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The Dick Van Dyke Show

O Rob! Part 2

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Part 2—The Return of the Repressed

That the upstanding sitcom family man re-emerged as an insensitive, petulant loser seems like a fitting enough sign of the times 

by Michael Gaughn

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“Rob Petrie was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael Scott lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.”

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As a possible way of life, the Liberal movement of the early 1960s barely survived the Great Society and was in any meaningful sense kaput by the early ‘70s. The eruption of political radicalism and the resulting right-wing backlash—which made it clear the Liberal dream was not just untenable but vanquished—swept the myths that fed both the Kennedy mystique and The Dick Van Dyke Show into the dustbin of history. But for many, that mythology represented America’s best possible face, and even people who found it repugnant acknowledged its allure.

You can’t aggressively repress a potent cultural force fraught with unresolved emotion without expecting it to return—usually in monstrous form. Faced with a society that felt beat up, disoriented, and cheated after a decade and a half of constant upheaval, the late ‘70s conjured up retro as consolation. An unconscious admission that the present wasn’t good enough and all that turmoil hadn’t added up to squat, retro gave us an excuse to get lost in a vague haze of nostalgia. But by reinventing history to suit the needs of the present instead of accepting it on its own terms, creating a false sense of security based on a lie, it kept yesterday alive in ways that could only trouble today.

Initially created to smooth over a massive cultural void, retro was too tempting a fiction to not be turned to political ends, with TV the primary vehicle for its dissemination. From the ‘70s through the early part of this century, we defined our political identity by way of the tube. Whether via sitcoms, dramas, news shows, pervasive political ads—even children’s shows and wrestling—it provided a way to feel politically at home. 

That all got supercharged with the emergence—more accurately, eruption—of social media, which thrives on fostering the illusion of free expression, interaction, immediacy, and intimate contact when it’s really just another form of entertainment. The pivot was reality TV, programs that made us comfortable with figures who were every bit as fictional as the ones on sitcoms and dramas but who we agreed to accept, out of a gaping emotional need, as actual. Once social media was able to add the illusion of access to TV’s illusion of reality, the door was wide open for creating a world ruled by influencers—people we flock to to define us because we don’t just admit to but feed on their superiority. Once all that became commingled with politics, the genie unleashed became an even more malevolent force.

All of this was set in motion, incredibly, by the Petries. Just because the whole influence thing has become hopelessly fragmented (deliberately so) didn’t mean it couldn’t coalesce in ways as powerful as a groundbreaking situation comedy able to command the rapt attention of more than a third of the nation. With the nuclear family dead and interred and a manic individualism—the very definition of atomization—on the rise, the idea of rallying behind a married couple that represents a national ideal is no longer tenable, but we can—and dodefine ourselves against thousands of influencers who, considered as a whole (and once you allow for the huge redundancy factor), hold the same kind of sway over society. All of that fragmentation just ensures that the ground never feels quite solid under our feet.

As for the political dimension—there’s no need to spell it out, but I’ve left enough breadcrumbs along the way for anyone with a keen enough interest to follow the trail. Kennedy’s obvious successor, ruling-by-charisma-wise, was Regan—but, a product of the movies, he was ultimately just a trial balloon. It would take a figure clearly born of TV to make this whole thing virulent.

Which brings us to probably the most salient recent example of mutation via repression. Like a classic doppelgänger from the uncanny, Michael Scott couldn’t be further removed from Rob Petrie. But, as the bumbling male lead of an influential TV series about work, he and Rob obviously spring from the same sitcom roots, which lends them an unsettling resemblance. A charismatic figure warped to fit the present, Michael is little more than the sum of his flaws, a social cripple we find endearing mainly because we share his plight. 

His defining character trait—and the point where he veers most radically from Rob—is the whole “no filters” thing, which allows him to get away with saying and doing things that are undeniably hurtful and offensive just because he’s seen as a well-meaning, hopelessly insecure dope. Rob was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.

“No filters” has of course become a kind of rallying cry, a pernicious phenomenon no one would have trouble finding multiplying examples of in the wider culture—and something that couldn’t be farther from the world of the Van Dyke show. Brutality as grace is the price we pay for stumbling forward clueless, believing something potent will go away just because we succeeded in temporarily sweeping it under the rug. By refusing to understand and assimilate the past, we leave it free to constantly judge the present and, not surprisingly, find it lacking.

It should be obvious none of the above is meant to be an exercise in nostalgia—if anything, it was a meditation on the price we pay for nostalgia. Adopting the comforting shells of the past without pondering their meaning, or relevance, to fill a sense of emptiness in the present has only lead to massive discontent. Huddling inside outmoded forms as if they’ll somehow protect us from a storm of our own making has left us vulnerable, isolated, frustrated, and angry. 

