A Face in the Crowd
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My father looked like Andy Griffith. My awareness of this resemblance goes as far back as I can
remember. In fact, it’s impossible for me to recall a time when I saw the man as my father and only later
noticed that he happened to look like the actor on television. Instead, the features that became fixed in my
mind as signifying “father”—the dark, curly hair combed back with oil; the friendly blue eyes set off by
thick eyebrows; and the wide mouth that seemed made for smiling, teasing, and laughing—were always
the same features I recognized from the face I’d seen countless times on The Andy Griffith Show. In turn,
I felt a similar sense of recognition every time I sat in front of the television to watch Griffith’s
performance as Sheriff Andy Taylor. I couldn’t help it: aside from that warm face, his uniform resembled
the uniform my father wore as a reserve deputy in the sheriff’s department; he also had a devoted son who
was my age, and his mannerisms had an easygoing charm that mirrored that of my father, who had grown
up in the rural outskirts of our hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. As I look back, I see how both sorts of
recognition, both sorts of misrecognition, fed each another in a strong, perpetual feedback loop in the
early development of my thoughts and emotions.
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The Andy Griffith Show was first born on February 15, 1960, as a pilot episode of The Danny Thomas
Show, formerly known in its first two seasons as Make Room for Daddy. This was eleven years prior to
my own birth—eleven years prior to the time when a 43 year-old man named John Delaney Trevitte made
room for himself by making room for me—and three years before the marriage of my father-to-be and my
mother-to-be, Peggy Marie Hicks. Subsequently, The Andy Griffith Show enjoyed a strong eight-season
run on the CBS television network (October 3, 1960-April 1, 1968), which in my hometown was
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broadcast on Channel 11, station WJHL. Alongside such shows as I Love Lucy and Star Trek, it was one
of the most successful programs from Desilu Studios—which not only sustained the show’s production
through its facilities in Los Angeles, Culver City, and Beverly Hills, but also ensured that the show’s
corporate signature would be a word associated with the sacred bond of matrimony: in this case, the
marriage of the studio’s co-owners, Dezi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Yet it should be noted, too, that the
inaugural year of The Andy Griffith Show was also the year of the “Desilu divorce” (brought on,
according to the tabloids, by Dezi’s womanizing and alcohol abuse), whereby the man revealed to be the
failed husband and father sold his share of the studio to the woman revealed to be the long-suffering wife
and mother. Thankfully this marital conflict had no adverse impact on the show’s launch, and it goes
without saying that it had no direct influence on either the show’s writers or its talented cast of
performers. Still, isn’t there already room here to notice the odd inversion between what happened at the
level of the show’s production (the absence of the father, the presence of the mother) and what appeared
within the imaginary frame of the show’s content (the absence of the mother, the presence of the father)?
Isn’t it strange—yes, strange and sad, but also somehow fitting, maybe even necessary—that a show
designed to make room for daddy emerged at the moment when there was no more room for daddy?
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This fact may not be unrelated to how I first began watching the show when I was little. At that point, the
show had been cancelled for several years, but it was still being broadcast in syndication. It was in that
network limbo that so many defunct shows from the past—from The Honeymooners on down to Leave It
to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and Bewitched—continued to exist in an enchanted half-life, forever
removed from their original channels of circulation yet still recycling the same collective daydreams from
generations of people who had already moved on to the more contemporary daydreams of the 1970s.
Against the colorful backdrop of so many shows like All in the Family or Rhoda, the black-and-white
medium of the older shows took on a special quality that I couldn’t help noticing even as a kid. It’s
something that many of us still recognize today: that tempered glow of cultural aging that initially comes
across as lame, cute, or kitschy, even as it easily transforms itself into a sacrosanct aura due to the passage
of time. No matter how much we may recognize these shows as frozen in their own moment of history,
it’s hard to avoid the sense that they were created not only for “them” but for “us” as well. No matter how
much we may know that the shift from black-and-white to color photography was just a byproduct of
technological change, it’s hard not to believe that these chromatically distilled fantasies were made in
such a way as to anticipate their own status as “classics”—as “iconic,” “mythic,” “archetypal,” or even
“nostalgic” artifacts—for future generations of American viewers. This is very similar, in fact, to the
impact that my father’s black-and-white photographs had on me as a kid. As I’d gaze at his face in its
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vintage time capsule, it was as if one implicit, generalized message—This is how I want them to see me—
would transform into a no less implicit, yet pointed message that addressed me: This is how I want you to
see me. It’s also similar to the even stronger impact that these photographs have on me now after my
father’s death: This is how I want them to remember me → This is how I want you to remember me. For
the time being, then, let me identify this uncanny trick of the eye as just one of many traits of what I will
designate as the “Andy Griffith effect.”
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In the years before home video, there were two ways a kid like me could watch The Andy Griffith Show.
Since the show’s broadcast was scheduled by the television networks, and thus rooted in factors that were
beyond my control, one way to watch it was simply to become acquainted with the television schedule.
Like most kids, I didn’t need to be able to read the TV Guide in order to do this; the lineup of my favorite
shows was something I knew by heart, so much so that it served as a mental calendar by which I
organized my weekly routine with all the painstaking, anal-retentive precision that Barney Fife displayed
while pinning wanted posters on the billboard in the Mayberry Sherriff’s office. Now that I think of it,
this analogy with Barney doesn’t strike me as all that bad: for it does seem that among all the adjustments
that a child of my age was supposed to make, the ability to plan your weekly television viewing was no
less important, in its own way, than your ability to control your bowel movements—thereby proving to
Andy, or rather your father, that you’d taken a crucial step in accepting your position in a world of laws,
rules, and regulations.
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In turn, my adjustment to the weekly television schedule wasn’t so different from the adjustment I made
when it came to my father’s return home from work. That was also something beyond my control, yet my
appearance in the kitchen to meet him at his designated time of arrival was no less faithful than my
appearance before the television to see, once again, that unforgettable opening sequence in which Andy
and Opie walk down a country road with fishing poles in their hands. Here we may recall one of the most
frequent observations made by fans of classic television shows: that in a cultural environment
overwhelmingly devoted to providing immediate satisfaction to its spoiled children, older programs like
The Andy Griffith Show serve as a reminder of the bedrock values that made our nation great. When I
think back on how patiently I waited for what I wanted from our television set and from my father, it does
seem that this well-worn claim has its truth. In both cases I learned how to be in the right place at the right
time. In doing so, I also learned how to control my desire rather than trying to control the object of it. For
this reason it would be no exaggeration to say that both Andy Griffith and my father first taught me the
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lessons of punctuality, deferred gratification, and self-policing that paved the way for my future as a
productive member of society.
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The other way to watch The Andy Griffith Show was the opposite of the more structured way the show
became part of my weekly ritual. For if it’s true that syndicated television set very clear boundaries for its
viewers in the pre-home video era, it still allowed for lucky encounters with your favorite show. This was
especially true of The Andy Griffith Show, which was used as “filler content” for various stations that
needed material for the extra gaps in their programming schedule. So even though the schedule of shows
was set in stone, there was nevertheless a certain amount of irregularity in the schedule that allowed for
surprise. Although we still experience something like this nowadays, the special charm of the “happy
accident” isn’t the same because it doesn’t emerge from the same backdrop of limitation—now anyone
who happens to run across an episode of, say, American Dad on television can just as easily watch it on
the internet, stream it from a Netflix account, or just pull it off the shelf. It’s not an event in the same way
it used to be. Yet for a kid like me, an accidental discovery of The Andy Griffith Show on a Saturday
afternoon was very much an event; in fact, it had all the charm of a blessing bestowed upon me by the
invisible gods of network programming. Here Barney Fife comes to mind again, because this is
something that he never seemed to understand. After all, weren’t so many his fits due to the fact that in
his starched, militaristic ideal of a world designed like the clockwork of some medieval Jehovah, there
could be no room for accidents? And in such cases, wasn’t it also Andy’s role to intervene by showing
how what we may initially perceive as an accident can turn out, with a simple shift of perspective, to
involve a sort of serendipity, a sort of grace, that in a more ironic way reconfirms a benevolent order
under the surface of things?
