Race and Reality in The Monkees
The Monkees television show is very watchable today... with a few caveats.
Because of the potential confusion that may arise from reference to The Monkees (television program) and The Monkees (band) they are differentiated by the use of italics. The characters of Mike, Micky, Davy and Peter are referred to by their first names and the real-life men by their last names, Nesmith, Dolenz, Jones, and Tork.
INTRODUCTION
By 1967 Mike Nesmith, de facto leader of The Monkees, had developed a reputation of surliness. In his one short year in the public eye, he had been consistently difficult and uncourteous to the press. In the June 1967 Issue of Monkees Monthly he addressed this reputation, “So now some people think I’m moody and difficult. Well, I come from the South. That’s really the key to it. I grew up among coloured [sic] people and there’s no argument that the Southern coloured [sic] folk are abused and sat upon. And that’s a stone drag for me.”[1] Race and racism were among the foremost topics of political debate in 1967, but they were not to be explicitly addressed by children’s television personalities. The Monkees television show was supposed to be an escape from the problems of the day, a shelter for a young audience. While the older teens and young adults were being drawn to the countercultural movements which would later define the era, The Monkees represented a safe commercial alternative for all the younger siblings left at home. The Monkees were filtered safely through studio executives and standards and practices departments.
The Monkees television show was the product of studio domination. It was produced as cheaply as possible, reusing sets, tropes, and actors, to create a familiar television landscape in which The Monkees meddled. Partially as a result of this, The Monkees episodes frequently featured the racial and ethnic stereotypes of the period, doddering Mexican banditos, sinister Chinese and Russian communists, sly Romani bands, and opulently wealthy but backward Arab rulers. In some ways The Monkees television program and The Monkees themselves poke holes in these tropes. These tropes are frequently mocked and occasionally questioned but never outright condemned. The failure of The Monkees to meaningfully challenge the racial stereotypes which they were presenting to their young audience caused the ideas to be interpreted by the audience no differently than if they had been presented in total sincerity.
The Monkees television program’s racism has very little to do with any individual people producing the show and a great deal to do with the business model by which television programs were produced at the time. Most of the racism that exists in The Monkees can be attributed to the simple fact it was a sitcom produced in the mid-nineteen sixties. Television critic Joanne Morreale describes the way sitcoms were produced at the time, “The Hollywood Studios ... produced predictable, formulaic programs based upon their B-films rather than innovative forms and formats. The competition for ratings also led the networks to eschew risky, high-quality programming in favor of formulas that would draw the largest number of viewers.”[2] The Monkees was considered an exception to this formula at the time, Morreale even specifically notes it, “noteworthy sitcoms were NBC’s The Monkees (1966-68), aimed at the increasingly large teen market and another example of innovative television in the sixties.”[3] The program was considered revolutionary by mainstream standards. The fast paced and zany editing style was new to television and the homosocial pseudo-family dynamic presented at the core of the show was a stark contrast to the nuclear families that were the subject of all other children’s programming of the era. Despite The Monkees bringing a fresh new audience to the existing television landscape, what seemed distinct in1966 now it seems very much a product of its time. It was largely the fast-paced editing style and The Monkees themselves that differentiated the program from its contemporaries, the tropes and formulas on which the scripts are based remain largely unchanged.
EPISODE SIXTEEN, ROMANI REPRESENTATION AND THE HARM OF THE TELEVISION STEREOTYPE
Perhaps the most troubling of The Monkees’ television forays into racial discrimination is their first: episode sixteen, “Son of A Gypsy” (1966). The episode’s insensitive plot might be more the result of laziness and callousness than deliberate and hateful bigotry, but it is still, inarguably, racist. The premise of episode sixteen is entirely founded on harmful racial stereotypes, a conventional representation of a group of people that is oversimplified and often inaccurate and demeaning.
In episode sixteen, The Monkees are auditioning to play at a rich woman’s fancy party. Their rivals for the gig are a family of Romani musicians. When The Monkees get the gig, the eldest son of the family, Marco (Vincent Beck) growls at them, shouting “Kill! Kill!”[4] His mother Maria (Jeanne Arnold) assures the boys he is just going through a phase, and asks their forgiveness, stating Marco is upset about not getting the gig, “But we don’t want you to think that Gypsies are vengeful people.”[5] It is with this line that the episode damns itself. It is unsubtly acknowledging its own power to shape the audience’s views about groups of people. Adina Schneeweis and Katherine A. Foss, assert that due to the relatively small population of Romani people in the United States, television representations hold a particular influence over the public’s perception, because of the “lack of interaction that most non-Romani have had with Romani communities in the United States, it is assumed here that depictions in U.S. television have shaped and continue to influence the beliefs about this culture for mainstream Americans.”[6] The harm of the racism of The Monkees lies largely with its interpretation by the audience. In perpetuating negative stereotypes about ethnic groups, the program is communicating these harmful ideas about groups of people to its audience. In all cases, the images of ethnic groups presented on television and in movies can impact people’s perception of that group outside of media, but this effect was of particular importance because of the relatively young target audience of The Monkees. At a time when campaigns for racial and ethnic equality were dominating the lives of young adults, programs for teens and younger children failed to move beyond the established racial stereotypes that dominated television. Just as Morreale described the sitcoms of this era as being cheaply produced and formulaic, she also emphasized that they did not challenge existing social and political frameworks, “huge amounts of money could be made from syndication, so many shows, particularly sitcoms, were deliberately structured so that they could be repeated endlessly without appearing outdated; this also meant that they did not address controversial subjects.”[7] The racist stereotypes that are the basis of this episode, while controversial now, were not at the time. They were part of a larger culture of constant casual discrimination and bigotry, so ubiquitous that they went unquestioned on children’s television.
