Hard Hitting Cultural Analysis

You thought this was all about VanDerWerff?  Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to star television critic Neil Genzlinger, for that most illustrious of papers, the New York Times.

Sorry to bring this up on a weekend devoted to celebrating mothers, but you know all the things that have been wrong with young people for the past half-century? Mom’s fault.

I’ve reached this conclusion after an exhaustive study of an inadvertent historical record that has been left to us: the decades’ worth of sitcom mothers who have been caught on tape, as it were, giving dubious advice to children present and past.

I realize that the tone of this seems rather tongue-in-cheek.  What comic point will Mr. Genzlinger be making?  What far-reaching cultural analysis will that lead to in this 1200 word (!) edition of the “Critics Notebook”? 

At the start of this research, which consisted of watching whatever shows happened to be on TVLand-like channels in recent weeks or are in my DVD collection, I expected that modern-day mothers would be revealed to be shockingly lax, and they were. What I didn’t expect was to learn that their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers, were similarly irresponsible. And just as scientists have traced human lineage back to a mitochondrial Eve, the decline of motherhood can be traced to a single sitcom moment and a single sitcom matriarch. A momochondrial Margaret.

That’s a really terrible pun. 

But let’s begin in the present. We all know instinctively that, though there are probably exceptions, in general kids today are immoral, nihilistic dunderheads.

Since this is written in such a breezy tone, if I object it’s only because I’m not in on the joke.  But what if there’s no joke to be in on?  I just blew your mind, didn’t I?

If American children are being outdone by young scholars in other countries, you need look no further than Mom to know why. Specifically, you need look no further than a recent episode of the ABC sitcom “Last Man Standing.”

Last Man Standing—a paragon of progressive gender values, by the way. 

Vanessa Baxter (Nancy Travis), the mother in the family, is playing Scrabble with two of her daughters when one of them tries to play T-H-A-N-G. “That’s not a word,” Vanessa says. The child who made the play stands by her “thang,” and the other child invites Vanessa to go look it up.

“Where’s the dictionary?” Vanessa asks.

“Upstairs,” she is told. To which this lax mom responds, “Fine; it’s a word.”

Man, I’ve really got to start watching Last Man Standing.  That’s gold!

Mothers, it seems, can’t even be bothered to climb a flight of stairs in the interest of instilling good grammar in their offspring. No wonder American children are being outperformed academically all over the globe.

Again, this is obviously tongue-in-cheek.  But what the hell’s the point?  It’s not funny, so presumably it has a point, right?  Something about gender roles?  Anything?  Neil?  Neil?  Hello?  Anyone there?

(I’m mercifully cutting out another couple of examples—believe me, you’re happier for it).

…Look at “Beaver and Chuey,” a 1958 episode of “Leave It to Beaver.” Eddie Haskell has played a trick on the Beaver, and the Beav’s older brother is rushing out the door to exact revenge.

“Wally,” says June, “where are you going?”

He replies, “I’m going to go over and slug Eddie.”

To which this seminal, peerless mother says: “Wally! That’s no way to talk. This is Sunday.”

I shouldn’t have to point out that you probably shouldn’t call a mother “seminal.”  Look it up (I’ll wait.) Semin—got it? Just saying.

Wally grasps the moral relativism of the coming age instantly. He considers his mother’s input, then tells her, “Oh, yeah; I’ll wait till tomorrow and slug him in the cafeteria.”

By the way, that Eddie Haskell really had it coming.  What a smartass!

For young people in the ensuing decades, there would be no right or wrong, only arbitrary, fickle rules, which would soon be easily discarded, leading to unkempt hair, draft dodging, pot smoking and the drift and disorder that have been with us ever since.

So this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of ascribing large-scale social changes to cultural productions?  Is it?  Because this is a really fucking stupid point. Boy, I wish the Times would just go back to their sweet spot of writing feature articles introducing us to cultural phenomena that everyone has been aware of for years. 

But we can’t really blame June Cleaver for all this. Turns out she was merely expanding on the example of momochondrial Margaret:

I’m really glad you found a way to work that pun in twice.

Margaret Anderson (Jane Wyatt), a foundational television matriarch first seen four years earlier, when “Father Knows Best” had its premiere.

I believe I have found the moment when mothers began sliding down the long, slippery slope. It’s subtle; barely noticeable, really. It comes in Season 1, in an episode titled “Live My Own Life.”

 “I’m not so sure he’s handling it right,” she tells her older daughter, Betty. “Oh, it’s not that I don’t think your father has wonderful ideas. It’s just that, well, they don’t work.”

This was the moment that civilization began to fall apart. A mother has told her child that Father, the universal authority figure who for centuries has kept society from devolving into chaos, is an incompetent boob, and she has done so on a show named “Father Knows Best.” There can be no stability, no constancy after this. Margaret has effectively neutered the only thing standing between us and social and political anarchy, the Omniscient Patriarch. All of the bad TV mothering that followed was inevitable.

Is this comedy?  It’s not funny.  Is this cultural critique?  It doesn’t say anything.  Is this satire?  I wish, because it kind of sounds like a parody of a David Brooks column, but if so it sure as hell doesn’t lead anywhere. 

Perhaps you’re thinking that this is a lot to hang on a few random bits of dialogue from fictional TV series, and that a half-dozen examples of good mothering could be found in the very same shows.

Whaddya know.

Maybe. But here’s the thing: I too am a product of one of these postmodern mothers.

A postmodern mother. Does she have like, a guitar for an arm, and a Grecian column for her left leg? No, that sounds like a modern mother.  Maybe she just “performs” the idea of “modern motherhood” while actually being a sixteen-year-old German Shepard? Or does she run her own countercultural mail system?  She’d better, because if she just wore bell bottoms and went out of the house without a bra, I’m going to punch you in the face. 

Where in the world would I have acquired the discipline and academic rigor to construct a well-researched, fully realized argument? Not from watching television, that’s for sure.

Here’s the moment when you’re going to bring it all together.  Here’s the moment when this sorry excuse for humor is going to justify its privileged place on the front page of the Weekend section.  You’re going to tie these ideas in with critiques of the new HBO show Girls, show the ridiculous burden that television representations of women are forced to carry?  No?  That’s it?  Really, you’re done? Wait let me see the next line.  

Not from watching television, that’s for sure.

Oh my god that is really how you just ended this piece. Neil, you write for the Times.  (Admittedly, writing television criticism for the Times does not require much in the brains department: see Stanley, Alessandra).  But I might expect a writer for the Times to have at least a half-sense of the meaning of the word “postmodern.”  Perhaps that’s asking too much.  Perhaps I would expect a writer for the Gray Lady, when he was sitting down to write a 1200 word column, to have a point in mind.  Just acknowledging at the end of the piece that you have no ideas and no methodology does not make your piece any less of a waste of time.  Why don’t you just say, my editor gave me an assignment to write about Mother’s Day, and I kind of whiffed.  It happens—but then you don’t go ahead and publish it.  Oh, wait.  I forgot: you’re Neil Genzlinger.  You published an article about The End of Comedy that I’m still reeling from.  This isn’t an exception.  This is the rule.