Why I like the Addams Family

Why I like The Addams Family

1) This is gonna start with another "look how big a wimp Joe was" stories. My dad took me to see The Addams Family film when I was a kid. I covered my eyes during the walk through the cemetery, though my imagination vividly conjured up the horrible images of all the dead Addamses. When they got to the scene where Pugsley and Wednesday violently recreate Shakespeare, I was crying and had to be taken home.

2) Years later, as a sullen Goth teenager, I went back to the Addams. I started with Addams Family Values, worked up the courage to watch the first film, then bought a collection of Charles Addams comics. I was still worshipping the ground Tim Burton walked on, and I wanted more stories set in strange dark fairytales. 

3) If there are two things Goth kids respond to, it's romance and antiquity. The Addams family have both in spades. Their house is a crumbling old Victorian abode, much like the one I grew up near in San Francisco (I refuse to believe that the Addams actually live in New York City, no matter what the musical tries to say), full of old antiques for the family to lounge on.

4) As to the romance, Gomez and Morticia are positively gross in love with each other. Because they live in their own tiny crazy world, they never deal with the mundane crap that most cohabitating couples deal with. They fawn and swoon over each other, waltz constantly, and babble sweet nothing in French. It's all so cute. Every once in awhile, I see a run on my social media feeds about how people are looking for romance like Gomez and Morticia share. 

5) The Addams Family are just plain odd. Unlike the Munsters, who seem completely unaware of their strangeness, the Addams see their strangeness as normal and don't see how the rest of the world doesn't go along the exact same way. The charm of the Addams, beyond their cute morbidity, is that they are so completely comfortable in being themselves. Because of that, I've never seen a more loving family portrayed in any medium (once you get past the occasional lighthearted murder attempts.)

6) I have a strange relationship with morbidity these days. When I was a kid, I used to read anything I could on death and dying, in the certainty that my own life would last forever. The older I get and the more I've encountered death as a reality, the more I find most people who profess to be morbid as either wearing it as an affectation or as having not suffered any real loss in their lives. But the fact is that death is interesting. Funerary rites are interesting. Lurid murders are interesting. The Addams Family is a way to find humor in the dark side of life. 

7) The farther I get from the Musical, the less I like it. No Addams family member should have the goal of wanting to be more normal. 

Conclusion: I like to check in with the Addams Family from time to time in order to remind myself that I'm still a little bit weird. The older I get, the more cluttered my life becomes with compromises and concessions to the oppressive crush of the day-to-day world. I like my family quite a bit, but it would sometimes be nice to have a family like the Munsters or the Addams. It's a place where my dark side could fit in.    

Why I like The Munsters

Why I like The Munsters

1) I used to love classic television. As a kid, I'd watch Nickelodeon until it rolled over into TV Land, when I'd watch all those hammy old comedies like Mr. Ed, Get Smart, and I Dream of Jeanie.  I hadn't seen The Munsters before, but it popped up in Netflix streaming and I've been devouring it with aplomb.

2) Unlike The Addams Family, where the characters are aware of and embrace their strangeness, the Munster family has no idea just how strange they are. I never get tired of Herman Munster, possibly the biggest fuddy duddy on television, constantly getting confused by people's reaction to him.

3) The comedy in the show usually relies on mistaken identities, misheard statements, and Herman's occasional childishness. The jokes run broad and farcical, with liberal use of a laugh track. It ain't high art, but I've lost more than one night watching one episode slip into the next.

4) Herman Monster is genuinely funny. Fred Glenn got a great face for comedy, with a wide, expressive smile and a playful goofiness. He usually gets stuck doing dumb-dad schtick, but I really like how gentle he is. Despite his massive size and apparently terrifying features (people in TV Land are both deeply prejudiced and cowardly) he's very careful not to harm anyone. There's one episode where he goes to confront the man he presumes to be having an affair with his wife. I was expecting a big violent fight, but Herman genuinely wanted to talk things over as gentlemen, and is distraught when the man passes out.

5) The running joke of the show is the family views the "normal" niece Marilyn as a deformed charity case. What's interesting is that she takes her family in stride, seeing their strange world as totally normal. There are a lot of funny moments where outsiders comment on her family or the cobwebbed mansion they live in and she fails to see things the way the outsiders see them.