The rest of the episode unfolds in contrast to Maria’s words as her family proves itself, vengeful, violent, and criminal. Maria assures her sons they can still accomplish their true goal, the acquisition of this episode’s MacGuffin, the uncreatively named “Maltese Vulture.” She invites The Monkees to their camp as a “chance to show there are no hard feelings.”[8] When The Monkees arrive they too don the television Romani garb and are comically dispatched by the sons, tied up, and threatened with torture so that they might participate in the family’s plot. When the boys initially refuse, the following exchange unfolds:
MARIA:
Nonsense! The urge to steal is basic; we are all thieves at heart.
DAVY:
Where did she get that idea?
MIKE:
She stole it.[9]
The idea that the Romani people are criminal and dangerous is the message of this episode and it goes entirely unchallenged. The few references to the fact this might not be true, are placed in comical juxtaposition to the actions of Maria and her sons. Their repeated reassurances that they are not an inherently untrustworthy or violent people are set-ups for jokes, the punchline being that their actions directly contradict these words.
In their study of Romani representations on television, Schneeweis and Foss argue not only that “the ‘Gypsy’ archetype has been a staple of American popular culture,” but that “most Americans have little firsthand experience with the group and instead learn about them from the dominant media and social system-particularly through television.”[10] Schneeweis and Foss’s research collects and categorizes the tropes of Romani representation which have appeared on television beginning with The Gene Autry Show in 1953. This study examined eighty-four episodes of television, and ten which predate The Monkees ans shows that this episode of The Monkees was not an isolated outlier, it existed as part of a larger culture of racism. The poor representations of Romani people documented in this study are not limited to the era. This stereotyping is indicative of the television system rather than the time period, although it was exacerbated by both the insensitivity and business model of 1960s television. Schneeweis and Foss specifically outline five repeated tropes found in Romani representation on television: Ethnic Other, Tradition, Swindler, Fortune-teller, and Misunderstood. Episode sixteen of The Monkees, which originally aired in 1966, is classified as containing all these stereotypes, apart from Misunderstood.
Rather than expressing specific ideological or racial beliefs of the individuals creating the television program, the racism is the product of practices and traditions inherent to the television studio culture of the time. Similar one-off episodes are present in countless programs of the era, including, The Andy Griffith Show, The Big Valley, F Troop, and The Wild Wild West, all of which aired within a year of The Monkees episode sixteen.[11] The 1960s are remembered as a period of innovation and creativity, but alongside the media which stood the test of time, was the Hollywood entertainment machine which churned out costumes, jokes, and scripts with little regard for the representations of marginalized groups.
“MONKEES CHOW MEIN,” ANTI-COMMUNISM AND ANTI-CHINESE SENTIMENTS
The impact of the Vietnam War and the general culture of anti-communist sentiment was pervasive throughout The Monkees television show. Episodes five and forty-one both feature the thwarting of undeniably, but never explicitly, Russian spies. In these episodes, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cool” and “The Card-Carrying Red Shoes,” ambiguously Eastern European antagonists are attempting to smuggle microfilm out of the country when they are inadvertently thwarted by the antics of The Monkees. In “The Spy Who Came in From the Cool,” Davy accidentally buys a pair of maracas hiding microfilm said to contain “the latest secret American weapon.”[12] The spies in this episode are never explicitly referred to as being from a specific country, and in “The Card-Carrying Red Shoes” they are instead said to be from a fictional Eastern European country called “Druvania.” In contrast to the refusal to specifically name the USSR, in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cool,” when the female spy known solely as “Madame” escapes the clutches of the fictionalized CIA, the “CIS,” she is said to be fleeing to “Red China.” In the next scene she is presenting the microfilm to a council of Chinese leaders, and bragging, “It will change the course of modern warfare!”[13] Whatever was once on the microfilm has, of course, been replaced by footage of The Monkees galivanting on the beach to “Saturday’s Child.”
Like, episode sixteen, episode twenty-six, “Monkees Chow Mein” (1967), uses a premise dependent entirely on harmful stereotypes about an ethnic group, in this case, Chinese people. In contrast to episode sixteen, rather than depending entirely on a television tradition of tropes, the characterization of the Chinese characters of “Monkees Chow Mein” relate more specifically to the mid-sixties concerns over communist Chinese infiltrators. The depictions of Chinese characters are still the result of a history of television discrimination, but the plot of the episode specifically pertains to the political imagination of the period. When this episode aired in 1967, the Vietnam War, and the domestic response to the war, was one of the foremost political issues in the minds of all Americans.
In “Monkees Chow Mein” the spies attempting to smuggle a “doomsday bug” out of the country are explicitly Chinese and using a Chinese restaurant as a front. “Monkees Chow Mein” begins in a restaurant called “The Chinaboy Club.” Mike chastises Peter for shoveling eggrolls into a comically large doggie bag. In the back room, two Chinese communist agents, “Dragonman” and his lackey “Toto” discuss their plan to hide a secret formula for a “doomsday bug” on the fortune slips in fortune cookies. Toto then takes the secret fortune cookies to distribute them to the agents waiting in the restaurant. Peter, unable to resist, grabs one off Toto’s plate as he passes. The restaurant erupts as the agents try to stop Peter from leaving, the boys manage to slip out. Confused about what happened, this exchange follows:
DAVY:
I wonder what they wanted.