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This element of grace was also part of the Andy Griffith effect prior to home video, and it had its own
lessons for kids like me. For example, on the first occasion when my father returned home much later
than he said he would, my response wasn’t far removed from Barney’s bug-eyed tantrums: like most little
kids, I had a literalistic attitude towards the language of my parents—especially my father, whose word,
as they say, was law—and so I became hysterical when his words failed to yield their promised result. At
first I thought that something terrible must have happened to him while doing his police work. “Mommy,
did someone shoot Daddy? Why isn’t he back yet?” In turn, when he finally did come home, I was
devastated in a whole new way when it seemed that he’d simply forgotten what he said to me. Then with
a smile that was even more boyish than usual, he pulled out something from the side pocket of his deputy
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sheriff’s uniform and gave it to me—a Hershey’s candy bar. Even without the help of a laugh track, I saw
that this was just a joke he’d planned: if he was late, it was only because he’d been looking for a present
to give me, and so I’d misunderstood him in much the same way that Opie Taylor, from time to time,
misunderstood his own father’s good intentions. In the blink of an eye, then, my father’s reputation once
again preceded him. So as he staggered his way back to the hallway where my mother was waiting to talk
to him, I began eating the first of many Hershey bars I’d be receiving from him on similar occasions,
secure in the knowledge that this treat was a special token of what Andy and my father knew better than
anyone: that what you can’t control will always return to you in the form of a gift.
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More than thirty years later this wisdom has been confirmed in a new way through the gift of digital home
video, which now makes it possible for countless viewers like me to summon the Andy Griffith effect at
will. Like most people I’ve become used to having easy access to movies and television shows on DVD
and streaming video; all the same, I still find it amazing that we have the freedom to enjoy so many
treasures from the past at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse. Moreover, in the case of The Andy
Griffith Show, the timing of its release on DVD seems especially fortunate in light of its history. For
example, the syndication of the show by Viacom involved its distribution on television videotapes, as
opposed to the now hard-to-find 35mm prints of the show distributed by Desilu Studios during its original
run on CBS. If these videotapes were the only source we had for the show, it would only take about thirty
years for the steady breakdown of their polyester and polyurethane compounds—a process in which one
of the telltale byproducts, according to restoration experts, is alcohol—to have a debilitating, irreversible
effect on the fidelity of the image. Likewise, if Paramount, the current owner of the show’s primary
distribution rights, had allowed the original 35 mm negatives of the show to languish in its vaults, it
would have only taken about forty years for the acetone film stock to start showing signs of decay through
yellowing, corrosion, and acid damage. So if you do the math, isn’t it clear to see that if digital
technology hadn’t come along when it did, we might very well have lost The Andy Griffith Show in much
the same way that we’ve already lost other cherished fantasies from our childhood? Instead, thanks to the
work of Paramount’s technicians, the show’s negatives have been translated into a digital format that can
be flawlessly deciphered by the invisible laser beams of our DVD players, or otherwise transmitted in an
even more disembodied, virtual fashion across the vast networks of the internet. We can now rest assured
that every episode of the show will always be available in the form of an immaculate binary code that is
no longer subject to dissolution. No longer chemically dependent. Alcohol-free.
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If image preservation is a crucial factor in the Andy Griffith effect, it turns out that my father played an
unfortunate role in this due to his primary line of work. Law enforcement, of course, was the first and
most important profession I associated with him, but his main job was with the Eastman Kodak company,
where he worked in the chemical division of their large plant in Kingsport. It was there that he helped
create the raw materials for various industrial products, such as the synthetic fiber used in the filters of the
harmless cigarettes that he and Sheriff Taylor enjoyed from time to time. It was also there that he helped
mix the patented compounds used in the production of Eastmancolor film, which had not only become the
most popular film stock for family cameras in the U.S., but also served as the new, less expensive
industry standard for the production of color motion pictures and television shows in Hollywood. Yet as
any film historian will tell you, Eastmancolor turned out to be an unstable medium, notoriously prone to
color fading. It’s something that can be seen in many of the sepia-tinted photographs of my childhood;
it’s also something that can be seen in the last three seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, in which the
dingy color scheme (even on Paramount’s otherwise pristine DVD transfer) goes hand-in-hand with the
marked decline of the show itself due to Barney Fife’s absence, Opie’s adolescence, and an occasional
peevishness in Griffith’s demeanor due to his growing fatigue with the series. Maybe it’s wrong to speak
too badly about it, but I can’t avoid having some uneasy feelings about my father’s other profession. For
it seems fair enough to say that his involvement with chemicals contributed to the steady waning of the
Andy Griffith effect as it was banished from its more mythic, idyllic realm of black-and-white
photography and transplanted into the hopelessly diminished world of modern America, in which the
“new and improved” tones of the Mayberry landscape, not to mention poor Andy’s noticeably aging face,
soon had all the abject quality of makeup on a corpse.
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It happened that I received a premonition of this on another occasion when my father came home from
work. By this time I’d learned that he worked at TEC, which stood for “Tennessee Eastman Chemical
division” despite my confused sense of the acronym as an abbreviation for “technology.” As this
misreading may suggest, I still had no idea that he worked with chemicals; I assumed that his job must
have involved machinery of some kind. Yet I learned otherwise one evening when, as he came through
the kitchen door and I reached out to hug him as usual, I looked up and saw a face I couldn’t recognize. I
mean, I literally couldn’t recognize the face of the man I held in my arms. The shape that looked down at
me was bloated and bright red, as if it had developed a severe reaction to some horrible drug, or was
otherwise afflicted with some genetic disorder that caused excessive growth in its facial muscles. Its
mongoloid eyes were swollen shut, and its lips, as they tried to wrench themselves into a vaguely
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obscene, drunken grin, looked like fish lips that had been glued together. It scared the hell out of me.
Amidst all my crying, it took a while for my mother to explain that Daddy had been injured on the shop
floor due to some sort of chemical getting splashed in his face. She told me that all Daddy needed was to
spend some time resting with some drugs he’d been given, and he’d be himself again once all the swelling
went down. None of this reassured me, though. Couldn’t she see that this was completely different from a
burned hand or a dislocated shoulder? Of course it was true that Daddy’s face was just a part of his body,
just a particular portion of who he was as a person. Still, couldn’t she see with her own eyes that his face
was also the special part of him that somehow sustained everything else that made him who he was?
Didn’t she see him the same way I did? Hadn’t she been watching television?
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I was no less disturbed by other things over the next couple of days. For the first time, I was confronted
with the notion that my father, despite my image of him as a strong figurehead of the law, was engaged in
some compulsory activity with substances that he couldn’t control. However limited my knowledge was
at the time, it was clear to me that his involvement with these substances was dangerous, perhaps even
more dangerous than the risks I imagined him facing while on his nightly rounds with the Sullivan
County Sheriff’s Department. I even began to discover bottles of these substances in the garage—some of
them marked with the letters “TEC,” and others labeled with the word “Seagram’s” in bold Gothic font.
Whatever they were, it seemed that they’d already begun to invade our home. Yet as soon as his face
came back, I stopped dwelling on this episode and filed it away for future reference. I removed it from
network circulation, you might say, and stored it in my own private version of the Desilu studio vault. In
later years I might briefly recall it when looking at the reddish tones of an Eastmancolor snapshot or a
color episode of The Andy Griffith Show, but this happened only rarely. Instead, it would return in an even
more indirect way through variants of a nightmare that many of us may recognize: that familiar nightmare
in which your father appears, but with some key change in his appearance, his voice, or his behavior that
becomes so upsetting that you’re jolted back into what passes for the more reassuring, “real” world of
waking life. At any rate, this episode became the first of my many failed encounters with another
principle of the Andy Griffith effect: its unbearable fragility in the broader scheme of things.
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This brings me back to the earlier question I was trying to address—that is, the question of what has been
gained and lost, or lost and gained, in the digital version of the Andy Griffith effect. If it’s true that the
older days of network television involved both a deliberate, ritualistic activity of structured watching as
well as the delight of the surprise discovery, does this experience still survive in some way despite the
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fact that the “eventfulness” of the show is no longer the same as it used to be? Or is it rather the case that,
due to the sheer overload of characters, stories, and images we’ve consumed over the years, any given
fragment of our media-saturated experience becomes so arbitrary, so exchangeable with another, that it
just can’t sustain any iconic power at all? Is the old magic gone for good? This is more than just an
academic question for any of us who value our memories. For regardless of how jaded you might get with
the huge assortment of recycled, easily accessible shows and movies out there today, there’s always that
inner circle of media images that constitute a privileged space in your own personal history. Moreover,
this isn’t just because of how these images, like points on a compass, allow you to map out the same wellrehearsed memories you’re all too familiar with in your life. These images resonate all the more due to
memories that reside somewhere beyond the established borders of that map; they resonate all the more
due to some other network of emotions and desires that, due to the numbing effects of time and habit,
you’ve long since forgotten. It’s for this reason that watching a favorite childhood show can still become
a private ritual in which even the most trivial, fleeting moment can have the feeling of an unexpected
visitation.
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For now I’ll offer just one example. When I first bought The Andy Griffith Show on DVD, about four
years after my father’s death, I made an initial leap into the series by choosing whatever episode grabbed
my interest, regardless of its place in the overall sequence. The one I picked was “Opie and the Bully,”
the first episode of Season Two (S2E01). As with most of the episodes, I had only a vague memory of it.
