A Man Named Herman (2): Herman Munster

Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster in American sitcom  

The Munsters (CBS, 1964-1966)

 

(Not to be confused with the German master glassmaker, 

Hermann von Münster (c. 1330 - 1392)) 

 

 

I. 

 

If D. H. Lawrence is to be believed, then Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851), is a man with the hate-filled heart of a monster:  "Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, than Melville did." [1]

 

While there may be disagreement amongst literary scholars about the validity and reliability of Lawrence's claim, I think all lovers of classic American sitcoms will agree that Herman Munster, a fictional character played by Fred Gwynne in The Munsters [2], is a monster with the loving heart of a man. 

 

 

II. 

 

The difference between the two Hermans turns essentially on how they experience family life: Melville was only really happy (albeit briefly) on Polynesian islands among palm trees, and lizards, and the people he found there who - despite their savage reputation as cannibals - were gentle and generous toward him. 

 

Unfortunately, Melville had a long chain round his ankle all the time, binding him to the white world of home sweet home and apple pie: 

 

"It was a long chain: and it never broke. It pulled him back. By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and Mother [...] back on the same old doorstep. Like a fatality." [3]     

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of courtship and fifty years of disillusion.  

      He just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet." [4]  

 

A savage-souled artist like Melville doesn't want domesticity and "lovey-dovey fulfilment" [5] found in the bosom of his family. 

 

But a man like Herman Munster, however, wants precisely this ...

  

For despite his monstrous origins [6], hard-working Herman Munster is perfectly content to lead a conventional and traditional family life in his spooky mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane [7], playing the devoted husband to Lily (played by Yvonne De Carlo) and the patient father to his young son Eddie (played by Butch Patrick). 

 

Herman is also proud to act as the supportive son-in-law to his wife's elderly father, Grandpa (played by Al Lewis) and the doting uncle to Lily's blonde niece Marilyn (played by Beverley Owen and later Pat Priest), who lives with them and is amusingly thought of as the ugly duckling of the family. 

 

Much put upon Herman even cleans up after Spot, the family's fire-breathing pet dragon, as well.

 

But let's examine Herman's character in a little more detail before deciding whether he is, in Deleuze-Guattarian terms, an oedipalised figure who has sacrificed his monstrous otherness in order to fit into American suburban life - i.e., one who has retained his neck bolts but lost his balls, so to speak - or is, in fact, what one commentator calls a rad dad [8] and a leading contender for best TV father ever.     

 

 

III.     

 

The consensus is this: Herman is a lovable, good-natured, and clumsy buffoon, prone to stuttering and childish temper tantrums, punctuated with animal-like roaring and a very distinctive laugh.   

 

In keeping with his goofy and childlike personality, Herman loves balloons, candy, and especially his wife's pancakes. He plays with toys and loves to read comic books (despite Lily's irritation at such behaviour). 

 

Above all, Herman is kind to everyone he meets and a champion of liberal values, once famously telling his son Eddie that it doesn't matter what someone looks like physically, or what colour their skin is, as long as they have a good heart and display strength of character.  

 

Which, I suppose, is true to some extent, though I'm philosophically wary of such trite humanism. And I do find Herman's comic silliness boring after a while. 

 

I'm also not convinced that the show's attempt to satirise the typical family sitcom of the era and the American domestic ideal was successful - it often just seems to reinforce such and, as a thinker shaped by Anti-Oedipus (1972), I have serious issues with the character of Herman Munster ... 

IV.

 

As far as I'm aware, despite their penchant for vampires and werewolves, Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about The Munsters. I'm confident, however, that they would diagnose Herman as a profoundly oedipalised figure who has lost his radical otherness and proud monstrosity in becoming a family guy and all-American dad. 

 

Whilst Frankenstein's original Creature managed to liberate a body without organs and become a kind of desiring-machine - disrupting the social order, unbound by law or lineage, refusing the judgement of his maker, etc. - Herman, by contrast, has been stitched together and stitched up within a scientifically organ-ised body and subject to the canned laughter of a '60s sitcom.  

 

The Creature flees into the wilderness and spends much of the time relentlessly wandering across Europe and the vast frozen expanse of the Arctic; Herman settles down to life in Mockingbird Heights, CA. Instead of seeking murderous revenge on his creator and terrorising humanity, Herman is a dedicated employee, a submissive husband and a regular consumer. 