MIKE:
Oh, you never can tell; Orientals are a curious people.[14]
Upon leaving the restaurant, the boys are immediately apprehended by American agents in suits who whisk them into a car. Again, confused by their situation, Davy repeats himself:
DAVY:
Hey, Mike. I wonder what they want.
MIKE:
I don’t know; occidentals are a curious people.[15]
This exchange is emblematic of the racism in The Monkees. The discrimination itself is partially undermined by Mike’s second statement. His first line is apparently just the set up to a joke. There is an implied assertion, that really, no particular group is more inscrutable or mysterious than another. But Mike’s first line exists in a larger context. Its implications cannot be brushed away with a punchline that negates it. This is the failure of The Monkees’ tongue-in-cheek approach to criticizing the tropes on which their show is built. The inscrutability of Asian people was a common stereotype which emphasized their foreignness. Mark Bernhardt asserts that television portrayals of Chinese people are frequently “characterized by characters’ accented speech, clinging to their homeland’s culture, associating with others of their nationality, and serving as comic relief because of their difference.”[16]
In some ways, The Monkees mocks these tropes but the harm of them does not necessarily come from the sincerity or seriousness with which they are employed. Many of these racial stereotypes established their cultural roots in the realm of comedy. The Monkees is a silly show, but simply including harmful racial representations in a silly show is not enough to communicate to the audience that these representations are ridiculous and not to be taken seriously. This is an ever-present and ongoing debate, the assertion that these are “just jokes” about a group of people and that no assertions are really being made about the character of a specific racial group. Regardless of the intent, the end result is that these harmful stereotypes are being perpetuated, put forth to an audience, and reinforced as the episode is re-run and syndicated. Regardless of the punchline of Mike’s joke, the set-up still perpetuates the othering of Asian people on television.
It turns out that the agents who have abducted The Monkees are members of the fictional Central Intelligence Service (CIS) and they warn The Monkees that they’re in serious trouble because the Chinese spies will be after them and the portion of the formula which they inadvertently obtained. The boys hand over the formula but decline to sign up to help the CIS’s efforts in exchange for their protection, not believing the situation to be serious. In an attempt to kidnap Peter, Toto accidentally kidnaps the stuffed dummy the boys keep in their house, Mr. Schnieder, a joke at Peter’s expense as well as Toto’s. The Chinese characters are simultaneously sinister and incompetent. These are characteristics consistent with negative Chinese stereotypes of the time, but also traits generally shared with all antagonists in The Monkees. What makes these antagonists distinct from those which are featured in other episodes, other than the fact they are Chinese, is that they are politically motivated spies. The CIS’s preoccupation with spies is partially a mocking of the paranoia of the McCarthy era and partially a reflection of persisting fears of communist infiltrators and more largely communist China.
The same issues of harmful representations that arose in episode sixteen persist in this episode. In addition to the negative stereotypes of Chinese people which are asserted in this episode, the two lead Chinese antagonists are portrayed by Joey Forman and Gene Dynarski, who are not Chinese. Ashley Isola [RRS1] describes the ways that television programs and movies discriminate against Asian people, “The depiction of Asians during this era manifested itself in three distinct forms, including the ‘verbal racism’ which included slurs and language, the ‘physical racism’ and its exaggerated features and caricatures, and the ‘psychological racism’ which included the villainous roles.”[17] This episode of The Monkees engages in all three forms which Isola outlines: the Chinese characters are portrayed by white actors in offensive yellowface make-up, they are the villains of the episode, and they are portrayed as incompetent and stupid, they are also referred to with offensive terminology and names. Like the stereotypes of Romani people, these stereotypes exist within the wider television landscape, but they are exacerbated by the political climate and comparative prominence of Chinese Americans.
“It’s A Nice Place to Visit,” Latinx Representation, and the “Neutrality” of Whiteness
The first episode of Season two, Episode thirty-three “It’s A Nice Place to Visit” is alternatively titled “The Monkees in Mexico.” The Monkees’ car breaks down in a small town and while they enlist a local to fix it, they cannot pay him, so they go into a local bar to look for work. There Davy encounters a girl who he falls for immediately, but their love is thwarted when the boys find out she is the girlfriend of a local gangster called, “El Diablo.” El Diablo arrives and kidnaps Davy, taking him back to his camp. In an attempt to get him back, Mike, Peter and Micky dress up as bandits to infiltrate the camp and free Davy. The outfits are exaggerated for television, just in the way that the “Bandito” stereotype had been exaggerated for film and television throughout the history of Latinx people in media. In addition to The Monkees’ insensitive costumes and accents, the lead antagonist, El Diablo is portrayed by Peter Whitney in brownface.
