If there is one thing that living in isolation provides abundantly its leisure time.
Oh, I try to be productive: Everyday I write at least 500 words of my novel, most days a bit more; I sweep and mop the apartment floors; I wash my own clothes and dishes; I wash and disinfect anything and everything that comes into the apartment.
But thee is still a lot of time left over for leisure activities, mainly watching television or listening to the radio, or reading books, and soon I plan to squeeze into my schedule playing my guitar and doing some drawing.
In the case of television, I now have time to watch things I would not have watched before, in those days when my afternoons were taken up by a walk to my favorite bakery to buy bread for my merienda, the late afternoon bread and coffee custom that we Mexicans love to observe. Or I would have walked to my beloved bookstore Rosairo Castellano to lounge around in one of its comfortable armchairs to peruse a book from the "Novelties" table.
But now, from six in the afternoon to eight, at which time I watch the opera transmission from the Met, I watch episodes of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," or "Route 66," or "Wagon Train," or "The Dick van Dyke Show," or even "Leave it to Beaver."
I admit that I started watching out of pure nostalgia. I wanted to remember those time when as I kid I would hurry to do my homework at five in the afternoon, so I could have dinner at six and then watch the "prime time" programs that started at six thirty.
Of course, all of these shows, and the king of great television writing, "The Twilight Zone," were then nothing but entertainment to me. I was too young to understand what was being said between the lines, as it were. The genius of writers such a Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), Max Shulman (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), and Stirling Silliphant (Route 66) was way beyond my head. I didn't understand that they were pointing to what was "rotten in Denmark."
Most sitcoms of the sixties, "The Donna Read Show" and "Father Knows Best" to name just a couple of samples, portrayed a society that did not exist. In that fantasy world father arrived promptly at six, changed into a cardigan sweater, lit his pipe, and read the newspaper before being called to dinner at six thirty. The son of the family got fifty cents for mowing the lawn and the daughter of the family invited her friends over for milk and cookies so they could discuss what to wear at the school prom. Real life was not like that. The real marriage behind the fictional happy and funny couple of "I Love Lucy, for example, was a disaster of bitter fights due to Desi Arnaz' infidelity and alcoholism. They were not alone in their troubles.
The youth of America, and indeed in most of the world, was becoming aware of the social and sexual hypocrisy and and rampant materialism that hid behind the picture-perfect suburban houses and apparently placid lives of the families that dwelled in them. Television writers wrote about this in shows like The Twilight Zone in which each episode of apparent science fiction, there lay a moral question. "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" used over-wrought stereotypes (the very rich boy, the beatnik, the money-grubbing girl, the ultra conservative storekeeper) to make point in each episode, too.
For example, there is an episode in which Dobie brings home his girlfriend to meet his parents. She is wearing shorts which causes Dobie's father to strongly disapprove of her. He wants Dobie to marry a woman like his grandmother who would only expose her legs "in case of an automobile accident or death." When Dobie's mother asked Dobie's father to explain the "facts of life" to Dobie, Dobie responds to his father's incoherent attempt to tell him about "the bids and the bees" by saying that he knows all about that because in school they are shown films about the mating habits of certain birds. This alarms Dobie's father. He says that he will protest in the next parent and teacher's meeting that the school is becoming a brothel by teaching such things.
What Max Shulman, the writer, was trying to do in that show was expose in a satirical and comical way the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of society at the time. Writers like Shulman, and Serling, and Silliphant couldn't openly criticize the morals and hypocrisy of their contemporaries; they had to thread a very fine line in writing criticism into their shows. In fact, there is the story of sponsors of Dobie Gillis protesting the way Dobie's father expressed his conservative views; they wanted and got the writers to tone down the father's conservative outrage. Why? Because the sponsors felt that their audience might feel that its conservative way of thinking was being ridiculed. Which it was!
Even shows as staid as "Wagon Train" tried their hand at social comment. There is an episode in which the wagon master played by Ward Bond, a veteran of several John Ford films, objects to a woman traveling alone in his wagon train. She is a newspaper reporter who has been hired to write about the life of the people traveling west in these wagon trains. But the wagon master believed that a woman's place is by her husband taking care of children and cooking and keeping house in general. He and the woman reporter, of course, clash constantly during the trip. The episode climaxes when a vote is to be cast to see who should lead the wagon train. And the women win the right to vote on who should lead the wagons in spite of the wagon master's objection. This episode was aired just a women's lib was becoming an issue in America and other countries.
Even "Route 66," a show about two guys traveling around the USA in a Corvette sports car, tried its hand at social comment. In an episode filmed in the town where I grew up, Corpus Christi, Texas, a runaway boy hustles and steals money in order to have enough so he and his sister can runaway and find a man to substitute their dead father. A welfare worker is trying to catch the boy and return him to the good foster family that has adopted the boy and his sister. The episode gently discusses the right of children to have a say in their fate when faced with orphanhood. Children's rights was something unheard of in those times.
As far as "The Twilight Zone" is concerned, I could write a book about the many episodes that commented on the social and moral mores of the times. But some standout as particularly interesting. There is the episode of a young boy who has such mental powers that he can read everyone's mind, and if he catches anyone criticizing him or doing or saying something he disapproves of, he can destroy that person. It is a comment on dictatorship and the evils of absolute power. There are also many episodes that comment on being careful what you wish for because you might get it. We must remember that the McCarthy witch hunts were going on at the time. There is also the story of the man wishing he had all the time in the world to read books. He gets his wish when an atomic war wipes out civilization and he is saved by having been in a vault at the time. Now he has all the time in the world to read all the books he wants to read. BUT. he drops his glasses and they break. Now he has all the time in the world but it is impossible for him to read.
Many of the shows of the era were also ahead of their time in the production values and music they used for their themes. Dobie Gillis' jazzy harmonies and Henry Mancini's jazzy theme for "Peter Gunn" are great examples. As per production values, to quote Wikipedia, "[Peter]Gunn operates in a gloomy waterfront city, the name and location of which is never revealed in the series. He can usually be found at Mother's, a smoky wharfside jazz club that Gunn uses as his "office", usually meeting new clients there." These production values foretold a change in how society was discarding the worn-out clichés of the fifties.
These and other shows of the late fifties and early sixties were heralding a change which came in the mid-sixties when a veritable revolution in social change gave birth to The Beatles, hippies, the anti-establishment movements, youth's rejection of the military-industrial complex, and so on. Those shows had issued a warning but the post-war generation, complacent in its boon-times materialism wasn't listening.
In nineteen sixty-six I graduated from High School. I remember coming out of the Plaza movie theater after having seen "The Graduate." The scene where the man says to the graduate, "I'm going to say one word to you, just one word: plastics. There's a great future in plastics." was still playing in my head. All of my generation, like The Graduate, got the message, but not the way Mr. McGuire, the man talking to The Graduate, intended.
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