 

No longer a figure of the Outside, Herman Munster has been metaphorically castrated and his monstrosity commodified and packaged as safe, weekly entertainment designed to reinforce the status quo.  

 

In other words, his chaotic potential has been successfully channelled into the service of capitalist production and domestic complacency. Herman doesn't just inhabit the role of the father, for example, he desperately hyper-performs it; fretting about his son's school grades and - as we have seen - giving wholesome, moralising speeches about character.

 

But if this makes him a sap and a sell-out for Deleuze and Guattari, it makes him something altogether different and more positive for others - a rad dad ...  

 

V.

 

According to A. Michelle Smith, Herman Munster deserves to be nominated "as the best dad to ever walk across the television screen" [9] and should be looked up to not just as a father figure that all children can learn from, but the dad "that has the ability to guide other dads to be better dads" [10]. 

 

But then, this is a woman who finds the most admirable thing about The Munsters to be the fact that "despite the fictional characters being unusual and odd in their appearance, they resemble the epitome of what it means to be together as a family at home" [11] - they learn, they love, and they grow together. 

 

Smith congratulates Herman for his noble attempts to ensure his son Eddie grows up to become "the best version of himself" [12] - not by freely expressing his lycanthropic nature, but by repressing such [13]. But that, arguably, is a form of child abuse and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, one day, a teenaged Eddie goes full werewolf, refusing like Arthur Fleck to just sit there and take it like a good little boy. 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-132. The line quoted is on p. 124.

      And see also the post on Herman Melville that forms part one of this two-part series on men named Herman (published on TTA on 19 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The Munsters is an American sitcom about a family of benign monsters that aired from 1964 to 1966 on CBS (Thursday evenings at 7:30). The series was partly a satire of American suburban life and partly an affectionate spoof of the Universal monster movies from the 1930s and '40s (as Universal jointly produced The Munsters, the show was able to exploit the copyrighted characters). A total of seventy episodes were produced.  

      Interestingly, it achieved higher ratings than (the more sophisticated) Addams Family, which aired concurrently on ABC. But the show was cancelled after ratings fell dramatically in the face of competition from a new ABC show that began to air twice weekly in January 1966 called Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. 

      Today, of course, thanks to re-runs on free streaming platforms and digital on-demand services, The Munsters continues to find new fans.    

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 130-131.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 131. 

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] The fictional facts, if we may call them such, around Herman Munster's origins, are rather vague. He is said to be one of Frankenstein's monstrous creations, assembled in a lab in Heidelberg at some undetermined date in the 19th century. Having left Germany for the UK at an early age, Herman was adopted by the Munsters of Munster Hall, a noble family living in the fictitious county of Shroudshire, England.  

      Later, Herman moved to Transylvania, where he met his future wife, Lily Dracula. After marrying, in 1865, the couple emigrated (taking her father, the Count, along with them) to the United States. Herman later enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Second World War. 

      In the early 1950s, Herman and Lily move to the Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional town of Mockingbird Heights. Herman finds a job nearby at a funeral home (Gateman, Goodbury & Graves). Although his co-workers sometimes comment on his height and superhuman strength, they otherwise seem to find nothing unusual about his appearance (including the greenish hue of his skin).   

 

[7] Readers would be forgiven for mistaking the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane for Gothic or Mock-Gothic. It is, rather, a Second Empire Victorian mansion given a haunted house makeover, complete with decaying exteriors, gloomy interiors, and spooky, overgrown grounds. The set was originally built by Universal Studios for the movie So Goes My Love (1946) and features the classic hallmarks of the Second Empire style, including a mansard roof, a wrap-around porch, and ornate woodwork along the cornices and eaves.  

 

[8] A rad dad is a slang term for a hands-on, modern father figure who actively shares his hobbies with his kids, balances fun with guidance, and brings a relaxed, youthful energy to traditional parenting. The phrase was popularised on social media by Millennials and Gen Z-ers who contrast the rad dad idea with a more emotionally distant model of fatherhood concerned with the maintenance of paternal authority.

 

[9-12] A. Michelle Smith, 'Herman Munster Is A Rad Dad', in the online literary journal The Odyssey (13 June 2016).

[13] As a reader of Deleuze and Guattari, one has to use the concept of repression carefully. 

