Movie Doubles - 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' & 'The Blind Side'

The Family As Project


I got asked about the myth of the family after I posted my movie double on 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Revolutionary Road'. As in, I guess, "tell me of movie examples where this myth is operating!" A quick look through some stuff I've watched recently turned up 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' and last night I watched 'The Blind Side' which ultimately is nothing less than the myth of the family writ large.

The family is emphasised greatly in Hollywood cinema because affirming the family allows it to affirm other socially normative things, from heterosexuality to gender roles to social status and subsequent acceptable interactions. Quite often, Hollywood betrays the illusion that America is a class-less society when compared to the old world, only to write in the privileges of wealth.

Takeshi Kitano opined in one of his columns in Japan that America is a society that sells lottery tickets to its own citizens, and the name of the lottery ticket is 'The American Dream'. He suspected that American society might go on the brink of revolution when they found out how unlikely the said dream was. One could contend that the recent 'Tea Party' activism is a sign that this is already happening. The point of this is that the socially normative function of reaffirming the myth of the family is in effect a very important part of the American ideological control over its own population.

So, that's why it's important to see the con as it comes, so to speak. The con is always in the pitch, and what American films like to pitch is the formation of families.

What Kind Of Family Is That Anyway?

'Fantastic Mr. Fox' actually kicks off with the courtship of Mr. and Mrs. Fox, as voiced by George Clooney (this man is in everything good lately. How does he do that?) and Meryl Streep. The family expands when they have a son, and they take in Mr. Fox's nephew. Mr. Fox's partner in crime, Opossum is recruited into the family fabric. Once the conflict sets in with the human farmers, Mr. Fox's family expands to loosely include Badgers and field mice and other assorted creatures who have been flushed out of their habitat. By the end of the film, Mr. Fox is toasting quite a menagerie of animals as part of his family.In doing so, he and his wife accept everybody.

Similarly, 'The Blind Side' is a story of a white family who take in a black youth and make him a family member. Remarkably it is one of those 'True stories, loosely based on fact" numbers, but the source book happens to be written by none other than Michael Lewis. Sandra Bullock's character Leigh Anne Tuohy exerts a great deal of maternal influence to bring Michael Oher into her family and in turn Michael sublimates his Oedipal complex sufficiently to succeed in his new white-person environment.

In both cases, the family is heterogenous across species, and race. It's oddly couched in both films so as to obfuscate the dividing line, but the obfuscation itself brings attention to the act of obfuscation. That is to say, they make the point that the characters we are supposed to like are not species-segregationists or racists, but this bringing to our attention inadvertently points to fact that the text is about species or race.

Another way of reading all this is that in the Hollywood vision of America, it's not what race you are that is important; it's how normative you are in respects to sexuality and gender that is more important.

The Oscar Goes To The Politically Correct

It's one of those odd things that occasionally a very limited sort of actor or actress gets the big gong. This year it was Sandra Bullock - who also won a Razzie for her film 'All About Steve', which makes it a rare double. While she might not be as bad as a Razzie suggests, she's not as good as 'Oscar Winner' suggests. She does an okay job in 'The Blind Side'. She clearly won it on the politically correct vote as well as the 'She'll never be in a position to win the Oscar ever again' vote. I'm inclined to think they're right.

The degree to which this 'PC' factor works can be seen in the frown as you read this and say, "but, but, but..." Look, if it looks politically incorrect to you that I point this out, then it must have been pretty politically correct for Sandra Bullock to win with this film. There is no way this is a historically great film, but it is a lot more watchable than some of the more feted films of recent years. I didn't suffer watching this the way I suffered watching some of the other films.

The Blind Eye To Class

I'm not a class warrior but some times I just have to drag the Marxist stuff out to make a point. There's nothing like a couple of films that proceed to brazenly hammer down bourgeois values that get my hackles up. So you'll have to bear with my momentary lapse into rabid Marxist critique for a moment. I guess I did get that from AFTRS, but in this case, believe you me, it's relevant.

One of the more pernicious projects in American cinema is how they essentially place  everybody as 'middle class' and this middle class seems to cover the whole vast tract of the demographic, unless it is specifically a story about coming from the wrong side of the tracks. That is to say, the ubiquitous white collar status is the zero-zero coordinate from which all values emanate, but it only addresses blue collar as the other - not the wealthy.

