This Month's JEST Article

Pain, Torture, Domination, Humiliation and Pleasure
in 'I Dream of Jeannie'.
by Bruce Bernstein

Author's Bio
Bruce Bernstein, a writer and an afficianado of American pop culture, works regularly in TV Land.

eMail your submissions.

Most people generally dismiss the late-1960s sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, as a silly, light-hearted fantasy providing mindless entertainment to an audience eager for escapism. However, if one digs only slightly beneath its frothy surface, it becomes clear this TV series is rife with with violence, cruelty, sexual domination and pathology, all rendered in brilliantly hilarious fashion.Thus, this series’ decidedly adult themes are more unsettling than one would expect.

Ostensibly, I Dream of Jeannie is a bubbly comedy about the wacky misadventures that befall astronaut Tony Nelson after he discovers a beautiful, two thousand year-old genie named Jeannie and unwittingly becomes her master. Certrainly humorous, but also quite disturbing.

The slapstick tends to slap painfully hard and the comical backfirings that pepper the storylines are surprisingly fierce.

Episodes are routinely ladled with high-strung havoc and the threat of uncontrollable terror, both in the service of generating the chuckles and guffaws that percolate virtually non-stop in the show's laugh track.

The two key elements behind this siniste jocularity are the two distinct milieus which envelop this series. Ancient tyranny and modern marshall law.

Jeannie hails from ancient Baghdad, a land noted for its merciless slavery and its harsh code of ethics. In this old world society, the streets flow with vengence and vindictiveness rather than reason and rationality. On the other hand, Major Nelson is employed in a branch of the United States Armed Services (specifically the Air Force). Apart from the fact that the military is known for the conscription of its personnel, it's also similar to Jeannie's home town in that it too operates on a system of unflinching authoritarianism. In Nelson's line of work he is expected to wear a stiff uniform and earn a meager salary by rigidly obeying orders, regardless of their logic, or otherwise suffer the consequences of swift and severe punishment dealt by short-tempered superior officers with loud voices. By uniting the realms of ancient civilization and modern military society, the writers and creators of this series effectively trap the hapless Major Nelson into an environment rife with sadistic possibilities.

Although Nelson's life after discovering Jeannie never seems to be one of relaxation and comfort, in spite of the expectations that come with having his own personal buxom blonde slave who lives to grant him his every wish, it is interesting how often he becomes the recipient of brutal torture. A cornerstone episode in this regard is from the second season and is entitled "How to Be a Genie in Ten Easy Lessons." The story entails Nelson buying Jeannie a book of tales about the Arabian Nights in the hopes that it will help her improve as a genie and therefore not drive him up the wall so much. Without so much as cracking the book open to glance at its contents, he orders Jeannie to memorize and obey the lessons it contains, not realizing that it is a book of tortures for genies to inflict upon their masters in order to get them to submit. The resulting shenanigans involve Nelson's king size mattress turning into a bed of nails just as he is about to retire for the evening and, later, Nelson hanging by a slippery rope over a den of hungry crocodiles. Both of these tortures cause Nelson to shriek with one of his trademark "Major Nelson howls," a high pitched, idiosyncratic yell that actor Larry Hagman sprinkled with great frequency throughout the series and which perfectly encapsulats the fear, distress, pain, embarrassment and horror his character routinely experienced from his encounters with a voluptuous woman in a sexy harem costume.

In this episode it is admittedly Nelson, and not Jeannie, who is fully responsible for the torture inflicted upon him due to his arrogance and stupidity. However, it serves as a enlightening example of his plight. Although situated in a comfortable, middle-class suburb with a mild climate and average American values, Nelson's life has become one of often shocking extremes. He is a man forced to come within inches of death on a regular basis, and, ironically, these deadly encounters usually have nothing to do with his dangerous occupation in the high risk realm of NASA’s manned space program.