Fans of the show won’t need a summary of the plot, but I’ll sketch it out here. On his way to school, Opie
encounters a kid who threatens him with a knuckle sandwich if he doesn’t give him the nickel he has for
his lunch money. Opie gives in, which leads him to ask for an extra nickel each day from Aunt Bee.
Quickly sensing that something is wrong, Aunt Bee mentions it to Andy; in turn, Barney Fife tells Andy
that Opie also asked him for an extra nickel, which Barney finds troubling as well. Andy tries to get an
explanation from Opie, but his son remains evasive about it in such an obvious way that he only calls
more attention to it as a problem. Asking Barney to investigate by tailing Opie on his walk to school,
Andy soon learns about the bully. Yet rather than confronting his son directly about the problem, Andy
takes him on a fishing trip and tells him a story about his own childhood experience with a bully who
tried to force him to give up his favorite fishing spot. The story is a parable designed to illustrate the
importance of courage: even though he admits to having been afraid at first, Andy tells Opie that he
finally stood up and said “no” to the bully’s demand. In this parable Andy doesn’t fight the bully but
rather receives a punch in the face, only to discover that it doesn’t hurt—which further stresses the
primary importance of conquering one’s fear, as opposed to the value of physical strength. When his
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father is finished with his story, Opie is amazed and asks him: “Paw, you say you didn’t even feel it?”
Andy smiles and says, “Nope!” The next day, Opie returns home from school with a big smile on his
face—and a black eye. “You were right! I didn’t even feel it!” As Barney fetches a raw steak to reduce
the swelling around Opie’s eye, Andy notices his son’s pride in his new mark and finally tells his deputy
to let it go: after all, it would be a terrible shame to lose such a fine black eye so soon. Laughter from the
characters. Laughter from the invisible audience. Closing credits.
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As quaint as all this may seem, there’s already a lot going on here that deserves further thought when it
comes to the Andy Griffith effect. For example, there’s much that remains to be said about how Andy’s
professional and family roles are integrated with one another, rather than two separate dimensions of his
life. There’s much to be said about how his bond with Opie serves as a link between these two roles, thus
fostering Andy’s appearance as a unified, cohesive character for the viewer’s enjoyment. There’s much to
be said about how all the character relationships are so tightly knit that even Opie’s request for an extra
nickel, such a small departure from routine, can be immediately detected as a sign of trouble by both Aunt
Bee at home and Barney at the courthouse. There’s a great deal to be said about how Andy’s parental
strategy doesn’t involve any overt guidance, but rather a covert process of benevolent deception whereby
he hides his knowledge of the real problem while smuggling a coded message into his son’s
imagination—such that Opie’s desire to be like his father allows him to receive this message as if it were
a part of his own “inner Andy,” so to speak. There’s even a lot to be said about that nickel: how such a
small, impersonal object can be such a crucial prop for a little boy’s self-image, so that “showing Opie
how to keep his nickel” becomes a way for Andy to give his son a version of what his son already gives
him by sustaining his own self-image as a wise and loving father. There’s a lot to be said about how
Andy’s parable involves the notion that you can still “save face” even when your face has been damaged,
setting the stage for the final scene in which what might otherwise be a sign of shame, weakness, or loss
becomes magically transformed into a badge of honor. There’s quite a lot to be said about the fact that in
this episode, as in all 249 episodes of a series that has alcohol as a recurring image, we never see a single
scene that depicts Andy so much as sipping a glass of wine, much less a can of beer or a glass of whiskey
with his morning newspaper. There are volumes to be said about the fact that a nickel, like a badge,
always has two sides to it.
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Yet what first seized my eye was a brief, passing moment early in the episode—a moment that in “real
time” lasted only a few seconds on the screen. At this point in the story Opie is in bed; his father has tried
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to get him to explain why he wants the extra nickel each day, but Opie yawns and says that he’s just too
tired to continue talking. The scene ends with a sequence that I’ll illustrate with a few stills. First is Opie
pretending to be falling asleep; this shot is sustained for a few seconds as Opie engages in some forced
snoring, which triggers the soft murmur of laughter from the audience.
Then the camera cuts to his father, who gazes down at Opie with a mixture of concern and affection. The
audience’s laughter quickly fades. The vulnerability in the father’s expression seems to register the
vulnerability he sees all too well in his son, and the effect is impossible to describe without simply
noticing it as it emerges.
At this point the camera lingers a bit more on Andy’s face. (Note how the left side of his face perfectly
registers his fatherly concern, whereas the right side perfectly registers his fatherly affection.) A small
snippet of sentimental music eases into the soundtrack. Andy’s smile then becomes more open and
animated—more radiant—as he continues looking at Opie.
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Then it’s as if Andy Taylor the character, Andy Griffith the actor, or some combination of both, can no
longer sustain this look—as if his own emotions are too much for him to continue exposing to the eye of
the camera—which leads him to turn his eyes downward with a bemused shake of his head, savoring the
moment even as it’s already beginning to slip away from him.
As in any well-written television comedy, this scene has a twofold function: it’s both a short, relatively
discrete interlude as well as a transitional bridge in the episode as a whole. However much the scene can
be enjoyed for its own sake, it soon passes and we can then see it as one of the stages in the further
development of the plot. Yet when I watched it, something different happened. Even though I knew that I
was supposed to “stick with the program” and keep moving ahead, the gravitational pull of the scene—or
rather, this brief moment in the scene—was much stronger than the forward momentum of the storyline.
In fact, it was as if this moment refused to allow itself to be re-contained in the plot at all. It felt as if these
thirteen seconds of screen time had somehow broken free of the show and became a complete fantasy
space in its own right, like a planet suddenly spinning out of its orbit and assuming its own self-contained
field of force.
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What is it about this moment that accounts for its power? Consider the way that seeing and not seeing
have a complex relationship with one another in this sequence, which takes on the feel of a game: (a.)
Opie knows that his father sees him, but he believes that he can escape being seen too much; he doesn’t
want his father to see his weakness, so he puts on an act. In doing so, he closes his eyes, which excludes
his father’s gaze from his own line of sight. (b.) At the same time, Opie’s trick is so blatantly artificial—
the repeated yawning, the exaggerated snoring—that it also seems to register something very different:
namely, his vague, unconscious wish for his father to see some sign of what he’s hiding, even though he’s
too ashamed to explain it. Here Opie is giving mixed signals to Andy, and so his naiveté comes across as
its own sort of trick: a “trick within the trick” whereby the son captures his father’s gaze all the more as
he seems to be trying to avoid it. (c.) As Andy looks at Opie, he clearly has a sense of his son’s mixed
motives, even as he’s still not sure what the problem is. He sees that his son is trying to trick him, while
also seeing that his son wants to appeal to him on some level. In this way Andy’s gaze still sees more in
his son than his son sees in himself…. So then how is the audience’s eye captured? How does the open,
receptive space of the audience’s gaze become “filled” by inserting itself into the receptive spaces opened
in this sequence? Here we can go further: (d.) Insofar as we in the audience can identify with Andy, the
scene allows us to assume the loving gaze of the father—a loving gaze that’s all the more intense for the
fragility it sees in the son. (e.) Insofar as we can also identify with Opie, the scene does something even
more magical by letting us see the father “through” the son’s closed eyes. (f.) Thus by allowing our eye to
fluctuate between Andy and Opie, the scene ultimately puts us in the position of what can only be called
the impossible gaze: that is, in one brief shining moment, it allows us to see how our father saw us when
we didn’t see him watching. It allows us to see how our father saw us when we thought he didn’t notice,
when we thought we were hiding from him, when we thought he didn’t recognize our own anxieties,
fears, and insecurities. While all of these impulses are simultaneously at work, it’s the last impulse that
gives the moment its sublime effect. That’s how it catches us. That’s how it holds us.
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Of course, none of this occurred to me when I first saw the sequence; instead, I only found myself playing
it repeatedly on the DVD player. As I thought about it later, these images didn’t correspond to any
specific memory I had of my father, so I couldn’t explain their impact in terms of a simple parallel. All
the same, the connection still seemed to be there on some other level than just facial appearance—I could
feel it. It was only by looking further that I was able to examine the sequence more carefully, sketch out
its dynamics, and recognize how it evoked a world of childhood desire which now seems so remote to me
that I’m unable to access it without the help of a televised prop. For at this late point in the game there are
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still so many gaps and flaws in the image I have of my father that it feels self-deceptive to say that I loved
him. It doesn’t feel real; it doesn’t feel right. It always seems that on some level I’m just going through
the motions, saying what any son is expected to say about his father—all the more so after his father has
died. Moreover, isn’t there always something a bit phony about the veneration that fathers inspire in their
children long after these children have reached adulthood? I mean, haven’t we long since reached the
point where we can simply admit that such an attitude can be more than a little annoying, if not downright
repulsive? Yet when I watch this sequence from The Andy Griffith Show, the experience of seeing Andy’s
face go through these tiny changes—an experience that feels much longer than just thirteen seconds,
much thicker than just a few frames in the digital stream—is so vivid that I can’t help but recognize just
how much I did love that man. Yes, I loved him with a furious, blind desperation that only small children
are capable of feeling, with a devotion that makes all religion seem lame in comparison, and with an
intensity that, if it were ever fully accessible to me now as an adult, would come across as nothing less
than a sort of madness.
