He was an average athlete, and an average student. Played by a young Fred Savage, Kevin was cute, but in a brown-eyed, brown-haired, conventional kind of way-nothing that would turn heads in the street. Yet what “The Wonder Years” really got right, above all else, was Kevin’s evident ordinariness-a distinct identity that managed to characterize a broad swath of the population perhaps best known for being unremarkable: average, middle-class, white kids. They aim for small victories, but always fall short, finally too weak, dependent, and inexperienced to stand up for themselves. Boys resent the authority of their fathers-the disciplinarians, the breadwinners-but have no recourse to do anything about it, which breeds more resentment. But when his father tells him to speak up, Kevin grows timid, and drops the matter entirely. Kevin, attempting an act of assertiveness, asks him to turn it down. Kevin’s father flips on the radio to an oldies station, and grins as something of the “Jeepers Creepers” variety comes loudly through the speakers. In the car, conversation is painful and strained, though when Kevin was a child, before he had a desire for independence from his Dad’s tyranny, this was not the case-each knew where he stood, and was comfortable, happy, and safe in his clearly defined role. Arnold, were supposed to go suit-shopping for Kevin-a manly errand forced upon a boy ankle-deep in puberty. The two of them, under the encouragement of Mrs.
For example, I recall the awkwardness and tension of a day trip that Kevin took with his taciturn father. Because while the show was a period piece, its loyalty to the facts of the period was never the attraction. That I was coming of age in the nineties, in a drastically different era than Kevin Arnold’s, did not much matter. I remember little touches, specific details or scenes that did the work of explaining the world in which I lived. I haven’t seen “The Wonder Years” in a long time, and if you asked me to provide you with an array of plot points, I’d be at a loss. Shows that attempt to replicate the ambitious aesthetic of “The Wonder Years”-the humorous, yet serious, portrayal of suburban malaise the small, messy complexities of relationships the absurdities of a privileged adolescence, with its attending pains and joys-are, like “Freaks and Geeks” and “My So-Called Life,” typically cancelled after a single season. Instead, it relied on high-school football as an apparent narrative rationale, around which acute depictions of middle-class drama, among teen-agers and parents, took place. Not even a first-rate program like “Friday Night Lights,” which the first-rate critic Daniel Mendelsohn extolled as “the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture,” was able to do that. And, though a preciousness and sentimentality pervaded “The Wonder Years” that was absent from the literature, the show was a significant achievement, relying on boring realism, in and of itself, as a propulsive narrative device. Literary fiction, of course, had already been doing this sort of thing for decades, though with more menace and darkness in the mix, reaching a commercial fever pitch in the eighties with writers like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Stephanie Vaughn. And by making dull, quotidian life its subject, it redeemed all that was dull and quotidian. “The Wonder Years” was, for me, the first show that artfully dramatized the banality of a white, suburban, middle-class childhood. Until I saw “The Wonder Years,” I had never experienced verisimilitude while watching television but there was Kevin Arnold, who looked like me and was my age, getting pummeled by his older brother, Wayne, on the front lawn, much like I was pummelled by my older brother on the front lawn. It was a period piece before period pieces were all the rage, epitomized by the opening credit sequence that layered Joe Cocker’s rendition of “With a Little Help from My Friends” over grainy, Super-8 home-video footage.
Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper were the central characters in “The Wonder Years,” a television dramedy that ran from 1988 to 1993, but took place in Nixon’s America.
0 kommentar(er)