      They no longer frame it simply in terms of biological instincts, but of desire's containment within the Oedipal confines of the family (Mommy-Daddy-Me) and argue that because the child as a desiring-machine is connected to the wider world his development becomes a socio-political question and not just a family affair. 

      For Eddie to become a healthy, happy adult he has to be allowed to howl at the moon and not forced into an isolated all-too-human identity that leaves him vulnerable to state and corporate control and ashamed of his own lupine desires.    

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch the opening credits to The Munsters. The instrumental theme tune was composed by Jack Marshall and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965. 

  

This post is in memory of the actor Fred Gwynne who was born 100 years ago on July 10th, 1926 - the same date as my mother. 

 

 

My Purrfect Catwoman

 

Fig. 1 Selina Kyle as Catwoman wearing her classic outfit (DC Comics)

Fig. 2 Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns (dir. Tim Burton, 1992)  

 

I.

 

I think everyone likes the DC comic book character Catwoman, criminal alter ego of Selina Kyle, created by Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane in 1940 [1]. 

 

Even Batman can't resist her feline charms and, despite the fact that she is one of his major adversaries, many stories depict them as a couple caught in a complicated romantic relationship. Probably this has something to do with Finger and Kane deciding from the outset that they wanted to give the character sex appeal [2].  

 

Not that there's anything wrong with that! Even D. H. Lawrence approves of sex appeal, which he defines as the communicating of beauty and the kindling of a sense of warmth and gaiety. 

 

For Lawrence, indeed, the loveliness of a really lovely woman - such as Selina Kyle, in whom sex burns brightly - lights up the entire  world. To encounter such a woman - extremely rare even in a comic book universe containing wonder women and supergirls - is a genuine experience [3].     

 

However, without wishing to jump on any kind of moral highhorse, I do sometimes feel that the kinky hypersexualisation of Catwoman has been taken too far in recent years and that this negatively impacts upon a character with a long and interesting history. 

 

As one commentator writes:  

 

"She's always been attractive, however, her [...] complexity takes a nosedive when creators rely too heavily on feline and female cultural connotations. When she's rendered with an extremely minimal waist, but with boundless cleavage [...] her power is diminished." [4]

 

The same commentator adds that whilst the the way Catwoman is drawn in the comic books diverges from artist to artist, all too often "her imagery falls into the realm of overplayed sex fantasy" and her body is often "twisted submissively into feline poses" [5] that are essentially designed to titilate heterosexual male readers.   

 

 

II. 

 

Many people blame TV and Hollywood for this hypersexualisation of Catwoman; from Julie Newmar in the 1960s, to Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1990s, Catwoman has always been portrayed on screen in a manner that emphasises her physical attributes rather than her criminal skills and intelligence [6]. 

 

However, we might also remind ourselves that it was the comic book writer Frank Miller (in collaboration with artist David Mazzucchelli) who not only reimagined Batman as the so-called Dark Knight, but radically revised Catwoman's origin and character ...

 

Thus, in Batman: Year One (1987), we were now asked to accept that before becoming a cat-suited thief, Selina Kyle had worked as a dominatrix whilst also taking care of a 13-year-old prostitute named Holly Robinson.

 

And that, I would suggest, is a pretty much perfect example of the pornification of popular culture.      

 

 

III. 

 

So, how then would I envision Catwoman, if I were tasked with so-doing? 

 

Well, I'd be tempted to return to her Golden Age look prior to the Batman TV show, consisting of a purple dress, a green cape, a domino mask, and mid-length boots. It's a good look: sexy, but sophisticated and stylish, rather than porno-fetishistic in a way that - even if once transgressive - has now become boring and stereotypical. (See figures 1 and 2 above.) 

 

Alternatively, I think I'd go for a look inspired by legendary English ballerina Margot Forteyn, as Agathe, in Roland Petit's Les Demoiselles de la Nuit (1948): see figure 3 below. 

 

For ultimately my perfect Catwoman is graceful and stealthy rather than raunchy and explicit; a daring thief characterised by impeccable manners and charm, who steals rare and beautiful objects not because they are valuable, but because she enjoys the challenge and the danger involved; a woman who defies convention and lives on her own terms, but doesn't drone on about being empowered or feel the need to have the letters BDSM tramp-stamped on her lower back to show us how sexually liberated she is.    

