Once again, the appeal of The Rockford Files [Media Notes 164 B]

Once again I find myself working my way through The Rockford Files thinking, “Gee, this is my intellectual comfort food, I should write a post about that.” And once again I discover, “Hey! I’ve already written that post.” And so I have.

That means that, to justify this post, I’ve got to cover new material, so I will. Here’s what I said in that previous post:

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

I also noted that he doesn’t live within the confines of work mode. He’s not a slave to Homo economicus.

Moreover, he’s not married. His police buddy Lt. Becker is married, but Rockford himself is not. We do see Becker’s wife in a handful of episodes, but that’s all. She’s there as an adjunct to Rockford’s relationship with her husband. That’s all she could be in the show. So it doesn’t make sense to have her in too many episodes. She’d be in the way.

But why couldn’t Rockford himself be married? We know that he’s thought about, maybe even came close in the past. But married himself? How would that change the dynamic that makes the show work?

What if he’d married his attorney, Beth Davenport? It seems that they’d dated in the past and she pretty much confessed that she’d thought of him as a husband. Well, if they’d have gotten married, what kind of life would they have lived? I can’t imagine her living with him in that trailer; that’s not at all her style, not at all. Nor can I imagine him living her life style, with the elegant apartment. What of his PI business? Would he have taken it upscale to suit her clientele as a lawyer? I don’t think so.

Now, can I translate that paragraph into a statement about audience preference? That is, whoever finds Rockford appealing, male or female, finds him appealing as he is, an interstitial bachelor who likes women, dates them occasionally, and has longer term affairs, but that’s it. Whatever the basis of the show’s appeal, it’s incompatible with marriage as we currently conceive it.

Now, David Chase wrote and produced many episodes of The Rockford Files. But he’s best known as creator of and writer for The Sopranos. Marriage is central to that show, both Tony’s relationship to his wife and his two children, in addition to his many responsibilities as a gangster. What I’m suggesting is that, in a way, Tony Soprano is a Jim Rockford who’s married. Obviously, they’re very different types of people. Tony Soprano is overbearing, aggressive, and violent in a way that Jim Rockford his not. And if Jim Rockford is interstitial, then Tony Soprano is interstitial on steroids. And where Jim had is lawyer, Beth, Tony Soprano had his psychiatrist, Jennifer Malfi. That’s a very different kind of relationship – and I note that Rockford’s most substantial affair within the show was with a (blind) psychiatrist.

What interests me is that neither Rockford nor Soprano are “broken” to work mode. They make their living in (something like) play mode. I’m thinking something like: If you want to center a program around a Rockford-like character AND have him be married, you have to make him a gangster to do it. That is to say, our conventions about men, women, and marriage are such, that that’s what you have to do.

Do I believe that? Not quite. After all, I just made it up. It’s worth exploring with shows like Breaking Bad and Ozark, both about married couples (forced) to live on the wild side. The Hunting Wives? Sex/Life? Hmmmm....

On the Appeal of Tne Rockford Files [Media Notes 164 A] {Beware of work-mode!}

I've been watching The Rockford Files again and though I should write up a post about the appeal of the show. But I decided to check the blog first and, wouldn't you know it, I'd already written that post, in June of 2025. So instead I'm just bumping that post to the top of the queue along with a prefatory note. If you look toward the end of the post, the highlighted areas, you'll see that I brought up work mode, pointing out that Rockford doesn't seem possessed by it. 

Now that I'm explicitly thinking in terms of a contrast between Homo economicus and Homo Ludens that in itself seems sufficient to revisit this post. I'm thinking that might be a good way of analyzing the show. Rockford's wayward buddy, Angel Martin, also manages to keep work mode at bay. He met Angel where? Prison, that's right, prison. But he was pardoned. Jim – that's his name, "Jim Rockford" – and Angel are contrasted with Rocky, his retired truck-driving father, and his good friend, Dennis Becker, an overworked cop. Rocky's always after to Jim to get a legit job, like driving a truck.

That's a beginning. I wonder how far we could get with that? Here's the original post, though I added a phrase at the very end.

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I’m currently working my way through The Rockford Files for the fourth, if not the fifth, time. I watched the program when I was originally broadcast back in 1974-1980, and I’ve watched it online several times in this century. Part of the program’s appeal certainly comes from the star, James Garner.

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

He’s an ex-convict who’s been pardoned. Was he ever guilty? Probably not, but I don’t recall off hand. Does it matter? He’s damaged goods. He lives in a beat-up trailer on the beach at Malibu, a marginal dwelling in a desirable location.

He makes his living as a private investigator, which is depicted as a marginal occupation in this, and other shows, but not always. While he’s a decent and honest man, he does quite a bit of sneaking around and more than a little deception. There are a number of episodes where he orchestrates a complex con, though on behalf of a good cause. Always.

He’s got a good friend on the police force, Lt. Dennis Becker, but is otherwise persona non grata with the police force. And he’s friends with a good lawyer, Beth Davenport, who once had a crush on him. He’s also got an ex-con pal, Angel Martin, who’s a bit more marginal than he is, and cowardly as well, yet somehow manages to retain Rockford’s loyalty.

All of which is to say, he doesn’t work within the confines of work-mode, as I’ve been writing about it. Life is not easy for Jim Rockford. He’s often broke, and in at least one episode that I can remember, in danger of losing his home. But his life is interesting and challenging.

