Post #36622 by Tiki King on Fri, May 30, 2003 1:17 PM

Here is a dissertation on the brady tiki I found years ago while surfing the net. I do not know who wrote it, but it cracks me up!.....

"Why Does the "Hawaiian" Episode of The Brady Bunch So Haunt Us?
No sooner does the child of the seventies hear the word "taboo" than rings in his ear a five note palindrome, tapped out on a Bontempi organ ("recorder" setting), and best approximated verbally by the phrase "diddle-iddle-oo". The music passes, often unnoted, and the young person resumes his discourse on the kinship traditions of southern Africa's !Kung society, shaking off an inexplicable chill. This phenomenon is no accident. It is my task to show how the creators of The Brady Bunch exposed their society's psychosexual norms as fragile make-shift seawalls, unfit to protect us from even the slightest of the universe's self-assertive tidal waves.

The episode-proper begins when an idol is found on a Hawaiian construction site. A young laborer scoffs at a wizened crone's talk of "taboo" (diddle-iddle-oo) and "bad luck"; he tosses the artifact into the grass. It is here, where men are excavating--hollowing out an artificial womb in the great mother to erect a phallic monument to male intellect, science, and capitalism--that Bobby finds the talisman, calling it "neat". Mother nature has given birth to a tiny charm (admired by Bobby for its outward, aesthetic form), which is actually a radioactive source of blind Dionysian amorality.

When Jan puts the idol in her bag, a hideous island spider follows, contaminating Jan's pristine womb and breaking the sanctity of her virginity. Jan--an everygirl archetype--becomes an unknowing carrier of uterine filth. Jan's defilement is heinous because she is the protected middle child, nestled safely between Cindy (the Magic Child) and Marsha (the Femme Fatale). Through the idol, nature has shown the idealized Jan to be a social lie, a virginal pretender made doubly laughable by her ignorance of her sin. This theme finds resonance in Jan's fellow middle child, Alice. (For analysis of Alice's sibling rivalry with her elder sister Myrtle in Seattle, see The Brady Bunch, "Monkey in the Middle").

While hula dancing, in a grotesque attempt to emulate the lithe pagan nymphs of Honolulu, Alice experiences a pain in her side: a displaced menstrual cramp in an apparently sexlesss, post-menopausal matriarch. By attempting to "go native" in a grass skirt, Alice has ventured ouside her role of Domestic Virgin Mother. Once again, cthonian narure mocks the dubious sexual masks the members of this microcosmic "bunch" ritually wear.

The idol is responsible for several near-deaths. While Peter and Bobby engage in homo-erotic horseplay on their hotel bed, they are almost crushed by a gigantic wall-hanging. The artifact has brought out the latent libidos of the family's two youngest males, and consequerntly, they are almost annihilated by society's rigid law, represented by the heavy piece of iron artwork.

The idol has its most chilling effect on Greg, the muscular Beautiful Boy of Golden Age Athens, who uses his long, sleek surfboard with consummate skill and strength (the epitome of classical arrete) to conquer the angry Pacific Ocean, representative of the uncharted and deadly liquid reality of female nature. But it is nature's talisman he wears, and so he must fall, knocked senseless by his own phallic instrument. That Mike must save the failed youth from drowning in the chaotic sea perverts the Telemachean search for father, which always ends in water. Greg emerges, limp and waterlogged, utterly conquered and robbed of his virility by an indifferent female opponent. One can read the disgust on Mike's face.

Salvation, such as it its, is finally found in the person of a mysterious, overtly homosexual father figure (Vincent Price), who first holds the boys in his hermit womb of asocial contemplation, but eventully gives in to the architect father's "calm cool reasoning". (For analysis of Mike's failure to appease Buddy Hinton's barbarian father, and the ultimate victory of Peter's brute violence, see The Brady Bunch, "Baby-talk, Baby-talk").

Thus, civilized, Apollonian norms appear to win out, with the outcast hermit's reabsoption into society and the "sensible" reconfiguration of all the horrifying misfortunes as "good luck". In other words, the magic is clearly not destroyed, but only rechristened by a terrified intellectual patriarch seeking to regain his family's faith in an unnamed Providence and a benevolent universe. The "taboo" (diddle-iddle-oo) cannot be destroyed, but only reburied and reset in an innocuous commemorative matrix, until such time as another luckless bastard unearths it, once again unfettering its chaotic influence. This episode is our momento mori, a keepsake to remind us that our heroic efforts to "somehow form a family" are always contingent on keeping the death's-head of "taboo" (diddle-iddle-oo) underground, and therefore, they are doomed."