The answer isn’t to return to Rob and Laura’s world any more than it is to continue to obsessively, mechanically repeat our present mistakes. It could even be argued that our refusal to become unstuck from the past is the whole problem. But the past we continue to cling to bears practically no relation to the past as it actually happened but is more a kind of willy-nilly appropriation, a history’s greatest hits, a child’s form of succor. And no sane person could ever expect anything good to arise from a lie like that.

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Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

“Honey, I’m Home!”

To provide a little potted Freud for context: The Return of the Repressed comes from Sigmund, and the core concept is that things once comfortable and familiar that we repress for whatever reasons will inevitably return to haunt us because we’ve never resolved how we feel about them. This led to his concept of The Uncanny, which Freud called “unheimlich”—or “unhomelike”—because what once protected and nurtured us re-emerges transfigured into forms that now threaten us instead. Overly reduced, the womb becomes the tomb. The whole notion of homelike become unhomelike obviously has a particularly pungent and ironic meaning when applied to a domestic situation comedy—the domestic situation comedy—of the early ‘60s.

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O Rob! Part 1

O Rob!--Part 1
Part 1

How the best sitcom ever helped pave the way for many of our current cultural ills

by Michael Gaughn

AT ITS HEIGHT, The Dick Van Dyke Show was seen by more than 17 million viewers a week. The most popular sitcom of this past year, Young Sheldon, averaged just over 9 million viewers. There were 52,600,000 TV households in 1963; there are more than twice that now. Roughly translated, about 33% of the people watching TV in 1963 tuned in to the Van Dyke show, while around 13% of viewers today watch Young Sheldon. (I admit I’ve thrown enough apples and oranges together here to make a fruit salad but

the basic proportions are accurate enough.) And the programming on the only three networks available then added up to a tiny fraction of what virtually any TV viewer can access now.

In an age of rampant tribalism and the acute atomization of media, it’s easy to forget how dominant and influential a single TV series could be—especially when that series didn’t resemble anything else that had been on television and seemed like a harbinger of the medium’s future. There had been plenty of domestic comedies before Van Dyke but those husbands and wives were neither young or old but tended to exist in an ageless realm of staid maturity. And everyone tended to live in a non-specific middle-American everywhere. You knew the husbands had jobs but you rarely, if ever, saw them at work. The level of sophistication was decidedly low—everybody seemed to eat meat and potatoes, and if they went out at all, it was to the movies. Knowing references to current culture were taboo, considered likely to alienate the lowest common denominator.

Rob and Laura Petrie were young and hip-enough suburbanites living in the very real New Rochelle, NY with Rob taking the train or driving to his job in midtown Manhattan where he was the head writer of a comedy/variety show viewers readily identified with similar shows hosted by Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle. The series was peppered with spot-on nods to Leonard Bernstein, bebop, Roger Corman films, Lenny Bruce-type comedians, Tennessee Williams, late-night talk shows, Ingmar Bergman, Albert Schweitzer, comedy albums, Off Off Broadway, underground film, and even the early days of audiophilia.

And at a time when nothing on TV was overtly political and definitely not specific, the Van Dyke show exhibited an obvious fascination with the Kennedy administration. In “Bank Book 6565696,” Rob yearns for a XKG-JFK-400 roadster. In “The Sam Pomerantz Scandals,” comedian Danny Brewster does a lengthy JFK impersonation. And Laura looks like a Jackie Kennedy clone when she goes to beg mercy from Alan Brady in “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth.”

O Rob!--Part 1

But it went deeper than that. The money for the pilot for the show that would become The Dick Van Dyke Show was put up by Peter Lawford—a has-been actor whose only fame at the time came from having married into the Kennedy fold. But Lawford was just the beard—the funds actually came from the Kennedys, and series creator Carl Reiner had to send his script to family head Joseph Kennedy for approval before the money could be released.

The series and the administration seemed fated to be intertwined. The first episode was shot on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration; and even though everyone on the show was in shock from the President’s assassination, Reiner decided to go ahead with filming “Happy Birthday and Too Many More,” just without the usual live audience. It’s likely coincidental, but the quality of the series, which crested during the 1963 season, fell off after the end of the Kennedy administration, as if it had lost its lifeline.

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that Reiner deliberately crafted the Van Dyke show to be a definitive expression of the late ‘50s/early ’60s Liberal agenda. Episodes like “That’s My Boy???,” “A Show of Hands,” and “A Vigilante Ripped My Sport Coat” are direct expressions of the movement—again, something new for series TV, where any kind of advocacy was strictly forbidden. Reiner only became overt with his leanings once the show’s popularity was established but that worldview, and those politics, were baked into Van Dyke from the beginning and permeated it so completely that there’s barely an aspect, overt or covert, they didn’t inflect.

Let me pause, lest anyone get their hackles up, and say this piece isn’t really about politics, let alone any particular political position. The form of liberalism Reiner was espousing pretty much died with the Great Society and continues to exist, if it exists at all, as little more than a historical artifact, not unlike the Know-Nothings and Abolitionists of the Antebellum period. Any resemblance between it and any current politicians and movements is almost purely coincidental.

