Leaving it to Beaver: NOT the Best Idea
by Timber Masterson
I am a true fan of the show Leave it to Beaver.
Every afternoon in grade school when lunchtime came around I would head home to ingest a can of whatever ChefBoyardee had to offer and plop myself down on a brown bean bag chair in front of the set, gazing rapturously into the Cleaver’s black and white wonder world of hi-jinx and mayhem.
I’d digest the pasta and tomato sauce offering along with my side order of Life Lessons from Beaver’s household in my usual 30 minutes.
After watching a couple seasons of the show, a blinding epiphanic realization came to me; there was one very big problem, one that I can’t help but ponder, even to this day.
WHY oh WHY would one leave anything at all to this ‘beaver’ character?! I can cite many a situation where, in having a taste for mischief, he consistently fouled up and created nothing more than chaos, bedlam and unnecessary hurt to his fellow man.
I take issue with the following:
What about when Beaver was entrusted with Ward’s library card and borrowed books, but held onto them way past their due date, accumulating monstrous overdue library fees, AND keeping it from his father?
Knowing full well what the rules were, what was expected from him, still, what of the countless times Little Theodore would try to take the easy way out, bringing upon himself scoldings and after-class leather-whippings by his sultry tight-sweatered teacher, Miss Landers (yes, a sort of Bettie Page hottie, many imagined) “You can’t go through life hoping others will clean up your mess.” (Speaking figuratively and metaphorically, Beaver having projectile vomited up his two-day-old-white-bread salmon-sandwich Wally prepared, the parents off at some convention. Did we ever find out just what the hell Dad did down at the mysterious ‘office’?)
What about when Wally and Beaver said they’d look after Herb Wilson’s four-year-old daughter, Puddin? Puddin becomes a handful when she locks herself in the bathroom and the boys have to call Gus the bug-eyed saggy-fleshed fireman to help get her out. Gigantically irresponsible. Would you leave your child in the hands of this curmudgeon? Who in Christ’s name would call their kid Puddin’? Yuck.
If you really sit with it and revue, you’ll see what we have here is a desperately unbright whiney child, unable to learn from or even recall his mistakes.
How about the occasions where he’d rely on donning the old pajamas before approaching Ward in the den to either fess up or explain away an attempt to weasel out of some scheme he had part in. Damaged thinking. Manipulative, playing the “Who, little ole me?” pubescent child card. When I have to go and apologize and make nice, maybe I’ve missed the boat in sporting my flannel Cowboy and Indian flannels.
Another example: Beaver returns home from school one day with a black eye. Ward is very upset to learn that Beaver didn’t fight back…until he finds out that is was, in fact, Violet Rutherford that hit his son! Yes, that was that skanky loudmouth Medusa (today, leader of an all woman’s motorcycle club) who repeatedly cut down Beaver in classroom interfacing. In his defense, I submit he had little healthy emotional support. Ward then teaches Beaver how to defend himself against his aggressors. Just what kind of parenting is that, teaching your 12 year old to beat up on girls? Not that old Violet wasn’t deserving of a good knock, nevertheless. Later that day, Beaver and Violet are found playing ‘Doctor’ together in the park, apparently having forgotten about the fight earlier, though remembering all too clearly where one another’s private parts were.
*A little known fact, Beaver was asked to leave the public school system because of a controversial involvement with a radical student magazine. Also, word has it there were some inappropriate intimate cuddlin’ sessions with a mildly psychotic janitor named Clayton.
I cite another example: The boys send away for a genuine Florida alligator and decide to keep it secretly in their bathroom. Eventually it outgrows the bathroom and is moved to the basement where the boys charge ten cents to the neighborhood kids for a quick peek. They name him after Captain Jack, who once owned an alligator farm and who advises the boys on how to care for their alligator until June finds out. (After finding Ward’s Playboy stash, the Beav and brother Wally brainstorm and find they can charge the neighborhood kids upwards of a sawbuck to get a look at dirty old Violet’s developing chest). Uh hello?! Ordering up endangered out-of-state reptiles and on Ward’s Master Card, too!! Beav should have been sent packing: an excruciatingly rule-oriented community, like Dr. Drew’s Celeb Rehab, maybe a Charm School for Convicts, chained to other children in orange jumpsuits (not pajamas) with the same unruly disposition, digging ditches at highway roadsides under a
burning hot California sun…somewhere to have learned discipline, not to be further coddled.
Some of Leave it to Beaver’s themes emphasize the magical granting of ones wishes (infantile). Others promise success in exchange for hard work and self-sacrifice (neo-Puritan). Many of our stories today say that valuelessness is itself the best value! Time and time again, Beaver Cleaver was promised if he acted accordingly in natural Darwinian fashion, he would be rewarded, though often, in retrospect I submit he got nothing but screwed: in terms of allowance, personal time on weekends (“Screw cutting that lawn again, man!”), and not being allowed to choose his own sensible female counterpart, having his mom roll out some lame, dumb-assed, head-braced friend of the family to meet, marry and later spawn with.
So, I argue that to leave anything whatsoever to “The Beave” was a horror show choice and should have been exhibited as what NOT to do; a crushing, teeth-grinding failure that did nothing but illuminate bad behavior to a fragmented pre-teen nation i.e. Examples of Rotten Ways to Handle Situations (though that title did not wash with the North Eastern pre-screening US audiences).
I take issue with how infantile the kid is. Beaver possesses wishes but no will. Filled with dreams and desires, he didn’t have the self-discipline to make anything of his dreams and desires, and so had no choice but to become dependent and conformist. He loves, but his love means little. Enter myths, stories that help us to “make sense” out of out lives, “guiding narratives.” They resemble to some extent Jung’s archetypes, but they can be conscious and unconscious, collective and personal. A good example is how many people live their lives based on stories from the Bible. In some of the lost episodes, Beaver joined up with the conniving grifter Eddie Haskel, kind of a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby crusading on a musical journey spreading the word of Jesus. That wasn’t the first time good old Eddie hornswoggled a gullible Beaver Cleaver. There were more than a few times Beaver believed in his bumbling schemes and paid the price for it later.
Not exactly the brightest bulb in the ship’s chandelier was he, for instance, when Aunt Martha gives Beaver a family heirloom ring which he is told not to wear to school. Instead of wearing it on his finger, he ties it to a string and wears it around his belt loop. It eventually gets on his finger and becomes stuck, and Wally tells Beaver the only way to get it off is to cut his finger off. Again, not such lucid thinking.
A second ending, one where Beaver really cuts his pinky off and lives the rest of his days a nine-figured freak, was lost in a fire at Warner Brothers, or so the studio says. (If you’re able to get up close you’ll be able to see tons of stitches joining a finger to a hand).
How about when Beaver and Wally decide to sell a perfume called Flower for a dollar a bottle, but the problem is that the perfume smells like a dirty catcher’s mitt. The boys need to think of a strategy in order to sell 24 bottles to win a movie projector. Ward steps in and decides to help the boys by making some phone calls for them, again, not allowing Beaver (or his brother) to feel the full brunt of their actions, thus remaining seemingly forever, the Child.
I must say that I will think twice, no, probably a half dozen times or more, when the idea hits me that to Leave It To MY child, would be a very bad idea. I’ll tread extra carefully in my home when it comes time to handing over any important concerns to my little guy.
So I thank you little Beaver, Jerry Mathers, as these have proved to be important life lessons for me.
Dragging along all this and more as I reflect, what I now affectionately refer to as my unbearably isolating and disfiguring personality influx. Thanks Beaver.
You gave it your best shot, kid. And I thank you for that. I thank you.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Masterson is wonderful; his words make me float away.
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