“THERE’S A MAN WITH A GUN OVER THERE”: COPS AND THE COUNTERCULTURE Terry Moellinger, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2001 APPROVED: Olaf Hoerschelmann, Major Professor Harry Benshoff, Committee Member Steve Craig, Committee Member C. Melinda Levin, Graduate Coordinator Alan Albarran, Chair, Department of Radio, Television, Film C. Neal Tate, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Moellinger, Terry, There’s A Man With A Gun Over There: Cops And The Counterculture, Master of Science, December 2001, 304 pp., 2 tables, references, 236. By 1960, television advertisers recognized the economic potential of American youth, and producers were expected to develop programs to attract them, while still maintaining appeal for the older audience members. This task was to prove difficult as the decade wore on. While continuing to link the nation’s cold war concerns to the portrayal of good and evil, some shows, like 77 Sunset Strip, and The Mod Squad, explored alternative lifestyles, but still accepted American values. As the 1960s developed, crime programs continued to promote American hegemony but became increasingly more open to alternative reading strategies. This study examines the strategies developed to draw a youth audience to 1960s crime programs, while also supporting the dominant ideology of American society. Copyright 2001 by Terry Moellinger ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES ……………………………………………………….. v Chapter 1. “THERE’S A MAN WITH A GUN OVER THERE”: COPS AND THE COUNTERCULTURE………………………………….. 1 The Subculture and the Media The Crime Show Genre Ritual Approach Aesthetic Approach Ideological Approach Reading the Text of Police and Detective Programs Limitations and Outline of the Study 2. FROM THE JAILHOUSE TO ROCK: THE UNTOUCHABLES, AND 77 SUNSET STRIP………………………………………. 38 The Independent Model: Desilu and The Untouchables The Warner Brothers Model of Television Production: 77 Sunset Strip Conclusion 3. THE POLICE BECOME THE BLUE MEANIES: BATMAN, DRAGNET AND CAMP IN THE MID-1960s………………… 88 Camp and the Youth Subculture Batman and the Introduction of Camp Dragnet: Camp as an Alternate Method of Reading Conclusion iii 4. I GOT A HEAD FULL OF IDEAS THAT’S DRIVIN’ ME INSANE: TELEVISION LOOKS AT RACE AND WOMEN IN THE MID-1960s……………………………………………….. 141 Television’s Shift in Depicting Race Relations: I Spy The Avengers and the depiction of Women Conclusion 5. THE SUBCULTURE AND PRIME TIME: THE MOD SQUAD …………………………………………………………………. 186 The Mod Squad and the Portrayal of the Youth Subculture Conclusion 6. THEY’VE GIVEN THEM A NUMBER: FIVE-O, NUMBER 6 AND THE CULMINATION OF THE 1960s…………………..211 The Subculture Receives a Message: Hawaii Five-O The Subculture Sends a Message: The Prisoner Conclusion 7. THERE’S A MAN WITH A GUN OVER THERE: CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………………. 263 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………. 283 iv LIST OF TABLES Page 1. THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE UNTOUCHABLES…………….. 47 2. POLAR OPPOSITIONS IN THE “ARRIVAL” EPISODE OF THE PRISONER……………………………………………………………. 246 v CHAPTER 1 “THERE’S A MAN WITH A GUN OVER THERE”: COPS AND THE COUNTERCULTURE There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear There’s a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth” On a personal level, the first year of the sixties saw my best friend and me successfully lobbying our seventh grade classmates to vote for Kennedy in an election day straw poll at our school. Like many people, we believed “that America was entering a decade of intellectual, political, and economic progress.” (Morrison & Morrison, 1987, p. xviii) However, toward the end of the decade, like many of my contemporaries, I could agreed with the sentiments expressed in Stills’s (1966) song, that “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” By the end of the 1960s, the United States was involved in an unpopular war in Vietnam; riots, motivated by racial inequality and the assassination of liberal political leaders, had occurred in many cities; and college campuses had become the focal point for student demonstrations. It is no wonder that many people could not understand what was “happening here.” To complicate the situation, American young people—the most affluent 1 generation in American history, at least in terms of their discretionary spending potential—were rejecting the source of their affluence and questioning America’s consumer culture. Like the first generation that grew-up watching television, the medium was also undergoing internal evaluations. The producers of television programs strove to achieve the dual and often conflicting goals of providing programs that could attract the potentially lucrative youth audience for advertisers and still produce texts that would promote the dominate ideology of their mainstream viewer. This was