 

 

Fig. 3: Margot Fonteyn as Agathe the Cat in 

Roland Petit's Les Demoiselles de la Nuit (1948) [7]

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Kyle features as a mysterious jewel thief called the Cat in Batman #1 (Spring, 1940). Although she doesn't wear her iconic cat-suit and mask, the story establishes Kyle's character as a feline femme fatale who both frustrates and attracts Bruce Wayne.

 

[2] As mentioned, what Finger and Kane did not originally give Catwoman, however, was a costume or any form of disguise. It was not until her third appearance that she donned a full-face furry cat mask and not until sometime later that she adopted what became her regular look prior to the Batman TV show, consisting of a purple dress, a green cape, a domino mask, and calf-length boots. This costume is distinct from the sleek and shiny catsuit she is now known for. 

  

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 143-148. I discuss this text in relation to the thinking of E. M. Cioran in a post published on 24 September 2018: click here 

 

[4] Elliot Swan, 'The Oversexualization of Catwoman Harms Her Character', on CBR (6 June 2013): click here. 

 

[5] Ibid.  

 

[6] Julie Newmar was the first actress to play Catwoman during the first two seasons (1966-67) of the live-action TV series Batman, starring Adam West as the caped crusader Bruce Wayne and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson (aka Robin). Newmar later revealed in an interview that the skin-tight costume she wore left her no option but to tell the character's story with the movements, postures, and gestures of her body. 

      Unfortunately, due to an injury, Newmar was unable to reprise the character for the full-length movie based on the TV show (dir. Leslie H. Martinson, 1966), thus opening the way for Lee Meriwether to play Catwoman. But perhaps the most famous actress to do so is Michelle Pfeiffer, who haphazardly stitched and squeezed herself into an iconic shiny black cat-suit in the 1992 movie directed by Tim Burton, Batman Returns, playing opposite Michael Keaton's Batman. This movie was far darker and more sexual in tone - as well as more violent - than many fans and critics were anticipating. 

      Pfeiffer's latex costume - of which there were dozens made at a $1000 a pop - was designed by Bob Ringwood and Mary E. Vogt. Some versions, made from a cast of Pfeiffer's body, were so tight that she had to be covered in baby powder in order to get into them. Ringwood and Vogt found it problematic to add actual stitching to latex and so they essentially painted what looked like stitching on to the suit with liquid silicon while it was worn by Pfeiffer.     

 

[7] Roland Petit's one-act ballet Les Demoiselles de la Nuit premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Marigny on May 22, 1948. The libretto was by Jean Anouilh, with music by Jean Françaix. The costumes and set designs were by Leonor Fini. Petit created the role of Agathe especially for Miss Fonteyn.  

      It tells the tragic story of a poet-musician who falls in love with his beautiful cat Agathe, who has magically assumed semi-human form. Agathe initially attempts to be faithful to her human lover, but is eventually seduced by the sound of male cats howling in the night and the desire for freedom. Leaping from a rooftop in order to escape, the poet-musician tries to grab hold of her and they both fall to their death. 

 

 

Readers might be interested in an earlier post on feline femininity - 'Reflections on the Case of Irena Dubrovna' (4 June 2022) - click here. 

 

Readers might also like this piece of artwork slightly reimagining the work of Finger and Kane from the first issue of Batman (Spring 1940) that I didn't have the chance to use in the main body of this post: 

 

 

 

Last Clown Standing

Last Clown Standing (SA/2022)

 

 

There's a certain irony in the fact that the only soft toy to have survived from my childhood is the one I never really cared for and used to treat with astonishing violence: an 18" clown figure with a rubber painted face and a harlequin style outfit. 

 

It wasn't that I was scared of clowns, although coulrophobia is, apparently, a fairly common fear and many people - particularly young children - find clowns disturbing.*     

 

In fact, I was enchanted by the sad little clown (or pierrot), who turned the roller displaying captions and credits at the opening and closing of Camberwick Green and was a big fan of the Joker as played by Cesar Romero in Batman. 

 

But, for some reason, I was never very fond of my clown companion, although I now have a new-found respect for his endurance, outliving a much-loved Teddy Bear and even a hard-bodied Action Man.   

I suppose it's a case of he who laughs loudest lasts the longest.

 

 

* Note: if this phobia is mostly related to their bizarre - sometimes grotesque - appearance, the unpredictable behaviour of clowns can also be unsettling; no one likes to be invited to smell a flower only to have water squirted in their face.  

