Guns and Robots and the Film Family Unit

By Mark Johnson
(Holidays, Movies and Celebration: Relationships Issue Moving Pictures Magazine Dec. 05/Jan. 06)

Today's movies give new meaning to the term "blood relations."

Far from the cuddly image of holiday reunions and happy embraces, contemporary film families are violent, physical entities. Themes of individuality and dysfunction have taken center stage, demolishing the idea of family as sanctuary.

"Welcome to America's weirdest home videos." (American Beauty)

According to Elisabeth Bronfen, a professor of American studies at the University of Zurich and author of the new book, Home in Hollywood, "American creativity is part and parcel of violence. The way the nation was built, essentially in violence, is picked up again in stories about families, because the way that the families hold together or don't hold together becomes tropes for how the country does, or doesn't, hold together."

The survivalist-family mindset being tapped into by both U.S. and international directors has deep roots in American film history - from D.W. Griffith's silent melodramas to mythographic pistol odes like Shane (1953) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Even benevolent dad Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) unassumingly held the title of "best shot in the county."

A History of Violence

Cronenberg - a Canadian director - has compared Violence to the western genre and explores how America clings to its lone-justice myth in the face of danger; the father's "history of violence" quickly extends to the entire family.

Like a single organism, the family physically asserts itself in fighting off the infection of the outside world that seeks to divide it.

"What becomes clear is that it's the violence that holds that family together - to the point where it's really the fantasy that he might be a killer which makes that family work again," explains Bronfen.

War of the Worlds

In Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005), the alien tripods arguably embody tensions within the family that can't be clobbered in any other way. As Bronfen puts it, "It's easier to kill a monster than to kill your wife." Jointly engaging in warfare is posited as a healing experience.

The Incredibles

Even the hugely successful "family film" The Incredibles, so far grossing $625 million worldwide, lends fire to the argument. Despite being a cartoon, The Incredibles is no less violent. Even timid daughter Violet transforms into a well-bonded family member by kicking serious ass.  

"That's my family, Kay. It's not me." (The Godfather)

Fatal Attraction

Moviegoers know full well what's going on, and Bronfen relates that this becomes particularly clear in the case of a movie like Fatal Attraction (1987). The ending was actually changed because the audience was thrilled by the idea that Glenn Close's character could be killed. I would go so far as to say that they enjoyed seeing the person destroyed onscreen who destroyed the family.

"In films today, in contrast to films of the 1970s, there is a return to thinking about how we could reconvene the family. It is less a question of whether we should or not, but what are the costs," says Bronfen.

Cronenberg's film has often been compared to David Lynch's work, particularly his dissection of the American idyll in Blue Velvet (1986). Film theorists have pointed out that, in Lynch's film, the family rupture at the heart of its Oedipal nightmare may also be a consequence of the mother's continued existence as a sexual being. The film is a kind of shock treatment, returning her - however precariously - to maternal docility.

Moms vs. Dads

Generally, cinema views the shift of families into abridged surrogate units (a wholly normal real-world evolution) as evidence of failure. With family serving as the ideal breeding ground of life and identity, problems are pegged on its individual members. In American Beauty, The Shining and the Star Wars saga, the father figure has become a failed, even evil, man.

According to Bronfen, the reason fathers have become so unreliable is that, compared with mothers, "fathers are exchangeable. Fathers can be anything from tyrannical to completely weak. Men will go out and kill for the family, but the home remains a dangerous zone for them."

Steven Mintz, Professor of History at the University of Houston and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, says "the theme of men seeking redemption has been very powerful." War of the Worlds, for instance, clearly uses its science-fiction premise to give Tom Cruise's character an excuse to show what a good father he can be. He gets to have his Odyssean quest and eat it, too.

Meanwhile, mothers are the family's real salvation. "The mother is very connected with the idea of survival," says Bronfen. "That connects with her being the one that gave birth to the family, the nourishing one, the one that is necessary to preserve it."

"The deepest fear for parents," Mintz contends, "is the fear that somehow, because of divorce or something else, they might lose contact with their child." The recent wave of lost-child thrillers include The Ring (2002), The Forgotten (2004) and Flightplan (2005).

