other, both thinking about Heidegger: in one sense obviously “being-there” [Dasein] but in another sense, just as obviously, “not-at-home” [Unheimlichkeit, Nicht-zuhause-sein.]) What was it about the eighties that caused so many dreadful sitcoms to succeed, while the best of them (Frank’s Place) failed, and the hour-long dramatic series went into one of its cyclic tailspins? (I would blame it on King Babar and Queen Celeste in the White House and Ollie North in Neverland. What was Iran-Contra but a high-concept Tom Clancy–S. J. Perelman sitcom?)
Late in the seventies, a New York know-it-all with a flashy line in psychic yard goods, for whom TV criticism was merely a part-time indulgence, a kind of avuncular moonlighting between serious books on loftier subjects, I flew coach to California to present a paper at a conference on “Television and Human Sexuality” (Was it good for you? More taste! Less filling!) sponsored by a foundation that felt there was room for improvement. A car awaited me at LAX. This is because it’s necessary in California to drive for two hours whether you want breakfast or transcendence. In my case, it was two hours north to Ojai, where golf links lay like a rug in a lap of little hills and swimming pools shivered like sheets of undulant tin. We slept at night in bungalows carved out of pastel chalk and candle wax, and rose at dawn to put on leopard-spotted Bermuda shorts and troop to tape-recorded T-group sessions. Among psychologists, sociologists, network veeps, and by-the-numbers tele-playwrights, I was the only media smarty-pants. In Wilfrid Sheed’s savvy novel about a critic, Max Jamison, we were told:
He was in love with the way his mind worked, and he was sick of the way his mind worked. The first thing that struck you about it… was the blinding clarity, like a Spanish town at high noon. No shade anywhere. Yet not altogether lacking in subtlety. Very nice filigree work in the church. This was the mind they were asking him to blow.
You’ve heard such riffs. I was clever at the expense of those nuclear-family sitcoms of the fifties wherein it was permissible to cry but never to divorce and certainly not to die, not on I Love Lucy, The Life of Riley, Mama, The Goldbergs, The Aldrich Family, Father Knows Best, The Trouble with Father, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, December Bride, I Married Joan, My Little Margie, Blondie, Leave It to Beaver, and Make Room for Daddy. Several exceptions proved semicontagious. In Mr. Peepers and Our Miss Brooks, Wally Cox and Eve Arden found families in the schools where they taught. And in You’ll Never Get Rich, Phil Silvers, as Sergeant Bilko, found one in an army platoon. The idea that you could enlist or be drafted into a family led in the sixties to sitcom families on ships at sea (McHale’s Navy, Mister Roberts), in marine barracks (Gomer Pyle), in prison camps (Hogan’s Heroes), cavalry forts (F Troop), high schools (Room 222), a convent (The Flying Nun), and a spy agency (Get Smart). The nuclear family nevertheless kept on trucking in the sixties, from Dick Van Dyke to Peyton Place, missing the occasional parent (Doris Day, Julia, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and The Partridge Family), adding the occasional animal (Mister Ed, Gentle Ben, Flipper, and The Monkees) and the occasional monster (The Munsters, The Addams Family). But nobody on the small screen smoked pot, dropped acid, seized a college building, burned down a ghetto, or fragged a Bilko in ’Nam.
As Wally and Phil were exceptions in the fifties, That Girl was the exception of the sixties, with Marlo Thomas as a wage-earning alternative to Donna Reed, Ann Sothern, and Gidget. That Girl made it possible in the seventies for a mysteriously single Mary Tyler Moore to have a career and even sex; for Diana Rigg, briefly, to be divorced; and for Bea Arthur’s Maude to have the first and the last abortion on a prime-time series till Picket Fences in 1994. (Even so, marriage and childbirth still goosed ratings. As it had been for a raucous Lucy and a bewitched Samantha, delivering babies in the fifties and the sixties, so it was for Rhoda’s wedding in 1974, and so it would be for Murphy Brown’s baby Avery in 1992.) Mary, Valerie Harper, Linda Lavin, Cloris Leachman, Karen Valentine, Sandy Duncan, Loni Anderson, Penny Marshall, and Cindy Williams found surrogate families in the seventies on radio and at TV stations, in dress shops, ad agencies, law firms, acting studios, beer halls, and consumer groups, as did Hal Linden at a police station, Gabe Kaplan at a high school, Dick Van Dyke on a soap, Bob Newhart in group therapy, and Alan Alda in Korea. Not that the family burden didn’t remain primarily nuclear: All in the Family, Good Times, Happy Days, Benson, The Jeffersons, and Mork & Mindy. Briefly, even Don Rickles came home from his ad agency to a wife and child who pretended to want him. But there were at least more working women, more black faces, and some fallout. As Maude faced up to abortion, and M*A*S*H to war, and Good Times to heroin, All in the Family sought to “cauterize” bigotry with taboo-busting incantations of “spic,” “coon,” “dago,” “hebe,” and “fairy.”
So, I said, television is catching up with America. And because everybody in Ojai is afraid of our keynote speaker, Germaine Greer, all we have talked about, so far, is what this means for women. And certainly—if we duck our heads in order not to see the network movies whose only premise is a female menaced, in a lonely bedroom late at night in an empty suburban house, in a stalled car on the deserted road in a surprise monsoon, in a telephone booth on a mean city street in a problematic neighborhood, in a high-rise elevator or, especially, the underground parking garage—the women we see on TV more closely resemble the women we meet in the world than they used to: Instead of Harriet Nelson, Jane Wyatt, Barbara Billingsley, Betty Furness, Grandma Moses, the Miltown tranquilizer, or a White Tornado, they remind us of Annie Oakley, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Next year in Burbank: Antigone.
But what about men? Why is it on sitcom television, between, say, Robert Young and The Waltons, that the American father is so generally a mishap, such a Dagwood Bumstead antihero sandwich? From Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy, Stu Erwin in The Trouble with Father, Ozzie Nelson in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, William Bendix in The Life of Riley, Charles Farrell in My Little Margie, and Danny Thomas in Make Room for Daddy, to Carroll O’Connor in All in the Family, Tom Bosley in Happy Days, John Amos in Good Times, Sherman Hemsley in The Jeffersons, and Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son, the Sitcom Dad can’t lace up the shoe on the foot in his mouth without falling off his rocker, into contumely.
