What I watched: The twelfth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Lanny Rees, Sid Tomack and Bob Jellison. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “Junior’s Birthday Party” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, December 20, 1949, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open with Peg telling us that Babs is staying with a friend for the weekend, thus saving the show her appearance fee. With his kids out of the house, Riley conks out on the couch, until Waldo comes around to wake him up. Waldo has written a very long poem about the value of love, friendship, and tolerance that sounds like a children’s book. Gillis comes by to interrupt him. Once again, Gillis brags about how his relationship with his son is so much better than Riley’s.
Naturally, this gets Riley to feeling insecure. When Junior comes home, Riley asks him who his best friend is, and Junior says his mom. I’m already reaching for my Freud books again. Riley founds out that, in his son’s estimation, he ranks somewhere below the other family members, Eggbert, and his girlfriend Marilyn. The next day, Riley asks for a kiss before heading off to school. Yeah, definitely going to need more Freud.
Peg reminds Riley that Junior’s birthday is this weekend, conveniently enough. Riley decides to throw him a great party to secure his love. After a brief cut, they’ve secured a cake and invited twelve kids. Riley goes to hide the cake in the coat closet, but Junior comes home early. He quickly sees the cake, and Riley admits that he’s throwing a surprise party, Junior tells him that he already has plans.
Junior reluctantly agrees to cancel his plans. However, it turns out that a lot of kids are also cancelling theirs, calling Riley and telling them that they have the measles. He calls the head of the Board of Health, who happens to be the father of two of the kids. Apparently everyone is going to the hot party at Barton Harper’s house. (I think that’s the name they said. It might have been Baron Harkonnen.) The grown-ups agree to have a party all by themselves.
Marilyn calls next, saying that Junior is taking her to the happening party too. Riley starts commiserating with Gillis about his failure as a father, but Junior shows up to his party anyway and says “jeepers” a lot. Even Marilyn didn’t come to his party — they broke up. They both start crying about being forever alone. But Marilyn comes back, asking for forgiveness, so I guess everything is okay.
What I thought: This is the third episode that Life of Riley has done around the idea that Riley thinks his son hates him. (It’s even the second to revolve around a birthday.) I say this not simply to bemoan the show’s repetition, but because I find it a very interesting dynamic. Junior, like the rest of Riley’s family members, is an almost character-less void — the fact that our protagonist is constantly projecting antipathy onto him (and to a lesser extent his wife and daughter) suggests something about him, and perhaps something about the show’s idea of fatherhood.
This is also a very gendered dynamic. When Riley worries that Babs is drifting away from him, it’s specifically a fear that another man will come and take her. On the other hand, a father’s fear of his son is grounded in the fear that the son will surpass him, and ultimately render him irrelevant. As the son approaches adolescence, he ceases being a dependent and starts being a competitor. (Fortunately, I was far too hopeless for my dad to have to worry about such things.)
But despite this gendered difference, “Junior’s Birthday Party” oddly still has an Oedipal feel to it. Riley demands professions of love from his son, including a kiss on the lips. His rivals for his son’s affection are teenagers who Junior might have erotic attachments to — the popular male kid whose party Junior would rather attend, and the girlfriend Marilyn, who has already planned a wedding that would take the Rileys’ son away from them.
Of course, in Freud’s Oedipus concept the relationship between father and son becomes strained because the son fears the father will castrate him like he did his mother, and the father fears that the son will kill him and take his place. (Symbolically speaking, of course. Sort of.) That is, while the father/daughter and mother/son relationships are erotic, the father/son bond is essentially agonistic, with the two locked in competition.
Freud in general imagines natural desire as exclusively heterosexual, with homosexuality a form of neurosis. I say this not to dunk on a psychologist from the 1890s for being unwoke, but to point out that an acceptance of homosexual desire changes the terms of any Freudian reading. Other than social gender roles, there’s no reason why a father can’t sublate desire for his son just as he does his desire for his daughter– or that the emotional bond between parent and child can get its wires crossed with the kind of erotic affinity which has previously been the only safe desire for a man to express in public. After all, father/son relationships are full of sites for uncomfortable desire, from public showers to slaps on the butt. And fatherhood has for a long time been eroticized in both gay and straight culture.
So I guess what I’m saying is: heh heh, these two old TV characters are gay. Heh heh.
Coming up next: The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Are they also gay?
The Eternal Couch Potato 