The following is an essay I wrote for one of the modules for my English Literature MA. I sort of always wanted to put this essay online for the heck of it, but my MA was nearly ten years ago and I don’t know that I feel too confident about such ancient writing, so just as a bit of preface:

1. I haphazardly threw myself into an English MA not really knowing what the heck I was doing.
2. I got a bad grade on the essay! I still passed though.
3. I did this degree in England so the grammar and spelling is all Britishized. Yuck!
4. This was meant to be cultural criticism so I tried to make it work for the assignment, but I just wanted to do character analysis, which you can sort of tell, I think.
5. I didn’t know how to use parentheses back then. You’ll see.
6. Footnotes have just been plopped under the paragraph to which they pertain. Some of them do help bolster the argument and are probably worth reading.
7. The little blue footnote links do not do ANYTHING when you click on ’em! Enjoy!
8. Rats off to ya!

Tom Peters and the Failure of the American Dream

The concept of the American Dream, regularly defined in terms of the white male perspective, is essentially a yardstick by which the average citizen can measure the worth of his life. To achieve the Dream is, in basic and general terms, to be a homeowner, married with children, and able to both contribute to and reap the benefits of a free, capitalist society. Tom Peters, the protagonist of the cartoon, Tom Goes to the Mayor, does, in a manner of speaking, live the Dream. He has a house, but it’s a dilapidated one-story structure. He has a wife, but he’s her sixth husband and, further, she is a socially and physically reprehensible person. He has three sons, none of whom are biologically his and who alternatively hate and fear him. His attempts to contribute to the community in his fictional town, Jefferton, are ill-conceived, to say the least, and, instead of benefits, he garners horrible failures. However, failure is not limited to Tom; behind a flimsy façade of being a fun, vibrant community, Jefferton as a whole is actually a drab, depressing place run by an apathetic city council and an insane, corrupt mayor. Through the protagonist of Tom and the town of Jefferton, Tom Goes to the Mayor is a program that simultaneously delivers and subverts an idealized vision of the United States and the American white male.

The introduction sequence of the show mimics a tourism video, complete with quick cuts, unnecessary graphical transitions, and upbeat soft rock music that repeatedly declares, ‘Jefferton alive’! The introduction, though only about forty-five seconds in length, contains multiple elements that serve to define Jefferton as the quintessential American suburb.

First, both spoken and splashed across the screen are the words ‘Community Spirit!’ along with Tom and the Mayor shaking hands as the city council applauds; the falsity of the situation is played up by the fact that both the Mayor and Tom are staring directly at the camera. The reality is that the Mayor repeatedly fails to remember who Tom is (even though they cross paths in each and every episode) and that both characters are particularly alienated from their community, the two of them having little in the way of acquaintances beyond each other. This encapsulates, on a smaller scale, what is true of America as a nation: that it is ‘an imagined political community’ ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.[1] Indeed, Tom continues to believe in his role as an important asset to the Jefferton community, approaching the Mayor with new ideas on revitalizing the town again and again.

[1] Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, p. 5-6.

The next draw of Jefferton communicated in the opening is ‘Shopping’! The bulk of Jefferton’s shopping options appear to be located in a mini-mall, with oddly non-essential stores, one that sells pipes and doubles as a steakhouse called ‘Pipe’s Buffet’ and a store that sells tiny chairs known as, fittingly, ‘Tiny Chairs’. It’s less important, however, what can be purchased in Jefferton, so much as the fact that there is purchasing to be done at all. The ideal that one should be able to obtain whatever they so desire in a capitalist society often translates directly to pure commercialism. The American Dream is ‘grounded in a patriotic form of consumerism’[2] and, again demonstrating itself to be a town to live in if one seeks their deserved fulfilment as an American citizen, the tourism video taps into ‘Americans’ penchant to consume’[3].

[2] Samuel, Lawrence R., Brought to You By, p. 228.
[3] Ibid.

Taking this idea of consumption all the further, the final focus of the introduction sequence is ‘Food’! The buffet in town, Gulliver’s, is showcased, along with a number of shots of plates of fattening looking meals. Food is easily the most heavily advertised theme of the town, publicized in the introduction more than any other aspect. This essentially ties in with the theme of consumerism in general, but the show continually puts an emphasis on food specifically, acutely aware of what a massive focus is placed upon eating in American culture[4].

[4] ‘America’s fast food culture has become indistinguishable from [its] pop culture’, Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation, p. 48.

