Television in an Age of Transition: Closet Monsters and other Double Codings

• Published in: Canadian review of American studies 1992-09, Vol.23 (2), p.115-148
• Main Author: McGregor, Gaile
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0007-7720; 1710-114X
• DOI: 10.3138/CRAS-023-02-05

Remember "Beauty and the Beast?" One of the most surprising successes of the 1987-88 television season. Or perhaps not so surprising. The neonihilist would no doubt see this series as an exemplary telefable for the postmodern era. Vincent—tall, primitive, powerful (albeit a little stooped as he roams his underground kingdom)—is clearly the father-become-child, the phallus reclaimed by the womb. The message, then, is a timely one: in Baudrillard's simulacrum world, we all share the woman's lot.1 "Unmanned" by the incessant replications of spectacle that assault us from every direction ("the repetitiveness, the self-sameness, and the ubiquity of modem mass culture," as Adorno put it a quarter century ago2), we conspire in our own disenablement. Like Vincent, with his feminine alter ego, his cultivated tastes, his obsessive, horrified attempts to repudiate his animality, we are conditioned not only to settle for but actually to prefer substitutes: substitutes for freedom (the male on call, running through the tunnels), substitutes for love (it's all in the mind), substitutes for potency (when Catherine conceived Vincent's child in December 1989, flowers unfolded, volcanoes erupted—but the father himself slept through the whole thing). As the sign denied its signified, Vincent is the postmodern subject par excellence. According to this reading anyway. The trouble is, such a reading only works if one is careful to ignore context. For all his angst, it is made clear by the structure and even more the inter- and extra-textual reference of the series as a whole (I'll be returning to this later) that Vincent bespeaks something above and beyond emasculation. More to the point for present purposes, there are good reasons for suspecting the validity of generalizations based on one, even so striking, representation. If any television protagonist represented the phallus in 1987, in fact, one would have to say it was Hawk, the tall, cold-eyed, philosophy-spouting, osten- tatiously undomesticated Afro-American enforcer from "Spenser For Hire," with his bare, shining skull and very large gun. It matters not that his spin- off lasted only one season—the character itself had enough audience appeal that the network thought it worthwhile to keep him on when his home program was cancelled. Any explanation for "Beauty and the Beast," then, has to explain Hawk as well. And Wiseguy—a loose phallus if there ever was one. Not to mention the new western, the new war drama, and the ne