Perfect is boring. Even though this existence is something we seem to strive for as a society, this unreachable ideal really isn’t that interesting. Nobody wants to read a book, hear about, or see a movie about anyone or anything being perfect. Perfection doesn’t breed conflict and that’s why we’re drawn towards things with discord, with problems, with issues. That’s why the dysfunctional family has been a trope found in film: it’s the perfect situation for conflict, and lots of it. There are the serious films dealing with family dysfunction, but a more unique breed is the comedic dysfunctional family. Two modern examples are The Royal Tenenbaums and Little Miss Sunshine, films that make us laugh at things that aren’t supposed to be funny. Though they’re both from the same family (forgive the pun), these two films address dysfunction in different ways, yet still make us laugh.
Family isn't a word...it's a sentence.1
Nothing screams dysfunction more than the Tenenbaum family: the interactions between Chas, Richie, Margot, Etheline, Royal, and the other cast of characters that make up their extended dysfunctional family can hardly be called average. We’re first introduced to the Tenenbaums as Royal is telling the children (Chas, Riche, Margot) that their mother (Etheline) is kicking him out and keeping the kids and the house. Already a broken family, each child is introduced as the prodigy they are: Chas the businessman, Margo the playwright, Richie the tennis pro. Even though they’re a fragmented family this is the peak of the family’s success, and as the narrator says, “Virtually all brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.” Jumping ahead those two decades the Tenenbaum kids have grown up, but have only gone downhill in the years. And when Henry Sherman (friend and business manager) proposes to Eltheline, Royal isn’t too pleased she’s planning on getting married to someone else. So Royal takes matters into his own hands, and of course doesn’t handle things in a very deft manner. When he ambushes Etheline on the street to ask to spend more time with her and the kids she of course refuses, and instead of taking no for an answer he tells her he has cancer, that he’ll be dead in six weeks. Royal’s “illness” brings the family back together, and reunited under the same roof for the first time in seventeen years. The Tenenbaums’ dysfunction is only amplified as the film continues.
One of the most apparent ways the Tenenbaums are dysfunctional is their interactions together. Speaking on the collective whole, the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums have a skewed sense of right and wrong, and this results in inappropriate behavior-a lot of it. There’s the time Chas asks Richie inappropriate questions about his suicide attempt the first time he sees him after the incident, or how Margot’s cheating on her husband with childhood friend Eli, or any of Eli’s drug-induced actions (especially crashing into the house). Royal is by far the biggest culprit of them all: from lying about his “illness,” his condemning Margot’s first play on her 11th birthday, picking up half the flowers he just put on his mother’s grave to Chas so he can put them on his wife’s grave. The root of the dysfunction comes not from the Tenenbaums behaving badly, but their honest belief that their actions are morally right.
The happy family. 2
Beyond just their actions amongst each other, the clearest way the Tenenbaums’ dysfunction shines through is in their dialogue. Much like their physical actions, their communication is wrought with inappropriate moments. Provocative, revealing statements and moments are often followed by lines that have nothing to do with the problem at hand, or speak to such an insignificant part they’re almost non sequiturs. When Eli and Margot break off their “relationship,” at one point Eli says to Margot “You’re in love with Richie, which is sick and gross.” After a pause, all Margot answers with is, “Do you send my mother your clippings and your grades from college?” When Richie and Margot’s husband, Raleigh St. Clair, go to a private investigator to see if Margot’s having an affair, Margot’s secret past is revealed in a fast paced montage of her life. After discovering his wife smokes and the many, many, many people she has slept with, all Raleigh can say is, “she smokes?” These seemingly off base responses demonstrate how the Tenenbaums are unable to deal with confrontation, further heightening their dysfunction.
"Wait...so most families don't wear matching tracksuits?"3
Overall, the Tenenbaums aren’t an exemplary family: they lie, have affairs, keep secrets, abuse drugs, divorce, and generally behave badly. But despite all this, the reason we can laugh with and at the Tenenbaums is their world isn’t really the one we inhabit. Yes, they’re in New York. Yes, those are streets we could drive down. Yes, we too could own Chas and Co.’s red Adidas tracksuits or Etheline’s Hermés handbag. But the Tenenbaums’ reality is most definitely a surreal one. Their personal successes of epic proportions are improbable, even if they all are the prodigies they are presented as. Their social interactions cross the realm of probability: yes, a coked out writer could drive his sporty convertible into a brownstone, but its unlikliness coupled with everyone else’s responses crosses the line into unrealistic. Even their home is a funhouse of extremely affluent proportions. Of course, their world is meant to exist in this realm of hyper reality. The Royal Tenenbaums is told as a story, complete with narration (Alec Baldwin, what a voice), chapters, the classic opening of a book (guess the title) as the first shot of the film. We’re meant to view this as a story, as a fable, as fiction. By lifting our expectations of realism also lifts the societal expectations of appropriate behavior on both the character’s and our behalf. So it’s okay to laugh at the Tenenbaums, because we all know this really isn’t happening.