The plot is drawn straight from dozens of other movies and television shows, the poor people of the small town are being abused by a violent gang of bandits. This is the first of the episodes I am discussing that is recognizable as a deliberate parody. While there are a few references to specific films, such as Micky’s use of the iconic “Stinking Badges” line in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Monkees are sending up Westerns more generally, specifically those which feature Mexican bandits as their antagonists.[18] In “The Monkees and the Deconstruction of Television Realism” Laura Goostree argues that The Monkees is reflective not only of the television culture but all culture, “it is impossible to approach any text as a totally blank reader or viewer because we have the experience of so many other texts from which to draw our interpretation of the current text … there is only one text, the culture itself, and … all cultural artifacts constantly, necessarily refer to each other.”[19] The Monkees is having an intertextual conversation with both the history of Western films and its Western contemporaries, such as F-Troop. In taking on the dress and affectations of the bandito stereotype, The Monkees are mocking it. The Monkees are ridiculous, they’re non-threatening, and they are white. The episode enforces this idea. The Monkees manage to free Davy from his captors and get their car repaired, as they attempt to drive away, they are stopped by a parking lot attendant portrayed by African American actor, Godfrey Chambers.
PARKING LOT ATTENDANT:
Hey! Haltiamo, por favore! You guys ain’t going nowhere.
MICKY:
What?
PARKING LOT ATTENDANT:
Fifty cents for parking.
MICKY:
Fifty cents for parking? What do you mean? We’re just tourists.
PARKING LOT ATTENDANT:
Tourists? Where are your seersucker jackets, your flat shoes, your Japanese cameras?
MICKY:
We are Mexican bandits. Mexican bandits.
PARKING LOT ATTENDANT:
If you can be Mexican bandits, I can be a Mexican parking lot attendant. Fifty cents for parking.[20]
This deliberately draws attention to and mocks the racial incongruity.
In the typical television landscape, whiteness is seen as neutral or default, The Monkees dressing up as Mexican bandits is simply putting on a costume, and within the logic of the episode, they’re believable, they manage to convince El Diablo to let them join his gang. But it isn’t believable, the existence of Chambers as the Parking Lot Attendant proves this. In television, Blackness is the exception, but white people can play anything, they do, they have, on dozens of The Monkees episodes already. When Chambers’ claims to be a “Mexican Parking Lot Attendant” it is obviously incongruous to the audience, and this delineates The Monkees’ own pretending as just that. Chamber’s presence in the episode thins the fourth wall and directly acknowledges the suspension of disbelief that the audience is willing to extend to The Monkees but not to Chambers. It forces the audience to think about why that is. Goostree argues that this is not just a critique of the way that television is produced and watched but of the society which produces and watches it, “The Monkees is both an aesthetic critique of the dominant discourse of television and a cultural critique of American society in the mid- to late 1960s. The series subverts aesthetic norms by deconstructing television convention; it subverts cultural norms just by existing.”[21] The Monkees lampoons the culture of television as a representation of the larger American consumerist culture. Television does not exist independently of the culture; it reflects the culture and in turn shapes it.
“EVERYWHERE A SHEIK, SHEIK” AND REPRESENTATION OF SOUTHWEST ASIA AND NORTH AFRICA
The Monkees episode thirty-five “Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik” is dominated by orientalist, exoticizing, and othering, imagery of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). It stars Monte Landis as King Hassar Yaduin and Donna Loren as his daughter Colette. Colette is told by her father that she must marry in order to inherit the crown of the fictional nation of Nehudi.[RRS2] She is distressed and fears she will be forced to marry her father’s sinister advisor, Vidaru, portrayed by William Bagdad. To avoid this fate, she arbitrarily chooses Davy to be her betrothed based only on a picture in a magazine. Immediately, two of King Hassar’s lackies arrive at The Monkees’ pad and weigh Davy on a comically large scale, paying the boys his weight in gold and carrying him away in a sack.
When Davy arrives in Nehudi and asks why he has been kidnapped, the first instance of the reoccurring line of this episode occurs, Shazar, one of the lackies, says, “Do not question the strange ways of our people.”[22] The people of Nehudi are presented as particularly opaque and backwards. Bizarrely, the people of Nehudi seem to think of themselves as opaque and backwards and trapped in their ways. The best examples of this are Colette and her father who are frustrated with the way that the traditions of their culture are confining them and forcing them to conform to the outdated laws of their country. The views of the writer of this episode, Jack Winter, who also wrote for That Girl, and The Dick Van Dyke Show[RRS3] , were seeping into the episode and also out through the characters.[23] The rest of The Monkees weasel their way into the palace where Davy is being held. Despite their protests to Davy’s kidnapping and impending coerced marriage, the boys are quickly plied by the promise of positions as cabinet ministers and more decisively, the king’s offer of their, “choice of a dozen wives.”[24] This offer in itself is a racialized stereotype. Vidaru and his lacky attempt to assassinate each Monkee in a series of wacky schemes that are inadvertently thwarted.
Eventually, Vidaru’s treachery is revealed after an unsuccessful attempt to poison The Monkees, but he is not only unmasked as a villain, but as an imposter:
HASSAR:
How could you do this to me or to the land of your birth?
VIDARU:
The land of my birth? Dah! I am not a Nehudian. I was born in Enid, Oklahoma. I just came here to get your oil, which I’m gonna do right now.
Even as the episode has been engaging with the existing television framework of stereotyped views of Southwest Asian and North African cultures, in typical Monkee fashion, it subverts these stereotypes. Vidaru is the only truly villainous Nehudian character presented to the audience, and it is now revealed that he has been an American the whole time. This undermines the twenty minutes that have come before it, “Generally, The Monkees is not what it appears to be. Instead of the simple series of stories about a struggling rock band it is disguised as, The Monkees is a complex text that is part and parcel of the oppositional youth culture of the 1960s, drawn from the images of that culture as well as the dominant American culture.”[25] But fundamentally, the target of this subversion is not stereotype but trope. The Monkees asserts that there is something wrong with the story they have just presented to their audience, but the problem that they identify is that the story is tired, not necessarily that it is racist.