According to the theater, we are James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. According to the movies, we have devolved from Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird to Charles Bronson in Death Wish. According to the men among our novelists, well, from Melville and Twain and Henry James to Malamud, Mailer, and Vonnegut, they’ve been either silent or evasive. Faulkner violently engaged the generations, but his children were flowering curses, clocks wired to bombs. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were bright little boys to the bitter end, waving wooden swords. (Who knew from Gatsby or Tender Is the Night that Scott was writing such splendid letters to his daughter? Only after Papa ate a gun would he worry, in a posthumous novel, about what fathers do to sons.) In Updike, a child is for feeling guilty about after a father commits adultery. Bellow’s no help. Both Eliot Nailles, in Cheever’s Bullet Park, and Robert Slocum, in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, commute to dispiriting jobs in New York from homes in exurban Connecticut to which they’ve removed their families to spare them the frightful city. Slocum’s boy stops talking to him: “He used to have dreams, he said, in which the door to our room was closed and he could not get in to see us. Now I have dreams that the door to his room is closed, and I can’t get in to see him.” Tony Nailles goes to bed and won’t get up: “I just feel terribly sad.” Neither father can protect either son—from what, exactly? From Dad, perhaps: so fearful of failure that he secretes it. Failure is his homespun art.
Anyway, the next morning at Ojai, we were asked in our T-group by the “facilitator” with the kindly voice and the gentle beard to close our eyes and talk about our sex lives. What? Yes. Well: very nice filigree work in the church. After which, three of the very best writers in the sitcom business, James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, and Ed Weinberger, fresh from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Lou Grant, and Taxi, on their way to The Cosby Show, Alf, The Simpsons, and The Critic, ganged up on an NBC vice-president for broadcast standards (a censor). Brooks had heard that any script submitted to NBC touching in any way on the subject of homosexuality was sent by the net for vetting to a gay dentist in New Jersey. Could that possibly be true? Not true, the veep replied: In New Jersey, he may once upon a time have been a dentist, but he was now a psychotherapist. We stared for a while at the clouds in our coffee. Then Weinberger waggled a hand. “You mean,” he said, “you mean… there really is a Tooth Fairy?”
The point here is not to stamp one’s foot at a wisecrack that may be offensive to gays, or to dentists, or to New Jersey. When push comes to shove, at Stonewall or on Rodeo Drive, Brooks, Burns, and Weinberger are likely more liberal than the rest of us NIMBYs and certainly more fun to talk to, even in a T-group, than most of the people you meet at a New York literary cocktail party, obsessing about real estate. The point is, this is what sitcom writers do. They turn everything, even censorship, into wisecracks. It should not surprise us that Diane English and Jerry Seinfeld turned O.J.’s white Ford Bronco into a sight gag in the fall of 1994. Can you imagine what the gang at Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows—Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen—would have done to O.J.? To Michael Jackson? To a John Wayne Bobbitt? Or, for that matter, to Woody, Mia, and Soon-yi? That’s what they get those big bucks for and why Chekhov doesn’t. From Cheers did you really expect the loneliness of the long-distance runner or a goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick? From Home Improvement, a class-action suit against the Ford Motor Company for exploding Pinto gas tanks? The surprise ought not to be that nothing under our sun is safe from the trivializing one-liner. The surprise is that, every once in a sitcom while, there is actually something new under that sun, like Hawkeye’s nervous breakdown in an episode of M*A*S*H; or Judd Hirsch on Taxi falling in love with the radio voice of an obese dispatcher and learning just how thin our culture is, how starved for sympathy; or Jane Curtin’s discovering late in Kate & Allie’s run what it felt like to be homeless; or Tim Reid on Frank’s Place taking the paper bag test to see if his skin color was light enough for membership in the New Orleans men’s club; or Dixie Carter on Designing Women opening her mouth to deliver an impassioned aria on Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas; or Roseanne opening her mouth to kiss Mariel Hemingway.
A decade passed before I dared again to leave the house for another conference, this time at Brown University in Providence on “The Changing American Family.” There’s no reason why I couldn’t have repeated the same growl about dumb dads—Know-It-Alls are invited to summit meetings in order to repeat themselves and secure a niche; it’s like performance art—updated, maybe, with a new emphasis on “the single father epidemic.” While single fathers have always been around on network television, more often widowed than divorced, from My Little Margie, The Rifleman, and Brave Eagle in the fifties; to My Three Sons, Bonanza, and The Andy Griffith Show in the sixties; to Nanny and the Professor, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Sanford and Son, and Hello Larry in the seventies, they had seemed in the eighties to undergo a fruit-fly proliferation—Benson, Coach, Empty Nest, Silver Spoons, You Again, Rags to Riches, Dads, My Two Dads, Paradise, Free Spirit, Raising Miranda, I Married Dora, and First Impressions. (The odd trend would spill over into the nineties with Blossom, City, Uncle Buck, American Dreamer, Sunday Dinner, It Had to Be You, Second Half, Me and the Boys, Daddy’s Girls, and The Critic). What could this possibly mean? Although divorce was catching up to death as an excuse for single fatherhood, and many of these dads at least had rudimentary nurturing skills, the facts were out of whack. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 25 percent of all children in the Real America lived with single parents in 1989. But in this same Real America 89 percent of all those single parents were women. Moreover, 57 percent of the children who lived with single parents were black and 32 percent Hispanic. Whereas, in TV America, more than 90 percent of all the Little People with just a single Big One in the backyard bomb shelter seemed to be yogurt-colored.
It would also have been necessary to face up to the two most important television fathers of the eighties, neither bearing much resemblance to reality for the rest of us. One, of course, was Bill Cosby. Cosby had originally proposed a blue-collar sitcom. ABC turned him down. He then upwardly mobilized the concept to white-collar professional, starring himself as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, an obstetrician practicing out of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone; Phylicia Rashad as Clair, his lawyer wife who left that home to toil nobly every day for Legal Aid; and five children for whom a wise, if sarcastic, dad would always be there, whether they wanted him or not. ABC turned that down, too. NBC was shrewder.
The other important father of the eighties was Edward Woodward as Robert McCall, in The Equalizer: a retired intelligence agent who set up shop, in a Manhattan apartment to die for, as a last-resort detective, bodyguard, and avenging angel, doing good as a way of doing penance for his nasty past in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. While McCall’s relations with his own son, Scott, were strained, it was amazing how often the children of strangers in trouble happened on his classified newspaper ad and left desperate messages on his answering machine. To which messages he invariably responded. This was post-Freudian and deeply satisfying: the mythic father all children wish for and none of us has ever had, or ever will have, who promises to protect us from the Dark Side—exactly like Ronald Reagan.
But not many of us work at home in such agreeable neighborhoods as Brooklyn Heights with friends like Stevie Wonder, B. B. King, and the Count Basie Band to drop in. Even fewer of us are guilt-stricken intelligence operatives, any more than we are a Captain Ahab or the Lone Ranger, which is why we watch television instead of leading insurrections. We don’t even work for ad agencies. We are, like an Al Bundy and a Homer Simpson, less thrilling. Not old enough yet for a reptilian retirement in Florida, we seem never to have been as young as the demographically desirable NYPNS (Neat Young People in Neat Situations), DINKS (Double Income, No Kids), or what the mystery novelist David Handler calls YUSHIES (Young Urban Shitheads). Did I really have to think about Yup instead of fatherhood? Of course I did. As a professional critic, it was my zeitgeist duty to think about whatever the crybaby boomers were thinking about, which was always their conflicted, Y-person selves. As a guy said to a gal in the TV movie Bare Essentials: “The only food-gathering you’ve ever done is at a salad bar.”