With this in mind, it is possible to understand how politics function in Tom Goes to the Mayor. Government is presented in the form of two bodies, the city council and the Mayor. The city council consists of three men who seem to possess a vague awareness of what might be a poor decision for the town’s well being, but are ultimately pushovers who allow the Mayor the freedom to act upon his maniacal whims. Council meetings are held at Gulliver’s, the town buffet, driving home the point that government and consumerism are irrevocably intertwined.

Even more blatant is the Mayor, whose self-absorbed materialism is defined in the first episode as his presentation to the city council begins with his explanation of how important him getting a new mayor’s hat (literally depicted as a ridiculously large hat with a photo of the Mayor’s face plastered on the front of it) would be to the town. The Mayor repeatedly demonstrates his constant need to consume as he guiltlessly receives payoffs for doing harm to the community.[5] One example that demonstrates his lust for both material as well as food-based consumption is in the episode ‘Pipe Camp’. In it, the Mayor funds a boys summer camp that teaches children to smoke so that he can receive, in return, free briskets and a scooter fashioned in the shape of a giant pipe from the aforementioned Pipe’s Buffet.

[5] ‘The state and corporations jointly shape the course of consumer regulation and protection efforts and often make decisions that advance commercial interests over public concerns’, ‘The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics, p. 6.

The Mayor’s behaviour certainly comes off as patently absurd and bizarre here, which, of course, it is. It is important to understand that the show deals in extremes. American ideals are unashamedly destabilized in every episode, eventually culminating with a point of total outlandishness. This is essentially the most overt example of the Mayor’s corrupt affinity for consumption and the clearest way to illustrate it. These ‘extreme’ points will be used to frame further themes.

To explain how Tom Peters interacts with the Mayor (his government) first requires explaining the sort of man that Tom is. There is a myth in place in American culture that a true American man lives his life on his own terms, living resourcefully off of his own skills and volition; ‘self-made men’ like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone being two examples of such an archetype.[6] Tom Peters, in premise, fits this ideal. He is a self-proclaimed entrepreneur and has a new idea every episode, often something to enrich the community, other times a marketing venture. Of course, the truth of the matter is that all this truly means is Tom is unemployed and, deflating his masculinity, this means he relies mostly on his wife for financial support. Additionally, Tom’s ideas are nearly all devoid of any semblance of decent creativity; one, for example, being a history-teaching restaurant in which war veterans are employed as waiters (this also demonstrating his completely misguided perception of patriotism).

[6] This myth is largely the focus of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man; the first chapter covers the basic idea.

Tom’s manliness is constantly demeaned; he often dresses, ostensibly purely out of his own taste, in vaguely feminine attire and wears a nightgown to bed. Further, it is revealed at one point that he took his wife’s name (his original surname being Pickle, providing the possibility for an argument about castration symbolism) and not vice versa. However, one aspect of Tom’s masculinity that deserves further discussion is that of his fatherhood[7], or failure of.

[7] ‘Throughout much of the 20^th century, fatherhood as a mainstay of heterosexuality has been a central theme’, Burgess, Adrienne, Fatherhood Reclaimed, p. 22.

Firstly, Tom is a stepparent. This would not be such a huge issue if he was not constantly reminded of what an outsider he is to the family. His wife, Joy, sometimes refers to him as her ‘stephusband’ and, when he attempts to offer any input about the boys, she screams at him, ‘Don’t tell me how to raise my effing kids’![8] Two of her exes, the biological fathers of the children, even show up over the course of the series, and belittle Tom around his own house. ‘[T]here is an internal emotional development specific to boys. Manhood is a perpetual future… As a boy there is a sense that one’s destiny is somehow bound up with an image of father – his achievement at work, his status in the home’.[9] The image Tom presents of a father to his sons is hopelessly flawed[10] as they are present to witness him being humiliated in a multitude of ways.

[8] ‘Caregiving is now almost entirely in the hands of  women… Fathers are no longer assumed to be children’s protectors (quite the opposite), and as women take responsible positions in their communities and participate in the wider world, they are no less able than father to interpret that world to their children, or provide them introductions to it’, Fatherhood Reclaimed, p. 16-17. Tom’s life is in line all the more with an American Dream ideal as Joy is a ‘stay-at-home mother’. This is subverted, however, by the fact that she is still the one making the money (by way of a home webmaster business) and simply because she is a terrible mother and a horrible wife.
[9] Tolson, Andrew, ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, p. 122.
[10] It is also revealed in the episode, ‘The Layover’, that Tom has an extremely poor relationship with his own father, whose approval he desires. His father, however, seems to want nothing to do with Tom, having judged him as a failure, and any interaction between the two proves to be awkward and stilted.

