Family Matters
Charles Addams drew the first cartoons of the Addams Family in 1937 for The New Yorker. The macabre clan remained popular with readers for years, and was the subject of an ABC television series that ran from 1964 – 66. Feature films The Addams Family and Addams Family Values (a flawless, hilarious film) in 1991 and 1993 kept them alive, or at least undead, as did as later animated features and a Broadway musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth.
Gothic was decidedly not mainstream, nor even as popular in the thirties and forties as it is today, but Addams’ cartoon family appealed to many. They were a dark reflection of the ideal American family, with two parents and two kids, a grandparent in residence, and pets all residing in harmony (as defined by the Addamses) in a comfortable home. They did family things: Grandma baked cookies, Mom and Dad read report cards, and they took family pictures.
They weren’t presented as monsters, deviants, or objects of horror. In key ways they were like most families, and didn’t seem to notice the attention drawn by their unobtrusive attachment to the weird and strange. That was precisely why they appealed: the normal was presented through a macabre lens; elements of American life were seen outside their usual setting. And that was what made them part of the Gothic tradition: the sense of the uncanny, the familiar made unfamiliar, daring the onlooker to ask what’s wrong with this picture? In a very real sense, Addams’ humor was predicated on getting us to identify what was right about his images.
The Addams as a different kind of family was accepted in the 40s and 50s because the macabre was outside of pubic judgment. In their own weird way, they conformed to mainstream America and weren't contentious in any way other than being ghouls. Morticia was a SAHM and no one had any contentious political stance. They were capitalists and consumers who sent their kids to public schools.
But perhaps they contributed in a small way to a growing sense of the difference between real families and depictions of families, as well as the distillation to a definition of family that relied less on a structural formulae and more on connection and support. The presence of the fantastic diffused any objections. Gomez affirmed the values in a toast at the end of Addams Family Values:
A toast, to the glorious mysteries of life, to all that binds a family as one, to mirth, to merriment, to manslaughter, to dear friends, to new friends, to youth, to passion, to paradise, to pain, tonight!
As the Addams Family continued into the 21st century, producers Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement readied a new iteration in the humorously ghoulish family. Their 2014 comedy/horror film What We Do in the Shadows was set up as a documentary about the quotidian lives of three vampires living as roommates in contemporary society. In 2016 it became a popular television series starring four vampires (one of them an energy vampire, portrayed deliciously by Mark Prosch) sharing a spooky old house on Staten Island.
The WWDITS household reflects its time. In place of the nuclear family composition uniformly represented in the 40s and 50s including the Addamses, there’s a childfree married couple, two single guys, and a live-in personal assistant (a human “familiar”). The vampires are cheerfully and matter-of-factly sexually active with anyone including each when the mood strikes them.
The premise is the same: a very different type of family doing many of the things most families do, with some significant and darkly humorous differences. We can relate to some of their longings, and then delight in the ways they seek to fulfill those needs. Nadja, half of the married couple, wants personal fulfillment and control, and is thrilled to become a “working woman” as Supreme Leader of the International Vampiric Council. She finds the bureaucratic details stultifying and pursues her dream of opening a nightclub. How many of us can relate to being in a job that doesn't feed our soul? Nandor the Relentless relentlessly seeks a partner; he misses having someone with whom he can share his eternal life. Most of us can relate to this longing, so we’re on board when he dismisses dating sites in favor of having a djinn bring back the 37 wives of his former harem, whom he vets and eliminates one by one until only contender remains.
Comedy is often predicated on a fresh, unusual view of the mores and values that society accepts; Gothic humor can accomplish this by pulling those values into foreign territory, and animating them via a sort of alternating current between darkness and the leavening force of humor. The tension between the two is the successful formula for both of these unusual families; not surprisingly, the darkness of the 21st century family is several shades deeper than the one from the 1930s.