Jack Shaheen in his study of Arab representations on television, finds that most characters fell into a few very limited roles: terrorists, sheiks, and seductors.[26] Vidaru’s twist ending does little to extricate him for the dominant stereotypes of Arabs, or Arab Americans, “In today’s film and television shows, Arabs do not only pursue women, but a host of things, like American real estate, businesses, and government.”[27] Vidaru is lecherous, in his pursuit of the young princess Colette, greedy, and conniving. A button joke at the end of episode does little to dispel the harm of these stereotypes. Especially when The Monkees have already perpetuated these tropes earlier. At the end of season one, in “Monkees in Manhattan” the boys sneak into a “Millionaires Club” with Micky disguised as the “Sheik Farooq Dolenz-a.”[28] Searching for investors in their musical, the boys shop around with the millionaires:
MICKY:
No, I cannot invest personally. You see, I consider the theater immoral.
MILLIONAIRE #2:
Really?
MICKY:
Yes, and so do all my wives.[29]
Micky asserts the supposed hypocrisy and backwardness of his adopted persona. The repetition of the trope betrays not only the racial animus but the laziness of the writing. Shaheen argues that the harmful representations of Arabs on television create a positive feedback loop, “Part of the problem is that members of the television profession know very few Arabs and their perceptions of the Arab world come not from personal contact but from secondary sources such as motion pictures … and other television shows.”[30] Writers have their incomplete views of Arabs affirmed by other television programs’ propagation of the same ideas. This even happens within The Monkees, writers Caruso and Gardner put forth their closeminded views of Arabs as immoral and inconsistent sheiks in “The Monkees in Manhattan,” which Winter expands into an entire episode in “Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik,” this imagery is carried through to the writing of The Monkees and Jack Nicholson, in the script for Head.
HEAD (1968): ORIENTALISM AND INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION
When The Monkees television show was cancelled in 1967 after just two seasons, The Monkees set out to make a movie. Alongside producer and director Bob Rafelson and his friend, who would eventually receive credit for writing the film, Jack Nicholson, The Monkees brainstormed their ideas for what a Monkees movie would entail. Disillusioned with the vapidity and corporate constraints of what they were told would be a revolutionary television program, the movie is a scathing critique of the television landscape of the era and the whole Monkees phenomenon. In Dolenz’s own words, “It was obviously a deconstruction of not just the Monkees but of Hollywood in general.”[31] The movie, Head is a series of vignettes which The Monkees frantically travel through, trying to [RRS5] escape the constraints of their television personae and the physical confines of The Black Box which they repeatedly find themselves trapped in. Head is an incredibly dark film. It begins with a suicide and features the footage of the killing of Vietnamese prisoner of war Nguyen Van Lem prominently and explicitly.[32] The Monkees entirely alienated young audiences and their parents. Head feels like the two years of pent-up anger at the entertainment industry let out all in one sharp, violent, eighty-five-minute burst. In Jones’s words, “I always thought The Monkees were going to make a movie similar to our show. You know, a lot of fun … but no, we took the events of the time which we had been asked not to talk about, drugs we never talked about, political opinions we never talked about, and here all of the sudden it’s like the top gets off the bottle and all this comes out.”[33] Head’s target audience was not the young, impressionable, and uncritical children who were being appealed to by The Monkees. It is unclear who exactly the film was for at the time, but it has found a dedicated audience in The Monkees fans of today and those interested in the drug fueled psychedelia of the sixties. Head has stood the test of time better than The Monkees despite featuring a number of the same racial tropes. This is because of the more explicit nature of the critique being offered. Still, Head is incredibly successful in communicating its critique of the Hollywood machine, but it falls short in its indictment of the racism that was inherent to that machine.
