[For this year’s
Valentine’s
series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most
love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive
scholarly FilmStudiers!]
On two wonderful
recent films that challenge and enrich our images of family.
The combination of being a
professional analyzer of literature for nearly two decades now and being a
consistent reader of children’s books for a significant part of my last dozen
years means that I spend a good bit of time—some might say way too much time,
but I yam what I yam—analyzing those books. That’s especially true of the ones
that I’ve read enough by this point to be able to recite them largely by heart,
freeing my mind for even deeper such analyses. And near the top of that list,
both because I have read it a ton and because it’s just full of mysteries
awaiting—nay, demanding—my analytical attention, is Dr.
Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. The
most striking mysteries are the most central ones: why is the Cat so thoroughly
destructive a presence in the home of Sally and the unnamed narrator, and what
are kids to take away from this tale of an uninvited house guest who bends
rakes, tears gowns, traumatizes fish, and the like? But underlying those
mysteries is an even more foundational, and (given the book’s 1957 publication
date) even more striking, one: why has Mother left her two young children alone
for the day, and where’s Father?
I might be reading too much into
it (shockingly), but it seems to me that Mother is a single parent, and that
because of that status she sometimes has to leave her kids at home alone
(leaving them open in the process to the advances of strange men, or male cats
at least, and their wild and destructive Things, but again I’m really not sure
what to make of that). If so, that would make Cat a pretty significantly alternative vision of family in the era
of Leave It to Beaver and,
more relevantly, of the Little
Bear books, which feature Mother
Bear who stays at home and sews and cooks and Father Bear who goes off on long
fishing trips in his hat and tie. Over the next few decades, of course, our pop
culture images of family would become significantly more diverse and varied,
and single parents thus less striking of a prospect (although in many
representations, as in the 1980s TV shows Who’s
the Boss? and Full House, those
single parent families are due to deaths, not divorce or children born out of
wedlock). But I would argue that our most dominant narratives of family
identity still rely heavily on very traditional nuclear models; and relatedly,
one role for many out-of-the-mainstream texts (such as independent films) has
been to push back on those models and construct their own alternative visions
of family.
Two of the most smart and
successful indie films of the last twenty years, Don Roos’ The Opposite of Sex (1998) and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (2000), are
centered on precisely such alternative family units. Lonergan’s is slightly
more conventional, with pitch-perfect Laura Linney’s never-married single
mother trying to balance raising her son, working full-time (and beginning an
affair with Matthew Broderick’s married co-worker), and mothering her wayward
brother (played to equal perfection by Mark Ruffalo); but the reason for their
close sibling relationship, the death of both of their parents when they were
very young, makes them a fundamentally distinct kind of family. On the other
hand, Roos’s vision of family is purposefully non-traditional and extreme—the
film’s central family unit features a teenage runaway (Christina Ricci), her
gay step-brother (Martin Donovan), his young boyfriend who then becomes Ricci’s
boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), and the sister (Lisa Kudrow) of Donovan’s former
boyfriend who had died of AIDS—but by the end of the film makes clear how much
these characters, and the few others who have come into their circle, have
become most definitely a family in the fullest senses, including the presence
of two newborn babies in the mix. Similarly, both movies take very cynical and
sarcastic tones toward themes like love and loyalty for much of their running
time, yet by their conclusions they have become (in entirely believable and not
at all clichéd ways) testaments to how much their characters and relationships
emblematize those themes (if at times in spite of themselves).
Such
non-traditional families are, of course, no more necessarily representative as
images of the American family than were Beaver’s and Little Bear’s; it is,
instead, very much the spectrum of possibilities for what family is and means
that represents the variety and diversity of American experiences and models.
And thanks to some of our most talented artistic voices, from Dr. Seuss up to filmmakers
like Roos and Lonergan, our popular culture includes, and thus helps make more
present and (ultimately) more fully accepted, many more of those possibilities.
Guest Post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?
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