This gives rise to a really strange tension in 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' which is an adaptation of a text by Roald Dahl. Dahl actually is somewhat of a class-ist snob when he portrays the meanness of the 3 farmers, and the 3 farmers in the film are played by Englishmen with broad accents. In turn, there is a strange demarcation of consciousness that takes place in the text vis a vis, who has any consciousness. The Fox and Moles and Badgers have equivalent consciousnesses, but the chickens and turkeys that get eaten, do not. They die silently and are quickly consumed. The contradiction of this structure only goes to delineate Dahl's own class-consciousness and betrays a weird kind of elitism of the urban middle class. When voiced by Clooney and Streep, this elitism actually steps forth as a strange kind of demarcation of the American bourgeois sensibilities rather than a British quirk of the source text.

Similarly, in 'The Blind Side', we are shown a fantastically wealthy white family and are expected to absorb the wealth we see as just another middle class family. The bourgeois sensibility carried by Bullocks character is so powerful, it drives her to adopt Michael. Her kindness extends out of her Bourgeois ideals, and later in the film she reflects on whether she is good or not. The irony is clearly lost on the writers because it seems to me it's a story of a woman who has no self-reflection about her own bourgeois values.

Thus, the wrong side of the tracks where Michael comes from becomes the other that must be cut away from Michael. The film explores the notion by having Bullock's Leigh Anne visit the biological mother of Michael Oher, and exculpates the fact that she takes over from the biological mother through the force of her character. There's no crisis a la 'Revolutionary Road' in this bit of super-wealthy suburbia. Sandra Bullock's Leigh Anne joyously embraces the naked, lurid, materialism of her existence. For her, there is no hopeless emptiness that plagues Kate Winslet's April. I guess this sort of issue doesn't decide who wins an Oscar at all - which suggests the Academy in general actually holds suburbia in contempt.

As character studies go it is interesting, and in some ways could be an American version of a Madame Bovary. Except being an American film, it doesn't rush headlong into self-destruction, it rushes towards a super-affirmation of the bourgeois values inherent in her own milieu.All this happens hand in hand with affirming the new American family.

The Republican Soul

The strangeness of 'The Blind Side' is probably best characterised by the irony of its white characters. These white people are really nice. They're really good. They're nice and good because they have solid values; and the fact that Leigh Anne is a member of the NRA and packs a pistol in her purse are more character quirks than signs of a deranged social paranoia that is endemic in certain parts of America. The point of the film is, she's nice: She takes in a disadvantaged but talented boy and makes him family - in spite of his colour/race, which makes her extraordinary. The film doesn't let up that she is a good person and these are good deeds she is doing.

That's all okay with me... except she's a Republican. Presumably she is exactly the sort of person who joins the Tea Party and objects to the recent Health Bill getting passed by the Democrats. You sort of marvel at the contradictions that reside in the American political consciousness.

I mean, what is that?

The Family And Consumerism

The ultimate haven the Fox family find towards the end of the film is a supermarket where there is an abundance of food. In other words, heaven is participation in consumerism itself. The fact that the formation of the mega-family around Mr. Fox is celebrated this way is no accident. The formation of the family powers demand which is met by economic supply and capitalism finds its optimum expression where demand meets supply. The expansion of a family thus means expansion of the capitalist system itself.

The same dynamic is displayed in the Thanksgiving scene in 'The Blind Side'. When Michael sits at the dining table to eat on his own, this prompts the Toohey family to come together around the table with their abundance of food, discussing where things were bought, and then they celebrate a God that allows them this big consumerist feast.

Considering I sort of grabbed these 2 films as random examples of the formation of the family being a central myth to American cinema, it's pretty amazing how both these films have these scenes.

Sharing of food in American cinema possibly deserves a greater deal of analysis which I won't go into here, but I will point out that Woody Allen often uses Thanksgiving dinners as occasions to explore the family. He bookends 'Hannah and her Sisters' with Thanksgiving feasts with one in the middle, and the penultimate scene of 'Broadway Danny Rose' features a Thanksgiving dinner shared by Danny and his hapless acts. The discussions about food that takes place in each of these scenes are critiques of the family and consumption. The capacity to deliver a sizable feast on Thanksgiving affirms the providing power of the patriarch in each instance, and underscores the symbolic transfer from God to Capital to stomach.