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.