 

 

The Doll, the Joker, and the Man Who Laughs

Oh, you fools! Open your eyes! 

I am a symbol of your humanity!

As many fans of Batman will know, the appearance of the Joker owes a good deal to Conrad Veidt's astonishing portrayal of the facially mutilated figure of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928); a silent romantic drama-cum-horror movie directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni (and an adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit).

But what many readers of Daphne du Maurier don't realise is that her description of Julio - a creepy sex doll in one of her earliest short stories - also appears to be modelled on the above* and anticipates Gotham's most notorious supervillain, right down to the cocked eyebrow:

"His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin, with curved nostrils, and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one - the eyes of a hawk. The hair was sleek and dark, brushed right back from the white forehead."

Heath Ledger as the Joker in  

The Dark Knight (2008)**

Notes: 

* Unfortunately, this cannot be the case; the film was released a year after du Maurier wrote 'The Doll' (aged twenty, in 1927).

** Heath Ledger's Joker - unlike Joaquin Phoenix's more recent (equally brilliant) portrayal - makes the relationship to Veidt's Gwynplaine clear by suggesting that the crimson-mouthed smile is the result of disfigurement rather than merely an expression of underlying madness.    
 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Doll', in The Doll: Short Stories, (Virago, 2011), p. 23.

Send in the Clowns

I.

In an early school report, one of my teachers noted: "Stephen's work suffers due to his insistence on playing the clown. He has to understand that he is in school to learn and not merely to amuse his classmates."

Despite this po-faced attempt to nip my talent for comedy in the bud, this insistence on playing the clown - influenced in part by Cesar Romero's performance as the Joker in Batman - continued all the way into adolescence, when that fabulous grotesque, Johnny Rotten, the clown prince of punk, became a great inspiration.     

II.

As a matter of fact, I never regarded myself as a clown: certainly not the type who relied on slapstick or other forms of physical comedy; and certainly not the type who was solely interested in entertaining others.

Even at six-years-old, I was more interested in challenging authority and provoking laughter through the use of language - including the language of fashion - than by throwing buckets of water (not that there's anything wrong with throwing buckets of water, as Tiswas demonstrated).

Admiring as I did fun lovin' criminals like the Joker and, later, anarchic pranksters like the Sex Pistols, meant there was always a bit more of a subversive edge to my fooling around, refusal to care, and mockery (of self and others). I may have worn Grimaldi's whiteface makeup, but that's just about where any point of comparison ends.    

III.

If not a clown, then what was I really? Some might say a fool and I've nothing against those who rush in where angels fear to tread.

But I'd probably be happier with the term trickster, as there's something more ambiguous about such a shape-shifting figure and the manner in which they often push things beyond a joke; are they being mischievous, malicious, or both? Either way, they seem to act with the full intelligence of evil.

Primarily, tricksters violate principles of social and natural order. That is to say, tricksters playfully deconstruct reality and dissolve binary distinctions. And that's why Jordan Peterson is absolutely right to describe Derrida as a philosophical trickster - though his ignorant dismissal of Derrida's work (without even attempting to engage with it) is as shameful as that of those four Cambridge dons who, in 1992, opposed the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

Ironically, Peterson has himself just had an offer of a visiting fellowship rescinded by Cambridge University following a humourless and politically correct backlash from members of both faculty and the student body, who seem to regard him in much the same way he regards Derrida - that is to say, as a dangerous charlatan.

Ultimately, culture requires its clowns and tricksters - almost as comic saviours. Indeed, that's something I would have thought Peterson, as a great reader of Jung, would readily agree with. Thus his loathing of Derrida is, in some ways, surprising as well as disappointing.

In Memory of Roger Moore and Adam West

    

Roger Moore as 007 and Adam West as Batman

In the same way that many of us subscribe to the view that Roger Moore is the best Bond, so too is it unarguably the case that Adam West is by far the greatest Batman - the camp coolness of his Caped Crusader in the sixties TV show, superior to the brooding menace of more recent cinematic versions: Dark Knight, my arse!  

So it was sad to learn that Adam West has died, aged 88, from leukaemia - just as it was sad to hear the news last month of Moore's passing, aged 89, also from cancer. Both actors were very much part of my childhood and are fully deserving of the place that each has secured within the cultural imagination, as well as the hearts of millions of fans around the world.