Head features a wide variety of racial stereotypes; they are drawn directly from The Monkees and in many cases are included for the purpose of mocking the television program. Still, Head is always mocking the cheapness, the unoriginality, or the inauthenticity of The Monkees, and never the racism. In one of the first sequences in the film, Micky is lost in the desert, attempting to find an oasis in a lone Coca-Cola machine, he is devastated to find the vending machine empty. As he throws a fit over the hopelessness of his situation, a lone figure rides a horse across the desert dunes and the screen. He slows down as he rides past Micky, and we see that it is William Bagdad, reprising his role as a “Sheikh.” When he reaches Micky, he says simply “PSST,” this subtitle flashes across the screen and the figure is on his way, spurring his horse on and out of the frame. This is the first indicator of the scene to come. After a run in with an Italian tank company who gladly surrender, Micky, and now the rest of The Monkees, are wearing what Peter Mills describes as “the classic Hollywood signifier of the Arab at the time, the head dress with the ornamental cord known as the agal, a look which would also have been familiar to a mainstream audience from Lawrence of Arabia.”[34] It would have been familiar to the audience of The Monkees from “Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik,” which had aired just over a year earlier. But The Monkees are not the only figures in this garb, the tent that they find themselves in is overwhelmingly populated by beautiful young women in gauzy belly dancing attire. Led and choreographed by Helena Kallianiotes, the dancers are blatantly objectified and sexualized, they are a literal Harem. The Orientalism and exoticization are amplified even further by the soundtrack, Tork’s “Can You Dig It?” which has a “North African feel in its tone,” and is, according to Tork, about the Chinese philosophical writings, the Tao.[35]
While Tork’s interest in the Tao was sincere, this draws attention to the overarching orientalist bent of the entire hippie movement which tended to mysticize and romanticize Asian philosophy and religion with little regard for the cultures or people who originated and practiced these systems of belief. This tendency is satirized, though perhaps not knowingly. Towards the end of the film, Peter finds himself in a steam room with heavyweight champion Sonny Liston and the character “Swami” portrayed by Abraham Sofaer. Swami enlightens Peter with some philosophical musing on the nature of television, arguing that people cannot tell the difference between “the real and the vividly imagined experience.”[36] Peter, freed by this knowledge, attempts to recount it to the rest of The Monkees, but the oft-ignored Peter finds his words falling on deaf ears, until the boys find themselves trapped once again in The Black Box. Now, that they are a captive audience, Peter repeats Swami’s words back to The Monkees nearly verbatim, as if they were his own. In Mills’ interpretation, the voice of the Swami is one that is not necessarily explicitly untrustworthy but dubious and, despite the supposed ancientness of the wisdom, newfangled and unverifiable, “this was contemporary material, and as a consequence the film doesn’t quite know whether to satirise [sic] or praise it – undoubtedly a fashion trend but certainly possessed of some real substance.”[37]
The world presented by The Monkees is not reality. It bears some resemblance to our own, but it has certain fundamental and irreconcilable differences. The world that the television characters “The Monkees” live in is ruled by television logic and television stories. The Monkees reproduces and challenges the existing television modalities, satirizing frequently, criticizing rarely, and always messing with the boundaries of the television set itself. Peter Mills saw this practice as a form of play, The Monkees set out to “explore various established genres of movies and TV that were by the mid-60s so well established that they were ripe for satire. Not in a vicious or angry sense, the satirical tone of The Monkees has more in common with the insider humor of This Is Spinal Tap. These were styles and conventions widely known and recognized, and fun could be had using them and sending them up, rather in the way children do: ‘Let’s play cowboys!’, ‘Let’s play space!’, ‘Let’s play pirates!’”[38]
While this style of satire lends itself to the joking and joyful tone of The Monkees, it also contributed to the racial stereotyping. Perhaps the single most emulated and mocked group of people throughout the entirety of The Monkees television series and Head is Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. Throughout the series there is a Native headdress that frequently appears in the fast-paced music video segments of the show being worn by various Monkees; there are also smaller bits which feature caricatures of Native Americans in “Monkees in a Ghost Town.” Two episodes which feature Native people, or caricatures of Native people, prominently are “Monkees Marooned,” and “The Monkees in Texas.” In “Monkees Marooned,” Rupert Crosse plays Thursday, the presumably Native lacky of the British Colonel Pshaw who has staked claim of an island that the Monkees have acquired a treasure map of. Thursday is dressed in television Native garb but is comedically genre aware, he stops the flow of action several times to beg the question, “Who writes this stuff?”[39] Despite Rupert Crosse’s Caribbean heritage, the joke here is somewhat similar to that of Godfrey Chambers as the Mexican Parking Attendant.[40] Crosse is an African American in a role of a somewhat exotic and unfamiliar nature. While his appearance is not presented as incongruous as that of Chambers, Crosse’s New York accent and cleverness are played to the audience as contrasting to his costume and circumstance.
The other significant portrayal of Nativeness is very different. In “The Monkees in Texas,” Micky and Peter split from the group to go in search of help from some local cowboys, in doing so, they dress up: Micky as the “Lone Stranger” and Peter as “Pronto.” Peter’s get-up is as deracialized as possible, aside from the single-feather headband, he is dressed in his typical hippie fashion. With the exception of a few direct allusions to Tonto, Tork’s performance is completely unaltered from his normal ditzy behavior. Despite this, Peter is explicitly treated differently for his perceived Nativeness. When Micky and Peter go to the town’s Marshall to ask for help, he refuses and reacts negatively to Peter,
MARSHALL:
No, uh, Emmy dinner’s tonight. I’m up for an award.
PETER:
Oh, congratulations.
MARSHALL:
That’s enough out of you, Injun! Tell you what to do. You go down to the saloon and hire some outlaws.[41]
While Peter’s poor treatment as Pronto is partially due to his standard role in the show as “the dummy,” it is explicitly racialized by the use of offensive and dismissive language by the characters in the show. Tork’s portrayal of Pronto is somewhat a critique of the treatment of Native American characters in Westerns of all kinds. Foisting the abuse put onto Native Americans onto the familiar and beloved Peter would have made the audience of The Monkees uncomfortable and would have called into question the racial discrimination that Native people faced. Later in the episode, Peter is caught when trying to warn Mike and his Aunt of some outlaws’ treachery, and he is abandoned by his fellow Monkee, Micky,
BART:
Which one of you is a traitor? Somebody was just at the Nesmith ranch. Who was it?
RED, SNEAK:
The Injun.
PETER:
We’re in a lot of trouble, Micky.
