[Released on May 11, 1964, “I Get Around” would go on to become the first #1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeat Guest Post from one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]
On why
those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.
Back in
the blog’s early days, 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 Friends’ 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 tuning in.
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 Baywatch
Nights 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?
Last Beach
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?
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