What I watched: The nineteenth episode of the first season of The Lone Ranger, a kid-oriented Western created by George W. Trendle. This episode starred Clayton Moore as the titular hero and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, with guest appearances by Stanley Farrar, Esther Somers, Dick Curtis and Lane Chandler. This episode was directed by George B. Seitz and written by Tom Seller. “Man of the House” aired on Thursday, January 26, 1950 at 7:30 PM on ABC, and is available to watch on YouTube, which seemingly also has a collection of pirate LR episodes.
What happened: We open on a seemingly mismatched couple, with a meek man named Casper (Farrar) breaking dishes as his masculine and aggressive wife, Maud (Somers), yells at him. She tells him she wishes she never married him, which seems a little harsh for a dispute over dishes, but you know how relationships get. Elsewhere, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are tracking some rustlers. They find a stray calf, and see from the branding that it belongs to the Circle D ranch (all of the ranch names have “circle” in them, I guess.)
The Circle D, of course, belongs to Casper and Maud. Casper takes the duo to be rustlers and tries to stand up to them, but fails to even draw his gun. Despite his professions to be a weakling, the Ranger sees something in Casper and decides to bring him along on the manhunt.
In town, Tonto enters a barber shop, and is immediately greeted with a racial slur. When he hears the two men in the chair discussing something shady, he decides to tail them. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Maud comes home to find her husband gone. Her ranchhand Tex (Chandler) comes in, and gets berated as well. The Ranger trains Casper by having him shoot at the wanted poster of Spike Wade (Curtis), the head of the rustlers. This is apparently enough to make him a dead-eye in the course of an afternoon.
Spike catches Tonto following the trio of rustlers, and they surround him. Tonto puts up a good fight, and sends his pinto horse Scout off to find the Ranger. The rustlers underestimate the super-intelligence of this horse. Elsewhere, Casper has mastered the art of killing, much to the approval of the Lone Ranger. The horse comes and gets them, leading them to the canyon where the rustlers are hiding.
They find the hideout and the missing cattle. The rustlers are just about ready to kill Tonto. Casper fires a couple of shots to draw the two out. The Ranger busts into the cabin and straight-up tries to shoot Spike in the gut. He gets surrounded, but Casper comes to the rescue and even shoots Spike’s hat off. But this isn’t satisfying enough, so the Ranger and Tonto decide to have a fistfight with the miscreants behind closed doors, which they presumably win.
Back home, Maudie is still looking for Casper, if only to cook he night’s meal. He arrives, and she doesn’t believe what the Ranger says about his role in the adventure. So he proves his masculinity by shooting her favourite teapot and commanding her to make him a meal at gunpoint. You know, for kids! Seeing patriarchal order restored, the Ranger and Tonto ride off.
What I thought: Critics have a tendency to talk about TV series as monolithic texts, particularly in a contemporary context where stories are heavily serialized. But large projects like television shows, particularly episodic ones, are sites of struggle as much as they are participants. Different writers, directors, showrunners, and even actors all work to create their own meaning, sometime in harmony and sometimes in conflict with each other.
Hence, after weeks of Lone Ranger episodes with relatively active and engaging female characters, we have an insistent piece of misogyny like “Man in the House.” The episode seems like almost a direct rebuke to episodes like “Cannonball McKay”: here, instead of being a sympathetic hero, the masculine woman is an overbearing shrew who needs to be put in line. Tom Seller seems to have walked into the room, realized that the women writers were taking over this show, and violently wrested it back to traditional gender roles in the same way his protagonist Casper does. (This probably didn’t actually happen — I doubt The Lone Ranger had a contemporary TV-style writer’s room, or that writers would even have seen previous episodes before submitting their scripts — but it sure feels like it.)
The domestic world that Seller paints is meant to be lighthearted, but it comes across as a bitter and desperate battle. When Casper becomes newly confident, he doesn’t enter into a relationship with his wife as equals, or leave her because of her mistreatment. Rather, he assumes the position of abuser, physically threatening and berating her. The choice, Seller suggests, is to be abuser or abused, and the former role naturally belongs to the man. This seems like a tremendously hollow and dissatisfying way to interact with the most important person in your life, but then again I’m a beta male too.
Of course, the contesting of meaning doesn’t end within the production of the text, but also involves the reader (or, in the case of television, the viewer.) Even so, it’s hard to imagine how one could come up with a feminist or reparative reading of “Man of the House” without ignoring large parts of the text. Seller seems insistent on imposing his meaning, with every stray line of dialogue doubling back to the same phrases of masculine self-discovery. Like a bad arthouse movie, the same few set of symbols — man vs. mouse, the gun, the meals — are used over and over again in every combination until their meaning becomes suffocating.
Even the action-adventure part of the episode is a let down, as the conflict with the rustlers is about as generic as could be. At least Tonto’s horse gets some spotlight. There are still like two hundred episodes of The Lone Ranger left, so hopefully the Tom Sellers on the staff don’t ultimately win out.
Coming up next: Another Life of Riley, which suddenly looks like the SCUM Manifesto.
The Eternal Couch Potato 