The urban space – the ethnic neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – that Gabe Kotter (Gabe Kaplan), his wife, and his students inhabit is depicted in an interesting way in these two episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter. For all intents and purposes, it is a “dangerous” ghetto – a place where the poor and the ethnic non-whites live (and sleep on foldout couches in the middle of the living room) and interact on a day-to-day basis and where the gangs that hunt the streets at night are so dangerous, “they don’t use guns. They insert the bullets manually.” The ethnic students of this neighborhood – the “hip” African American basketball player, the Italian American who is religiously devoted to his mother, the “toughguy” Puerto Rican Jew, and the class clown with the funny last name (that is apparently a slang term for brothel?!) – are not expected to amount to anything. Instead, they are all shoved into a remedial class on the topmost floor of the local high school, where no one else has to think about them and they can soon become forgotten (after all, they will probably drop out before anything else).
This is how Gabe Kotter characterizes the neighborhood in the pilot episode – both through his conversation with his wife and through non-diegetic voiceover (and with the aid of frame setup). And yet, despite this image, the viewer cannot help thinking of the urban space as an inviting one. The students are “delinquents,” but they get along very well with each other and with their teacher, whom they seem to treat with some sort of respect (despite the attempts to outsmart him with forged doctors notes and other similar antics). The jokes that do permeate the classroom setting in the two episodes are less symbols of disrespect, and more signs of how – despite coming from unfortunate backgrounds – the students and the teacher are happy (or at least, satisfied) with their positions in society and in life. They are not troubled by poverty and racism. There is hope in the face of adversity. Mr. Kotter was a Sweathog, but he made it out of high school and became somebody. With his help, there is the chance that the new generation of Sweathogs will also do the same.
THIS image of the urban space is an unrealistic one. I can hardly imagine a group of delinquents acting with the same kind of respect for their teachers that the Sweathogs show for Mr. Kotter. It is more likely that a delinquent student dissatisfied with his grade in a class would key his teacher’s car than offer to take a makeup exam or challenge him to a basketball game. And if the neighborhood was as dangerous as Gabe made it out to be when talking to his wife, I doubt any of them would be walking around with smiles on their faces or cracking jokes. Because the show chooses to depict it in this way, the neighborhood becomes an ethnic utopia, where – though they talking about the adversity they face – the characters seem to be impervious to its effects. They are one big, happy, non-white family, and the viewer sort of wants to be part of this family too – because, let’s face it, the world we live in sucks by comparison.
