We see Hank standing with his friends, drinking a beer, while his family members do various activities around him. This includes Peggy bringing out an old couch to be thrown out, changing a flat tire, and putting away Bobby’s bicycle. But then Peggy brings out a bag of trash and hands it to Hank, who carries it the final few feet to the garbage bin.
I can maybe see Hank being a traditionalist who feels that the husband goes out into the world and earns the money while the wife takes care of all the work around the house. So Peggy wouldn’t expect Hank to help her with the couch or tire or bike (or all of the work going on inside the house). Why was the trash bag the sole exception? Is there some implied reason why throwing out the trash is supposed to be Hank’s job? And if so, was he derelict in not bringing it out from the house? Was Peggy handing him the trash bag to carry the final few feet to the dumpster her passive-aggressive way to remind Hank of the one job he had supposedly agreed to do? Or was Peggy enabling Hank by taking the one household job he was supposed to do, doing ninety percent of the work for him, and then handing him the bag so he could take credit for completing the job? Am I overthinking this?
I don’t have answers to these questions. Except for the last one, which is “yes”.
I always assumed it was a passive-aggressive way of reminding him that he had one job and that while he’s standing around drinking beer with the fellas, she’s getting things done.
I always took it as just Hank standing around and shooting the breeze with his friends while everyone else is busy getting things done. It establishes the dynamic of the four men being friends, getting into various random discussions and ridiculous hijinks, interrupted by the demands of adulthood and family life.
I didn’t watch it terribly often, but I don’t recall Hank being portrayed as such a slacker during the actual show.
I agree. Just standing around and watching his family members work out of laziness is more of a Homer Simpson move. Which is why I theorized Hank’s belief in stereotyped gender roles as a cause for his behavior.
True. But while I can make jokes about it, the reality is that things don’t just happen in an animated series. Somebody was looking at a blank page (or screen) and made a conscious decision to create the image of a trash bag and put it in the middle of that scene. Every image and every second of an animated show reflects a conscious choice and no small amount of labor. And this is the opening credits. That trash bag is literally where Mike Judge and Greg Daniels decided to sign their names.
I think this is the closest to the answer. It’s Judge and Daniels taking the piss out of themselves and a reminder not to take the show too seriously if it looks like it is just about slagging off Texans or southerners. They’re happy to mock themselves with some self-deprecating humor.
I agree that Daniels and Judge probably put their names on a trash bag as a self-deprecating joke. But that doesn’t explain the hand-off of the trash bag, which was not necessary for that joke. Somebody decided to have Peggy bring the trash bag into the scene and then hand it to Hank.
I realize animation is deliberate in that you really have to plan and execute every shot. You can’t just change your mind on a whim and shoot a scene differently just to see what it looks like. But sometimes a garbage bag is just a garbage bag. Maybe Mike Judge or someone else said, “Hey, this would make for a cool open credits. Kind of like a hillbilly Koyaanisqatsi! We’ll have Peggy bring out the garbage and we can just put the title there.” It might not have any deeper meaning than that.
It might be that in the first season, Hank (and the show in general) was still more of a caricature than what he would be eventually become. So they didn’t have a problem playing up the husband-drinks-while-wife-does-work trope. A better question might be Why didn’t they change the opening once it became obvious that it doesn’t really reflect Hank’s character well? Maybe it’s because they really, really, liked the names-on-the-trash-bag joke.
Let me ask everyone a question. Is this normal behavior and I’m just unfamiliar with it?
Is it common for one person to pack up the trash in a bag, carry it outside, and then hand it to another person to put in the garbage can? I’ll admit I’ve never thought of putting the trash out as a two-person relay event but maybe I’m the odd one out.
Well, mrs. dirtball will sometimes pull it out of the can in the kitchen and then hand it off to me to take outside and dump. But that leaves me doing all the legwork. I doubt that very many people would take it to within three steps of the outside can and then hand it off.
Well, I think the issue being brought up here is that, yes, it introduces the characters, but not necessarily the flavor.
The opening makes it look like Hank just hangs out in the alley all day drinking beer, which, of course, don’t get me wrong, he more than frequently does. But in doing so, the opening makes it look like that’s all he does. And even if they do it as like a microcosm or something to focus on one thing he does a lot, the problem is that it just makes him look lazy and detached from his family. It pretty much sets him up as the opposite of his character – a hard-working, dedicated husband and (even if it exasperates him) father.
To take it a little further, when Peggy comes out with the trash bag, she looks angry, or at least the other guys think she is as we see them run away from her. She’s upset that Hank hasn’t done his chore of taking out the trash. Since when does Hank shirk a chore? Hank absolutely lives for chores. So the opening doesn’t really compute in that respect.