What I watched: The ninth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, John Brown and Marlo Dwyer. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “Junior Falls for Teacher” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, November 29, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
What happened: Peg has noticed that Junior has his head in the clouds, but finds that it’s equally hard to get Riley’s attention. He’s distracted by a story in the newspaper about an old man leaving his wife for a sexy blonde. When Peg finally tears the paper away, Riley tells her that their son is in “puppy love” and that it’s nothing to worry about.
At her prodding, Riley goes up to tell his son about the “facts of life” — or at least as much as you could say on TV in 1949. Junior asks how love can make you feel so good and so awful at the same time, a question most people are still pondering. He tells his father that he’s in love with an older woman, and Riley freaks out. One detail is emphasized over and over again: that Junioe hears bells when he sees his love. Gillis, apparently accustomed to invading Riley’s home unnoticed, pops his head in to say it can’t work. A despondent Junior rushes out of the room.
Riley relates the situation to Peg, and Gillis has somehow found out who Junior is in love with: his married schoolteacher, Mrs. Hendrickson. Peg laughs this off, but Riley takes this seriously, and goes to meet with the teacher. Her hair and earrings kind of make her look like a middle-aged aunt, which further raises the question of Junior’s pathology. She also dismisses the issue, saying that schoolboy crushes are normal. Riley starts hearing bells from the Good Humor man, and believes that he is falling in love with Mrs. Hendrickson as well, much to his horror.
At dinner, both father and son stare into space, mooning over the same woman. Riley takes Gillis aside and tells them of his unwanted affection. Gillis argues that his wayward attraction is perfectly natural through a convoluted chemistry metaphor. This leads Riley to obsess over “hearing bells” with Peg. Riley kisses Peg, but still doesn’t hear any bells. (There’s something about this family and confusing love for auditory hallucinations.)
Digger O’Dell drops in to give his own advice on the situation, while Gillis makes jokes about Riley needing a funeral. Digger tells him to tell his wife about his feelings, possibly hoping to get a big commission. Mrs. Hendrickson drops in to tell Peg that Junior has gotten over his crush, and has asked Marilyn to the school dance. Riley comes in and gets spooked. However, he doesn’t hear bells, so he decides he doesn’t love her. A creeped-out Mrs. Henderson backs out. Riley then hears the ice-cream truck bells again, and decides he’s in love with his wife again. And so, adultery is averted! Huzzah!
What I thought: I never had crushes on teachers. Okay, maybe one in uni, when I was old enough to know better. But for me, it was audacious enough to think that a girl my own age would be interested in me. Teachers, however much I might have found them attractive, were in a separate world. Wait, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, The Life of Riley.
Once again, “The Life of Riley” repeats itself in its plotting. As in “The French Teacher”, we have a Riley child developing a crush on an instructor, and once again the threat of the outsider’s seduction is passed on from child to parent about halfway through the episode. However, this time the genders are reversed — which may not say much for our trio of writers’ creativity, but as gender roles are so intricately woven into how we understand appropriate desire, it completely changes the tone of the episode.
Instead of a father fending off threats to his patriarchal dominance, we have a more internal struggle featuring a man trying to fend off patriarchal lust. This isn’t that surprising, as Riley is the protagonist of the show — but then again, aren’t men always the protagonists of these dramas of infidelity, in fiction or in real life?
The gender swap also changes the psychoanalytic ramifications of the storyline. Riley, Junior, and the teacher form a classic Oedipal triangle. Here, the teacher functions as a mother figure, with both men’s feelings about Peg transferred to the safe external target of the teacher. Father and son become romantic rivals, just as they are rivals for the wife-mother’s attention. Riley even directly compares his feelings for the two women on more than one occasion. Fortunately, we don’t get the bloody end that Freud ascribes to this kind of drama: instead Junior is unconvincingly shuffled off to a more age-appropriate love off-screen. (Say what you will about Freud’s idea, but at least it was dramatically interesting.)
It’s also worth noting how Riley’s belief in his love for his wife comes entirely from external cues — the much-repeated metaphor of hearing bells. Mostly this is just because he’s a sitcom dad and hence the stupidest person imaginable. But there’s also a submerged observations about how much the narrow form of Western love and marriage relies upon social ritual: how would we be sure how we feel if we didn’t have love songs, rom-coms, and wedding bells to tell us so? Those adolescent crushes I mentioned above were, in the end, about wanting to fit into a comfortable narrative as much as they were about the poor girls. Are all our interpersonal relationships inevitably tangled up in our relationship to society? Who knows!
Coming up next: Suspense also takes aim at the domestic sphere.
The Eternal Couch Potato 