18
A moment ago I referred to the Andy Griffith effect as a “televised prop,” but now it strikes me that a
more fitting analogy might come from the world of medicine. Imagine a man who, for one reason or
another, has to have his leg amputated. If we need a more specific reason, let’s say that it was due to a
loss of blood circulation in one of his legs due to decades of smoking. If we need a more specific age,
let’s say the man is in his early seventies; if we need to know more about what that lost leg was used for,
let’s say that it was once used for law enforcement—as well as occasional walks with his young son. The
man loses his leg, and after the amputation he is given an aluminum leg. The leg isn’t real, of course, and
the New Balance tennis shoe that it wears seems like a cruel joke on the part of his wife, who has always
been more than willing to add insult to injury. Yet the joke cuts even deeper because when he puts the leg
on, it triggers the feeling of the “phantom limb” that was lost. So in one sense the man knows that there’s
no getting his leg back as it once was; he knows that he needs the aluminum leg to walk, despite how
embarrassing it may feel to wear it in public. Yet he knows, too, that there’s some little spot hidden just
beyond the outer reaches of his consciousness that will always send its signal when he wears, touches, or
even sees that false leg. Sometimes the involuntary twinge from the phantom limb may cause so much
anguish that he’d prefer to leave the leg in the corner while taking extra doses of hydrocordone-fuelled
painkillers he’s squirreled away in various hiding places. Even so, that carefully customized yet patently
artificial substitute is all he has, and its power to call forth such vanished muscle memory still seems
mysteriously embedded in the very material of the leg itself, no matter how much of an illusion this may
13
be. So it is that among the many qualities I’ll be exploring in the Andy Griffith effect, one of the most
important is its own ability to function as a prosthetic in my otherwise deficient perspective of my father.
19
Moreover, it seems that this prosthetic function becomes all the more powerful due to the digital medium
itself, which allows a measure of viewer control over the Andy Griffith effect that would have been
unthinkable to me as a child watching television. Thus when I watched the sequence I’ve described
above, I was able to use the pause button to stop the show for a moment when I sensed something vaguely
significant in what I saw. Then I was able to use the backward tracking button to replay the same
sequence as I tried to fathom why it caught my eye. Playing it in slow motion was also a convenient
option that allowed me to coordinate the actual speed of the sequence with my own subjective impression
of its longer time span, which in turn allowed much more space for me to dwell upon the effect of the
images. (Remote control—isn’t it an addictive thing to have?) After replaying it about a dozen times, I
was also able to retrieve it on later occasions, trying it on once again to see how it might fit. For that
matter, if I ever felt compelled, there’s really nothing that could stop me from selecting a single frame
from the sequence—
—and allowing it to stay frozen on the television screen, glowing in the darkness of my living room like a
digital icon for sustained meditation. My old Panasonic DVD player is especially suited for this since it
doesn’t have an automatic shut-off feature when the pause function has been left on for more than five
minutes. So yes, if I ever felt compelled, there’s really nothing at all that could stop me from freezing this
image on the screen so that it’s the last thing I see before drifting off to sleep…and the first thing I see
when I wake up. It would still be there: still maintaining the same silent, petrified vigil; still waiting
patiently for an explanation of what’s been troubling me. So what’s the story, son?
14
20
In this sense it’s safe to say that the Andy Griffith effect is far from dead; instead, it has only entered a
new phase in which it lends itself to unforeseen levels of absorption. However, it’s no less true that this
sort of absorption can become—well, a bit oppressive at times, a bit too much for even the most devoted
viewer to endure without becoming overwhelmed by all the thoughts and feelings it inspires. This may be
a further reason why Opie needs to keep his eyes shut in the sequence I’ve described: after all, even if he
could fully assume our position of the impossible gaze, could he sustain it for any length of time without
feeling entirely consumed by it, without becoming so invaded by it that it shatters his image of himself as
an independent, self-reliant individual? Not only does Andy seem to be aware of this dilemma, but his
own inability to sustain his gaze for more than a few seconds also seems to mirror it; no doubt this
moment is hard for the father himself, and so he tactfully leaves before his son loses his resolve and opens
his eyes. And let’s be very clear about this: it’s not that the love isn’t there between them; it’s just that it’s
very difficult to endure because it’s so boundless in its appeal. This is exactly why it has to manifest itself
in more manageable plot scenarios that allow the father’s gaze to be reduced to brief, incidental moments
that support the storyline; otherwise, the viewer might be held captive in a state of pure longing that
eventually becomes unbearable. It’s for this reason, too, that an equally important aspect of the digital
medium comes from our simple ability, when suddenly faced with the appeal of the father’s image, to
make it disappear—to efface it—at the touch of a button. If the Andy Griffith effect can be summoned at
will, it can also be banished at will, and this allows the viewer a necessary degree of wiggle room when
dealing with it. That is, it allows the viewer to engage in a virtual variation of Opie’s game, in which there
are only two basic, alternating moves: Make daddy go away…make daddy come back…make daddy go
away…make daddy come back…. If this game feels so familiar to me when I play it with the remote
control, it’s because this is one of the first games a child learns to play with his father. It’s also a game
I’ve been playing with him my whole life.
21
Another way of understanding this game comes from one of the basic duties of Sheriff Taylor in
Mayberry: arresting people. What does it mean to be arrested by the Andy Griffith effect? Part of the
answer comes from the pilot episode that first aired on The Danny Thomas Show: “Danny Meets Andy
Griffith.” While on a trip, Danny becomes suspicious when he gets pulled over for running through a stop
sign in the small town of Mayberry. In keeping with his skeptical, city-slicker attitude towards the region,
Danny suspects this sheriff of singling him out for entrapment—for example, the sort of entrapment that
racial minorities, Jewish or otherwise, might be known to have suffered from time to time in the rural
South. So Danny decides to fight the case in court, only to discover that Sheriff Taylor is also Justice of
15
the Peace. The fact that Andy has both jobs (in addition to being the editor of the Mayberry newspaper)
makes Danny even more concerned about the power this man seems to have in the community, so he
continues to object to his fine. At this point Judge Andy begins to get frustrated and, deciding that Danny
needs more of a lesson, puts him in jail. During this time Danny tries to get help in exposing Andy as a
fraud, but he also begins to notice other things. He begins to see how wise Andy is in dealing with his son
Opie; likewise, he begins to see further signs of Andy’s integrity, fairness, and tact in all his interactions
with the townspeople. Rather than a sign of corruption, it seems that this concentration of power in one
person actually allows for a more beneficial and humane approach to the law. It’s then that Danny has his
road to Damascus moment and realizes that his concern with the letter of the law—is it really legal for the
same man to be chief lawman, chief magistrate, and chief scribe?—has blinded him to Andy’s role as an
effective, authentic embodiment of the law that transcends such distinctions. He realizes that Andy, too,
has been able to make room for daddy, and that just maybe this simple-minded, cracker-barrel sheriff
been able to do so with even more virtuosity than Danny himself, for all his sophistication, ever could. So
as the last step in his conversion, Danny finally agrees to pay the fine. As a result, Sheriff Andy Taylor
would soon re-emerge as the central figure in a new show named after the handsome North Carolina actor
who so memorably portrayed him.
22
So if being arrested by the Andy Griffith effect means being arrested by the law, it also means being
arrested by a certain notion of the law. It means that one is free to accept the idea that the law is just an
artificial construct—along with the idea that the fatherly figurehead of the law is just an appealing image,
a well-crafted performance, a charming sort of mascot suited only for slow-witted hicks and naïve little
kids—but only in order to feel all the more compelled to reject this at the end of the day by re-embracing
the law, as well as the charismatic image of it, as entirely natural and therefore impervious to skepticism.
It’s really no coincidence that the very first television appearance of Sheriff Andy Taylor involves a
scenario in which the role of “Sheriff Andy Taylor” is open to question as a potentially deceptive
appearance; the doubt we see in Danny Thomas is a necessary stage in the overall dynamic, whereby a
certain disruptive resistance to the law has to be taken into account so that it can then be transformed into
a happy embrace of the same law that previously seemed so alienating. (It’s worth noting, too, how often
the writers of the show would return to this classic formula—as in the case of “Andy and the Woman
Speeder” [S2E35], in which a lawbreaking woman assumes Danny’s role in the conversion plot.) Yet
however decisively this pattern is played out, one can’t help but wonder: if Danny believes at first that
he’s being set up by this tricky lawman, isn’t it still true that his final shift in perspective involves another
16
sort of setup, whereby his inability to resist Andy’s homespun charm becomes the most effective form of
entrapment?