Films' exploration of a child's relationship with its mother has been fraught with peril, and a mother's love may hold back the hero, as in Psycho (1960) and its countless successors. On the other hand, a father's love challenges and gives a kid something to prove.

Bronfen says that's mostly "Freudian residue. If you don't sever yourself from the mother, she'll become a monster character and suck you dry." In Oedipal terms, "too much mother is much more threatening than too much father."

"What does anyone in this family know about being normal?" (The Incredibles)

Apart from being non-dramatic, nuclear-family harmony is statistically unrealistic, at least in Hollywood's home market. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, fewer than 25% of American households boast the full nuclear triangle of father, mother and offspring. By 2010, the number will be down to 20 percent.

Mintz points out that dysfunctional film families aren't new. Melodrama, one of film's first genres, thrived on discord at home. By the time Rebel Without a Cause hit in 1955, sheer love was no longer enough.

A broad, if non-exhaustive, sampling of around 60 movie families over the last 20 years - in several different genres and in both the mainstream and independent sectors - shows that the vast majority of screen families are troubled to say the least. In addition to The Incredibles and War of the Worlds (gross: $529 million), the most successful films about families - such as The Sixth Sense (1999, $662 million), American Beauty (1999, $336 million), Meet the Parents (2000, $296 million) and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000, $162 million) - range from foible-ridden to fatally flawed.

Animated Features Keeping the Faith

One genre is keeping the faith. A study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy in 2003 found that Disney's animated features - which are among the most popular genres for children and families - tend to strongly prioritize family relationships. Fathers are usually in elevated roles, with mothers more marginalized. When characters fall in love, they do so at first sight, and, as long as the man's in charge, everything works out just fine. It's no accident that the most valiant attempts to prop up patriarchy are found in cartoon fantasies.

"Americans both believe and don't believe the stories they see onscreen," says Bronfen. "They know this is fiction, and that's why family movies work even though they know reality isn't like that at all."

Is It Any Different for Black Families?

"A family has got to stay strong." (Soul Food)

As each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, each family's reality is equally diverse. The black family's issues in film tend to be less psychological and more on the order of crime, poverty and racism. Charles Burnett's 1977 classic Killer of Sheep, recently restored for DVD release, shows a strong family unit at the mercy of hard times. Later black films as well, from Boyz n the Hood (1991) and the vastly underrated Crooklyn (1994) to Soul Food (1997), portray the family as a bastion in an unfair world.

"The black family has a separate set of problems, such as the whole issue of single mothers and absence of fathers, so there may be even more of a wish to believe in family," says Bronfen. "With upper-middle-class white families, privilege allows them to deconstruct the family. That's much harder if you're working class, where the family is so much more threatened."

Straight from the Couch

Steven Mintz sees movies as social workshops. "Movies provide a screen on which we can observe our anxieties and the possible solutions to them. We can see what might work and what doesn't work."

The psychiatric field is taking the idea literally. John Hesley, a family therapist in Arlington, Texas, and co-author of Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning, told Psychology Today magazine that he recommended The Bridges of Madison County (1995) to a man who needed to learn what women value in a relationship. In that film, Clint Eastwood plays a sensitive man none too proud to peel carrots, light some candles and just listen.

A therapist in New Orleans reported using Soul Food to heal sibling rivalry. Another in Virginia kept a raft of popular classics on hand, from To Kill a Mockingbird to On Golden Pond (1981).

Reflecting today's families on screen also means showing solutions when reconciliation is impossible. Asymmetrical and surrogate families are now the primary area of exploration in films about families, particularly outside the mainstream. Happiness carries a greater ring of truth when it is found, rather than pre-programmed.

"If you let me, I'll be so real for you!" (AI: Artificial Intelligence)

"One of the most profound contemporary films" is Spielberg's earlier AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), according to Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "It is certainly about the break-up of a family. It's also about film and the definition of human, of what humanity is in a mechanical medium, and there's almost no bigger subject than that. People sometimes treat other people like things and things like people."

"According to AI," film theorist William Beard wrote recently, "the only way to make a truly good child, a child who will love his mother unconditionally, is to machine-make one - to movie-make one; and the only way to make a human parent who will love him back is - well, there isn't any way."