“Time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.” – Joan Didion
On Monday I spoke, through Dick Cavett, of Nebraska and the pull of place. I’ve never felt a particular draw to the Midwest, or the plains, or the mountains. Nor has the South ever appealed to me, though an adolescent fondness for the novels of Pat Conroy generated for a time a distant image of weeping willows lining long drives to stately white mansions where handsome military families resided in the shade of violent dysfunction. The Northeast, my home, does exert a kind of personal pull – the surprising lushness and heat of the summer, nearly unimaginable in the cold days of rain and the small buds of spring; and then the famous fall and all too soon the exposure of the spindly, twisting trees ending, and then beginning, the years with snow. The hills, the forests, winding roads, the clusters of neighborhoods and towns and cities inevitably miniaturize the landscape. Vistas are always limited, but wonderfully varied, and these small scenes are altered and renewed in each season. I think it was Chesterton who wrote that it is the fence that creates the landscape, and New England, quite literally, is a world of fences.
And yet an exception needs to be made for Southern California. There exists a place in my imagination not only for the experienced landscape of the Northeast of my own life, but for the idea of California, an idea that doesn’t have anything to do with the typical attraction to “the West;” you know, frontier theory, or the promise of reinvention, or the weather, or Hollywood. Rather, the strong sense of place I get from Southern California is largely a visual one, and I owe it, like so much else, to television.
When I think of sitcoms that have a definite sense of place, I can’t think of many. Most of the shows I watched seemed to be set in non-distinct suburban houses that looked a little bit like my own, despite allusions to Chicago or Ohio or what have you (a notable exception – Sesame Street has always evoked New York City). But it was The Brady Bunch that stands out in my mind as somehow different and I think it is my early experiences of this show that exposed me to a landscape and a lifestyle that I still somehow feel.
First of all it was the house itself. Modern, split level, interesting, colorful. And then it was the few glimpses you got of its setting: exotic palm tree, small but well-kept green lawn (California green, that which Cary McWilliams called “surreal”), the unspoken intimation of good weather. It was all so different from the wooden colonial houses, uneven lawns covered in trees and rocks, and the patchy brown grass of my New England.
But this external scene cannot be separated from the show itself. There was something about the uniqueness of this fictional family that I responded to when I was young. The unlikely story sung to you each day was seductive, the necessity by which they became a family, the various anxieties and potential difficulties you might imagine, and yet the daily reinforcement of their charmed life. Their familial environment seemed somehow more demanding, more delicate, but also more rewarding than my own. An analogous situation, I think, would be the week spent with a friend’s family, or time spent (sans parents) with relatives where one is not quite at home, unsure, better mannered, less at ease, where you can’t help but marvel at, or at least compare, the variations of family life. I was always apprehensive when placed into the caring ward of genial uncles and aunts, subjected to the mercy of cousins, some of whom smoked corn silk and shot at me with BB guns, but after a period of warming to my environment, I inevitably loved it, loved familiarizing the foreignness, the daily novelty, the everyday ordinariness of their lives which was, in turn, so strange to me. The Brady Bunch then had something of that feel about it; a family created anew almost out of nothing, a family that was a source of constant fun and togetherness. It was a place where loneliness was foreign, not discouraged, but not possible. The loneliness was at the end of the episode, and that wistful impermanence of the half hour. When the episode ended and I thought of the Brady kids going outside - their house, yes, but also, by extension, into the world - I felt they possessed a sense of entitlement, of security, where they would never be at the mercy of inclemency. If I didn’t share that attitude, I couldn’t help but appreciate it.
This is domestic escapism, a fantasy of familial transference, and it’s both a pretty weird fantasy for a young boy to have and I think completely normal. But that I came to associate it with Southern California still interests me. It was reinforced by other shows, CHiPs, for example, and by the cities such as Burbank named as I watched TV on summer mornings with my oversized glasses sliding down my nose. It was here, in this mythical land, where I probably first thought it possible that family life existed not entirely unlike mine, but somehow better, newer, where you’d be ferried in large wood-paneled station wagons and race along wide sun-kissed highways, passed by cops on motorcycles. A place where people were so comfortable with life, so used to fortune smiling on them, that they gathered on bright warm days in air-conditioned studios to watch tapings of Press Your Luck rooting and laughing in the cool darkness. I watched all this from afar, in the encroaching humidity of an early Connecticut July, waiting to be chased out of my house by my Mom into the unforgiving sun and the unattractive neighborhood pool and the long games of wiffle ball all of which I liked, mind you, but when a part of me really wanted to be in world in which people went to game shows for fun.
I won’t go on any longer, but I will say that this, like all fantasies, was a lie and its exposure was subtle, and untraumatic, and part of what we call growing up. And yet when I’ve gone to California as an adult I’ve often felt a simultaneous fascination with the environment and a kind of odd deflation there. Indeed, I think a line may be drawn from the seed that The Brady Bunch planted in me to, say, John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence. It’s a very long line, one that goes over many years, but it shares the recognizable Southern California of the 70s and that remains somehow alluring; but it is, in this case, the difficulties, the inarticulateness, the grasping, well, that has become what is more than recognizable, but meaningful. Et in Arcadia ego.