23
Consider how the soundtrack sets the stage: when Sheriff Taylor first appears, the audience’s enthusiastic
applause indicates that they already recognize Andy Griffith as the amiable, folksy actor they’d seen not
long ago in No Time for Sergeants. This invites all of us to be in on the joke, secure in our knowledge as
virtual citizens of Mayberry, whereas Danny is still compelled to play the dupe who will soon come to
learn what we already know. Meanwhile, of course, our very desire to be in on the joke is what allows us
to become willing dupes ourselves, insofar as Griffith’s own paradoxical persona as a “natural” star—an
actor whose apparent lack of artifice is itself the most beguiling artifice of all—provides us with the
necessary bait to assume the position of truth: yes, we know all too well that this is Andy Griffith we’re
watching, and Danny Boy just needs to catch up with us. This even relates to the difference between
Danny Thomas (Danny Williams) and Andy Griffith when it comes to the titles of their respective shows:
Danny’s show is still named after the character he plays, whereas Andy’s show adopts the convention of
radio comedy whereby the show is named after the actor rather than the character. One might say that The
Andy Griffith Show lays its cards on the table by emphasizing the distinction between actor and character,
but this admission of artifice also cuts the other way by situating the “reality of the actor” as the trump
card that allows the fictional character to appear as a natural extension of the actor’s own personality.
This is exactly why we feel such closeness to Andy, such a secure intimacy with him, no matter how
much we’re aware of the imaginary framework of the show itself. If all this may seem fairly obvious to a
contemporary audience, it’s still worth noting as a powerful strategy for arresting the viewer. For whether
it’s our perception of a television personality or our perception of a family member, one should never
underestimate the power that comes when the law assumes a human face. I mean, is it any surprise that
Andy never needed to wear a gun?
24
Yet if all this is true, then what sort of dynamic is at work when we try to call attention to how this image
functions? What are we really doing when we try to extract it from its seemingly natural home in the
show in order to examine the chemistry of its magic? Here another childhood game may come in handy.
When I was little, one of my favorite routines was to pull my cap pistol on my father, preferably when he
was in uniform, and say “Freeze, Daddy! You’re under arrest!” (You’re a wanted man, Daddy. Drop the
bottle and put your hands up.) This memory came to me when I once again found myself pausing the
DVD player to scrutinize Andy’s face—for in making him freeze, it seemed that I was responding to the
17
arresting power of the image by trying to arrest it myself. So this may serve as another principle of the
Andy Griffith effect: when one is arrested by it, one can always try to resist this arrest by turning the
tables on it. And I have to admit that I still feel a special enjoyment in doing this. By freezing Andy’s
image on my television screen, I can get the drop on him. I can take him into custody. I can lock him in a
cell for close observation. Like Barney Fife, I can even pace back and forth while he’s stuck in his chair,
shining a bright light on his face so that I can make him crack, make him spill his guts, make him reveal
the secret of his duplicity. All right—no more monkey business! You hear me, smart guy? Tell me how
you did it. Tell me how you fooled me with your daddy act. Confess! In turn, when I think I’ve received
the answer I was looking for, I can shut off the DVD player and put Andy in solitary confinement. No
need for further questions. He’s now doing his time. He’s no longer at large…no longer wanted. Case
closed.
25
Still, there’s always this nagging feeling that I haven’t interrogated my suspect nearly enough, and so I
soon find myself bringing him back for further questioning. Even when I don’t, I often find myself in
another situation that sometimes baffled Barney: my prisoner escapes his cell. Like Otis, the town drunk
who periodically shows up for his appointed jail visit, my prisoner apparently has no trouble reaching
between the bars, grabbing the keys off a nearby hook, unlocking his cell door, and roaming around just
as freely as he did before I arrested him. He won’t stay in his box like a good prisoner. He pops up
everywhere, it seems: when I see Hershey bars in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, when there’s a
sale on Seagram’s at the liquor store, when Turner Classic Movies or TV Land has an Andy Griffith
marathon, or when I run across an old, not-so-forgotten snapshot of my father in a desk drawer instead of
the shoebox in the back of my closet. So I have to go through the same crazy routine all over again—
manhunt, arrest, interrogation—which then begs the question: Doggone it, Andy, who’s really arresting
who here? What kind of cotton-picking jail are we running in this town? So let me propose a further
principle: the arrest of the Andy Griffith effect always cuts both ways. In arresting it, one is still arrested
by it. In resisting it, one is still complicit with it. In controlling it, one is still controlled by it. Now ain’t
that a hoot?
26
Meanwhile, it would be wrong to suggest that the full scope of the Andy Griffith effect can be illustrated
in any single instance of it. The examples I’ve provided so far only scratch the surface when it comes to
how this image works throughout The Andy Griffith Show; even this seemingly simple role goes through
some interesting permutations in the series. Moreover, Griffith was a talented, versatile actor who took on
18
many roles in his career, and some of these roles also captured my attention as my perspective of my
father underwent its own transformation. For example, Griffith’s appearance in two television movies—
Murder in Coweta County and Under the Influence—also had a strong impact on me when I saw them: in
the first movie he played a bigoted killer who matches wits with a small-town sheriff played by Johnny
Cash, whereas in the second he played an aging father whose drinking problem, whose alcoholism, whose
addiction, estranges him from his teenage son. In turn, several years before he became known for his role
on The Andy Griffith Show, he took on his most challenging role in Elia Kazan’s unforgettable film A
Face in the Crowd: in this case he portrayed Lonesome Rhodes, a homeless guitar player who, in the
process of becoming a radio and television star, soon becomes a dark, cynical parody of the same
backwoods hero Griffith had previously portrayed in No Time for Sergeants—as well as the diabolical
alter-ego of good old Andy Taylor from Mayberry. (Is this why Danny Thomas is so suspicious of Andy
when he first sees him? A question for later.) As I grew older, it was as if all these further variations in the
Andy Griffith effect were giving me new glimpses of my father, albeit in a metaphoric way that I was
only partially conscious of at the time. So if this brilliant actor’s image is one that we think we can grasp
immediately—as some self-evident truth like the blueness of the sky—it’s all the more important to avoid
the temptation to define it entirely in terms of any given role that the actor assumed. For in doing so, one
may only end up confronting an inert shape that prevents any further avenues of discovery…not unlike a
cop arresting you for ignoring a road sign. STOP. It becomes a sort of prohibition. A sort of censorship.
No—it would be more honest to consider the image of Andy Griffith not as a single face but a complex
assortment of faces; not as a unified figure but a cluster of related figures; not as some immutable,
Platonic ideal floating in the sky but what certain well-versed practitioners in textual analysis would refer
to as a dynamic, multivalent, decidedly slippery signifier.
27
We’re now coming a bit closer to my own line of work, which is different yet similar to the profession my
father had in mind for me when I was a kid. When I first started coming home with good grades, he began
talking to me about the prospect of becoming something more ambitious than a police officer, which is
what I originally wanted to be when I grew up. For he’d been called into court on various occasions to
testify in the trials of people he’d arrested, and he’d seen how prosecuting attorneys and criminal lawyers
exercised their skills in attempting to sway the jury. By the way he described these men, I could see that
he’d developed a great deal of admiration for them—for their clever rhetorical tricks, for their special
status as “insiders” in the judicial process, and for the tailored suits and silk neckties that served as the
enviable signs of social rank in our community. To be a lawyer was to be a slick son of a bitch whose
connections with other high rollers in town guaranteed a level of prestige, a level of sheer class, that
19
county deputies could only dream about from their own modest position in the pecking order. Here of
course we come to Andy Griffith again, since a certain benevolent image of my father’s fantasy would
later appear in the television show Matlock, where the title character’s combination of legal knowledge
and canny folk wisdom always allowed him to get the upper hand over his opponents in the courtroom.
Matlock clearly came across as a country boy who’d made it big in the legal profession, a man whose
apparent simplicity was precisely what allowed him to beat his urbane opponents at their own game, and
this was very much what my father envisioned for my future. In fact, it now strikes me that it was in these
conversations that I first heard him describe the law as a game—not as a simple set of rules and
ordinances that all good citizens must follow, but something closer to a sport in which a true player could
always employ tactical maneuvers to ensure, or avoid, conviction. Yes, I still remember the knowing,
conspiratorial smile on my father’s face when he sipped his beer and spoke about how brilliantly those
men in suits could play with the law.