For instance: thirtysomething. Sensitive Jewish Michael and supermom Hope and bearded Elliot and blonde Nancy and red-haired Melissa and long-haired Gary and careerist Ellyn felt bad every Tuesday night from 1987 to 1991 about children, adultery, Thanksgiving, computers, and the sixties. Growing up hurts so much you want to suck your big toe. They rode their anxieties, like Melissa’s Exercycle. Or wore them, like Hope’s Princeton T-shirt. They played parent the way they played mud volleyball or laser tag. For all the smart talk, their frontal lobes seemed full of video rentals instead of books or politics; medium tepid instead of Big Chill. They were as lukewarm and secondhand in their erotic fantasies as in their attitudinizing, as if they’d bought the whole Xerox package of other people’s prefab experiences already market-tested by Michael and Elliot at, of course, their ad agency. There was no true north in them, nor any bravery.
Who needed this in my living room? I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money; gaudy balloons of avarice and ego tethered by their red suspenders to all that’s trendiest, waiting with twenty-four-carat coke spoons for Tom Wolfe or Dave Letterman. By day this block belonged to barbers, dry cleaners, shoemakers, and locksmiths. But at night, in the sports bars, pubs, and ethnic restaurants, the Y-people bloomed like henbane or belladonna and you heard their wounded wail: “Gimme, gimme.” For their many sins, they had been punished on a Black Monday with the stock market crash of October 1987. But they’d forgiven themselves and promptly risen, almost the very next night, with an hour of prime-time television of their very own, like a platinum American Express card.
Why was thirtysomething such a popular success and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd a network flop, shuffled off to cult status on Lifetime cable? Wasn’t Blair Brown a boomer, too, eating Chinese, teaching piano, listening to rockabilly in a West Side apartment building where the elevator never quite properly stopped to meet the floor, as Molly never quite met life at the proper angle? But Molly was a poet, divorced from a jazz musician. And worked in a bookshop, where D. H. Lawrence was actually spoken. And then at a publishing house, where she wasn’t on the best-seller fast track. And dated, instead of an account executive or a pork-belly future, a black cop, whose name was Nathaniel Hawthorne. And was lusted after by her own psychiatrist, who happened also to be female. And went out after work to night school and museums instead of sports bars. A brave and baffled Molly made her own experiences. You’d never catch her in silk jacquards, tapered Lord & Taylor tunics, tobacco-suede Euforia boots, and Lady Datejust Oyster Perpetuals, eating steamed skate and pumpkin seeds on Columbus Avenue, smelling like the guts of a sperm whale. And yet the television culture disdained her almost as much as it had disdained Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard as storefront lawyers in Sara, or the Linda Kelsey who had quit the rat race to teach preschoolers in Day by Day.
However, by the time I got to Providence I was a humbler and chastened Know-Only-Some-of-It. In Kyoto, in front of Takanobu’s Portrait of Taira no Shigemori, a Japanese scholar told André Malraux that “You want to be in the painting, whereas we want to be outside it. European painting has always wanted to catch the butterflies, eat the flowers, and sleep with the dancers.” As if television were my European painting, I had spent a good portion of the eighties alone in my house, wanting to catch, eat, and dance with those butterflies, flowers, and dancers. I was hitting bottom, and then in the beginning stages of a recovery from alcoholism. Never mind the horror stories about hospitals and estrangement. You have already seen their equivalent, if not in your own lives, then certainly in the TV movies: a wife hiding out in a West Side loft, with her spices and her afghan; the children in exile in Madison, Prague, and Taipei; the X-rays, EKGs, and CAT scans; the old people who seemed, in their tatty bathrobes, to be practicing a martial art on the lawn each morning and the young people of the adolescent wing who roamed in packs at night in their fluted Ionian deathgowns; the withdrawal dreams of basilisks, scorpions, and ravens’ heads; of peacock tails and Pontic rhubarb. In Saul Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak one character asks another: “Uncle, how do you picture death—what’s your worst-case scenario for death?” Uncle replies: “Well, from the very beginning there have been pictures—inside and outside. And for me the worst that can happen is that those pictures will stop.”
When I came back from the hospital to an empty house, television no longer seemed an upstart medium, amusing in its presumption, about which to sermonize and smarty-pant. There were, to be sure, the video cassettes that arrived now by messenger and express mail, the same size and as self-important as the books I spent the other half of my professional life reviewing. I no longer had to leave the house and visit the networks and wait around in darkened anterooms for a member of the appropriate craft union to replace a cartridge and punch up a preview tape. I had only to consult the clock of my convenience, settle my fragile self in front of the VCR, and, like a car alarm, anticipate being burgled. But tape was not enough, nor was there enough tape, to fill all the holes in my apprehension. I needed TV in a different way. And it was like looking through the window of a washing machine during a spin-dry cycle, at tumbles of bras and socks, at twisted arms and severed heads. I was, suddenly, watching TV as a civilian. I fell into it, as if to water bed. After a decade of passing out and coming to, I couldn’t sleep at all. Like some Aztec Mother Serpent, my metabolism was shucking skins. There are only so many books and tapes a pair of eyes can read or watch, so many words a pair of hands can process, so many walks a pair of feet can plod, around the block or to a meeting. At those amazing meetings, in an underground network of church basements, over the cardboard cups of lousy coffee in a blue smog of cigarette smoke, we told each other stories to get us through the night. These many stories were really merely one, about a lost child in a black forest of bad chemicals.
None of this was television’s fault. But enough of it showed up on television to suggest to a disordered mind, if not coincidence or causality, at least an eerie series of correspondences, a hanging-together of related metaphors as the metaphors had bunched up in, say, Nahuatl poetry, or Roman and Gothic worldviews, among Mings and Renaissance Florentines. So I watched Hill Street Blues not only because it was the best TV series of the eighties and not even because Daniel J. Travanti as Frank Furillo and Joe Spano as Henry Goldblume had assumed the Alan Alda Hawkeye role model of the New Man Who Has Non-Predatory Feelings, but because Furillo was a recovering alcoholic, and when Kiel Martin’s LaRue finally got himself to an AA meeting, there was Frank already in The Rooms. I watched Cagney & Lacey, not only because such a partnership of class-conscious fast-talking street-smart feminists was so singular as to have become Gloria Steinem’s favorite show, nor because anyone could have guessed that Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in New York would make Thelma and Louise imaginable in Hollywood, but because Chris Cagney so obviously had a drinking problem, and when she finally got around to doing something about it after her father’s death, the series dogged her every step of the difficult way, all twelve of them. Toward the end of the decade, while I liked everything else about Murphy Brown, its breezy nonchalance on the matter of Murphy’s drinking ticked me off, as if alcoholism were another of her quirks or cranks. In the pilot, Murphy was just back from Betty Ford. Thereafter at Phil’s she drank designer water. One New Year’s Eve, subtracting scotch, she was minus a sense of humor. Otherwise the flagrant behaviors of her drinking days were recalled by her officemates as comic romps. So much for recovery. It’s as easy as having a baby, if you forget about both for weeks at a time. And having a baby, of course, was another half-baked, unbright idea that occurred to Murphy’s writers and shouldn’t have, not for fear of ruffling Dan Quayle’s indignant feathers but because even the sleepiest of us knows a real-world Murphy would have aborted. Compare such glibness to the gallows-humor sitcom fashioned for the nineties by John Larroquette—Under the Volcano with Barney Miller’s laugh track—from his own experience of bottoms and recovery, which partook of memory, process, and duration.
