I have no statistical evidence to support this thesis, but, believe me, it’s true: a disproportionate number of American men who are now between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-eight will forever love Winnie Cooper. It is not so much a phenomenon as a textbook example of nature versus nurture—we were all nurtured to love Winnie Cooper, and to see ourselves as her counterpart, Kevin Arnold. The universal identification was so strong that Danica McKellar, Winnie’s nonfictional alter ego, said in a 2010 interview, “I’ve always been really cautious about guys who have a Winnie Cooper fantasy.” That this quote accompanied a sexy photo spread, with a schoolgirl theme, in Maxim magazine, did nothing to discourage the dreamers.
Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper were the central characters in “The Wonder Years,” a television dramedy that ran from 1988 to 1993, but took place in Nixon’s America. It was a period piece before period pieces were all the rage, epitomized by the opening credit sequence that layered Joe Cocker’s rendition of “With a Little Help from My Friends” over grainy, Super-8 home-video footage. Until I saw “The Wonder Years,” I had never experienced verisimilitude while watching television; but there was Kevin Arnold, who looked like me and was my age, getting pummeled by his older brother, Wayne, on the front lawn, much like I was pummelled by my older brother on the front lawn. “The Wonder Years” was, for me, the first show that artfully dramatized the banality of a white, suburban, middle-class childhood. And by making dull, quotidian life its subject, it redeemed all that was dull and quotidian.
Literary fiction, of course, had already been doing this sort of thing for decades, though with more menace and darkness in the mix, reaching a commercial fever pitch in the eighties with writers like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Stephanie Vaughn. And, though a preciousness and sentimentality pervaded “The Wonder Years” that was absent from the literature, the show was a significant achievement, relying on boring realism, in and of itself, as a propulsive narrative device. Not even a first-rate program like “Friday Night Lights,” which the first-rate critic Daniel Mendelsohn extolled as “the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture,” was able to do that. Instead, it relied on high-school football as an apparent narrative rationale, around which acute depictions of middle-class drama, among teen-agers and parents, took place. Shows that attempt to replicate the ambitious aesthetic of “The Wonder Years”—the humorous, yet serious, portrayal of suburban malaise; the small, messy complexities of relationships; the absurdities of a privileged adolescence, with its attending pains and joys—are, like “Freaks and Geeks” and “My So-Called Life,” typically cancelled after a single season.
I haven’t seen “The Wonder Years” in a long time, and if you asked me to provide you with an array of plot points, I’d be at a loss. I remember little touches, specific details or scenes that did the work of explaining the world in which I lived. That I was coming of age in the nineties, in a drastically different era than Kevin Arnold’s, did not much matter. Because while the show was a period piece, its loyalty to the facts of the period was never the attraction. For example, I recall the awkwardness and tension of a day trip that Kevin took with his taciturn father. The two of them, under the encouragement of Mrs. Arnold, were supposed to go suit-shopping for Kevin—a manly errand forced upon a boy ankle-deep in puberty. In the car, conversation is painful and strained, though when Kevin was a child, before he had a desire for independence from his Dad’s tyranny, this was not the case—each knew where he stood, and was comfortable, happy, and safe in his clearly defined role. Kevin’s father flips on the radio to an oldies station, and grins as something of the “Jeepers Creepers” variety comes loudly through the speakers. Kevin, attempting an act of assertiveness, asks him to turn it down. But when his father tells him to speak up, Kevin grows timid, and drops the matter entirely. Boys resent the authority of their fathers—the disciplinarians, the breadwinners—but have no recourse to do anything about it, which breeds more resentment. They aim for small victories, but always fall short, finally too weak, dependent, and inexperienced to stand up for themselves.
Yet what “The Wonder Years” really got right, above all else, was Kevin’s evident ordinariness—a distinct identity that managed to characterize a broad swath of the population perhaps best known for being unremarkable: average, middle-class, white kids. Played by a young Fred Savage, Kevin was cute, but in a brown-eyed, brown-haired, conventional kind of way—nothing that would turn heads in the street. He was an average athlete, and an average student. He had charm, but he wasn’t precocious or an emotionally troubled beautiful loser. Unlike almost any other child on television, whether Kevin was twelve, or fourteen, or sixteen, he always acted his age, unless he was being a jerk, in which case he acted younger—the hallmark quality of real-life boys.