28
However, my own career path eventually led me to become an English professor; I received my final
degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, which happens to be the alma mater of none other than Andy Griffith
himself. While I had many occasions to talk to my father about my job, it was always difficult to give him
a clear idea of what I did; in fact, during most of these awkward discussions he was much more inclined
to change the subject to more familiar topics, and his inability to focus on what I was saying—to receive,
process, and retain new threads of information—only got worse as the years progressed. If I had another
chance, I’m still not sure if I could fully explain to him how some aspects of my job aren’t so far removed
from the legal profession after all. As with an attorney in the courtroom, there’s certainly an element of
performance that’s involved, particularly in class when you’re trying to encourage critical thinking in
your students while discussing some key pattern in a particular text: for example, the image of the father
in Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg,” the image of the father in Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” the
image of the father in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” the image of the father in Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman, the image of the father in John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” the image of the
father in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, the image of the father in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child,
the image of the father in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the image of the father in Don DeLillo’s White
Noise, the image of the father in Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” the image of the father in Barry Hannah’s
“Nicodemus Bluff,” the image of the father in Lorrie Moore’s “What Is Seized,” the image of the father in
Curtis White’s (brilliant) Memories of My Father Watching Television, the image of the father in Jeffrey
Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, the image of the father in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, or the image
of the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In class discussion, I ask the students to examine the
20
evidence of the text while modeling the sort of interrogation that literary critics often employ. In my own
way I’m trying to get my students to consider whether this evidence allows us to reach some sort of
conviction, or whether it resists any easy verdict. To achieve this, I sometimes rely upon a rhetorical trick
that lawyers use all the time—the leading question. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: To what extent is
the paternal image in this text consistent in its meaning, and to what extent is it contradictory? To what
extent does the text reinforce certain familiar myths of the father we’ve inherited from our culture, and to
what extent does it subvert, redefine, or criticize such myths? It is possible that a text which seems to
embrace the father myth, to render it inscrutable in its power, also reveals a more critical awareness of
its imaginary status? Or is it possible that a text which seems to reject the father myth, to dismantle it,
also reveals an underlying investment in the same myth from which it’s trying so very hard to distance
itself? Any observations? Any hypotheses? Anyone…?
29
In turn, there are also parallels with the legal profession when it comes to academic scholarship in my
field, which also encompasses motion pictures and even television. Thanks to the emergence of a cultural
studies approach in the curriculum over the past few decades, people in my line of work now have the
freedom to examine all sorts of “texts,” regardless of their medium or their position in the spectrum of
what used to be called high culture and low culture. Yet even when dealing with the audiovisual media of
pop culture, we’re still concerned with what might be called the linguistic function of images: that is, the
way that an image works as part of some underlying structure, some underlying system or network, that
has its own sort of logic even if it doesn’t call attention to itself at first. Like an attorney, then, a scholar in
my field is concerned with establishing how any given case can be evaluated according to certain laws
that seem applicable to it, and in turn with whether the case in question—the text in question, the image in
question, the signifier in question—involves some violation of the same law that it seems to be obeying.
Moreover, just as any good attorney should be acquainted with various theories of jurisprudence when
making his case, the scholar in my field needs to be acquainted with various theories of language and
creative expression when making his case. This is where we often have to rely on a particular model or
paradigm that seems to be most effective in establishing whether, say, the fluctuating image of the “good
father” and the “bad father” in the same text involves a disruption of some law or rather two opposed, yet
interdependent aspects of the same law. In my case, however, what’s so strange is that even though for
the past twenty years I’ve known that the best paradigm for interpreting such an image comes from
psychoanalysis, it never occurred to me that this paradigm had any relevance for understanding the Andy
Griffith effect. Maybe lawyers (not to mention psychoanalysts) have their own version of this problem:
you spend years of your life constructing arguments based on other cases, focused exclusively on the
21
situations of other people, but you never notice that the most relevant case is the one that hits closest to
home. You’re not listening carefully enough to your own questions.
30
It wasn’t my father’s death that finally shook me out of this deafness, but rather a question my wife asked
me four years later when I was going through the closet. I’d recently watched A Face in the Crowd for
what must have been the sixth or seventh time—as part of a scholarly project I’d planned on depictions of
the South in Hollywood melodrama—and I was looking in the shoebox where I keep my father’s
photographs along with other mementos of him. I was trying to see if I could find a photograph of him
wearing his deputy sheriff’s uniform. (I couldn’t.) My wife’s question was one that other spouses, I’m
sure, have asked in similar situations: “Why don’t you have any pictures of your dad on the wall?” I’d
talked to her on previous occasions about my father, so I just said that if I hung any pictures of him on the
wall, I’d end up seeing them at unexpected moments—and I was afraid of the pain that they would cause.
I didn’t want to go any further than this, but my wife kept prodding me about it. Finally I became so
frustrated that I said, “OK, if you have a few hours to listen, I’ll give you an earful.” She was kind enough
to oblige me, and so I began what I can only describe as a long, babbling rant about how it’s impossible to
explain my feelings about my father without explaining my feelings about Andy Griffith, how there’s
something so beautiful as well as something so lame and pathetic in this (here the sobbing began), how
hard it was for me to reconcile the partial memories I had of my father, how it seemed that we’d both
given up trying to understand each other in the final years of his life, and how all this seemed tied to how
his televised double continued to be making some sort of demand on me despite years of my trying to
regard it as nothing more than a small, private joke I could occasionally share at dinner parties. During
this rant I found myself remembering various episodes from the past that I’d forgotten about, which
would then lead me to make another connection with Andy Griffith, which would in turn lead me to some
other memory of my father, which in turn would lead me to offer yet another comment on Andy
Griffith…Each reference to the actor seemed to provide a new link in the chain, and I only stopped when
I was too exhausted to speak any more. Over the next several months, however, this chain—this chain
reaction in which Andy seemed to be the catalyst—kept playing itself out in my head in regular bursts.
31
Professors like to give lectures and map out ideas on the chalkboard, so I hope you’ll bear with me here.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the psychoanalysts are right when they say that our conscious
mind is simply one localized region in a much vaster network that also makes up who we are. If the full
scope of this network is impossible for us to access directly, it’s because we wouldn’t be able to function
22
otherwise: the sheer quantity of information—ranging from every memory we have to all the genetic
information coded in our DNA—would be too overwhelming. Maybe the network is even like a vast
archive of digital recordings that includes not only the images themselves but also all the coding and
metadata associated with them; we have conscious access to some of these recordings, but we don’t have
conscious access to the whole archive and all its associated codes. Yet whatever rough analogy we might
make to “represent” this signifying network, it still involves the notion that, as one prominent
psychoanalyst proposed, “The unconscious is structured like a language.” (Nathan, could you please shut
off your smart phone…?) OK. So now imagine someone seeing a psychoanalyst because he can’t bring
himself to display any pictures of his dead father on the wall. He even refers to this as his hang up, not
recognizing the pun at first. When talking about it, he also describes his painful reaction to the pictures as
an increasingly oppressive, unresolved battle between two questions: (a.) “Can’t you love him for who he
was?” and (b.) “Who was he?” Now for those of you who recall the funeral scene in Death of a Salesman,
this conflict may sound familiar. In fact, it has a classic structure that in this case might even be captured
in a formula whereby the stronger insistence of question (b.) in response to question (a.) is in turn
counteracted by an even stronger insistence in question (a.), thereby resulting in a steady, exponential
increase in the power of each question in the cycle:
{…(a2) (a1) (a) ↔ (b) (b1) (b2)…}
So what we see at this level of the patient’s network is a sort of deadlock between two questions, two
demands, that can’t be reconciled because they only feed on each other. The demand for filial love
grounded in knowledge (a) can only be met by a further demand based on the lack of this knowledge (b),
which, rather than being met itself, only gives way to a guilty return of the same demand for filial love
grounded in knowledge (a). It’s a pretty claustrophobic pattern, really, when you think of it. No wonder
our patient needs to talk about it.
32
Yet as the man talks about it further, something interesting happens. First, in discussing this deadlock,
this short circuit in his response to the photographs, he refers to his father’s resemblance to the actor
Andy Griffith. When he does so, it’s clear that he’s initially ashamed of this. It’s embarrassing to him. He
makes nervous jokes about how lame it is because any good son shouldn’t need to rely on the image of an
actor from some dated television show to describe what his own father was like. Or so he believes at first.
Yet his impulse to put the image of the actor in the same structural position as his father’s photograph
requires an adjustment to our formula:
{…(a2) (a1) (a) ←(X)→ (b) (b1) (b2)…}
23
If X marks the spot of the father’s photographic image—which opens the gap in the man’s network where
filial love and filial knowledge emerge as interdependent, yet conflicting demands—it’s also the spot
where the Andy Griffith image takes its place. (Make room for daddy.) In this case the emblem of the X
also works well because the man’s embarrassment over the image initially involves a psychic block or
barrier that prevents him from taking it seriously as a legitimate vehicle, a lawful vehicle, for
understanding his father. On some level, it’s just a dumb coincidence to him that this resemblance exists,
and he’s afraid that he’ll sound like a crackpot if he talks about it too much. Can we blame him?
