Hollywood Updates the American Family

As the smoke of the battle over California’s divisive Proposition 8 and its now-inevitable hearing before The Supremes still clouds over our cultural horizons, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo, and Julianne Moore play a new kind of family in Lisa Cholodenko’s recent film The Kids Are All Right.  It’s a meaty slice-of-life about what happens when the coming-of-age son and daughter of a longtime lesbian couple decide to seek out the third trilon in their genetic sequence, their biological father — I mean, “donor.”

My, how times have changed.  Forty years ago, when Sherwood Schwartz cemented the pop-culture immortality that Gilligan’s Island delivered unto him with an even bigger hit, The Brady Bunch, he recalled that the impetus for the show was a major newspaper article he’d happened on which talked about the “growing trend” of blended families.  Yes, even in the “summer of love” era of 1968, the phenomenon of blended straight families were considered newsworthy. (Blended gay families were considered another word — criminal.)

The movie isn’t particularly stylish — if you insist on Charlie Kaufman / David Lynch quirkiness or “grammar of cinema” framing and editing, and if you left movies like Doubt or Frost/Nixon disappointed because they were too stageplay- or novel-like, you’ll be disappointed.  But it has a grungy, stealth storytelling quality that befits its subject matter and setting – trendily rundown foreclosure-bait bungalows in the lower Hollywood Hills, whole-foods restaurants, gay families in Craftsman homes in Silverlake, sunbaked public parks and state college dorms.  It’s an old-fashioned movie from the era of Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People with a new-fashioned, post-ironic sense and a no-big-deal attitude about things that would have been scandalous even back then.

While the movie falls back on the cliché of one of the lesbian women having a temporary lapse into “straightness” with the rakish Ruffalo (territory already covered by the more femme partners in The Killing of Sister George, The Children’s Hour, and more recently on Queer as Folk and The L Word), part of the point of the film is that sexual identity is anything but fixed.  The sensitive-jock son comically denies that he’s gay, yet if he and his studly, wrestling, bad-boy friend were the focus of the picture, they’d have more “slash” fiction written about them than Randal and Dante from Clerks or Peter and Neal from White Collar. The daughter meanwhile is in a more glam and liberated rerun of Thora Birch’s role in American Beauty – she has a shy-quiet boyfriend, but we never see them getting physical despite genuine romantic tension, and a sexually active, faboo best galpal right out of 90210 or Gossip Girl.

Without giving away and spoiling the whole story of this worthwhile and well-acted dramedy, let’s just say that sure, the kids are as screwed up as any modern family, but they are also well and truly “all right.”  They may be a little sexually confused, but who wouldn’t be coming of age in this era, even if they were raised by straighter-than-straight, family values parents?  (Paging Bristol and Levi!)  There is much to be said about the two-parent, male-female family as being the ideal.  Most Freudian and Jungian psychologists would say that in an ideal world, a child will grow up with a built-in masculine and feminine role model to identify with.  (Though in both fiction and memoir from Shakespeare to Mommie Dearest, aside from outright sexual molestation, the worst hatreds and family feuds are almost always same-sex — mother/daughter, father/son.)   I myself made the decision when I was barely 20 not to have any children, no matter what sexual geometry of relationship I would ever find myself in, because I don’t have the patience or unconditional, puppy/kitten love or the steady career and life goals that would be right for a child.  Simply being marginally “good enough” isn’t good enough for me.

But as the movie passively addresses (to its credit, without preaching and teaching), in the real world, how many of us Gen Xers and Millennials had anything approaching “ideal” upbringings, no matter what the orientation of our parents?   How many of us had parents who “chose life” not out of moral conviction but out of rank selfishness, from the grotesqueries of Octomom to Mo’Nique’s savage portrayal in Precious, or the Jerry Springer-style white-trash mother that novelist Jonathan Kellerman expertly pegged in his novel Billy Straight, who refused to give her child up for adoption:  “He’s MINE!  You people can’t have him.  I’m just as good a mom as everyone else!” (she kept telling herself, with shoulder-raised defiance.)    Why is it always the gay family that takes it on the chin in family-values rhetoric — or serves as the boffo bag for all these decadent, dysfunctional straight families?

Many ultra-right-wingers would criticize the late Law & Order (original recipe) for its supposedly left-wing bias in showing most crimes, including rape and murder, perpetrated by the country club set (even though DA Jack “Hang ‘em High” McCoy would turn the law on its ear in order to come across as tough on crime.)  The same ones probably also decry all of these movies and TV shows about alternative families, and twenty years of gloriously dysfunctional “straight” ones, from Roseanne and Married with Children to Malcolm in the Middle to Modern Family, as just more Lib’ral Media Propaganda against God, family, and the American way.

But what if it’s the other way around?  No doubt the no-limits movies and TV of the past thirty or so years contributed immensely to the coarsening of American culture.  But what if the chicken gave birth to the egg?  Would a Brady Bunch or Father Knows Best sitcom, or a Waltons or Little House on the Prairie drama be seen as anything other than camp by today’s post-everything viewers?  Would a movie about a happy, well-adjusted family have any dramatic “meat” to entice a filmgoer to pay to see it?

Annette and Julianne may run a different family, but it is every inch a family — their family.  When their characters first decided to have children, in the late ’80s/early ’90s, being a gay family was still an in-your-face, provocative and political statement.  Though not illegal in California (we struck down our “anti-sodomy” laws in 1975), a lesbian family still risked having their children taken away by social services in many jurisdictions back then, and gay families went unrecognized by the law even in many cosmopolitan big states until very recently.  Their very normalcy — not perfect, not abusive, sad and funny, just like a straight couple without being “just like” a straight couple, is the very point.

That in itself will be offensive to many members of the Proposition 8 set, though the movie is as much a reproach against liberal closed-mindedness as it is conservative — the idea that the bi-curious man who fools around but has a wife or girlfriend he honestly and physically loves, or the woman who goes through a “gay phase” in college, are just pathetic self-haters and nothing more.  Still, many people are still hopping mad that their children are being taught to tolerate gays and lesbians as full equals in society by both their schools and the media.  And in many school districts, parents do not in fact have a choice to opt their children out of learning tolerance for gays and lesbians – any more than the parents who would prefer that their child not mix with black or Latino children have a choice, even if they also hid behind religious reasons.  And speaking of choice, even if you believe that homosexuality or Lesbianism is a “choice” – for the parents – a child who was artificially inseminated or adopted by a gay couple certainly had no choice in who his or her parents were.  Teasing and bullying Heather because she has “two mommies” should be almost as unacceptable as the you-know-what word.

As Team Obama showed, mobilizing a youthquake of 18-to-24’s not seen since Vietnam and Watergate, multiculturalism and alternative lifestyles are just — hello — another day at the office or the campus for “the kids” of today.  Perhaps the movie’s moral comes best from the late singer, actress, and talk/variety show queen Dinah Shore (a hero to lesbians for her golf and tennis tournaments, and the ultimate Southern-lady “cougar”, snagging an over 15 years-younger Burt Reynolds for four years in the ’70s), “Love is such a rare commodity in today’s world as it is.  When you find it, you shouldn’t turn it away.”   While there are many things and trends to be dismayed at in today’s society, for all its surface attitude, The Kids Are All Right politely asks if the existence of a family like this one is really one of those things?