"Malcolm in the Middle" Episode I Can't Forget

In the early 2000s, I often bounced between San Jose and Austin. Oftentimes, I’d spend the night in a hotel on Sunday night before catching the early morning flight back to the West Coast (R.I.P. “Nerd Bird”). As part of the Sunday-night return ritual, I would catch the airing of Fox’s “Malcolm In the Middle.” One episode has stuck with me across all these years because it said something revolutionary about class in America, gender relations, and features a blistering monologue about nascent incel-culture delivered fantastically.

In the exposition of episode 207, “Robbery (2000),” the working-class-to-working-poor mother of the series, Lois, portrayed by Jane Kaczmarek, is working the evening shift at her retail pharmacy store job.¹ ²

While at her till, she is held up and taken hostage along with her man-child boss Craig (David Higgins). The robbers’ plan is to compel Craig, proudly sporting his new “Assistant Manager” pin (and its extra few percent employee ~~pittance~~ discount) to open “the safe.” Showing more resolve than the Uvalde, TX police force of 2022, Craig refuses to yield to the armed menace and drama ensues.

Res Economica

The irony is that corporate doesn’t trust Craig with the safe combination. In a prefiguring of the tyranny of low expectations of employees in 2023 and the late-90’s meme of McJobs, “assistant managers” are not given the combination to the safe (which, it turns out in the dénouement, has something like $150.00 in it). But Craig’s pride won’t admit that his title is a ceremonial sop for the easily bamboozled who will accept any thinly-justified token of superiority (e.g. flimsy plastic pin on his branded, logo-inked polo) to make them willing enforcers of an oppression (e.g. wage exploitation) that oppresses others and themselves at the same time (see also: racism).

Res Virorum

So, Craig, in an action sanctified by American-capitalism-über-alles-stand-at-the-Alamo culture presents that he’s refusing to give the combination versus not having it at all. In doing so, he puts the lives of shoppers and staff in jeopardy. In what rational calculus should/could these lives be jeopardized?

Masculine ego

See, admitting that he’s a puppet of a faceless corporate lie is something Craig can’t admit to Lois for lo, he has been secretly carrying a torch for her. So let’s be clear, because of his fear of losing status in front of Lois, Craig is willing to put lives at stake.

It reminds me of the maxim of Margaret Atwood:

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

Perhaps there’s a missing adjunct: innocent people should fear men fearing women laughing at them.

Res Repellendi

Lois’ response to the revelation of love (likely infatuation or fixation, really) is this:

It’s a remarkable piece of writing that, in full pity, Lois apologizes for the fact that she is now going to completely and utterly break Craig’s heart so that he doesn’t bear any illusions that there could ever be a future between them.

In any case, I have to call out Jane Kaczmarek’s performance here because it is strong and tender and lets enough charm and dare I say sexiness seep through such that we could see where Craig could get the dream that Lois pours nuclear waste all over. And hats off to the writers of “Malcolm” for eschewing the familiar formula about how such a confrontation was supposed to go and doing something shockingly unexpected.

Ludum Rerum

There’s a curious infinite loop between the male ego and the right to be considered sexually viable present in the episode that is present in most incel-culture-adjacent public spaces (i.e. pretty much everywhere on the internet). The episode was way ahead of the curve in seeing that (pre-4chan, pre-“Something Awful,” pre-Reddit).

I think about this scene when I imagine being a woman on the internet. No matter what you do, even if that thing is merely existing, men are going to feel entitled to your attention and demand you entertain them as a viable mating prospect valuable reply contributor ("reply guys") even when you’re venting, sharing a livestream of playing Pokémon, or making a comment about a broken-ass programming interface. Dudes will show up. Dudes will demand recognition.

And while it’s played for laughs, we see Atwood’s latent violence grenade in what happens next: doubting or questioning a man’s right to female attention gifts men a blinding, white-hot rage. Craig uses his rejection to hurl the vaunted safe at the robbers (thus opening the cheap safe and netting them their score). But innocent people ought be and women are always aware: that could have been me.

Footnotes

To me, Lois’ store looks an awful lot like a Phar-Mor or a Long’s Drugs.
It’s an interesting line of questioning as to whether Lois and Hal are working class or working poor. I think during the late-Clinton / early-Bush era they’d be conceived as working class. Twenty years on, I think the would be squarely working poor.