By having the identity of the Van Dyke show spring so obviously from the New Frontier, Reiner unavoidably brought all its baggage in tow. It’s not to for one second diminish the genius of the series to say that it exhibits the smugness and elitism many, detractors and supporters alike, saw as that movement’s greatest flaw. Rob Petrie is college educated, lives in an affluent Northeastern suburb, and works in a glamorous industry in NYC—pretty much the perfect embodiment of the Liberal ideal, and a life practically no one actually lived but many aspired to. 

The problem was that this somewhat utopian worldview could only work on TV—and only if you played by its rules. Its centerpiece was tolerance—but a kind of tolerance that was only feasible under a form of benign monarchy, laced with a heavy dollop of noblesse oblige, where Rob and Laura (as stand-ins for Jack and Jackie) were undeniably king and queen.

WATCHING DVD

Some might look askance at the idea of site called Cineluxe devoting an article—let alone a two-parter—to an old TV series. Two immediate rejoinders: TV always has been and always will be nothing but sitcoms and melodramas, so old really has nothing to do with it. And the Van Dyke show is one of the few pre-‘90s sitcoms that holds up well when viewed on a big screen.

The series was shot on 35mm by veteran cinematographer Robert De Grasse, who cut his teeth on RKO classics like Stage Door, the Rogers & Astaire Carefree, and the Robert Wise noir Born to Kill—which goes a long way toward explaining how a relatively low-budget 30-plus-episodes-a-year black & white sitcom looks so damn elegant. It’s not the last word in the filmic art, but it doesn’t look like it was shot in somebody’s closet either.

That it was all originally framed for 19-inch TVs—which means lots and lots of medium shots and closeups—isn’t as jarring as it could be, mainly because the material is so strong that you quickly shake off any twinges of claustrophobia. The big screen also tends to expose any dings, scratches, stains, or painted-over hinges in the sets—which are more beat up than they should have been—as well as continuity errors and shots saved in post by way of the optical printer. 

The quality of the sound is all over the place, from season to season and sometimes from episode to episode within a season—and even with an episode. The last third of Season 3’s “Scratch My Car and Die,” for instance, sounds like they swapped out the boom mics for tin cans and string. Not that the audio for this series had to do much heavy lifting, but the too bland sound of the first two seasons tends to make the material feel flatter than it is and the actors more plastic than they are.

The release of the series currently streaming for free on practically any service you can think of is a pleasure to watch but looks like somebody went a little heavy with the edge enhancement. A new release done with a more delicate touch would be very much appreciated—and since it seems like the original 35mm sources are in decent enough shape, why not just do it in 4K next time?—although I’m not seeing where HDR would bring much to the party.

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The series reinforces this constantly, almost obsessively. The most blatant example is “My Husband is the Best One,” where it’s driven home that Rob is by far the smartest, most talented, and attractive person in the show’s universe (when Laura tells him, “You’re the best one and you know it, and so do I,” Rob responds, “Right!”) and that everyone else, other than Laura and including TV star Alan Brady, are mere peons (“Petrie is truly the genius behind the genius. The swift satirical sword belongs to him. Brady merely wields it.”). This is revisited in a more explicitly political context in the two-part Season 5 episode where Rob runs for councilman, where he’s seen as superior to a far more qualified candidate just because he’s taller and more personable. 

The ultimate message of the Van Dyke show would seem to be that height and a kind of modest charm are the keys to ruling a benevolent society. There are constant references throughout the series to Rob and Laura’s attractiveness and a large number of episodes focus on how they’re pursued by almost everyone they come in contact with. Meanwhile, there are just as many reminders of the inferiority of everyone else in the cast—how Buddy is short and dumpy, Sally unattractive and old (Rose Marie was just two years older than Van Dyke), Mel a cringing marshmallow, Millie a snoop, a nag, and a lousy cook, Jerry an uncouth braggart, and Alan Brady a tyrannical, egotistical boor. 

I could continue to cite examples—they’re legion—but you get the idea. 

All of this fed from and helped reinforce the Camelot mystique, the myth, created largely via America’s popular-entertainment apparatus, of a young and vibrant couple that would lead the country into a prolonged and enlightened Golden Age. That all of course collapsed utterly after the assassination, with no one, inside or outside the Kennedy clan, able to assume the mantle—mainly because no one had a Jackie to go with their Jack. But the core of the idea—of the enthralling power of a mass-media-created political mythology—didn’t die; in fact, it was just getting on its feet and would ultimately lead to the rise of the cult of celebrity.

Part 2 suggests that while the values promoted by the Kennedy Administration and promulgated by the Van Dyke show were plowed under by the tumult of the ‘60s, they refused to rest in peace, and, mutated, rose again to permeate the current cultural landscape

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

O Rob!--Part 1

Buddy, Sally & Mel—the bungled & the botched

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