Sometimes, the threat of being murdered happens by pure happenstance. In the episode entitled "The Strongest Man in the World," Nelson, through a misunderstanding, is roped into a boxing match against a savage opponent. Knowing that she might not be able to save him, Jeannie herself exclaims:
"My master will be murdered." Fortunately, Nelson is able to endure an astounding 49 blows to the head without spouting a single drop of blood. In the episode called "U.F. Oh Jeannie," Nelson and his pal Roger Healey land their aircraft, which resembles a flying saucer, onto the property of a hillbilly family who mistake them for Martians and therefore decide to have them immediately exterminated. Yet, these are unusual examples. More often the threat of death comes from either the military, Jeannie, or one of Jeannie's mentally unstable relatives.

In the case of military extremism, there are two memorable cases where Nelson and Healey are put under the supervision of a sadistic and maniacal physical fitness instructor who believes that their easy living and rich diet are making them soft and flabby. First, in the episode called "My Master the Weakling," Commander "Killer" Kiski, played by Don Rickles, wants to put the pair of astronauts through something he calls "punishment training." With this regime they will experience, in his words, "pain going past suffering, into the valley of agony." It entails following a ten mile run with three hours of "special exercises" and topping it off with an up-hill sprint in hundred degree heat while wearing a winter parka with 150 pounds of sand sewn into its lining. Kiski is so malicious that when, under Jeannie's spell, he offers them some blueberry pie, they are convinced the pie is poisoned.

Only a few episodes later, in a gem entitled "Please Don't Feed the Astronauts," Paul Lynde portrays the cruel Commander Porter who promises to put the pressure on Nelson and Healey -- "brutal, hard pressure." He vows that that within 24 hours he's going to reduce them to "broken, sniveling wrecks." His methods include inhuman exercise and a starvation diet, and a drug regimen consisting of nothing but pills and multiple vaccinations.

But even when Nelson and Healey only have to contend with their considerably more sane regular commanding officers, there is always the threat of being sent on long-term assignment in the bitterly cold Aleutian Islands as punishment for an infraction that is most likely the result of Jeannie's mischief.

On Jeannie's part, her brutality towards her master was often the unintended result of the miscommunication that occurred when she took his orders too literally. The typical outcome was that some object in Major Nelson's proximity would either appear or disappear, causing him to trip, stumble or fall and land flat on his back with his legs spread out wide.

But Jeannie also had a vengeful streak, which became evident whenever her jealousy was aroused by the presence of another female who might have eyes for her irresistible master. In "Jeannie and the Top Secret" she nearly strangles him with an airplane seat belt when she thinks he's flirting with a fellow passenger. In "Who Needs a Green-Eyed Jeannie?" she imprisons him in a jail cell in his living room when he tries to go out on a date.

Sometimes her vindictiveness is prompted by her sense that her master doesn't take her feelings into consideration. In "One of Our Bottles Is Missing" Jeannie forces Nelson to sleep in a desk drawer when he lets Amanda Bellows, the wife of his superior officer, borrow Jeannie's bottle to have it copied.

Such spiteful behavior, of course, pales in comparison with that of some of Jeannie's eccentric family members. When Nelson refuses to marry Jeannie in "Guess Who's Going to Be A Bride? - Part One," her uncle Suleiman (Jackie Coogan) makes him a galley slave on an ancient ocean liner. In "Jeannie and the Wild Pipchicks" Jeannie's mother (also played by Barbara Eden) deliberately causes Nelson significant trouble with a hallucinogenic candy recipe. Even Jeannie's adorable puppy, Djinn Djinn, viciously terrorizes Nelson and his cohorts at NASA, just because they wear uniforms.

However, when it comes to excessive malevolence nobody tops Jeannie's sultry sister (also named Jeannie). This is a woman who lusts after Tony Nelson so much that she will resort to exquisite cruelties in order to possess him, even if by doing so she runs the risk of actually endangering his life. And the icing on the cake is that if she were to succeed in stealing him away from her sister she would either keep him as a pet, locked in a bird cage, or make it possible for him to survive without sleep so that he could be her personal love slave 24 hours a day.