an even more difficult task for producers of crime (police, detective, and spy) shows, because many young people saw the hero of these programs, in the words of Stephen Stills (1966), as “a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.” In other words, much of the veneer surrounding the narrative of most television productions was stripped away in these programs, and the youth market saw that the heroes’ goal in these shows was to “protect and serve” many of institutions that they had come to question. It is the purpose of this study to examine the authority/rebellion relationship between the crime programs of the 1960s and their viewers who made up the growing youth subculture. In the process, various narrative techniques and formats used by the producers of 1960s crime shows to gain access to the youth market are examined. In addition, the texts of these programs will also be examined to learn whether they demonstrated a willingness to provide messages in support of the dominant ideology. This 2 study has also examines a number of alternative reading methods that members of the subculture could have applied in negotiating the crime show texts. Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to mention one limitation of television in general, one that is even more pronounced in times of turbulent social tensions. Fiske (1987) asserts: It is wrong to see it [television] as an originator of social change, or even to claim that it ought to be so, for social change must have its roots in material social existence; television can be, must be, part of that change, and effectively will either hasten or delay it. (p. 45) Just as Fiske (1987) chose to warn of the limitations of television as an instigator of social change, from the outset it is necessary to emphasize that television, and especially the police/detective, crime, genre in the 1960s, was not an instrument of social change. Having acknowledged that, a second portion of Fiske’s statement has interesting applications for the study of crime programs in the 1960s; did the genre “hasten or delay” social change through the images and text it presented its viewers? It is easy to make an argument for delay; in fact, one constant theme of this study is that the genre served to promote and maintain society’s institutions of authority and as such could naturally be expected to oppose social change that might disrupt the status quo. Further, many young people of the 1960s saw television as contributing to the problems facing American society. Spigel and Curtin (1997), acknowledged this sentiment, when they asserted in their book concerning television in the 3 1960s, that television was “a medium of hopeless consensus, aimed at the white majority and suited only to reproducing the lackluster shop-a-day world of happy homebodies” (p. 1). Yet, given that these same young people were emerging as one of the most desirable demographic groups for these programs, and ultimately their advertisers, it is easy to envision the potential for conflicting goals among those who produced television programs. Therefore, it is possible that messages encouraging social change could find their way into the texts of the program. It is the purpose of this study to examine both these messages and their reception by members of the newly forming youth subculture as the industry attempted to reconcile these conflicting goals. This type of examination emphasizes a textual analysis of the programs, and as such, these programs must be placed within the context of their time. Although the 1960s has come to represent a period of social change and tumultuous reaction to that change, much of what is referred to as “the sixties” occurred in the last third of the decade. In other words, there was a vast difference between the social attitudes at the beginning of the decade and at the end. Therefore, like all good stories, this decade has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in this case, a preface—the 1950s. This study will examine the programs and the social currents of the decade in that order. It is also necessary to acknowledge that social change during the 1960s came to mean different things to different people. During this period many opposing, yet interrelated, political factions—the civil rights movements, the 4 free speech movement, the free love movement, the anti-war movement, the back to nature movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement— were competing for attention. Further, within this amalgamated group that came to be known as the “youth” movement, were some who were concerned only with lifestyle issues. In fact, although many young people adopted certain styles, such as longer hair and brighter fashion, which were associated with an alternative lifestyle, still for the majority of the decade most of these same youth did not share the same political/economic perspective.