On the other trembling hand it was hard for me to watch either Cheers or St. Elsewhere. I needed never again to be in bars or hospitals: those dreamlike Easter Islands, with their long-eared priest-kings, their birdman cults, their ancestor worship, their megalithic petroglyphs, those great stone faces under black-rock top hats on Cubist penguins with their goofy, abstract, Bob Hope look. For the only time in my life, I sounded even to myself like Goethe: “How dare a man have a sense of humor when he considers his immense burden of responsibilities toward himself and others? I have no wish to pass censure on the humorists. After all, does one have to have a conscience? Who says so?” But whatever a Jackie Gleason drank on stage in the fifties and a Dean Martin in the sixties and seventies, it wasn’t funny, as Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke, Susan Saint James, and Don Johnson had strobelit reason to know.
Obviously, this is no way to review television. You have to watch St. Elsewhere so that you will be prepared when some of the same writers come up with Homicide: Life on the Streets, as you have to watch A Year in the Life to understand where Northern Exposure and I’ll Fly Away came from. But it is also an important way that civilians do watch television, as if by periscope under the heavy water of our own vagrant needs and monomaniacal compulsions, down where we are bottom-feeding like octopods on the fluffy bacteria and tube worms of everything we feel bad about, all those thermal vents in a problematic self. While I was reading and reviewing Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Don DeLillo, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Kobo Abe, and Cynthia Ozick, I was afraid of Cheers. What if I were coming home from teaching English as a second language in an overcrowded public school, or an assembly-line factory job, or milking cows and greasing tractors? What if after a hostile takeover, leveraged buyout, or obsolesence, I hadn’t a job at all? Or grew up uncertain of my sexual identity? Or was running out my string in a geriatric gulag where, like a rhododendron, I was misted twice a day? Or were poor, black, gay, Inuit, Rosicrucian, or a mixed grill of the above? What then would I require of television? How would it, all unwitting, muddle with that mind?
Years ago, when my daughter was five, together we watched The Littlest Angel, a Christmas special about a shepherd boy who dies, goes to heaven, returns briefly to earth to collect his box of favorite things, and then gives that box to God (E. G. Marshall) as a birthday gift for the Christ child. While I remember objecting to the idea of all that polishing and vacuuming in heaven (the Protestant ethic of drudgery even unto afterlife), The Littlest Angel seemed otherwise harmless. Not so to my daughter. First, when the shepherd boy looked around at the other angelic gifts, he was so ashamed of his, he tried to hide it. God, of course, noticed. “God is sneaky,” my daughter said. “He can see around corners. He’d never lose at hide-and-seek.” Next, after the program, she burst into tears and couldn’t sleep. It took me an hour to find out what upset her so. She had noticed that when the little boy returns to retrieve his box of favorite things, his parents can’t see or hear him. That must be what death is.
We hadn’t watched the same program. I couldn’t protect her from The Littlest Angel; no one protected me from The Yearling. Childhood isn’t Sesame Street, nor adulthood sitcoms. Suppose Amy hadn’t eventually graduated from The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and the afternoon soaps she taped all through college, to trade in her prurient preoccupation with Jim Morrison of the Doors for an equally obsessive crush on Martin Luther and become a doctoral candidate in Reformation history? Suppose, instead, she had turned into a professor of American Studies at Hampshire College, like Susan J. Douglas. Douglas published in 1994 a remarkable meditation on growing up female with the mass media, Where the Girls Are, in which she watched the same TV programs, went to the same films, read the same magazines, and listened to the same music as every other alert munchkin. Through her eyes, what sort of television culture do we see? She had to wait a long time, from Molly Goldberg and Alice Kramden, for a Joyce Davenport. Why did Stephanie Zimbalist need a “Remington Steele” in the first place? What is a young girl being told by Queen for a Day, The Newlywed Game, June Cleaver, Elly May Clampett, and Lily Munster? By Connie Stevens as Cricket in Hawaiian Eye and Diane McBain as Daphne in Surfside Six? By Police Woman and Wonder Woman and Bionic Woman? There’s nothing abstract about Douglas’s gratitude to NBC News for Liz Trotta, Norma Quarles, and Aline Saarinen, nor her celebration of Kate & Allie, Cagney & Lacey, China Beach, and Designing Women. While I saw The Equalizer as a Superdad, Douglas resented him as a collector of wounded women. While I was admiring a bionic Lindsay Wagner for her lioness graces, the violin string of restless intelligence that refined the shadows and planes of her good-bones face, Douglas deplored the dumbing-down of “liberation” into narcissism: Buns of Steel! On the other hand, while I disdained Charlie’s Angels as a harem fantasy (except for Kate Jackson, the Thinking Angel with a whiskey rasp of a voice, the Lauren Bacall–Blythe Danner erotic croak), Douglas identified with a trio of adventurous and resourceful young women who saved themselves and each other while occasionally cross-dressing.
Periscopes! Like God and television, we see around corners. In the popular culture, we all play hide-and-go-seek. We find our models in the oddest places: a glint here, a shadow there, a scruple, a qualm, some style and attitude. Douglas reminds us that pop culture is more than TV. She found an abundance of possible selves in music: in the Shirelles and Cyndi Lauper; in Joan Baez, Diana Ross, and Janis Joplin; in Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, and Madonna. But also at the movies with Joan Crawford and the Hepburns (Kate in Pat and Mike, Audrey as Holly Golightly); in books by Pearl Buck, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Susan Brownmiller; in sports, with Billie Jean King, and in politics with Shirley Chisholm. And so was the enemy everywhere. To save her own sanity, Douglas had to swim out from under magazines like Cosmo, Seventeen, Glamour, and Redbook; from Revlon and Victoria’s Secret; from Mary Poppins, James Bond, and biker movies; from Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, liposuction, and Ultra Slim-Fast.