I remember another episode in which Paul, who was a hopeless geek, wanted to try out for the middle-school basketball team. This bothered Kevin because, unlike his best friend, he didn’t have the courage to try out himself—he knew he didn’t have the talent to make the team, and thought Paul should be even more self-aware, since Paul, in addition to his geekdom, was also a severe asthmatic. Kevin tells him as much, and then, as a way of proving his point, challenges him to a game of one-on-one in his driveway, in which he gives Paul a thrashing. After the game is over, Paul’s disbelieving, sad face subtly articulates all the petty humiliations and cruelties suffered in adolescence, when one boy is always the casualty of another’s insecurity, even his best friend’s. Paul turns his back and sullenly walks home, while Kevin, realizing what he’s done, looks after him.
Typically, the show’s nuggets of wisdom were dispensed from a disembodied voice up above. The disembodied voice was the adult Kevin Arnold, whose reflections set the context for every episode, and ended them as well, though, from time to time, he would also intrude on the action, like a postmodern narrator, and comment on some sticky situation. The voice was the organizing principle, there to make sense out of what otherwise might have felt random, trivial, and meaningless. When I became particularly absorbed in “The Wonder Years,” I began to hear this voice everywhere, giving cinematic shape and a larger purpose to my days. This was around the age of eleven, after I had begun middle school. I remember sitting in an orientation assembly, doodling in a notebook, when, for the first time, I spotted who I thought was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She seemed to shake out her hair in slow motion, and when she smiled her white teeth appeared to twinkle. “There she was,” the voice said. “Kristen Newkirk. And there I was, getting up to speak with her, only to realize my fly was open.”
Winnie Cooper, the object of Kevin Arnold’s affection, was the paragon of innocent boyish yearning. Her brown hair was long and straight, and always managed, when she shook it out, to improbably catch the best light. And her bright smile, made charming by her buckish front teeth, finely complimented her olive complexion. But the looks were really just the manifestation of her disposition, which was sweet and polite, with a hint of fragility behind her big doe eyes. It didn’t suggest she could go to pieces at any moment, like a damsel in distress, but rather that she had absorbed some blows—her parents were at odds—and was, as a result, a tad older and smarter than her actual years. Yet the smartness, thankfully, wasn’t expressed in absurdly pithy quips, which always draw attention to the artifice of adolescent dialogue. Instead, she had what my grandfather would have called “dignity,” as if she were waiting patiently for all those silly boys to grow up. Winnie Cooper was too good for Kevin Arnold, but she gave him attention anyway, and provided hope for the rest of us in the process.
Still, her cultural significance hadn’t occurred to me until recently, when my wife gave me a T-shirt that reads “I Love Winnie Cooper.” Since the shirt is made of unaccountably soft cotton, and I agree with the sentiment expressed on the front, I wear it regularly. And often, as I’m walking down the street, a delighted man, somewhere between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-eight, will, as if we’re brothers in a secret alliance, point at me and say, “I love Winnie Cooper too!”
It’s not exactly an anthropological study, I know, but you can’t ignore a pop-culture reference that consistently elicits that sort of animated response. Danica McKellar, in her Maxim interview, essentially characterized any lingering infatuation with Winnie Cooper as Humbert Humbert creepiness. But she seems to have missed the essence of her appeal. Winnie Cooper was never sexualized. Really, she was an idea—the model for first love. She was the female equivalent of Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from the 1989 romantic comedy, “Say Anything.” Women of a certain generation and demographic feel about Lloyd Dobler the same as men of a certain generation and demographic do about Winnie Cooper. He convinced his female audience that they should want a marginally handsome, sweet, quirky guy who, just to prove his feelings, is willing to stand outside his disillusioned girlfriend’s window, boom box raised above his head, and blast “In Your Eyes” with a straight face. Put that image on a T-shirt, along with the words “I Love Lloyd Dobler,” and you’re likely to generate a palpable response from strangers.
When a guy nods at my T-shirt, he is effectively saying, “We have in common a crucial experience,” albeit a vicarious one: at a very impressionable, complicated, young age, we were both in love with the same girl. Because if you identified with Kevin Arnold, you probably desired Winnie Cooper. That she was a sort of ingénue was especially relevant at the time. At the age of eleven, I had no idea what I wanted, and, to put it mildly, had a rather limited imagination when it came to girls. I was crude and fragile, intimidated by them, but also feeling those early stirrings of innocent longing. Winnie Cooper was, in a sense, the first pretty girl to smile at me—at all of us—and for that reason, because of her benevolence and sympathy—because she appeared to understand—she continues to endure while so many others have fallen away.