In any case, whenever Jeannie's sister comes to town, Major Nelson is usually in for something nasty, designed to convince him that his own genie has become hazardous to his health and that it's time to be the master of somebody else, namely Jeannie's dark-haired twin. In "Tony's Wife," she blinks up a series of disasters to give Nelson the impression that Jeannie is bad luck. These include having him crash his car into his garage, sinking him in a canoe and having a wooden trellis fall on top of im. In "Jeannie or the Tiger," she wages a fight with her sister but uses Nelson as the actual target for her "jabs" and "hooks." Here, with twisted blinks of her eyes, she brains him with various household objects, smashes him with high velocity into walls and torches him with an explosive fireplace. Her wickedness really comes to the fore in the episode "Have You Ever Had a Genie Hate You?" By tricking her naive sister into despising Nelson, she allows her to roast him alive in his kitchen oven, encase him a giant block of ice, and comes within seconds of decapitating him with a guillotine.

Not surprisingly, given the sitcome Code of Happy Endings, none of these evil schemes work, causing Sis to resort to the worst thing she can think of: public humiliation. This occurs in at a nightclub in "Jeannie-Go-Round." Impersonating her sister, the wicked genie becomes a cabaret singer who, in the middle of her psychedelic song, zaps the pants off of Tony, leaving his friends, co-workers and a curious audience to stare at him in his polka dot shorts. Of course, embarrassment such as this is nothing out of the ordinary for Nelson. After all, his analyst and boss, Dr. Bellows, habitually catches him in difficult-to-explain situations, such as having a conversation with Jeannie's bottle or having a babbling brook run through his living room.

With so much madness and mayhem in his daily life, it's no wonder that Major Nelson is usually a nervous wreck. You can see his body abruptly tremble every time Jeannie pops into his office unannounced. You can observe how he's in a perpetual state of stress as he endeavors to avoid having minor nuisances turn into full scale catastrophes. Fortunately, it's not all misery and anxiety for this straight-laced astronaut. Just mostly.

The compensation for all the abuse he must suffer is the undying love Jeannie has for him. She expresses this love quite passionately and without a trace of inhibition. In fact, her kisses are so plentiful and forceful that they seem designed to make up for the torment she inadvertently causes him. But perhaps her ravenous embraces are yet another form of domination over somebody she willingly calls her master. Perhaps a life of submission is what Major Nelson deserves because such a life is what he deeply craves.
Perhaps you the viewer do, too.