To which we might add a Whole Earth Catalog of other shadows on our blameless childhoods. As much as the fifties were I Love Lucy, Howdy Doody, and Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap, or Dick Nixon and Charles Van Doren in prime-time tears, they were also Korea and Peanuts, Marilyn Monroe and Rosa Parks, Joe Stalin and atom-bomb air-raid drills, Joe McCarthy and polio, hula hoops and Grace Kelly, Levittown and Ralph Ellison, Edsels and Sputniks, Castros and Barbies. (From M. G. Lord’s 1994 “unauthorized biography” of that doll, Forever Barbie, we would learn that Mattel Corporation practically invented the advertising of children’s toys on television in 1955, committing most of its entire net worth of five hundred thousand dollars to commercials for a jack-in-a-box, a Burp Gun, and a Uke-A-Doodle on The Mickey Mouse Club, paving the way for Mortal Kombat.) Instead of Barbie, I had a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring with a color snapshot of the mushroom cloud, available in the late forties from General Mills for a couple of Kix cereal box tops. I also loved those horror comics that so alarmed congressional committees and psychiatrists like Dr. Frederic Wertham in the early fifties, as if they’d never heard of Grimm’s fairy tales. Nowadays, we only pay attention to cartoons if they show up on TV, like The Simpsons on Fox or Beavis and Butt-head on MTV. We haven’t noticed, at the candy store or the head shop, Swamp Things, Freak Brothers, the Flaming Carrot, Reid Fleming (World’s Toughest Milkman), Elektrassassin (Cold War Beast), Dr. Manhattan (the Princeton physicist who fusions himself into a human hydrogen bomb) or Love and Rockets (lesbians who wear combat boots and speak barrio Spanish). Plus any number of musclebound acid-heads into the superheroics for the money, the sex, the violence, the publicity, and the chance to dress up in their underwear.
For that matter, as much as the sixties may have been about Dylan and Joplin and Vietnam, they were also about Blow Up, Kurt Vonnegut, and Twiggy. As the seventies were about disco and the eighties about AIDS. Think of jet planes and birth control pills, of drive-ins and drive-bys, of transistors and malls. As Billy Joel once explained: “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
This much can still be said for our troubled culture: the sexual abuse of children not only turns the stomach and breaks the heart; it wounds the soul as well. It can’t be figured according to any ordinary moral arithmetic. The violation of a child also violates our fundamental notions of ourselves as guardians, what we owe to the innocent and defenseless, how we feel about family and authority, who we want and need to be. Faced with such violation, our helplessness is both a personal nightmare and a subversion of the social fabric. We want to avert our eyes. No wonder Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed was published for decades without Stavrogin’s confession.
Something About Amelia started it on television, in 1984, with Glenn Close as the incredulous mother, Roxanne Zal as the abused daughter, and Ted Danson, already two years into Cheers, as the father who promised never, ever, to do it again. But between Something About Amelia and the close of the 1980s an odd thing happened. In spite of facts we knew perfectly well—acts of domestic violence occur every fifteen seconds; 4 percent of American families are abusive to children; almost 3 million cases of suspected child abuse were reported in 1992; more than a third of American girls are sexually molested, usually by men they trust—the focus on television somehow shifted from family to strangers. And so did the blame except insofar as parents were at fault for entrusting their children to these strangers. Especially culpable were moms who insisted on punching a clock or playing tennis when they should have been home with their angelfood cupcakes—unless of course they were welfare mothers, who didn’t deserve children. (Although we can’t ever prove anything about pop culture and the zeitgeist, we can at least point to a correspondence between this new network emphasis and the great porn scare, the Christian fundamentalist backlash, homophobia, “victimology,” and a Reagan-Bush antifeminist agenda.) Amelia’s own Ted Danson was part of the shift, when he coproduced a 1986 TV version of Jonathan Kellerman’s novel When the Bough Breaks, starring himself as the child psychologist who tracked down and smashed a ring of well-heeled, politically connected pedophiles. Suddenly, as in I Know My First Name Is Steven, kidnapping made a comeback. Or, in Judgment (1990), the Roman Catholic Church was accused in court of covering up for a Louisiana priest who’d seduced altar boys (“We’re going to sue God!” exulted Jack Warden), as the mother church and Canadian provincial government itself would go on trial in The Boys of St. Vincent miniseries (1994). Worst of all in these paranoia sweepstakes, in both Do You Know the Muffin Man? (1989) and Unspeakable Acts (1990), preschool day-care centers were nests of pedophilic vipers. Behind Tiny Tot’s locked doors at afternoon naptime…
But the revised emphasis elsewhere was on the barbarians who cruised outside the gates. I Know My First Name Is Steven, the 1989 NBC miniseries, was a very Grimm fairy tale at the end of which everybody was eaten up by guilt instead of wolves. (What are fairy tales, anyway, if not coded fables of child abuse?) In real life, a dreamy and troubled seven-year-old Steven Stayner was kidnapped in 1972, on his way home from school in Merced, California. In real life, in motels and shacks all over northern California, he was sexually abused. In real life, he escaped seven years later and only when his captor stole another little boy. And in real life, he couldn’t go home again. He wasn’t the same boy, his family wasn’t the same family, and the very idea of “home” had been violated. TV told this savage story without a fabric softener. As Steven’s father, John Ashton was all but destroyed by bewilderment. As Steven’s mother, Cindy Pickett found you can’t love somebody back to health. As Parnell, the horn-rimmed, chain-smoking kidnapper, Arliss Howard was a soft-spoken monster with delusions of divine afflatus. As teenaged Steven, Corin Nemec came back to Merced a self-blaming wild boy. By devoting as much time to what happened after his homecoming as to the abduction, I Know My First Name Is Steven did the uncompromising work of art. It was as if Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun had gone on to tell us the future of the blank-eyed boy who survived the war. Steven’s kidnapping seems to have corrupted everybody. They didn’t know how to feel about what they would rather not imagine. It’s not just that the Brothers Grimm taught us to fear Black Forests, nor that we have always been fascinated by tales of wild boys raised by wolves, as we’ve been fascinated since the start of our country by the captivity narratives of children stolen by Indians and of slaves in the Middle Passage; and, since late in the nineteenth century, by Freud’s seduction theory; and, since the middle of the twentieth, by death-camp horrors. Family itself is a kind of ecology, an interdependence of organisms in an environment. No matter how arbitrary that environment is, the organism adjusts or dies. People, unfortunately, can adjust to almost anything, and yet hate our own adaptations. Like Steven, we may not forgive ourselves. It’s one thing to tell our children not to talk to strangers. It’s another if the child is a stranger, to us and to himself.