6) Grandpa Munster is pretty much the best thing ever: an old wacko who fusses around in the basement and waxes fondly for the old days in Transylvania. He's also the most overtly supernatural member of the family, turning into wolves and bats and causing more trouble for the others. I want him in my family.

7) My favorite aspect of the show is how weirdly conservative Herman Munster can be. We tend to think of the 1950s as a very conformist era in American history, and the Munsters are a great parody of that era. Many episodes start with Herman worrying about propriety, social standing, and the family's good name. The fact that most of his adventures involve shocking his neighbor's delicate sensibilities just makes the whole thing funnier.

8) There's a great episode where Grandpa Munster falls for a black widow temptress who wants to kill him for the inheritance. The Addams Family did something similar in their movie, and there's always something funny about a manipulative killer being taken by a family of monsters.

9) I don't know who the guy who plays the family doctor is, but he's like a fey Jerry Lewis. His episodes are always the best. 

Conclusion: I wish I were a Munster. I want to live on Mockingbird Lane, drive a boss Dragster/Hearse, and get a Rockabilly intro theme song, and smash any mirror I look into. I don't get into nearly enough wacky predicaments that lead to happy outcomes. As it stands, I'll just take The Munsters marathon.     

The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

I really like this story, but I suspect I would have liked it more if I were British.

It's a really, really funny story, but it's the weird kind of comedy of manners stories that works best from Great Britain. In my gentleman's travels across the globe, I've had the opportunity to watch a lot of television. One of the more common themes that I saw on zany British television is the very polite catastrophe: a series of increasingly vile humiliations happens to a person who strives to remain dignified and unaffected by the chaos surrounding them. Subtextually, it's pretty clear that this is an effort by the British to make fun of the stiff upper lip that won them an empire, but it usually winds up looking like an uptight dude surrounded by naked butts and covered in mud.

Barker's story fits well into that genre of comedy but it has a very sharp twist; if poor Jack acknowledges the humiliation that the demon is subjecting him to, his soul will be lost to Hell. I have always liked the way Barker does Hell. It reminds me of a Bosch painting, all inhuman shapes and bitterness and longing for Heaven. It's also a very hidebound place, full of the kind of fussy little rules that fit in well with a Catholic worldview. It's a great battleground between the will of one man and the malevolence of one increasingly desperate demon.

Also, one of the greatest punchlines of any story I've ever read.


Image by Ashnkatt

Speaking from a writing perspective, the big lesson I'm taking from this is the benefits of shifting POVs within a scene.

Most of the complaints I read in other people's reviews of Rawhead Rex were due to Barker's tendency to switch perspectives mid-scene. The effect doesn't really bother me. I like jumping heads to get different perspectives on a scene without sacrificing immediacy. It's a trick I use to a much more amateurish degree in my own work.

Here, jumping heads quickly enhances the effect in the story. The tale opens from the Yattering's perspective, and chronicles his growing frustration at Jack's complete obliviousness. We assume, like the Yattering, that Jack is completely clueless until a single paragraph, told from Jack's perspective, shows the reader that Jack is not just aware of the Yattering's presence but is playing a very dangerous game with it. From there, the facade of a comedy of good manners conceals a deadly game of wills between the forces of demonic chaos and the forces of English politeness for the soul of an "innocent" man.

It's a great comedy and one of the most intense battle of wills I've ever read.



BONUS LEVEL!

Apparently they did the entire story as an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Enjoy!

The AV Club Presents: Ridiculous Horror Movie Adversaries

You know what the sad thing is? I know most of these movies. And Black Roses was actually pretty good. I have the original recording.

Anyway, take a break from work and enjoy this video.

Gateways to Geekery: Slasher Films

The Onion's AV Club website runs a regular feature called Gateways to Geekery, which provides a primer on various nerdy topics for the neophyte enthusiast. They did an excellent write-up of George Romero's work and they recently posted a great guide to slasher films. It's got a good selected viewing list, some pointed criticisms against slasher film detractors, and was clearly written by someone who shared our demented affection for this stuff. Check it out.