In the episode ‘C.N.E.’, they are in the doctor’s office when their father’s nocturnal emissions problem is being discussed. Additionally, in ‘Saxman’, a series of events leads to Tom’s wife and children walking in on him as he kisses another man. One of his sons, Brindon (his sons’ names are Brandon, Brendon, and Brindon), snaps a photo of the event, placing it in a binder labelled ‘Brindon’s Memory Book’ and scrawling a caption underneath: ‘My stepdad with some man in our kitchen’.

Tom’s ineptitude at fatherhood is brought to a climax in the episode ‘Puddins’, in which his son Brindon ‘eats himself to death’, meaning that, during his birthday party (at Gulliver’s, the buffet), the boy literally eats until he explodes. Tom then focuses on his son more than he ever did when he was alive, by telling everybody he can about the tragedy and attaching a sign to the top of his car which reads ‘GUESS WHOSE SON DIED?’ with an arrow pointing downward. It is evident that Tom had so little a connection with his son that his grief is totally fabricated (and used by him to garner attention, which is another characteristic to be discussed shortly).

This also serves as the most extreme form of consumption; a point at which ‘consumer consolation turn[s] consumer trauma’.[11] The theme continues in this episode as the only way Tom is able to feel any true grief over his son comes by way of his choosing to go on what is termed a ‘pudding fast’, which in this case means Tom eats nothing but pudding. He does this because the Mayor tells him it is often what a parent who has lost a child does: associates a food with that child (Brindon was supposed to get pudding for dessert before his death) and then only eats that food in their memory. Tom takes this idea so to heart that eating pudding and lamenting his son’s passing becomes all he does till the point his wife kicks him out of the house and he has to live on the street. Tom does this because it is in line with another aspect of his character: that he is spineless and suggestible.

[11] Cherniavsky, Eva, Incorporations, p. 144.

‘[T]he enterprise of free citizens in a rich and spacious land of abundance made America a land of opportunity and wealth for all… ‘The constant reiteration of this mantra…firmly embedded in the American psyche achieves the wonders of ignorance’.[12] Tom Peters embodies this concept perfectly for no matter how many times his attempts at success end in tragedy, he tries again, apparently believing that, in this American society, an entrepreneurial type such as himself will eventually be rewarded.[13] Tom truly just wants to be rich and/or famous in any capacity and will take whatever presents itself as the most immediate route to that goal. It is such an attitude that results in him unashamedly requesting sympathy for his son’s death; it’s a way for him to finally get any acknowledgement.

[12] Sardar, Ziauddin, American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 22.
[13] It is worth noting that whiteness is not an issue that is specifically addressed within the show. However, the fact remains that basically all of the characters are white and much of what occurs in the episodes does seem somehow expressly white. The closest reference to an awareness of this is an episode that ends with Tom being shipped off to live in a third world country for a time. Perhaps one of his few positive qualities, Tom does not become particularly afraid or upset about being in his new location.

It is this attitude that leaves him open to be convinced to do quite literally anything[14], which many of the other characters take advantage of. This is how Tom is convinced to perform the aforementioned acts, i.e., kissing another man[15] and only eating pudding in honour of his son. The most severe situation is when Tom is talked into committing suicide[16] in the episode, ‘Spray a Carpet or Rug’. After an entrepreneurial effort with the Mayor leads to the inadvertent murdering of about four thousand people, Tom is sent to prison. It is his inmate there who convinces or, really, assists Tom in killing himself. Tom further embodies the average American as ‘Americans are taught to fear; and they fear self-reflection and self-examination’.[17] Even after being largely responsible for a massive number of deaths, much like the Mayor and his acts of corruption, Tom feels no particular guilt. ‘You know, if I was you, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,’ says his inmate. ‘Oh… really?’ is all Tom responds. He dies at the end of the episode, simply because someone else has helped him along to the decision.