Even scarier, because more artful, was The Boys of St. Vincent. Just minutes into the first hour of a nightmare miniseries about an orphanage in Newfoundland in the 1970s, the janitor tells the superintendent: “There are things in life that are broken and can’t be fixed.” Halfway through, what’s broken beyond fixing has come to include the little boys abused by the All Saints Brothers and the very idea of accountability. The police suppress a report of their investigation. The Church and the Ministry of Justice conspire at a cover-up. Brother Lavin, who insisted that his “special boy” call him “Mother,” is permited to leave both the Church and Newfoundland for Montreal where he will father children of his own. When I first saw The Boys of St. Vincent, at a screening of Banff Television Festival prize-winners, most Canadians hadn’t. Its broadcast up north had been delayed until the conclusion of the trial in the case that inspired director John N. Smith, who cowrote the script with producer Sam Grana and poet Des Welsh. More than a legal nicety, this delay seemed a scruple. So powerful was the film, trapped in dream-speed, drugged with menace, painterly yet visceral, you wanted to lay about you with an ax. So mesmerizing was Henry Czerny as Lavin, handsome, even dashing, princely but satanic, that you saw him in your cutthroat mirror like an evil eye. So corrupt were the agencies charged with protecting these abandoned boys, for whom there was neither appeal nor meaning, that you felt orphaned yourself: bereft. Part I was medieval: Never mind the telephone or the swimming pool where a ten-year-old discovered what being Brother Lavin’s special boy really meant. At St. Vincent’s, 1975 could be 1275, all passion and agony in a gothic vault of skeletal shafts, stained glass, and morbid candles; gargoyles and Gregorian chants. With a crucifix slung in the belt like a cudgel, in cassocks like black sails, the brothers patrolled corridors and tucked-in barracks beds as if they were cowboy Templars. Obedience had nothing whatever to do with God; power was sickly erotic; the only gravity was despair. Part II jumped to 1990: We met the damaged boys grown up around their wounds, and their corruptors at bay in the headlines. The modern imagination tried to come to grips with age-old evil in the distinctively modern manner, with a courtroom trial, a royal commission, a psychiatrist, and a call-in radio talk show. But the mind fell down like a torn black kite. So much for Boys Town.
No such art, but similar fears, applied to Do You Know the Muffin Man? and Unspeakable Acts. Until Muffin Man, we had not seen on television so many children so vilely used, so numb and inward, so trapped in shame, so disbelieved by so many adults, so tormented by their peers, so ridiculed on cross-examination by a hateful defense attorney. Nor had we experienced to such an excruciating degree the corresponding powerlessness of parents unequipped to make “the bad thing” all right, cancel it out, even to exact revenge. At a preschool, of all places… the hooded figures, burning candles, and pornographic Polaroids. About the “satanic” component of Muffin Man—the magic names (Virgo, Isis) and murdered rabbits, the bloody altars and black-mass pentagrams—I expressed some reservations in a magazine article in October 1989. But this was the lazy agnosticism of the armchair critic. You make reservations, but never actually go anywhere. Besides, had not Muffin Man been “inspired” by a “true” story? Hadn’t we already read in the papers about similar cases of “ritual abuse” in Los Angeles, El Paso, and the Bronx?
Three months after the murdered bunny rabbits in Muffin Man on CBS came a dead chicken in Unspeakable Acts on ABC. As chickens go, this dead one was a red herring, introduced early in a TV movie “based on” accusations of child abuse at a day-care center in Dade County, Florida, and then dropped before the trial, as if a Chicken Little in Burbank were having second thoughts. I certainly was. We were asked to believe the children, which ought to have been easy. After all, they accused Gregory Sierra, who had brought with him to the TV movie all those bad vibes from his many lowlife roles on Miami Vice. But looking at the therapists who coached the children in their testimony, the screen got smaller. It was impossible not to suspect the therapists themselves of something ulterior: Brad Davis, with his self-righteous little blond ponytail, and Jill Clayburgh, on some sort of Simone Weil starvation diet, seemed almost to slither, in thrall to an extraterrestrial music. Their eyes glistened, as if from esoteric rite. They were… creepy.
We’ve come to an interesting intersection of television and other American cultures. The Movie of the Week (MOW) had not, of course, invented alcoholism, cancer, wife-beating, child abuse, madness, murder, or rape. On the other hand, although we lack the helpful statistics, it’s hard not to imagine that a steady diet of such movies encouraged more Americans to report intimate crimes; leave abusive homes; go into therapy and twelve-step programs; petition courts, legislatures, and the media for redress of grievance; feel anxious and speak bitterness and sue. Because MOWs as a genre tend to emphasize the vulnerability of women and children, they also doubtless contributed by feedback loop to what critics came to characterize as a “victim psychology” and “political correctness.” (Amazing really that sensitivity to other people’s pain should somehow turn into a whole new rhetoric of ridicule, as if empathy and old-fashioned “knee-jerk liberalism” were any threat to the paychecks, perks, and power games of a muscular patriarchy; as if feeling bad on behalf of the aggrieved were simultaneously lily-livered and totalitarian. Or even worse: un-hip; less than way-cool.) But in the related hysterias about incest and satanic ritual abuse, television was far behind the cultural curve, so late it was out of any loop.
We first heard about ritual child abuse in February 1984, when newspapers, radio, and TV excitedly reported accusations that for two decades teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach had tortured and raped small children and killed their bunny rabbits. (Bunnies were to ritual abuse scenarios of the 1980s what black helicopters would become for right-wing militia fantasies in the 1990s.) That spring, in Jordan, Minnesota, there were twenty-four arrests for membership in a kiddie-porn sex ring said to murder babies, drink their blood, and toss their corpses into a river. In April, a janitor and three teachers at Chicago’s Rogers Park Day Care Center were accused of boiling and eating babies. In May, in Reno, a Montessori day school was shut down on account of satanic rites and a “naked movie star game.” In Memphis in June, a teacher’s aide and a Baptist minister at the Georgian Hills Early Childhood Center were brought up on charges of sexual assault and animal sacrifice. All that summer, from Malden, Massachusetts, to Sacramento, California, from West Point to Miami, hysteria spread. According to Satan’s Silence, an angry account of “the Making of a Modern American Witch-Hunt” by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995), accusations of ritual abuse triggered criminal cases in more than a hundred communities between 1983 and 1987. On the one hand, forks, spoons, screwdrivers, Lego blocks, monster masks, mind-altering drugs, feces-eating, and urine-drinking; on the other, battered-child syndrome, rape-trauma syndrome, child-sexual-abuse-accommodation syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Janet Reno prosecuted the Country Walk case in Dade County, Florida. When Kelly Michaels’s conviction was overturned in 1995, the aspiring actress and part-time worker at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, had already served seven years in prison, with another forty to go, for atrocities that supposedly ranged from licking peanut butter off children’s genitals to playing piano in the nude. As for the case that started it all, after seven years in court and $15 million in expenses, nobody associated with the McMartin Preschool was ever convicted on a single count of anything—not of sodomy, rape, group sex, satanism, or even excessive fondling; not of “Goatman,” the Alligator Game, the ritual murder of a horse with a baseball bat or the cutting off of the floppy ears of bunny rabbits and making munchkins drink their blood, much less membership in what the media had called “a nationwide conspiracy of pedophiles in day-care centers.”