MICKY:
What do you mean “we,” Injun?[42]
The discrimination Peter faces is a commentary, but it is also played for laughs. His reoccurring mistreatment is certainly considered a bad thing, but it is not taken seriously. Peter is wearing a costume, and an extremely perfunctory one at that. The episode portrays Nativeness not as an inherent trait, a racial or ethnic identity, but as a stock role in Western stories. Just as Peter can put on his feather headband, he can take it off.
Native identity as it exists in The Monkees is inauthentic and oversimplified. The Native characters in The Monkees are not even really portraying Native Americans, they are portraying a specific idea of Nativeness which exists almost entirely as the creation of White American fiction. In Head, this caricature is taken to the extreme in a pivotal scene. On a Western set, with the sound of whooping in the distance, Mike is dressed in furs and fringe and Micky in the cavalry uniform of the “Indian Wars,” most likely a direct reference to F-Troop, a contemporary comedy about bumbling cavalrymen and their equally bumbling Native neighbors. Mike and Micky are under attack by a supposedly insurmountable force of these television-style Native Americans. In the foreground, Testy True, a young Teri Garr, lays dying, begging for Micky’s help, simultaneously, Mike makes his own stilted and unnatural appeal to Micky from where he is slumped against a tree, stuck almost comically with an arrow,
MIKE:
… When you’re finished there, you can help me by pulling this painfully barbed savages’ arrow, first, by snipping the head off in the back, and then pulling it from the front quickly so that it doesn’t hurt me. Uh![43]
As he is delivering this line, a Native American enters the frame and draws his bow standing just a few feet from Mike and Micky, Mike shoots him immediately and the Native American runs toward the camera clutching his stomach, though it is clear he is not really wounded. When Micky fails to follow Mike’s instructions and simply yanks the arrow free, Mike does his best to act pained but is clearly confused by Micky’s failure to play along with the scene. As it continues, and Micky becomes more and more disconnected from the fiction that he is supposed to be maintaining, another Native American runs across the screen and Mike easily and quickly dispatches him with a thrown knife, he staggers off screen almost as if he were never there. These Native Americans are not characters, they are props, they are being transparently used as set dressing to establish the fiction of the scene. Despite the realism offered to their appearance by the higher budget of the film as compared to the television program, the suspense of disbelief is much more difficult to maintain in the face of the blatant usage of tropes. When Micky fails to help True, she collapses dead, but Micky, refusing to engage, simply kicks her lightly, telling her to stop pretending,
MICKY:
Hey, come on. Stop playing. It’s all over. It’s all an act. Come on, get up.
TESTY TRUE:
Well, stop kicking me!
MICKY:
I don’t want to do this anymore, man. Aw, these fake arrows and this junk and the fake trees. Bob, I’m through. It all stinks, man.[44]
Head’s entire narrative purpose is deconstructing the television reality that has been put forth by The Monkees television program and the repeated use of tropes, stereotypes, and caricatures of racial groups is a foundational aspect of this television reality. When Micky, walks out of this scene in protest, and right through the paper wall of the set, he subverts everything that we have just been presented with, but especially the set, and the people that populate it, because while True and Mike react to Micky’s interruptions to the scene and the obvious fakery, the Native people who make up the background do not have the same agency. Head acknowledges the Hollywood Native American as an invention but provides no alternative.
The true targets of Head’s mean-spirited dissection are The Monkees themselves. While it is more than a side effect of the deconstruction of the characters of Mike, Micky, Peter, and Davy, that the nature of the television system itself comes under fire, the racism which was inherent to the that system is an afterthought. The Orientalism that defines the desert sequence and the character of Swami are presented as sincerely as anything, in the extremely cynical film, can be. Conversely, the portrayals of the Native American characters are presented as ironically fake but not necessarily harmful, and just as these characters were used as props within the television system, they are here used as props in the subversion of that very system.
CONCLUSION
The Monkees represented a new era of television in the sixties. The premise of The Monkees was a not insignificant challenge to the existing nuclear family status quo that was being sold to children and teens. The Monkees was the first show directed at a young audience that did not feature an adult authority figure. It was also revolutionary in the development of music videos as a medium. But The Monkees fell short on most social issues. Women were generally relegated to traditional misogynistic roles. Characters of color not defined by stereotype were few and far between. Distinctly absent from The Monkees are any significant Black characters. The two who appear briefly, The Champ, in “Monkees in the Ring” and Sonny Liston, who appears as himself in Head, are both boxers.[45] The African American struggle for civil rights was so prevalent and controversial that The Monkees shied away from including any Black character whatsoever. Commentary on important social issues of the time was lacking. The Vietnam War, which dominated so much of life in the sixties, is conspicuous in its absence from The Monkees, a show which in its theme song asserts, “we’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say!”[46] Constrained by the television system and the underdeveloped political beliefs of The Monkees themselves, The Monkees is revolutionary in its advocacy for the independence of young people, particularly young white men, but beyond this, it perpetuates most of the dominant ideas of the time.
Perhaps the most engaging aspect of The Monkees is its tenuous relationship with the fourth wall. It is the relationship that the television show and later movie have with the real world and the television tropes that comprise the reality presented by the show that create a tension, both dimensional and racial within the world of The Monkees. In challenging the existing television framework, The Monkees challenge the racial stereotype that had become inherent to the industry at the time. Because the true target of their critique is the system and not the racism itself, they fail to condemn racism in any tangible or intelligible way, especially to their contemporary audience.