However, as long as the X continues to seem like a dead end to the man, the only trajectory that can
assume any real power is the short circuit between (a) and (b), which leaves him in the same dilemma
with the photographs. Does the man know this? In a way he does, but at first he doesn’t know that he
knows it. How can we tell? Because for all the shame he keeps expressing about the Andy Griffith image,
he can’t stop talking about it. And if he can’t leave it alone, it’s because from some other place in his
network, it won’t leave him alone. Even though the image is cancelled on the man’s main channels, so to
speak, it’s still in syndication somewhere else. In fact, this arbitrary, bogus image still has its own law
that requires recognition: the more the man claims that it’s just a dumb coincidence, the more he keeps
betraying his sense that it’s also a just coincidence that refuses to keep its trap shut. It has a voice of its
own—so that even when the man remarks that Andy Griffith’s face seems to be a loaded image, he again
may be saying more than he realizes at first.
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So what happens as the man starts rambling about all the variants of this image he’s seen from movies
and television—ranging from honest to deceptive, from strong to weak, from loving to remote, from
drunk to sober? He begins treating it more properly as a signifier, which allows it to be opened up into
what we may call a signifying chain:
(X) = (x1)…(x2)…(x3)…
At each point in the chain where some new variant of the Andy Griffith signifier appears, what we have is
no longer a block (X) but an intersection (x) whereby the man is now free to recognize a whole range of
associations with his father. As signifying relationships in their own right, such associations still arise in
the man’s own “fantasy space”—yet it’s important to remember that this is the only space he has for
encountering his father in any form at all. This isn’t just because his father is dead; it’s because even
when his father was alive, the man still had no pure access to him outside the signifying network. For all
intents and purposes the fabric of fantasy was always there; it’s just that now, thanks to the play of this
signifier—one that’s both lawful and intoxicating in its appeal—he can explore this fantasy space more
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consciously, and with much more flexibility, than he was ever capable of doing before his father’s death.
Among other things, this is what the unconscious is: all that stuff in my network that I never would have
noticed without following this crazy signifier I stumbled upon while talking to someone else.
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For this reason, too, the goal of the analyst isn’t to make the man renounce his fantasy. That is, it isn’t to
make the man finally “snap out of his waking dream” (as if he ever could), “adjust to reality” (whatever
the hell that is), and reclaim himself as a fully autonomous individual (which is itself a waking dream). In
fact, if this is what recovery is supposed to mean in so much of the pop psychology we see in the
bookstores nowadays, then some closer scrutiny of that word, too, just might suggest something that
covers up what it pretends to be restoring. In other words, it just puts the analyst in the position of a cop,
which provides its own sort of cop out for both the analyst and the patient: “It seems that you’ve
discovered that all this is just a neurotic fantasy in your mind. Problem solved! Welcome, my boy, to the
wonderful world of the well-adjusted personality! Go forth and be sober, industrious, and without
illusions…” No, the goal in this case is rather to let the fuller significance of the man’s fantasy speak from
within the turbulent space of the fantasy itself—through all the repetitions, mutations, displacements,
detours, and returns of the signifier that serves as its linchpin. Whatever truth he may hope to gain can
only come from this process. And if this process involves beauty and pain, unexpected insights and
renewed evasions as the signifier begins to cut into some forbidden territory in the network, then this man
must try to remember something that the son of an alcoholic may already know better than anyone: that
what you can’t control will always return to you in the form of a gift… (Sorry, folks. We went over a bit
today. Class dismissed. And over the weekend, please remember: Just say no.)
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The sponsor for this mock lecture isn’t Sanka, Andy’s beverage of choice on The Andy Griffith Show, but
rather a French psychoanalyst named Jacques Lacan—who tried to map out the linguistic structures and
patterns that shape the psyche in much the same way that chemical compounds generate the taste and
aroma of a fine cup of instant coffee. That analogy may be a bit crude, but it’s not so bad that it misses the
mark completely. For in describing his approach, Lacan insisted that a strictly organic, biological model
of psychic disturbance can never do justice to the way that language works; in such cases, the “nature” of
the disturbance is always informed by the “second nature” of the symbolic network through which people
experience themselves as human beings. So rather than understanding the disturbed patient as some
hormone-driven animal who just happens to use language like a tool, the Lacanian analyst understands
him as someone whose very being arises through language. However much of an artifice it may be, the
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“tool” of language still constitutes the very person who uses it, and so it becomes the preferred avenue for
any attempt to diagnose an individual’s neuroses, complexes, or fixations. Yet for a variety of reasons,
Lacan’s argument has fallen out of favor in the broader field of psychology—especially in the United
States, where the field has long been dominated by the same biological model that Lacan criticized. This
is in part due to the pressure psychologists have always faced in establishing and maintaining their field
as a proper science, which has led the majority of them to abandon any model that doesn’t lend itself to
being streamlined, empirically tested, and objectively confirmed in a “controlled environment.” (Like
most of his colleagues Lacan thought this standard was too rigid, despite his reliance on clinical case
studies as well as findings in other disciplines such as ethology. In fact, he always stressed that the analyst
is never just a neutral referee; even in his role as a silent listener—or especially in this role—the analyst is
still deeply implicated in the game. Much the same would apply to the traditional role of the objective
observer in a clinical setting.) It also seems fair to say that it’s in part due to the increasing demand for
new drugs that can target the neurochemistry behind conditions such as depression, attention deficit
disorder, and other cognitive or mood disorders. Along with other developments in neuroscience, the
effectiveness of these drugs has contributed to the decline of psychoanalysis in general; for many people
nowadays, the MRI scan seems to speak much more faithfully about the dynamics of the psyche than any
session on the analyst’s couch. Much like The Andy Griffith Show itself, psychoanalysis has become a bit
dated.
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Moreover, even among those who still practice the talking cure, the Lacanian model is much less
prevalent than other models of the psyche. Lacan’s insistence upon a “return to Freud” is part of the
reason for this, insofar as Freud’s own ideas have been subjected to quite a lot of criticism in their own
right. Even though Lacan tried to “purify” Freud’s ideas by treating them as forms and structures (e.g.,
“castration anxiety” as a metaphor for one’s early initiation into language), such attempts have still been
regarded as too beholden to Freud for their own good. But no doubt the biggest reason for Lacan’s
marginal status is his tendency to describe his model with pseudo-mathematical formulas as well as a
playful, arcane rhetoric that often puts his audience of fellow psychoanalysts in the uncomfortable
position of being simultaneously seduced and psychoanalyzed themselves. That is, Lacan was a sort of
drama queen, a self-conscious performer whose account of the tricky language games of the psyche was
itself a tricky language game, and the often cryptic mixture of humor and seriousness in his performances
was guaranteed to inspire suspicion among those who preferred a certain sober clarity in their
professional speakers. After all, when you’re a therapist who’s simply trying to define the nature of your
relationship with your patients (yes, I almost wrote parents there), it can be more than a little frustrating
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to be thrown into a mystifying maze of mirror metaphors, complicated diagrams of optical illusions, game
theory, multilingual puns, and oracular riddles drawn from idiosyncratic readings of Greek mythology.
And when the man engaging in this performance suddenly pauses in the midst of some confusing
reference to Hegel, sustains the pause for an unbearable length of time while seeming to stare directly at
you, and then proclaims that your own criteria regarding the “well-adjusted ego” is itself a sign of
neurosis—well, it may be very hard to resist condemning him as just a crank with a weird hairdo. Or just
another fraudulent father. Playing with the law. Seeing what he can get away with.
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Yet when I first read Lacan in graduate school, my own uneasiness was due to something else. His habit
of using graphs and mathemes didn’t bother me all that much, since it seemed to me that they were meant
to function as conceptual mapping tools rather than standard mathematical formulas. His rhetoric, for all
its tricky detours and cultural references, didn’t bother me either; at any rate it didn’t seem that much
worse than a lot of the other stuff I’d read by that point. Even his claim that the autonomous subject—the
“self that is fully transparent to itself”—was a mirage seemed valid to me, and his account of how this
mirage arises in response to an underlying lack that we can’t fully escape in ourselves struck me as a
welcome antidote to pride and egotism. (Get over yourself.) What bothered me was rather his emphasis on
the paternal signifier as a crucial reference point when exploring the structure of the divided subject he
described. One can see this, for example, in his discussion of the “name of the father”:
It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function
which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the
law. This conception allows us to clearly distinguish, in the analysis of a case, the
unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even the real
relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this
function; this results in a mode of comprehension that has repercussions on the very way
in which interventions are made by the analyst.
