Cult Culture: Gunsmoke

What happened to American television? Sitting naked on the living room
floor and drinking vodka straight from the bottle while watching TV
Land, I had a revelation during an episode of Gunsmoke.
I didn’t switch the channel because, if I were to move too fast, I
would have thrown up. In your later years, you get a feeling for things
such as that. So I held very still and watched the entire episode and
realized that our generation is being shortchanged. This is something
I’ve long suspected since, after all, the worst episodes of Are You Being Served? are better than much of the stuff coming out today. But this episode of Gunsmoke really put the situation in focus.

I don’t know what the name of the episode was, but it was about
three cattle hands who come into Dodge City after a particularly
strenuous cattle run. They’ve each earned 100 bucks and plan to head
out and settle down with the money. One has a girl waiting for him,
another has a plot of land in Texas that he wants to work and the third
is the main guy’s old buddy who doesn’t have any plans; which means
he’s the gay one.

Of course, three months on the trail with the cows has them all tweaked
out, so they head into the saloon to whoop it up, as you do, and end up
getting in an argument with a group of railroad engineers. The railroad
is undercutting the cattle driving industry with their fancy schmanzy
cattlecars and what not, so there’s some luddite tension on the part of
our three cattlehands. After posturing with the ladies and buying
drinks for everyone, they become involved in a fracas with the railroad
engineers. Chairs are thrown, girls are punched, bottles are smashed.
Afterwards, our boys wake up in Marshal Dillon’s jail where we learn
that the head cattle guy and Matt Dillon are old buds. That gets them
out and on the streets with relatively little problem, at which point
they realize that all their money is gone. In a bit of a snit, they
return to the saloon and accuse the owner of ripping them off. He
protests innocence, shots are fired, the cashbox is stolen and the
chase is on.

That’s all in the first 10 minutes. The rest of the show is the chase –
our three cowhand anti-heroes make a run from Dodge City to Texas with
Dillon and Festus in hot pursuit. Of course, our three boys are
honorable men. They want to do the right thing, but find themselves on
the wrong end of the law every time. Why? Because they don’t have
money. In what my grandmother would call a wicked turn of the devil’s
hand, the stolen cash box was empty. Our boys can’t survive with 32
cents between them, and so they become increasingly frustrated. Several
times on their fugitive journey, they stop and try to get a job in the
hopes of paying off their crimes. At every turn, they find that the
railroad has stolen all the jobs and that cowpokes are becoming a thing
of the past. Modern America versus the old ways is the theme, we even
get a narrated ending about the conditions and pay that the old
cowhands had to face and how they were “the backbone that really built
America” not the thieving, carpetbagger railroads, thank you. Luddite
tension appears to have infected the writers, as well. Or, perhaps,
failing grades in history.

Of course, our anti-heroes all die horridly. One returns to his girl,
only to be shot unjustly by a sheriff. Another gets belly shot by an
unscrupulous general store owner and dies as soon as he crosses the
border into Texas. Our main anti-hero, though, survives. At least,
until Matt Dillon and Festus catch up with him. He delivers a powerful
speech about honor, modern morality and life as a cowhand, then, to a
swell of music, he rides into the middle of a herd of cattle, driving
them to stampede while old friend Marshall Dillon screams frantically
for him to stop. Our anti-hero, riding amidst the stampeding cattle,
looks up sadly and then lets go of his horse, falling into the churned,
dusty earth. The camera lowers to a POV stampede shot, then lifts
slowly as the cattle thin out to reveal the twisted, ruined body of our
tobacco-chewing, straight-talking, honest as the day is long anti-hero.

Epilogue. The stone grave of our hero, Dillon and Festus standing sadly
over it, saying nothing. The scene fades back to an overhead shot of
the cattle, where the “builders of America” narration takes over. Fade
to black, silently roll credits.

