On why those
beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.
Late last year, I
humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier,
any text, even Baywatch, is a
possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will
momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground
the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s
existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Joey and
Chandler: pretty people
running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of
the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray
to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very
fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or
unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have
similarly depended on the attractiveness
of their casts to keep their audiences watching.
If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap
opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre
differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were
beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all,
the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the
lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too
did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami
Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in
this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatch was relatively progressive in
the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people
solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male
protagonists. Yes, the women of Baywatch were beautiful and dressed
skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally
heroic as well.
The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show
parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights,
about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits).
But the problem with BN wasn’t just
its awfulness (Baywatch itself wasn’t
exactly The
Wire, after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the
original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing
suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of
the beach were Jaws
and its many sequels and imitators,
a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water.
And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined
to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more
pleasant and attractive than Bruce
munching on tourists. Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt
that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into
our cultural narratives of the beach?
Special guest
post this weekend,
Ben
PS.
What do you think?
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