"Containment" and a Two Minute Pop Song
I was recently introduced to Nancy’s favorite episode of the classic sitcom Bewitched, in which Samantha’s cousin Serena drops a Boyce & Hart-penned pop bomb, which launched me on a quest chain to learn and record a version of said tune, “Blow You a Kiss in the Wind.”
It is barely two minutes long. It also contains enough chord changes for at least two other songs, assuming everybody agreed to be thrifty.
I actually learned it by way of Redd Kross, whose version speeds the thing up and fuzzes the edges while apparently mishearing at least one lyric along the way. From there I worked backward to Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, then Nancy and I worked forward again: the most modestly priced Fender Bronco bass over a Darkglass pedal, Jaguar through an overdriven Vox amp emulator, Jazzmaster through reverse reverb and reverse tape delay. The original song remained identifiable through all of this, although “the song remained the same” would be both cheesy and demonstrably untrue.
Then, walking Delia one morning, I had a thought that probably should have occurred to me decades ago.
Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie were on television at the same time. Duh.
I grew up with both in syndication, detached from their original schedules, so they had never occupied the same historical moment in my head. Yet there they were on competing networks for most of the latter 1960s: two immensely powerful blonde women attached to ordinary American men who spent an extraordinary amount of energy trying to keep their lives ordinary.
The similarities initially seemed funny. Darrin Stephens is an advertising executive trying to maintain a normal suburban household despite having married a witch. Tony Nelson is an astronaut and Air Force officer trying to maintain a normal military career despite having brought home a genie. Both men have somehow acquired access to powers beyond anything their respective institutions can imagine, and both routinely react as though this were primarily an inconvenience.
As a kid, I thought they were nuts. Why look this particular gift horse in the mouth?
Seen from adulthood, though, the settings became at least as interesting as the premises. Bewitched locates its magic inside the postwar suburban-consumer world: house, lawn, neighbors, advertising agency, respectable career. Jeannie puts hers alongside NASA, military command, security procedures, and the technological optimism of the space program. One show attaches the supernatural to the two-car garage; the other attaches it to early warning radar and the launchpad.
In both cases, the supposedly competent human system functions only because something vastly more powerful agrees, most of the time, not to overturn it.
That thought led naturally to what was missing from those sets. Poverty is mostly elsewhere. Political violence is elsewhere. Vietnam is elsewhere, except when the episode ends and the evening news begins. Racial and economic conflict occasionally enter, but as exceptions significant enough to become “special” episodes. The sitcom world has boundaries, and much of what makes it comfortable is what those boundaries leave outside.
A few years later, television redraws them. Suddenly Archie Bunker is singing wistfully at an unfashionable living-room piano. Good Times can put “temporary layoffs” into its opening theme. Sanford and Son builds a comedy around what consumer society has discarded. The outside world has not destroyed the sitcom container, but more of it has been admitted.
And then there are the commercial breaks.
They feel like interruptions, but of course they are not. They are structural. The half-hour program exists inside a negotiated sequence of narrative blocks and paid messages. Even a sitcom about unemployment or social conflict has to stop at the appointed moment so somebody can sell soap, a car, or breakfast cereal. The supposedly self-contained story is nested inside a larger economic container that makes it possible in the first place.
That was when “containment” began to become legible.
The sitcom contains disruption inside a half hour. The pop song contains an emotional event inside two minutes. The suburb contains a particular picture of ordinary life. The military bureaucracy contains threat through classification, procedure, and jurisdiction. None of these forms of containment are necessarily dishonest. We need boundaries to make anything manageable. Songs need endings. Stories need frames. Institutions need scopes. Humans cannot act upon the totality of reality at once.
The trouble begins when an operational boundary is mistaken for a boundary in the world itself.
That distinction became considerably less abstract when our train of thought steamed from Agnes Moorehead, who played Endora on Bewitched, to Howard Hughes’s The Conqueror. Moorehead had worked on the film in southern Utah, downwind of Nevada nuclear testing, and later died of cancer. A causal link in her particular case cannot simply be asserted, but the larger historical fact remains: radioactive fallout does not care where an administrative boundary has been drawn.
Hollywood could contain Utah inside a camera frame and call it Mongolia. The government could contain a weapons test inside a designated test area. Neither act obliged dust, weather, radiation, or biology to recognize the same border.
And yet leakage is not always catastrophe.
“Blow You a Kiss in the Wind” escaped the episode that contained it. Redd Kross found it years later and turned it into something else. I found it through them, traced it backward, and Nancy and I changed it again. The song crossed decades, genres, audiences, recording technologies, and intentions while remaining recognizable enough that we still call it the same song.
Which leaves me less interested in whether containment succeeds or fails than in what happens at its boundaries. Who drew them? What were they meant to accomplish? What passes through anyway? When do we redraw them? And how often do we mistake a useful line on our map for a line the world itself is obliged to observe?
I started with a two-minute manufactured pop song. The song is still there. Mostly unchanged, depending on what we mean by “the song.”
The boundaries around it turned out to be considerably more dynamic.