I wonder, off hand, how many TV shows present us with lives that are NOT dominated by work mode? And in work-place shows, just how is work depicted? How much entertainment presents us with alternatives to work-mode? And how often is the alternative presented as a critique of work-mode?

Is The Rockford Files a critique? I don’t think so. It’s not pointed enough. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so popular. It presents a clear alternative, a clear difference-from, but it never goes so far as to present the work-a-day world as a soul-destroying trap, though the depiction of Becker comes awfully close to that. 

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Also about The Rockford Files: Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files, Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2.

Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2

This is a follow-up to my previous post about “The Return of the Black Shadow”, an episode of The Rockford Files. If you’ve not read that one, you may want to do so.

This episode is about a brutal gang rape. The victim, Gail Cooper, is the sister of one of Jim Rockford’s friends and associates, John Cooper. What had me puzzled is whether or not the fact that she was a librarian merely contingent, or whether it was part of a pattern. If so, what’s the pattern? The pattern, if there is one, would have more to do with how stories are constructed than with the way the world works.

I’ve decided that it’s part of a pattern, a pattern of the sort I characterize as myth-logic. My primary sense of myth logic comes from the work of the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. And he emphasizes the importance of binary logic, of contrasts. The world, of course, is full of binary contrasts. The trick is to figure out which ones are at work in any given situation.

“Animal” and the Librarian

Let’s start at the point where Rockford and Ms. Cooper have stopped for gas. A motorcycle gang pulls into the gas station and Rockford is talking with the attendant. One of the bikers gets into the driver’s seat of Rockford’s car, thereby trapping Gail in the passenger’s seat. He’s big and fat and is known as “Animal.”

That’s our contrast right there, between “Animal” and the librarian. That is, the rape victim was set as an intellectual woman so as to afford maximum contrast to a brutish man known as “Animal.” As a shy intellectual she needs help getting a date – Rockford’s taking her out as a favor to his friend – and that also makes her maximally different from her rapists,

There’s another small detail that now falls into place. Where were they going on their date? Deep-sea fishing. And that’s just odd. There’s nothing strange about Rockford going deep-sea fishing; we know he likes to fish. But it’s strange that he wants to take Gail Cooper deep-sea fishing. Why would he agree to go out with her in the first place and then decide to do something so out-of-character for her–something she remarks on–for their date? He’s taken many women out to dinner; why not this one? Remember, this is not about what makes sense for real people, but about myth-logic. The “real” Jim Rockford wouldn’t do anything so stupid. But there are over-riding considerations in this story.

The point of taking her on such a strange date is simply the strangeness of the juxtaposition. Here she is talking about her project at work, which involves cataloging physics books, and she makes a remark about something totally different, deep-sea fishing. It just makes the situation seem even stranger and more awkward.

Not only is it awkward for Rockford and Gail, but it’s awkward for us, the audience. “It does not compute.” We’re at the edge of Brechtian distancing, not in the avant-garde theatre, but in mainstream American TV.

And why not? Rape is a very strange and uncomfortable thing. Distance is just what’s needed to make it a subject for mainstream TV.

Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files

I’ve been working my way through The Rockford Files on Netflix. As many of you know the show originally aired in the later 1970s and is about a private investigator, Jim Rockford, who lives in a trailer at the beach in Malibu. Rockford’s basically a good guy who has to bend the rules to make ends meet.

I’m coming to the end of the run and yesterday watched an episode entitled “The Return of the Black Shadow”. The episode is more focused on one of Rockford’s friends and associates, John Cooper, than on Rockford himself. Cooper has a sister Gail, who is a librarian, and Rockford has agreed to take her on a date (deep sea fishing). The date gets hijacked by a motorcycle gang that gang rapes Gail and beats Rockford up.

The question that’s on my mind is: Why is it that it’s a librarian who is raped? If you are going to tell a half-way interesting story about rape, the victim has to be something other than a rape victim, no? But why not an interior decorator, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, an engineer, or a model, all of whom have appeared in episodes of the show and many of them were dated by Rockford?

Obviously, this isn’t a question about the real world, it’s a question about story craft, about myth-logic.

When the episode opens Rockford and Gail are driving along in his car having a conversation, an awkward conversation. She’s thanking Rockford for taking her out; she knows he’s only doing this as a favor to her brother, John; and Rockford’s protesting that, no, he’s taking her out because he wants to and she’s a nice woman; and she’s telling him about a major cataloguing project she’s working on, physics; and he’s laughing at her jokes and; on the whole, they’re managing to put a pleasant face on an awkward situation. As they’re driving along they’re passed by a gang of bikers, The Rattlers, who hassle them a bit as they pass around them.

When the bikers have finally passed them Gail mentions that her brother, John, had been a biker in his youth; he belonged to The Black Shadows. But he grew out of it and went to law school. They continue driving.

When they stop for gas, the bikers show up at the gas station and start hassling Rockford. One of them gets in his car (Rockford had stepped out for some reason which I forget) and starts hassling Gail. The net result is that they take her up into the hills and rape her; Rockford follows and gets beaten up; and the police arrive just in time.

When brother John finds out he is, of course, very angry. He decides that he’s not going to leave things to the police. He gets his bike out, puts on his old Black Shadow clothes, and manages to work his way into the gang that did it. And so forth. The gang’s caught and, at the end, Gail seems to have recovered, at least physically.

And I’m still wondering: why a librarian? Maybe no reason at all, maybe that’s merely a contingent fact about the character. However, the maiden librarian IS a minor stock figure and Gail fits the bill.