[14] ‘The infantile mythology of America also promotes a conformist outlook – indeed, despite all the pretensions to individualism and freedom, the US is one of the most conformist countries in the world’, American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 256. In his attempts to prove his individualism as an entrepreneur, Tom conforms over and over again to what everyone else tells him to.
[15] In the ‘Saxman’ episode, Tom attempts to manage the career of a smooth jazz musician, the Saxman, who makes increasingly bizarre and homoerotic requests of Tom, such as that they both take their shirts off to feel more comfortable while recording and finally that his lips need to be moistened and that they ‘need to touch another man’s lips to bring ‘em back to life’. This is, of course, ridiculous, but it’s just one in a long line of absurdities that Tom is easily talked into.
[16] The show follows a format common to many cartoons in which very little is carried over from episode to episode and the situation seems to sort of ‘reset’ each time.
[17] American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 60.

Tom’s undying faith in his potential as an American citizen so long as he bends to the wills of others also extends to his government. Tom is the ‘infantile citizen’, he has a ‘faith in the nation, which is based on a belief in the state’s commitment to representing the best interests of the ordinary people’.[18] Based on what has been described of the Mayor, this is obviously not true. Although the Mayor indulges Tom’s ideas to an extent and even seems to sometimes genuinely appreciate them, he always, without fail, either completely perverts them or changes them to an entirely different concept altogether, which, Tom, of course, goes along with, regardless of how bizarre and/or awful the situation gets to be.[19] Tom sometimes shows misgivings, but always relents eventually, again fulfilling a dream of the American psyche, as he embodies the ‘reluctant hero’.[20] This is subverted, however, by the fact that he is not saving the world, rather, he is helping a madman get his way.

[18] Berlant, Lauren, ‘The Theory of Infantile Citizenship’, p. 27-28.
[19] ‘The essence of America’s constitutional faith is the consensus that its ideals are so self-evident and inalienable that they never need to be critically examined’, American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 67.
[20] ‘The reluctant hero is part of the repertoire of American myth, a seminal character whose presence shapes and informs the American psyche’, American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 92.

What the Mayor is interested in pursuing at any given point is based upon what seems most entertaining to him at that moment. Once in a while, Tom lucks out and his interests just so happen to already tie in with the Mayor’s. This happens twice because they’ve both seen the same program on television. ‘Entertainment…is the prime focus of American life, the place where values are expressed, performed, endorsed, published, taught, broadcast, ratified and mythologised in diverting ways’.[21] The Mayor is easily suggestible by what entertains him and Tom is easily suggestible in general. It only makes sense that Tom would get his ideas from the television and that the Mayor would run the town based on what the television tells him to do.[22]

[21] American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 53.
[22] Tom and the Mayor are actually very similar characters; both accept most ideas, especially those from television, both feel little to no guilt when they do something wrong, no matter how horrible, and both worship consumerism above all else. One gets the feeling that the Mayor is essentially Tom, but luckier.

In the first episode, Tom comes to the Mayor with a proposal about child safety and, luckily, the Mayor has just been watching a show about the threat of child kidnappings on television, so, when Tom describes his proposal, the Mayor is intrigued and responds, ‘That’s interesting, Tom. I just had a meeting with my TV about that’. Incidentally, in the other episode in which this same basic dynamic occurs it is sparked by a news program, also about children’s safety; this time about how the level of starch in school food is dangerously high. ‘The culture of fear is America; the fragility of modern affluent abundance is the recurring nightmare of a nation required to fear. To be under threat of the extinction of all that America promises is the natural condition of contemporary America’.[23] To simplify: the government (the Mayor) is run by consumerism, i.e., television, which is based principally upon a platform of fear. This is the proliferation of the failed American Dream.

[23] American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 48.

The town of Jefferton is, by and large, run by television. In the episode ‘Pioneer Island’, it is shown that the Mayor is able to make neighbourhood-wide announcements through the town’s ‘High-Screen TV’, literally a television attached to the top of a massive pole that extends skyward over the whole city.[24] This is usually utilized to broadcast misfortune, again touching upon the use of television for fear. When the television programming of Jefferton is not explicitly preaching panic, it is at least presenting a superior vision that the viewer or, at the very least, Tom Peters, will certainly never achieve. The only major recurring show that plays in Jefferton is the local news. The broadcasters are a married couple, Jan and Wayne Skylar and they are proud of their union as the opening of the show always boldly announces they’re, ‘the only married news team in the tri-country area’.

[24] ‘[T]elevision [has] entered the national psyche and become part and parcel of everyday life’, Brought to You By, p. 221.