"Everyone just pretend to be normal." 4
Meet the Hoovers. There’s Sheryl, mother and head wrangler of the Hoover clan. There’s Richard, father and motivational speaker determined that his “Nine Step Program” is revolutionary, something that will raise his family out of the economic realm they’re in. And there’s Dwayne, the teen so dedicated to getting into flight school and Friedrich Nietzsche he doesn’t speak. At all. There’s Frank too, the second highest regarded Proust scholar in the world and the newest addition to the Hoover’s. He’s staying with his sister Sheryl fresh from the hospital after a suicide attempt. Oh, and he’s gay too. Grandpa, Richard’s father, lives with them as well and besides being a heroin addict, he's a very, very perverted old man as grandfathers are often portrayed, right? And of course there’s seven-year old Olive, youngest daughter and the adorably bespeckled second runner up to in the regional Little Miss Sunshine pageant. But, when the winner of the regional has to forfeit her crown (something about diet pills), Olive takes the title and with it the chance to compete at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in sunny California. So the gang all piles in the yellow Volkswagen bus for a southwestern adventure, and with all that dysfunction in one car, comedy ensues.
For the Hoovers their dysfunction lies within each character’s individual personalities. From the above synopsis above it’s easy to say no one character is even remotely like another, and we see a glimpse of how they all function in the early scenes of the movie. Around the dinner table, Dwayne sits mutely as Grandpa loudly curses the entrée. Sheryl bickers with Richard as he goes off on a rant about the Nine-Step-Program, and Olive keeps asking Frank why his wrists are all bandaged up. It’s clear there’s a level of tension between these people, a manifestation of their inability to interact with each other. Their differences and inability to accept these differences creates an incohesive family, a cornerstone of the dysfunctional family. But Little Miss Sunshine amps up the Hoover’s dysfunction to a whole new level by sticking all six of them in the Volkswagen for an extended period of time. The proximity and length of their journey to California from New Mexico exponentially heightens their incapacity to relate and function together. Each person’s personality and characteristics becomes even more pronounced and apparent, conflicting and contrasting even more so with the others in the confines of the car. Grandpa’s inappropriate statements move to a sexual level when he advises Dwayne to “f*** a lot of women. Not just one woman. A lot of women.” Richard rants for an even more expended period about the “Nine Step Program” to his captive audience, prompting Frank to respond with the “refuge of losers,” aka sarcasm. And when Richard’s program doesn’t sell like it’s supposed to, he and Sheryl get into a full-blown screaming fight. The Petri dish that is the yellow van intensifies the Hoover’s dysfunction, making their different personalities clash on entirely new levels.
The epitome of a happy family. 5
The Hoovers are no Tenenbaums. Their world is painstakingly realistic: there’s no denying the setting of Little Miss Sunshine functions in our own world. So how come we can still laugh in the end? Little Miss Sunshine relies on situational, physical comedy much more than The Royal Tenenbaums, meaning many of our laughs come from the visual: watching the Hoovers frantically drive back to the rest stop after they realize they’ve left Olive there, or seeing the policeman go to the back of the bus and uncover porn magazines rather than Grandpa’s dead body. While these laughs aren’t directly dysfunctional, it’s the Hoover’s dysfunction that creates these humorous situations. That’s not to say there aren’t moments that are funny because of their maladjusted nature. Objectively speaking, is sneaking Grandpa’s body out the hospital window and into the back of the car funny? Of course not: it’s horribly morbid and a little disgusting. But the physical comedy and amplification of hyperrealism from the Hoover’s dysfunction allows some scenes, like this one, to teeter the line of believability, and their comedic aspects keep us laughing and buying the storyline. The root of Little Miss Sunshine’s comedy is in their dysfunction, but instead of us laughing at them, we laugh at the situations and reactions their maladjustment illicits.
Both the Tenenbaums and the Hovers are unquestionably dysfunctional, yet their issues and problems are vastly different so it seems they have little in common. The Tenenbaums are maladjusted in a moral sense, which causes them to act and interact in the ways they do. The Hoover’s dysfunction comes from personality traits and their inability to connect because of their differences. Dysfunction is no laughing matter, yet both films find humor in this sadness through suspending reality, or using dysfunction as a device to create humorous situations. As Tolstoy said “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and that’s definitely the case with the Tenenbaums and the Hoovers.
Photo Credits:
1. Photo from Vicky (Picasa)
2. Photo from OffOffOff
3. Photo from Photobucket
4. Photo from Beard Papa (Flickr)
5. Photo from Screenwriter's Corner
In a world where prozac prescriptions and anxiety attacks are increasingly common, it is said that dysfunctional is the new normal. It is my belief that we strive to attain our own ideas of perfection because we strive to avoid the stresses of conflict with ourselves and with one another. But because we all have differences, dysfunctional was always normal. It is the essence of the human condition in society. Perfection is but a foreign concept to us and as such, we are unable to relate.
I feel like I am lowering the intellectualism of this article, but its subject matter reminded me of Mike Judge's King of the Hill. Finding its humor in the mundane, it almost always took a realistic approach in conveying the condition of a regular, Texas middle- class family and the people around them. Judge was able to depict the personalities and idiosyncrasies of characters so well that it achieved in making me feel uneasy about my own experiences with people that I knew.
Posted by: Paul Eliasson | February 20, 2010 at 03:23 AM