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	Pain, Torture, Domination, Humiliation and Pleasure in 'I Dream of Jeannie'. by Bruce Bernstein
Author's Bio Bruce Bernstein, a writer and an afficianado of American pop culture, works regularly in TV Land. eMail your submissions.	Most people generally dismiss the late-1960s sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, as a silly, light-hearted fantasy providing mindless entertainment to an audience eager for escapism. However, if one digs only slightly beneath its frothy surface, it becomes clear this TV series is rife with with violence, cruelty, sexual domination and pathology, all rendered in brilliantly hilarious fashion.Thus, this series’ decidedly adult themes are more unsettling than one would expect. Ostensibly, I Dream of Jeannie is a bubbly comedy about the wacky misadventures that befall astronaut Tony Nelson after he discovers a beautiful, two thousand year-old genie named Jeannie and unwittingly becomes her master. Certrainly humorous, but also quite disturbing. The slapstick tends to slap painfully hard and the comical backfirings that pepper the storylines are surprisingly fierce. Episodes are routinely ladled with high-strung havoc and the threat of uncontrollable terror, both in the service of generating the chuckles and guffaws that percolate virtually non-stop in the show's laugh track. The two key elements behind this siniste jocularity are the two distinct milieus which envelop this series. Ancient tyranny and modern marshall law. Jeannie hails from ancient Baghdad, a land noted for its merciless slavery and its harsh code of ethics. In this old world society, the streets flow with vengence and vindictiveness rather than reason and rationality. On the other hand, Major Nelson is employed in a branch of the United States Armed Services (specifically the Air Force). Apart from the fact that the military is known for the conscription of its personnel, it's also similar to Jeannie's home town in that it too operates on a system of unflinching authoritarianism. In Nelson's line of work he is expected to wear a stiff uniform and earn a meager salary by rigidly obeying orders, regardless of their logic, or otherwise suffer the consequences of swift and severe punishment dealt by short-tempered superior officers with loud voices. By uniting the realms of ancient civilization and modern military society, the writers and creators of this series effectively trap the hapless Major Nelson into an environment rife with sadistic possibilities. Although Nelson's life after discovering Jeannie never seems to be one of relaxation and comfort, in spite of the expectations that come with having his own personal buxom blonde slave who lives to grant him his every wish, it is interesting how often he becomes the recipient of brutal torture. A cornerstone episode in this regard is from the second season and is entitled "How to Be a Genie in Ten Easy Lessons." The story entails Nelson buying Jeannie a book of tales about the Arabian Nights in the hopes that it will help her improve as a genie and therefore not drive him up the wall so much. Without so much as cracking the book open to glance at its contents, he orders Jeannie to memorize and obey the lessons it contains, not realizing that it is a book of tortures for genies to inflict upon their masters in order to get them to submit. The resulting shenanigans involve Nelson's king size mattress turning into a bed of nails just as he is about to retire for the evening and, later, Nelson hanging by a slippery rope over a den of hungry crocodiles. Both of these tortures cause Nelson to shriek with one of his trademark "Major Nelson howls," a high pitched, idiosyncratic yell that actor Larry Hagman sprinkled with great frequency throughout the series and which perfectly encapsulats the fear, distress, pain, embarrassment and horror his character routinely experienced from his encounters with a voluptuous woman in a sexy harem costume. In this episode it is admittedly Nelson, and not Jeannie, who is fully responsible for the torture inflicted upon him due to his arrogance and stupidity. However, it serves as a enlightening example of his plight. Although situated in a comfortable, middle-class suburb with a mild climate and average American values, Nelson's life has become one of often shocking extremes. He is a man forced to come within inches of death on a regular basis, and, ironically, these deadly encounters usually have nothing to do with his dangerous occupation in the high risk realm of NASA’s manned space program. Sometimes, the threat of being murdered happens by pure happenstance. In the episode entitled "The Strongest Man in the World," Nelson, through a misunderstanding, is roped into a boxing match against a savage opponent. Knowing that she might not be able to save him, Jeannie herself exclaims: "My master will be murdered." Fortunately, Nelson is able to endure an astounding 49 blows to the head without spouting a single drop of blood. In the episode called "U.F. Oh Jeannie," Nelson and his pal Roger Healey land their aircraft, which resembles a flying saucer, onto the property of a hillbilly family who mistake them for Martians and therefore decide to have them immediately exterminated. Yet, these are unusual examples. More often the threat of death comes from either the military, Jeannie, or one of Jeannie's mentally unstable relatives. In the case of military extremism, there are two memorable cases where Nelson and Healey are put under the supervision of a sadistic and maniacal physical fitness instructor who believes that their easy living and rich diet are making them soft and flabby. First, in the episode called "My Master the Weakling," Commander "Killer" Kiski, played by Don Rickles, wants to put the pair of astronauts through something he calls "punishment training." With this regime they will experience, in his words, "pain going past suffering, into the valley of agony." It entails following a ten mile run with three hours of "special exercises" and topping it off with an