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[1] Michael Nesmith, “Mike Talks About His Childhood,” Monkees Monthly 5, (1967): 5.
[2] Joanne Morreale. Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader (2003), 87.
[3] Morreale, 89.
[4] Dee Caruso, Gerald Gardner, and Treva Silverman. The Monkees Season 1, Episode 16, “Son of a Gypsy.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired December 26, 1966.
[5] Caruso, Gardner, and Silverman. “Son of a Gypsy.”
[6] Adina Schneeweis and Katherine A. Foss. ““Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”: Examining Representations of Roma Culture in 70 Years of American Television,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 94, no. 4. (2017).
[7] Morreale, Critiquing the Sitcom, 87
[8] Caruso, Gardner, and Silverman. “Son of a Gypsy.”
[9] Caruso, Gardner, and Silverman. “Son of a Gypsy.”
[10] Schneeweis. “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”
[11] Schneeweis.. “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”
[12] Dee Caruso, Gerald Gardner, and Paul Mazursky. The Monkees Season 1, Episode 5, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cool.” Directed by Bob Rafelson. Aired October 10, 1966.
[13] Caruso, Gardner, and Mazursky. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cool.”
[14] Dee Caruso, Gerald Gardner, and Paul Mazursky. The Monkees Season 1, Episode 26, “Monkees Chow Mein.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired March 13, 1967.
[15] Caruso, Gardner, and Mazursky. “Monkees Chow Mein.”
[16] Mark Bernhardt, “American Cold War Hospitality: Portraying Societal Acceptance and Class Mobility of Mexican, Cuban, and Chinese Immigrants in 1950s Sitcoms,” Journal of cinema and media studies 62, no. 4, (2023) 31.
[17] Ashley Isola, “Yellowface, The Yellow Peril, and The Rise of the Kung Fu Master,” TCNJ Journal of Student Scholarship 17, (2019): 2.
[18] Treva Silverman, Paul Mazursky, and Neil Burstyn. The Monkees Season 2, Episode 1, “It’s A Nice Place to Visit.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired September 11, 1967.
[19] Laura Goostree. "The Monkees and the Deconstruction of Television Realism," Journal of Popular Film and Television 16, no. 2 (1988): 54.
[20] Silverman, Mazursky, and Burstyn. “It’s A Nice Place to Visit.”
[21] Goostree, “The Monkees and Television Realism,” 57.
[22] Jack Winter, Paul Mazursky, and Neil Burstyn. The Monkees Season 2, Episode 3, “Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik.” Directed by Alexander Singer. Aired September 25, 1967.
[23] Campbell Robertson, “Comedy Writer, Litigant, Frog Lover,” The New York Times, January 11, 2007, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/arts/11wint.html.
[24] Winter, Mazursky, and Burstyn. Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik.” Directed by Alexander Singer.
[25] Goostree, “The Monkees and Television Realism” 58.
[26] Jack G. Shaheen, The TV Arab. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984).
[27] Shaheen, The TV Arab, 13.
[28] Dee Caruso, Gerald Gardner, and Paul Mazursky. The Monkees Season 1, Episode 30, “Monkees Manhattan Style.” Directed by Russ Mayberry. Aired April 10, 1967.
[29] Caruso, Gardner, and Mazursky. “Monkees Manhattan Style.”
[30] Shaheen, The TV Arab, 116.
[31] Head, Audio commentary by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, directed by Bob Rafelson (1968; New York, NY: Criterion, 2010), DVD.
[32] Peter Mills. The Monkees, Head, and the Sixties. (London: Jawbone Press, 2016), 157.
[33] Head, Audio commentary by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, directed by Bob Rafelson (1968; New York, NY: Criterion, 2010), DVD.
[34] Mills. The Monkees, Head, and the Sixties, 177.
[35] Mills. The Monkees, Head, and the Sixties, 177; Andrew Sandoval. The Monkees Day-By-Day Story. (San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 2005), 164.
[36] Head, Audio commentary by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, directed by Bob Rafelson (1968; New York, NY: Criterion, 2010), DVD.
[37] Mills. The Monkees, Head, and the Sixties, 226.
[38] Mills. The Monkees, Head, and the Sixties, 47.
[39] Stanley Ralph Ross, Paul Mazursky, and Neil Burstyn. The Monkees Season 2, Episode 8, “Monkees Marooned.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired October 30, 1967.
[40] “Television’s Rupert Crosse Dies of Cancer in Jamaica,” Jet 44, no. 1 (1973): 59, ISSN 0021-5996
[41] Jack Winter, Paul Mazursky, and Neil Burstyn. The Monkees Season 2, Episode 13, “Monkees in Texas.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired December 4, 1967.
[42] Winter, Mazursky, and Burstyn. “Monkees in Texas.”
[43] Head, Audio commentary by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, directed by Bob Rafelson (1968; New York, NY: Criterion, 2010), DVD.
[44] Head, Audio commentary by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, directed by Bob Rafelson (1968; New York, NY: Criterion, 2010), DVD.
[45] Dee Caruso, Gerald Gardner, and Paul Mazursky. The Monkees Season 1, Episode 20, “Monkees in the Ring.” Directed by James Frawley. Aired January 30, 1967.
[46] The Monkees, vocalists, “(Theme From) The Monkees” by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, recorded July 5th and 19th, 1966. RCA Victor, Released 1967.