The counterattack actually began on television. In 1990, in the churchgoing community of Edenton, North Carolina (population five thousand), seven defendants at the Little Rascals day-care center were charged on 429 separate counts of abusing children with knives, forks, scissors, needles, and hammers. Public-TV producer Ofra Bikel went to Edenton and talked, on camera, to almost everybody—accused, accusers, relatives, neighbors, lawyers, therapists, even many of the children named in the indictments—and the result was a 1991 Frontline documentary, “Innocence Lost,” that won not only an Emmy and the Columbia University–Alfred I. duPont Silver Baton but also scared the hell out of those of us who had been predisposed throughout the eighties to believe whatever children said or whatever their therapists had coached them to say. After a mixed bag of guilty verdicts in 1993, Bikel returned to Edenton for another batch of interviews and to Frontline with a four-hour reconstruction, overview, and cry of rage. After the first program, it’s amazing anyone in North Carolina would talk to her again, but most just couldn’t help themselves, including a judge with hindsight doubts and five troubled members of the jury that sent Bob Kelly, the co-owner of Little Rascals, to prison for twelve consecutive life sentences.
Because of Ofra Bikel, We the Jury know more than the actual jury did about Edenton as a frazzled community, about social-service agencies with their own agendas, about cops wanting to close an ugly case, about psychiatrists with ego investments, about similar cases falling apart in other states, and even about jury irregularities in Edenton itself. To our watching, we bring some history and respond (again, not ignobly) with a visceral rush. We start taking everything personally. For instance, I didn’t much care for the shifty-eyed Kelly. His wife, Betsy, seemed nicer, although she grew old before our eyes. And Betsy’s passionate younger sister, Nancy, was immensely appealing. Whereas Bob’s principal accuser, Jane Mabry, was somehow operatic and ulterior. And many of the parents who turned against the Kellys, including Bob’s lawyer once he was told that his own child might have been a victim, were clearly hysterical. (Well, wouldn’t you be, if you thought for a minute… ?) After which electronic personalizing, we all turn into advocates: No way, looking at such Little Rascals caretakers as Robin Bynum and Dawn Wilson, could we believe either capable of such devil-worship horrors. Hadn’t they been offered a plea bargain, even after the verdict on Bob Kelly? Knowing she was innocent, Wilson rejected such a bargain, and was sentenced to the max. How come? Jurors told Bikel they hadn’t trusted what little there was of medical evidence. (Of physical evidence, there was none.) Nor did they credit certain details of the children’s testimony. (Like Bob shooting babies.) But they took into their deliberations the lurid reports of the therapists, and these had apparently been decisive. Bloodlust, besides, has its own momentum, and so does bad faith. (If Bob was guilty, didn’t Dawn have to be?) And now everybody felt bad.
No one felt worse than Bikel, who refused to let go of her subject. Two years later in April 1995, she returned to Frontline with four more hours on “Divided Memories.” She interviewed dozens of adult “victims” who, after years of “repressing” memories of childhood sexual trauma, “recovered” these memories in therapy. She interviewed members of the families of these “victims.” She quizzed the therapists themselves, careful to sort out differences between hypnosis and “reparenting,” between “reparenting” and “age regression.” She talked to psychologists who blame Freud for having abandoned his seduction theory and to lawyers who are suing everybody, including, to their indignant surprise, the therapists themselves. It turns out that some of these patients “recovered” memories of ritual abuse in previous lives. It also turns out that, if any of these therapists had the slightest doubt whatsoever about the nightmare tales to which they had given such color and shape, they didn’t think factual accuracy really mattered. What the patient felt was all that counted. “Confabulation,” defined by the dictionary in its strictly psychiatric sense as “replacement of a gap in memory by a falsification that the subject accepts as correct,” seems to be contagious—as it had been among teenaged girls in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, and was again among goat-faced Bolsheviks at Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s.
There hadn’t been a more depressing program on television since Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame. Until, that is, May 1995, the very next month, when HBO aired its McMartin docudrama, Indictment. Enter Oliver Stone, executive producer. And Abby and Myra Mann, who wrote an angry script in the best tradition of TV agitprop. And Mick Jackson, directing in the slam-bang take-no-prisoners style of Stone himself. And James Woods as Danny Davis, a lowlife lawyer more accustomed to defending “drug dealers and other scumbags,” who would seem to have ennobled himself by representing three generations of McMartins. And Mercedes Ruehl, as the prosecutor who would do anything to advance the political ambitions of her DA boss. Not to mention a strong supporting cast that included Lolita Davidovich as a therapist who coached the children at their confabulations; Chelsea Field as a member of Ruehl’s team who began to have doubts; Sada Thompson as the grandmother Virginia McMartin; Shirley Knight as her daughter Peggy; and Henry Thomas as her grandson Ray, who forgot sometimes to put on his underwear and was caught with a skin-mag centerfold.
Well, they looked guilty: “Perfect typecasting,” said a prosecutor; “they could be Buchenwald guards.” So what if their accuser was a hysterical alcoholic who may have been covering up for her own abusive husband? So what if the prosecutors neglected to screen the unlicensed therapist’s videotaped interviews with the kids? So what if that therapist misrepresented the contents of those interviews besides sleeping with a tabloid-TV reporter and feeding him pillow-talk scoops? And so what if sad-sack Ray spent five years in jail before getting bail? “A client’s a client,” explained Woods in his Salvador/True Believer raw-meat mode, before he saw beyond the lizard eye of law as usual to the light of a just cause like a moral corona. No medical evidence of any variety of abuse at the McMartin Preschool was ever produced in court, not a single porn Polaroid, not a single sighting of an underground satanic cavern, nor the least residue of hot wax and singed fur. And who was to blame for these witch hunts? According to Indictment: parents, cops, prosecutors, therapists, and the vampire media.
To which list, according to Frederick Crews in two long articles in the New York Review of Books in 1994, we must add Sigmund Freud. An emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews had been hounding in hot pursuit after Freud for years, to punish him for the many sins of a subdivision of literary criticism bent out of shape by psychoanalytic concepts. To be sure, Crews was equally disdainful of Marxist, feminist, structuralist, and postmodern literary criticism—those kaleidoscopic lenses through which the trendier academics are accustomed to peering at every artifact of the culture in order to find it guilty of something. But the “recovered memory” controversy was a chance to up the animus ante. Feminists had an investment in the incidence of incest. Fundamentalist Christians had an investment in the existence of satanic ritual. And therapists had an investment in vulgarized Viennese voodoo. In this conspiracy of true believers, the victims weren’t texts; the victims were families and careers and human rights and common sense—all because of “recovered memory” techniques based on a theory of repression for which, like psychoanalysis as a whole, there was no empirical evidence and, thus, no scientific validation.