up-hill sprint in hundred degree heat while wearing a winter parka with 150 pounds of sand sewn into its lining. Kiski is so malicious that when, under Jeannie's spell, he offers them some blueberry pie, they are convinced the pie is poisoned. Only a few episodes later, in a gem entitled "Please Don't Feed the Astronauts," Paul Lynde portrays the cruel Commander Porter who promises to put the pressure on Nelson and Healey -- "brutal, hard pressure." He vows that that within 24 hours he's going to reduce them to "broken, sniveling wrecks." His methods include inhuman exercise and a starvation diet, and a drug regimen consisting of nothing but pills and multiple vaccinations. But even when Nelson and Healey only have to contend with their considerably more sane regular commanding officers, there is always the threat of being sent on long-term assignment in the bitterly cold Aleutian Islands as punishment for an infraction that is most likely the result of Jeannie's mischief. On Jeannie's part, her brutality towards her master was often the unintended result of the miscommunication that occurred when she took his orders too literally. The typical outcome was that some object in Major Nelson's proximity would either appear or disappear, causing him to trip, stumble or fall and land flat on his back with his legs spread out wide. But Jeannie also had a vengeful streak, which became evident whenever her jealousy was aroused by the presence of another female who might have eyes for her irresistible master. In "Jeannie and the Top Secret" she nearly strangles him with an airplane seat belt when she thinks he's flirting with a fellow passenger. In "Who Needs a Green-Eyed Jeannie?" she imprisons him in a jail cell in his living room when he tries to go out on a date. Sometimes her vindictiveness is prompted by her sense that her master doesn't take her feelings into consideration. In "One of Our Bottles Is Missing" Jeannie forces Nelson to sleep in a desk drawer when he lets Amanda Bellows, the wife of his superior officer, borrow Jeannie's bottle to have it copied. Such spiteful behavior, of course, pales in comparison with that of some of Jeannie's eccentric family members. When Nelson refuses to marry Jeannie in "Guess Who's Going to Be A Bride? - Part One," her uncle Suleiman (Jackie Coogan) makes him a galley slave on an ancient ocean liner. In "Jeannie and the Wild Pipchicks" Jeannie's mother (also played by Barbara Eden) deliberately causes Nelson significant trouble with a hallucinogenic candy recipe. Even Jeannie's adorable puppy, Djinn Djinn, viciously terrorizes Nelson and his cohorts at NASA, just because they wear uniforms. However, when it comes to excessive malevolence nobody tops Jeannie's sultry sister (also named Jeannie). This is a woman who lusts after Tony Nelson so much that she will resort to exquisite cruelties in order to possess him, even if by doing so she runs the risk of actually endangering his life. And the icing on the cake is that if she were to succeed in stealing him away from her sister she would either keep him as a pet, locked in a bird cage, or make it possible for him to survive without sleep so that he could be her personal love slave 24 hours a day. In any case, whenever Jeannie's sister comes to town, Major Nelson is usually in for something nasty, designed to convince him that his own genie has become hazardous to his health and that it's time to be the master of somebody else, namely Jeannie's dark-haired twin. In "Tony's Wife," she blinks up a series of disasters to give Nelson the impression that Jeannie is bad luck. These include having him crash his car into his garage, sinking him in a canoe and having a wooden trellis fall on top of im. In "Jeannie or the Tiger," she wages a fight with her sister but uses Nelson as the actual target for her "jabs" and "hooks." Here, with twisted blinks of her eyes, she brains him with various household objects, smashes him with high velocity into walls and torches him with an explosive fireplace. Her wickedness really comes to the fore in the episode "Have You Ever Had a Genie Hate You?" By tricking her naive sister into despising Nelson, she allows her to roast him alive in his kitchen oven, encase him a giant block of ice, and comes within seconds of decapitating him with a guillotine. Not surprisingly, given the sitcome Code of Happy Endings, none of these evil schemes work, causing Sis to resort to the worst thing she can think of: public humiliation. This occurs in at a nightclub in "Jeannie-Go-Round." Impersonating her sister, the wicked genie becomes a cabaret singer who, in the middle of her psychedelic song, zaps the pants off of Tony, leaving his friends, co-workers and a curious audience to stare at him in his polka dot shorts. Of course, embarrassment such as this is nothing out of the ordinary for Nelson. After all, his analyst and boss, Dr. Bellows, habitually catches him in difficult-to-explain situations, such as having a conversation with Jeannie's bottle or having a babbling brook run through his living room. With so much madness and mayhem in his daily life, it's no wonder that Major Nelson is usually a nervous wreck. You can see his body abruptly tremble every time Jeannie pops into his office unannounced. You can observe how he's in a perpetual state of stress as he endeavors to avoid having minor nuisances turn into full scale catastrophes. Fortunately, it's not all misery and anxiety for this straight-laced astronaut. Just mostly. The compensation for all the abuse he must suffer is the undying love Jeannie has for him. She expresses this love quite passionately and without a trace of inhibition. In fact, her kisses are so plentiful and forceful that they seem designed to make up for the torment she inadvertently causes him. But perhaps her ravenous embraces are yet another form of domination over somebody she willingly calls her master. Perhaps a life of submission is what Major Nelson deserves because such a life is what he deeply craves. Perhaps you the viewer do, too.
Return to Archives Return to Main page
back to Top