『The Man Behind Archie Bunker』のカバーアート

The Man Behind Archie Bunker

The Man Behind Archie Bunker

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Welcome back to Infinite Threads. I’m your host Bob.This week, I want to talk about television.But not exactly about television.I want to talk about what some of those old shows may have taught us without our realizing we were being taught anything at all.Looking back now, I think they helped shape the way I learned to see people.And if I’m going to begin anywhere, it has to be with Archie Bunker.Archie could be loud.He could be stubborn.And he could say things that were racist, sexist, insulting, and sometimes just plain awful.Norman Lear never asked us to pretend otherwise.But he did something I think was much more interesting.He refused to let Archie be only those things.Every so often, the show would pull the chair out from underneath the character we thought we understood.The bluster would disappear.The argument would stop.And suddenly there was just a man standing there.I remember those moments.Maybe not because I consciously understood what they were doing when I first saw them, but because they stayed with me.One of the strongest came when Archie and Mike got locked together in a storeroom.Normally, put those two in a room and you knew what was coming.An argument.Archie yelling.Mike pushing back.Neither one giving an inch.But that night went somewhere else.As they talked, Archie started telling Mike about being a kid.He talked about growing up during the Depression and being teased because his family was so poor that, for a while, he had to wear a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other.Then he talked about his father.The same father Archie had spent his life defending.A father who hit him.A father who once locked him in a closet as punishment.And the remarkable part was that Archie still tried to explain it as love.His father had done those things because, in Archie’s mind, that was what fathers did.That scene did not magically erase Archie’s prejudice.It did not turn him into a different character the next morning.But suddenly we could see more of him.We could see the boy inside the man.That matters to me now.Because it connects directly to something we talked about recently on Infinite Threads.Before somebody became the adult standing in front of us, there was a child.Life happened in between.Sometimes a lot of life.And understanding what happened does not mean approving of what came out of it.That may be one of the most important lessons those shows gave me.You can understand someone without excusing them.Those are not the same thing.Archie could be wrong.Very wrong.And still be human.Norman Lear trusted us to hold both thoughts at once.That is much more difficult than simply giving us a villain.A villain is easy.You know what to do with a villain.You dislike him.Problem solved.Archie would not stay that simple.We saw him with Edith.That was another place where the mask sometimes slipped.Public Archie had an answer for everything.Private Archie could be confused by his own feelings.Edith knew him in a way nobody else did.She could frustrate him, disarm him, and sometimes reveal the tenderness he worked very hard to hide.There were moments when you realized just how much he depended on her.He might not have had the language for it.He certainly was not going to sit down and give a speech about emotional vulnerability.But it was there.And then came the moment when Edith was gone.By then, All in the Family had become Archie Bunker’s Place.Edith had died.Archie tried to keep moving.He resisted grief the way Archie resisted almost anything that made him feel powerless.Then he went into their bedroom and found one of Edith’s slippers.That scene is hard for me to forget.Because suddenly there was no Archie Bunker performance left.No politics.No insult.No argument.Just a grieving husband holding something that belonged to the woman he loved.For years, we had watched him complain about Edith.Interrupt Edith.Call her a dingbat.And then she was gone.Suddenly we understood that beneath all of that noise was a man who had built his life around her.The mask came completely off.That is storytelling at its best.It doesn’t tell us, “Archie was secretly wonderful all along.”He wasn’t.It tells us something more honest.Human beings can contain things that seem impossible to fit inside the same person.Prejudice and love.Cruelty and tenderness.Fear and loyalty.That is uncomfortable.But it is real.And I think seeing that over and over probably did something to me.It taught me to look for the person underneath the behavior.Not so I could excuse the behavior.So I could understand what I was actually looking at.There is a difference between saying, “Archie says hateful things because deep down he is really a good man,” and saying, “Archie says hateful things, and there is also a wounded, frightened, loving human being inside him.”The second version does not erase responsibility.It expands the picture.And when the picture gets larger, empathy becomes possible.I think that is one reason All...
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