We would seem to have strayed from two-dimensional television into a swamp. Well, you can’t watch television, raise children, think about Freud, and fend off Frederick Crews, all at the same time, without starting to suspect that the culture’s constituents connect, collide, and ramify in messy ways, and that interrelatedness may be the normal respiration of intelligence. In May 1996 the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to swatches of wounding memoirs by writers like Susan Cheever, Mary Gordon, Mary Karr, Chang-rae Lee, Leonard Michaels, Joyce Carol Oates, Luc Sante, and Art Spiegelman. The editor of this special issue, James Atlas, seemed mildly susprised to find so much emphasis on dysfunction, alcoholism, incest, and mental illness. He seemed also to blame the contemporary novel, for no longer “delivering the news.” He simply hadn’t been watching much television. He might also have been reading the wrong novels.
When Crews at last published his essays in a book, The Memory Wars, in the fall of 1995, I put on another of my hats, as coeditor of the literary pages of The Nation, and shipped it out for review, along with Satan’s Silence, to an anthropologist at the University of Washington. What we got back from Marilyn Ivy and published that December still strikes me as the sanest take on the topic so far. After synopsizing both books, Ivy used them as booster rockets. So psychoanalysis isn’t scientific? Well, we have known for years “about the tension in Freud between his interpretive modalities and his scientism….” Nevertheless:
Crews’ Popperian valorization of science makes him uncomfortable indeed with ambiguity, not to mention undecidability. He can only imagine two alternatives: that there is real sexual abuse, or that psychotherapists plant false memories of abuse in children’s (or “recovering” adults’) minds. Having foresworn the murky depths of interpretation in favor of the transparent verifiability of science, he has no way to think about phenomena that don’t readily resolve themselves into the stable objects of real science but that remain unstable para-objects: memory, sexuality, desire, and terror. It’s true that we wouldn’t have recovered memory therapy as it is today if Freud hadn’t theorized repression…. [But] we also wouldn’t have had a body of thought, with its still discomfiting assertions of child sexuality and the reality of fantasy, that directly disputes the primitive premises on which that therapy is based.
As Nathan and Snedeker suggest in Satan’s Silence, what is also going on is “the systematic, class-based scapegoating of people who represent the intersection of the public sphere with the (ideally) privatized, sacrosanct sphere of the family: caretakers in day-care centers. In a nation in which an increasing number of women work, with the ongoing fragmentation of the nuclear family… the obsession with the sexual abuse of children in public places reflects widespread moral panic about the breakdown of gendered and generational boundaries.” Ivy continues:
What is clear from the record is that such moral panic could not have occurred without the intense investment in the pristine innocence of the “child” in late twentieth-century America. Recovered memories or no, the insistence on a wholly pure, sexually innocent child—and the terror that the potential defilement of that purity provokes—remains at the very heart of the ritual abuse panic (as well as the adult recovered memory movement). What makes this insistence even more revealing is that it occurs under the immense sexualization of children within consumer capitalism: There is no more charged figure for the seductive and the seducible than the child. The effect of mass media and consumption on children’s sexuality seems rarely remarked in the analysis of abuse cases, and not surprisingly. For to think about the child as a sexual object in capitalism is already to have violated the pristine space that the child must occupy to guarantee the crumbling social order….
Freud, of course, taught us that children are sexual beings. And memories are narrative reconstructions, artful mixtures of event and fantasy. Put into language, they can be deceptive. But equally deceiving are the “rococo paranoia” and “socio-sexual fantasies” of parents, child support services personnel, therapists, law-enforcement officials, district attorneys, and doctors, who so easily imagine midnight masses, devil masks, and rape orgies:
And along with those fantasies, an even stranger and stronger one: that of the untouched child, pristine and unaffected by the capitalized sexuality all around her. It is Nathan and Snedeker’s book that powerfully unmasks this world of specifically American phantasms, in which the terrors of day-care abuse appear as fabulous, perverse displacements of the systematic—satanic?—societal abuse and neglect of millions of real kids.
In March 1996, unattended by any sort of fanfare, in an otherwise routine MOW on ABC called Forgotten Sins, network television came full circle after only six years. John Shea, who had starred as a tough cop convinced his son had been molested at a preschool in the 1989 TV movie that started the whole prime-time craze for ritual abuse, Do You Know the Muffin Man?, also starred in Forgotten Sins, once again as a cop, who this time out was somehow persuaded that he himself had abused his own daughters, and so had half of his buddies on the force, all of them belonging to a satanic cult into goats and swords, dolls and pitchforks, Viking helmets and sacrificial infanticide. Shea was encouraged in this delusion, unto prison, by religious nuts, crazed prosecutors, bullying therapists, and, of course, the vampire media. But “sociologist” William Devane had bearded doubts. Bess Armstrong, playing Shea’s wife, only pretended to go along with the witch hunt so she could keep custody of her little boy. You wouldn’t have believed one of these accusers, Lisa Dean Ryan, if she told you she’d gone to the bathroom. And while the ABC movie had nothing to say about a psychology that insists on the sexual innocence of children, an economy that sexualizes them, our need for Satan now that Stalin’s gone, the perverse displacement of our fear of our own families onto surrogates like day care, or Little Red Riding Hood and the seduction theory, Forgotten Sins at least felt bad in all the right places.
Masks, mirrors, psychoanalysis, family values, consumer capitalism, the succubus media, and spectator sports… all show up on television because everything shows up on television because television can’t help itself. In both directions, sending or receiving, it’s always on: “The cat eats the bird; Picasso eats the cat; painting eats Picasso.” Before the lost child on American television, there was the lost child in American culture, from the captivity narratives of New England Puritans kidnapped by Indians to Huck Finn, Little Orphan Annie, and Holden Caulfield. (“Though I have done other things through the years,” we are told by the surprise parent in Anne Beattie’s Picturing Will, “I still think of myself as the person who knelt so many times to tie your shoelaces. Who needed to see them double-knotted and to know that you were safe, again, from tripping. I could have identified your feet, and still could, I see them so clearly, in a lineup of a hundred children.”) Before Freud, there was Kaspar Hauser, the Wolf Boy of Aveyron, and the punitive Brothers Grimm, (In Absence, Peter Handke remembers “how in childhood we had often hidden from others because we wanted them to look for us.” Kafka’s first novel, lost to us, alas, was called The Child and the City.) And previous to these Black Forests there was Goethe’s Gretchen, who drowned her newborn before killing herself, not to mention the slaughter of the innocents and the sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible, or the ritual infanticide of the mother cults of the ancient Middle East, or a classical literature full of dreadful fantasies of mothers losing or killing their children and of maidens dragged by their fathers to sacrificial altars, dying of despair at abandonment, stoned because they were raped; of Niobes, Medeas, Iphigenias, Ariadnes, and Didos. Don’t let’s get started on Claude Lévi-Strauss and his embroidery of the Amazonian Tucuna myth about the baby-snatching frog and the honey-gathering cycle. TV, like fairy tales and structuralism, is how we dream out loud about ourselves. Sitting down to watch, we are also projecting. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, her scary novel about female genital mutilation in Africa, Alice Walker took as her epigraph what she described as a “bumper sticker”: When the ax came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.