Looking for some family entertainment over the holidays, I found the entire nine seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies in the $5 and under bin at our local evil chainstore. In case you are a young ‘en or grew up abroad, this wildly popular sitcom ran from 1962 through 1971 and featured the Clampett family – Jed, Granny, Ellie May and Jethro – fictional hillbillies who struck it rich when oil was discovered on their rural property.
So what’s a hillbilly family to do when they shift economically from the 99% to the 1%? Why they take the advice of their opportunistic kinfolk, of course, and “move to Beverly.”
Here’s the rap version of that unmistakable theme song, performed by John Goodman head of that other famous 99% family…
The Clampetts move to the biggest house in the fanciest, nouveau-riche zip code in the country, with the assistance of their money-grubbing/personal banker/new best friend/next door neighbour, Mr. Drysdale. Mr. Drysdale, seeing only the dollar signs and transfer of mass wealth to his bank, doesn’t bother with the details, like the socio-psycho complications of having a family of hillbillies move into his wealthy enclave. While he is willing to overlook his neighbours’ shortcomings, Mr. Drysdale is terrified of his matronly, blue-blooded, hypochondriac of a wife, that she will divorce him for welcoming the barbarians through their gates.
According to the classic dramatic conflict – Noble Savage/Rube Comes to the Sophisticated City And Shows the City Folk How It’s Really Done – the Clampetts stay true to their rural roots, simple ways, and personal and family happiness. While they adopt some of the rituals and customs of their new culture, they never truly assimilate. They work the culture to their advantage and adopt the rituals and trappings of wealth to meet their basic human needs, with no guile or manipulation on their part.
They may be a freakish novelty to the Hollywood crowd but, it is also obvious that they are WAY more fun than the usual local social circle. Their modesty, natural attraction and good-nature are a constant foil and source of humiliation for the Drysdales, Mrs. D in particular. Apparently everybody wants to party with the Clampetts.
http://youtu.be/THphATy5ji4
The series is well-written and acted and remains relevant as social satire nearly fifty years later.
The upper classes are caricatured as sickly, both mentally and physically, while the Clampett’s are held up as robust and healthy, their natural ways and inherent poverty beneficent. Of course, neither extreme is true and there is little nobel found in true poverty.
The ‘courting’ and social-climbing rituals of both classes are held up for ridicule, being not dissimilar. Girls are pieces of meat to be tarted up and, essentially, sold-off to the highest bidder before their Best Before date arrives. The suitors are pathological creeps or charlatans, regardless of class, yet the elders are willing to overlook this. Ellie May’s physicality, resourcefulness and independence, not to mention modest clothing, is rejected as unfeminine and detrimental to her search for a man. Whereas Jethro, a brawny, innocent lout of a guy with a fifth-grade education and ankle-length pants, is held up as a model of manliness. He is potential partner for the brainy (and therefore less-attractive) woman and as a sex machine for the attractive, modern young lady of means. Sadly, I’m not sure much has changed in fifty years.
The series mirrors the conflict between the post-war jump in consumerism and slavish addiction to modern inventions vs. the ‘back to nature’ movement that emerged with the rise of the sixties counterculture, and which is re-emerging in today’s enviro-aware and post-oil culture. It’s not coincidental that Jed’s newfound riches came from oil. Cheap energy was the primary means to America’s new found, and broader-based, wealth and the show is set in Los Angeles, the ultimate centre of the oil-based car culture. It was cheap oil that allowed the most unlikely (and unnatural) places, like the Californian deserts, to be broadly settled by millions of people. It was cheap oil that enabled the lowest on the economic totem pole to move up into the next class, ultimately striving for the American Dream. Everyone got a house, a car or two, a stove, refrigerator and good education for their children. If you were really lucky, you became a millionaire and made it to the 1% club.
From a technology perspective, what’s old is entirely new again, and that which is old and simple always trumps the new. Granny as the family matriarch, ignores all of the modern technology of the mansion, opining that there is no well or indoor plumbing. Her first act is to set up the corn alcohol still. She then carries her water from the ‘cement pond’ (the swimming pool) into the house and the family continues to bath in an oversized barrel in the kitchen. She comments on the chemical smell of the water, noting that as the reason why “no fish live in there.” Jethro cuts down ‘trees’ (telephone poles) and hauls the wood into the kitchen so granny can light a cook fire in the gas-fired stove. Jed wanders around with a divining rod and a shovel to find a suitable place for the well. The rod goes crazy, uncovering the buried lawn sprinklers. Granny makes health potions with her dried herbs and her own lye soap that is guaranteed to clean anything and ensure the health of everyone. Jethro, searching for suitable ground to build a root cellar, ruptures an oil line while digging, to which Jed observes, “Don’t tell anyone about the oil. They’ll force more money on us and we have enough of that.” Jed and Jethro head out with their shotguns into the neighbourhood, hoping to find edible critters, unintentionally shooting Mrs. Drysdale’s fox stole instead. Ellie May is thrilled with her new bra, thinking that she has received a much-needed and coveted “double barrel slingshot”. The Clampett truck is homely but practical, able to transport the entire family and all their worldly goods, to their new home across the country. They are entirely portable and self-sufficient and nobody seems to object to them walking around with shotguns.
I am particularly amused because of the low-tech Clampett-like projects on my list to build/do, which include a root cellar, wood-burning sauna, a cidrerie, resurrection of our stone cistern, outdoor bake oven/smokehouse, chickens, and my recent foray into roadkill butchery.
Could I possibly be channelling the composite spirit of Granny and Ellie May Clampett without even knowing it? Is luxe, by necessity or trendiness, on its way out and tool belts and self-sufficiency in? How can we most quickly and efficiently transfer critical skills to the masses? Do we need to look backward in order to move forward? Are we truly learning from the hard lessons of our massive consumption? How do we select which technologies to support and which to disregard? And how do we assess which technologies benefit or detract from the human social experience?
For these and other ongoing discussions y’all will have to come back , now y’hear?