Dobie Gillis's Peace Time Army - A 4th of July Edition
Perhaps the most Kennedy era thing about The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, aside from his many loves, is when he and Maynard graduate high school and become enlisted men in the army. It’s a weird kind of army because they are in the same battalion and close enough to home that they seem to go there every weekend, or for half a show. It’s these scenes that are like the old Dobie Gillis, but the girls aren’t quite the same.
The army brings out a more “Third Reich” side of Dobie and that is troubling to see. It was always present in his philosophical meanderings that only centered around girls, and how he was better than Maynard for them liking him. But once Dobie gets that army suit on it brings out something in his character that is tempered with a tinge of evil that was missing from his high school days.
Dobie is always being offered advancement in the army unlike at school and is cashing in on his political skills. He seems to intuitively get the hierarchical structure of the army as if he was taught it as a kid. Maynard, on the other hand, is lost in the army, but what is he doing there? A bongo playing beatnik would be questioning authority and getting in trouble, but Maynard G. Krebs plays the same goof as he did at high school, but he’s less threatening. The Beatnik has been beaten out of him in his army rags and he’s a bit more pathetic. Dobie smells this on his best friend-like blood in the water and while his detached acceptance of Maynard’s general goodness is still present it’s drifting into contempt.
I’d guess the only reason that Dobie and Maynard go into the army is that the writers were met with that age old question of what to do with characters who come of age and leave home, but in so doing something true is revealed. This was the Kennedy years and a brief window in time before Vietnam and after Korea, when the draft was for everyone. What the army did, was to bring young Americans together, rich and poor, and give everyone a shared familial love for their country, but that is gone.
Dobie and Maynard are always going back home for the weekend, but one of the funny things about the show is that you never see their homes, or rarely. In fact, you never see Maynard’s home or any mention of his parents and this may be one of the most telling subtle things about the show. It also may be why he takes to the army more than he should. Maynard doesn’t have a home.
The closest thing Maynard has to parents are Dobie’s. They all hang out at the market like it’s a second home, true to Dobie’s Irish working-class dad. Dobie’s parents add a lot to the show and at first are perceived as simpletons but really are hard to figure out. They give a depression era backbone to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and strangely it’s easy to see Dobie in his dad even though he’s supposed to be a meathead and Dobie a refined if rough shod young man.
Dobie’s relation to them is abstract. Sometimes, it seems like Maynard is more their son than Dobie. He talks about his parents in the third person and neither resents them nor loves them, and this may be why Dobie is at home in the army. Maynard loves Dobie’s parents more than Dobie does, because he has love in his heart. To Dobie, this is one of Maynard’s redeeming qualities, though he never uses the word love.
As if on cue, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis has just come on. The boys in the barracks are watching a war movie together just like they were in college instead of the army, which would soon become a substitute to military enlistment for America’s young men. It’s an episode about Maynard going home. They did mention his parents writing him a letter in the army, and I was ready for them to appear to prove me wrong, but I was right. Maynard reads their letter sitting up in bed and when he needs help getting a weekend pass, he goes to Dobie’s dad. He’s America’s long-lost orphan on this Fourth of July, and the prodigal son - neither fit for the army, nor fit for home. Probably Maynard G. Krebs would’ve done better being born a generation later and going off to college.