So the father is first and foremost a “function” in the symbolic network of our experience; the name of the
father is the signifier that initially establishes this function, and any particular image we have of the father
in turn works as a sort of filler material in the function. For this reason “the father” always involves a
certain split between the key structural role he plays in the network—the figure of the law—and the
various ways he actually appears in a person’s experience; due to this split, one might even say that he’s
always both “more than himself” and “less than himself” in the broader scheme of things. The image
arises from the function, but no one image can exhaust the function…so the image, as signifier, fluctuates.
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Which is all good and fine—but as I thought about it more, it still bugged me in the bigger picture. For it
also seemed that Lacan was basically saying, If you think you’ve finally seen through your father and
achieved complete independence from him, you’re mistaken. No matter how smart you think you are,
you’re just kidding yourself. He’s still there as a functional effect in your unconscious mind, and for this
reason he’ll be with you—in one image or another, in one face or another—until the day you die. No one
errs more than the person who is no longer duped. So face it, son: you’ll always be a dupe.
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It’s this sort of thing that can piss people off when reading Lacan. Yet however much this was part of his
message—as expressed in his motto Les non-dupes errent (“The non-duped err”), a suggestively apt pun
on Le nom du père (“The name of the father”)—it wasn’t the only part; more importantly, my negative
reaction was due to a misunderstanding of Lacan that was based on a certain arrogance I had at the time.
First was the arrogance of believing that I’d reached such an elevated state that I was somehow “outside
the game” of language altogether, fully immune to all its more hidden effects on my own sense of who I
was. This is an easy trap to fall into when you’ve devoted yourself to the study of language; you easily
find yourself swept up in the delusion that your ability to decipher literary texts makes you somehow
above and beyond the very medium that still shapes you behind your back. Yet for Lacan, at least, the true
clinical category for someone who has achieved this position is the psychotic; it’s only the psychotic who
is entirely “outside” the symbolic network that constitutes human identity as such. If you could somehow
strip away a person’s fantasy formations entirely, you’d just end up with a completely dissociated mess.
A traumatic, quivering mess…The other source of my arrogance was very much tied to the first, insofar
as I thought that I really had “seen through” my father—if only by recognizing the limits of how I’d seen
him when I was a child. From where I was standing at the time, I thought I’d already been quite
successful in demystifying my father because I thought I was no longer in denial about him. It was at this
point in my life that I often enjoyed mentioning my father’s resemblance to Andy Griffith, but only to
joke about how he was anything but Andy Griffith in terms of who he “really” was. Sure it was a nice
punch line, but what the hell did I know about who he really was? How much time did I ever spend even
trying to know at that point? Not much. Not enough. No—I was too busy making patronizing remarks
about him, too busy trying to distance myself from him, too busy trying to act as if he no longer had any
claim on me. I was too busy trying to get the attention of other people because I no longer believed that
my father’s gaze, in any form whatsoever, confirmed who I was. I was too busy being recovered.
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39
If bringing Lacan into the mix still seems pointless here, we should think again. It’s true enough that
there’s a certain culture clash involved, and one can only imagine how Andy and Barney would have
reacted if they’d pulled over this odd Frenchman for running a stop sign and put him in jail. Who knows,
maybe the episode would be titled “The Speeding Frog,” and it would have a scene where Jack Lacan
(pronounced “Luh-can” by Barney) suddenly starts speaking in English when he’s placed in jail: “I am
thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking…I am not, where I am the plaything of
my thought; I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking…” (Gomer: Well gaw-awlee…how’s that for a humdinger? Opie: But what’s it mean, paw? Andy: Not sure, son. You reckon ol’
Otis left a bottle in that cell, Barn? Barney: I don’t like this a-tall, Andy. This here frog sounds like a
troublemaker…) Yet there’s certainly no shortage of episodes in the show where some mysterious, alien
outsider shakes things up a bit in Mayberry, so even in this respect there are still some good precedents
for me. More importantly, though, if there’s one lesson that keeps coming back in both Lacan and The
Andy Griffith Show, it’s this: when it comes to the law of the paternal signifier, you can subvert it, parody
it, mistake it, steal it, reject it, distort it, question it, flee it, ignore it, exchange it, hide it, divert it, rename
it, forge it, forget it, bypass it, divide it, displace it, condemn it, or otherwise juggle and play with it, but
still, in the bigger picture, you can’t escape it. The law of this signifier will make its claim on you. The
law of this signifier must still be reckoned with. There’s always a debt involved, always a fine to be paid,
and even your attempts to avoid paying it will become just another stage of the process whereby the
signifier continues to make its demand on you and continues to receive its designated share from you.
After all, this is what Danny Thomas found out in the pilot episode. It’s also why Lacan would eventually
have paid his fine as well. He recognized the power of the law as much as everyone else in Mayberry.
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It’s with all this in mind, then, that I intend to heed the call of the signifier I’ve been so busy confronting
and avoiding in the discussion I’ve had with you so far. That is, I want to respond to a demand that’s
arising from myself, perhaps even from you, as much as it’s arising from the televised face I’ve
described: Follow me. Stop ignoring me. Let me guide you on your journey, and you’ll be able to gain
some insight about that other face whose double I am—as well as your own, shaped by both of us in the
hall of mirrors hidden behind it. In a way this journey has already begun, and I guess that what I’ve said
so far might be seen as a series of baby steps: a bit wobbly and uneven, but still a start. As I go further,
though, you can expect a number of discoveries about my father and myself, and no doubt many of them
will be consistent with the sort of revelations that are common in the memoirs of people whose family
circumstances are like mine. However, please don’t be angry if some of what I say has a tenuous link with
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the image that I’m tracing; the main goal is to pursue the chain in whatever direction it seems to lead me,
and I’ll need a certain level of indulgence from you as we move forward. For example, if even a
lampshade from an Andy Griffith television movie serves as a productive link in the chain, this is fair
game as far as I’m concerned. Aside from keeping my mind as open as possible, this sort of flexibility
may give me some room to have fun from time to time (Andy: “I’m just funin’!”), which may go a long
way towards keeping me sane in all this. There may be certain occasions, too, when the signifying image
serves as more of a veil than a portal with respect to my father—yet even a veil can often be revealing if
it’s recognized as such, just as a detour can often be a vital part of the journey if its overall trajectory is
still clear. In turn, if the psychoanalytical model I’m relying upon ever seems to become an obstacle in its
own right, I’ll try to be vigilant about this as I consider the implications of what I say. Finally, I’m afraid
that I’ll also need to rely on your silence as a reader here, because it’s only through your silence that I’ll
be able to situate you in a range of roles that will keep me on my toes during this process. So if there are
times when I need to summon you as a judge rather than a trusty accomplice, as an authority figure rather
than a sympathetic friend, I hope you won’t hold it against me too much. After all, I wouldn’t be going
even this far if I didn’t have some sense of your good faith as a reader. In fact, I even like to tell myself
that you’ll understand what I’m saying for reasons of your own.
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So the time’s long past due for me to take this journey with Andy. He’s been waiting for me by the pond,
and it’s been years since I let go of his hand to throw that stone in it. I don’t recall the exact second I let
go of his hand; maybe it’s true that both of us let go at some point, but I can’t help feeling that I was the
one who did it first. The music that’s playing is familiar: a playful whistled melody called “The Fishin’
Hole.” I used to enjoy it and take comfort in it, and then for years it just got on my nerves—but now it
feels right to me. The credits are familiar, too, and even though they remind me that this is just a televised
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image created by producers, photographers, screenwriters, and actors, it feels no less real to me as I walk
towards the man who’s there on the road. He doesn’t look angry with me, but I’m still just a bit hesitant to
take his hand at first. In part it’s because I know that when I do, we’ll be taking a walk that will
eventually lead us very, very far from Mayberry. It’s also because I know that on this journey his face will
start changing. The changes may be subtle at first, but as we keep walking they’ll eventually become
more and more pronounced, more and more jarring in their impact as I look up at him. This can be scary
for a little kid, but it can also be scary for a 41 year-old adult. Is it scary for him, too? I’ll have time to
think about this as we go…but what still keeps me focused is his face as it is now. This moment. And at
this moment, the look of his face, the face behind his face, makes it the most beautiful face in the world—
a face that’s both a constant promise and a constant fulfillment of its own promise because it so perfectly
responds to the keen eye of the son who beholds it, beyond any sense of time or change that could ever
separate them. So it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to look down and see our hands clasped
together.
The image of the father’s hand will come back eventually in our journey, because it’s a signifier that has
other associations in the chain. It also serves as a nice visual emblem of the linking function of the Andy
Griffith signifier itself. But this isn’t how it feels to me as I look at it now. Right now I see it as an image
that I’m once again inhabiting. There’s nothing at all strange about this, since it’s an image that has
always been there for me to discover in The Andy Griffith Show, in my memories of my father, in myself.
In this image we’re holding hands. We’re holding hands because we’re father and son. We’re holding
hands because we love each other.
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