Just another episode of Gunsmoke. And it was a piece of 45
minute art. It was beautifully shot, perfectly cast and written with a
skilled hand. The suicide was a breath-taking scene and, as I watched
with wide eyes, I realized that this is something we don’t get on TV
today. Today, we get sanitized episodes of trash that barely make sense
if you actually stop and think about them…which you’re not supposed to
do. Oh, there are always exceptions, and they often do get the
recognition they deserve, but those exceptions are rarely successful
ratings-wise. The critics howl about them, but they are shows that are
cancelled, briefly saved by write-in campaigns, and never do well
enough to be labeled a “hit.” Gunsmoke was always a “hit,”
whether it was a mindless bad guy kisses Miss Kitty episode or a
complicated character study. It lasted for decades and, at its worst,
it’s better than most anything coming across the networks today. These
old shows dealt with complex characters, racial tension, controversial
American history and delivered prostitutes with hearts of gold, hanged
men and men that couldn’t be hanged, real mysteries, personal
revelations, madness, hatred and love. Hell, The Waltons were
dealing with Japanese-American internment camps 20 years before Clinton
delivered a waterhead apology. The stories didn’t always end well.
Sometimes, the good guys died. Rarely, compared to today’s formula, was
the story wrapped up with an innocuous “family friendly” finale.

Even the campy 80’s trash, which I love with a secret passion,
outstrips today’s TV. So what’s the problem? How can these outdated,
sometimes goofy classics do so much better than a multi-million dollar
per episode network series in 2003? Is this the horror of the PC
generation? I think John Carpenter hit a nerve, nearly 15 years ahead
of his time, in They Live.
The entire entertainment industry is not only controlled by an
interstellar marketing corporation, but all the TV really says is
“Obey” and “Spend” and “Sleep.”

Unfortunately, of course, there’s no grand conspiracy. The choice is
our own. For every one of us who questions the bullshit that gets
shoveled down our throats, there are ten people who follow it blindly.
You know them – the people who come home after a 12 hour day, turn on
the TV, and stare at it blankly. Ask them an hour later what they were
watching and, more often than not, they won’t be able tell you. In this
silent, lonely world the TV is companion, lover, mother, father. When
you have an exhausted, overmedicated, overworked society, then you have
to provide simple stories written by simple storytellers. Even the
critical successes are fading. As we move deeper into the hollow,
shallow life, the critics have begun to focus on shows like Monk,
which fail to deliver an ounce of intelligence. Critics have given up
on the real edge and, instead, they wallow in a strange sort of
defeatism. Monk will succeed because they say so but, most
especially, because it’s mindless entertainment. You can see this
happening because it’s clumsily handled. Monk is on the cover
of the TV Guide and the Washington Post’s TV guide on the same week,
and the articles raving about it being the best show on TV are
disturbingly similar. In the industry, don’t they call that “block
advertising”? Where you get the same commercial on multiple channels at
the same time? I sat down and gave Monk a fair trial and, well,
it’s mindless, it’s cute, it’s made for the masses. Our modern day
critical hits are on par with run of the mill bubblegum TV from
yesteryear. Of course, the critics are on the payroll these days.

So how do we change it? How do we take back our entertainment? My
solution has been to read books and get a Netflix subscription. But I’m
quick to surrender. The truth is, there is strength out there. The
biggest niche in the DVD market is that of television box sets. The old
shows are selling so well that they can even afford to put out a
lovingly restored boxset of the shameful Planet of the Apes TV series.
So my best advice is to keep buying those boxsets and weather
out the PC generation. All of this must end in social revolution, and
it’ll happen in our lifetime. Until then, in between watching episodes
of classic TV on state of the art entertainment systems, we can keep
our minds alive by defacing billboards, destroying advertisements and
surrounding our suburban homes with razor wire and cyclone fencing. Oh,
and don’t forget to have half nude women and mock pagan ceremonies in
your backyard. That really gets the neighborhood committee fired up.