American Beauty/Leave It To Beaver

10 Pages 2528 Words

tion it was the Cleavers. The black-and-white sitcom Leave It To Beaver is centered on the lives of the perfect family. There is a successful father, a stay-at-home mom, and two healthy, happy sons. Each family member is naturally equipped with a sound moral conscience and every pseudo-problem can by nicely solved and resolved in the thirty minutes allotted for each episode. The father, Ward Cleaver, is an upstanding citizen who provides for his family and always remains the superior patriarchal figure. The mother, June Cleaver, is the perfect housewife, with a never-ending smile on her face. She spends her time doing things that no other woman has ever had the time to do, like papering the shelves and taking a q-tip to the grout in the shower. Wally and Beaver Cleaver are the two good-looking children who play baseball, do well in school, and always obey their parents. The worst sin that either of them has ever committed is to break an occasional window playing a game of baseball. On occasion, Wally might take a nice girl out on a Friday night date, but never does more than holds her hand and is always home before curfew. The deception and problems that exist in modern-day normal family life are unknown concepts to the Cleavers. Even if the Cleavers had problems, it is incredibly unlikely that these problems were made known to people outside of the immediate family as though “the family should be sacred from outside intervention” (Coontz, 1989: 18).
Certain societal aspects such as “homosexuality, drug abuse, adultery, blatant sexuality, and most importantly, the disintegration of the family” (Berardinelli, 1999: 1) were never displayed in episodes of Leave It To Beaver. In American Beauty, the Burnhams’ next door neighbor is homosexual, but has repressed these feelings all his life because he is a military man. This repression has led to homophobia. Lester and the teenaged neighbor, who is also Jane’s boy...