Jan and Wayne are pleased to display to everyone how well their marriage is going, offering an ideal situation Tom can never replicate. The irony of this is that Jan and Wayne’s marriage, like everything else shown on Jefferton television, has major problems hidden just beneath the surface. Sometimes small spats break out between the two while they’re live, e.g., Jan telling Wayne to not ever talk over her while they’re on the air. Even more explicit is an episode in which the Married News Team is selling a calendar with them posing for different photos each month. Each page of the calendar is shown during the credits of this particular Tom Goes to the Mayor episode and it is subtlety implied (Jan appears to be pregnant on non-consecutive months) that, throughout this one year, Jan and Wayne suffered through at least two miscarriages. Still, such things go largely unnoticed by citizens like Tom Peters, who, like most citizens, holds the status of celebrity in extremely high regard.[25]

[25] ‘The business of show business is the business of empire is the business of colonising all minds and undermining all imaginations’, American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 159.

There is one episode, ‘CNE’, worth describing some of the events of in more detail. In it, Tom has a chronic nocturnal emission (or CNE) problem, coupled with a case of irritable semen syndrome (ISS), which makes these occasions quite painful. The Mayor, with his connections to doctors, is only too happy help Tom out with obtaining pills that ‘strategically eliminate all traces of sexual desire’. The only problem is the pills are not within Tom’s price bracket, so the Mayor offers him the option of becoming the official spokesperson for the pill in question. ‘I’m not really sure I want my image associated with a… penis disease’, says Tom. ‘Come on, Tom,’ says the Mayor, ‘don’t you want to be famous’? Thus, it comes down to Tom Peters publicly renouncing his masculinity[26] in exchange for being on television, yet again living the American Dream while failing it miserably.

[26] If ‘the appearance of Pfizer’s “wonder drug” in the late 1990s depicted the straight male sexual organ in well nigh diasporic terms’, (Traister, Bryce, ‘Academic Viagra’, p. 277), then Tom’s pledge to be impotent is a veritable self-castration.

‘The psyche of America, all that defines Americana, is deeply entrenched in myth’[27] and, in Tom Goes to the Mayor, the town of Jefferton is completely and totally enveloped and based upon these myths. Tom Peters, a resident, both lives and subverts the American Dream in everything he does. He works for himself, but his work leads to nothing good, he has a family, but it is a profoundly dysfunctional one, he is a consumer yet his consumption leads to tragedy, and he trusts his government implicitly, even though it is made abundantly clear that he should not. Jefferton, too, is a simultaneous American utopia and cesspool; all of that which the American Dream has become can be found there and it all proves to be hollow. The failure of Tom Peters lies in the fact that he is even more damaged than most around him, yet all the less likely to examine or change himself. His only major influences are the Mayor and television, which are flawed depictions of government and good living respectively, but Tom is too ignorant and shortsighted to take note of this. Tom Peters is both the typical white American male and the ultimate loser as he fails even to achieve the level of failure that surrounds him.

[27] American Dream, Global Nightmare, p. 20.

 

Bibliography

Tom Goes to the Mayor. Dir. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Cartoon Network. 2007. [ON DVD-ROM]

Episodes Referenced:

1 – ‘Bear Traps’, 2 – ‘WW Laserz’, 3 – ‘Pioneer Island’, 9 – ‘Calcucorn’, 11 – ‘Pipe Camp’, 12 – ‘Re-Birth’, 19 – ‘Saxman’, 20 – ‘Spray a Carpet or Rug’, 22 – ‘CNE’, 25 – ‘The Layover’, 28 – ‘Undercover’, 29 – ‘Puddins’, 30 – ‘Joy’s Ex’

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities  (London: Verso, 2006).

Berlant, Lauren, ‘The Theory of Infantile Citizenship’ in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 25-53.

Burgess, Adrienne, Fatherhood Reclaimed (London: Vermillion, 1998).

Cherniavsky, Eva, Incoporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Gilbert, Elizabeth, The Last American Man (London: Penguin Books, 2002).

Samuel, Lawrence R., Brought to You By (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

Sardar, Ziauddin and Merryl Wyn Davies, American Dream, Global Nightmare (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004).

Schossler, Eric, Fast Food Nation (London: Penguin Books, 2002).

Shah, Dhavan V. and others, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics’, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 611 (May, 2007), pp. 6-15.

Tolson, Andrew, ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ in Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, Vol. II ed. by Stephen M. Whitehead. (London: Routledge, 2006).

Traister, Bryce, ‘Academic Viagra: the Rise of American Masculinity Studies’, American Quarterly, Vol 52.2 (2000), pp. 274-304 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/v052/52.2traister.html> [accessed 7 May 2008]