Time traveling with a sense of nostalgia

We are a fortunate lot, alive in an epoch when we can carry time-machines in our pockets, have time-machines in our homes, able to operate them without risking a collapse of the time-lines. Of course, I’m not referring to anything as expensive as a radically costumized DeLorean. But I’m referring to something that, contrary to all the science fiction inventions, really does work: the VHS tape, the DVD, the Blu Ray discs, the tablets and smartphones with access to vast virtual libraries of film and TV. With cinema a tad older than comic books, and TV a tad younger, in the almost 120 year-history of these visual art forms it is amazing the notion of vertiginous –yet unbroken – social change forever recorded in those cultural artefacts. Thanks to them, on the whim of a moment, one can visit another time-line; say one where it would be excitingly daring for a lady to lift her skirt above the knee; or unseemly for that same lady to sit at the dining table without waiting for a man to pull it back for her. On another whim, we can travel to a time when Janet Leigh is still alive and in her thirties, lying on a seedy motel bed in only a virginal white bra and a rumpled skirt. Jump after jump, we may by searching for a time when we ourselves were young and alive and attuned with the times, instead of surfing the timelines like lost retronauts in search of  archaeological memories. Excluded from the present by the ever-growing reach of the politically correct cancel police, one must dwell in the glow of days gone by.

On one of those jumps, I landed once more in the time when I was no more than twelve or thirteen, enjoying life and the endless pleasures only childhood allows, one of them being THE DUKES OF HAZZARD on TV. Bo and Luke Duke, just like Tom and Huck before them, were the epitome of youthful daring and sunny adventures. They lived in a fantasyland of dusty backroads and dense tree forests, of crystalline creeks and sun-softened two-lane blacktops. They drove a muscled up 1969 Dodge Charger with a characteristic charging horn and a Rebel Flag on its roof. And they had a cousin, Daisy Duke, that was as hot as the Sun and as cool as the Georgia rivers, and sexy as the sins country bumpkins went to confess in husky tones before Sunday mass.

This time around I landed in episode two of the second season, “Gold Fever” (1979). The plot, revolving around a gold swindle that almost puts Boss Hogg on a three million dollar debt to some Texas crooks, and Bo and Luke behind bars, is of no great concern to us here. What is, is a scene where, as the country narration of Waylon Jennings tells us, in order to impress the (to him, unbeknownst) swindler, Boss Hogg “shut the Boar’s Nest down, dressed Daisy up, and went all hog”. And the Texan swindler is dully impressed. Who wouldn’t be, with Daisy (Catherine Bach) dressed up in a frilly, v-necked mock-up of a French maid costume, all of it short skirt, black pantyhose and deep cleavage. Daisy is a wet-dream come true, and while the family-oriented comedy tone of the series makes us unmindful that she’s only working for Boss Hogg because he had loaned money to Uncle Jesse and the boys at a specially low-interest (to purchase the entry fee to run with their car, the General Lee, on a competition), the exploitative role of her attire makes any male viewer sizzle with desire.

Obviously, Daisy Duke is a country bumpkin caricature. But Catherine Bach has made the caricature come to sizzling live and throughout the entire run of the DUKES OF HAZZARD (1979-1985) she was able to turn Daisy’s sometimes unbelievable naïveté into one of her most charming assets, portraying her as negotiating a fine line between knowing she’s super hot and not believing that fact at all.

Not that Daisy is being naïve on the scene I’m considering here. When Boss Hogg keeps urging Daisy to put more food on the plate of his guest, she is plainly aware that when he answers with a subtly impolite “No, thank you, little darling, I’ve had quite enough. (Pause) Food, that is” he is plainly staring at her generous décolletage. As is Boss Hogg: “Careful, Daisy honey, the eyes of Texas are upon you.”

Daisy is there as mere eye-candy, an object of desire that Hogg exhibits as a way of mellowing his new business partner, impressing him; but also as a proud business man would exhibit one of his expensive acquisitions. And one could even perceive in Boss Hogg’s attitude a certain undisguised Georgian pride about the way this Georgian beauty is firing up the Texan’s concupiscence. Hogg and the Texan crook are on the same wavelength; Daisy however is not. She just rolls her eyes at such infantile infatuation and nonchalantly proceeds to embarrass Hogg by mentioning that a noise that came from the adjacent kitchen (Bo and Luke inadvertently tumbling some trays) came probably from the usual rats that dwell there.

This nonchalance on her part is what makes light – literally disarms – what could be perceived (and surely is, by today’s thought police) as the troubling objectification of a beautiful young woman in a family-oriented comedy/adventure series. For Daisy is at one with her hotness. It is part of her and who she is, and is something to enjoy and allow others to enjoy – on her own terms. The generosity of those terms made the happiness of countless kids in the late seventies and eighties, and will keep doing so while we’re able to travel back in time, to more simpler and happier days, through the oceans of time preciously stored in our jeweled plastic libraries.