[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]
On
nontraditional families in groundbreaking children’s books and provocative
films.
The combination of being a
professional analyzer of literature and being a daily reader of at least a
couple children’s books means that I spend quite a 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
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 fifteen 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
Roos and Lonergan, our popular culture includes, and thus helps make more
present and (ultimately) more fully accepted, many more of those possibilities. Last
great screenplay tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?
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