MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The repeated preoccupation with Lindsey’s intelligence in Freaks and Geeks is a coded class critique of her decision to stray from traditional middle-class values. Her association with the “freaks” mirror criticisms leveled at the working-class. However the show, in addressing these critiques, ultimately rejects middle-class notions of respectability. Lindsey is in a unique situation compared to the rest of the teenage freak characters. She is a safely resistant middle-class heroine who young adolescent viewers can identify to and adult audiences can relate to. Throughout the series, the audience can see how the middle-class gaze influences Lindsey’s experiences with her friends, family, school, and future life. As a middle-class, successful student choosing to hang out with the freaks, Lindsey provides an opening for the audience to see how ideas of class exist in representations of the high school experience. Lindsey’s entry into the freak group in the pilot episode sparks a tension within the series that, although coded in high school rhetoric, is largely class-based.

A middle-class insider herself, Lindsey paints a sympathetic position for high school students who may be skeptical of the rigidity of following a social code that is not a guarantee of success or, in Lindsey’s case, happiness. Samantha Lyle explains that the middle-class gaze “is underpinned by an anxiety about the working-class that has historically entailed the misrecognition of the working class as being of lesser value, as particularly suited to specific forms of labour, and as a pathological, abject other” (320). During the show, we see that the freaks are shown both as degenerates and as primarily working-class. The criticism that they are lazy or inept, in large part because they do not get good grades, participate in after-school activities, or have stable home lives is reminiscent of complaints against the supposedly dysfunctional working-class.