The Talkies/Homes Rearranged

...The assassination of President Kennedy not only serves as a cheap generaor of emotional energy in the film but also reminds us all that father figures, like fathers, are inherently unreliable...

...All the stereotypes of hypocritical respectability are there, but it is impossible to be angry with them because they are so stylized and overdrawn...

...The elder of Cher's two daughters (played by Winona Ryder) nurses an unhealthy longing for the return of a father whom she only knows from a photograph of his shoes...

...Scissorhands could have joined up with the Lakota buffalo hunters of Dances with Wolves, no questions asked...

...It is as if the traditional family is less a lost ideal, requiring comic ingenuity in those who must make shift without it, than an evil in itself—something which presupposes the tragedy of its collapse...

...Moreover, not only are the women cleverer in their methods of manipulation, they are also tougher in the long run...

...T o be fair, this is not a particularly 1 hard-edged version of feminism: there is almost a wistful quality to the pathos of sexual impasse and the inevitability of the absent male...

...We admire the innocent outsider, the Noble Savage, the new creation uncorrupted by the traditional hypocrisies on which civilized life is based, yet we recognize him as a lonely figure, someone who must be driven back into his solitary lair by an out-raged community of individualists lest he remind them of the primitive values of, well, harmony and family, which their world has jettisoned in order to come into being...

...Yet laughter at such incongruities as Edward's talent for hedge sculpture—every bush on the block becomes a topiary masterpiece, mostly in vaguely dinosaurian shape—and ladies' coiffure is uneasy...

...At one point she runs away from home and briefly joins a "normal" family with "a real live father actually living at home with his wife and children...

...D ut if American cinematic families are, by contrast, fraught with possibilities for new and interesting variations on the traditional theme, tradition itself, when it is not merely a nostalgic appendix, turns into conventionality and tends to excite contempt...

...What does such a child want or need from parents...

...A traditional papa who administers traditional discipline when he gets home from work...

...For there is a core of truth in the distinction it draws between civilization and primitive or tribal existence...

...In the end, of course, he is glad to see the rest of it back, but only because he misses the company, not because he is socially or personally defined by it...

...Well, she's got to learn...

...The more typically American view of childhood is to be found in the first hit of the Christmas season, John Hughes's Home Alone...

...In fact, Mr...

...Here the little savage is not only blessed by nature with the skills necessary to survive without any parents as he is accidentally left behind when the rest of his family goes on vacation, he is actually the guardian and preserver of the family home against a couple of marauding burglars...

...Glamour is fear," they believe, and their lives are a testimony to the fact: "If people are afraid of you, you can just do anything...

...Not since Miss Watson attempted to learn Huck Finn some manners have we cottoned to that kind of talk...

...My, what a big house," she says as she climbs the vertiginous stair to the loft where this Caliban lives: "thank goodness for my aerobics classes...

...Children are the Noble (or not so noble) Savages that live in our midst, and a lot of the trouble with American education can be traced to our Romantic unwillingness to force them too precipitately from their natural state of savagery...

...The forsaken husband has no more rights in the film's dramatic structure than he does in his broken marriage: we can only pity his pain as a curiously alien version of the pain that everyone involved feels about an unavoidable break-up...

...The smash hit Three Men and a Baby of 1987 did something to assuage our collective anxiety on this head...

...Her scatty mother may or may not stop running away from men and problems—up until now the two have been synonymous—when she meets a sensitive and caring shoe-salesman played by Bob Hoskins (the shoe motif de serves further exploration), but the daughter must accept the wacky, feminine world her mother has crafted for the family...

...You've just got to laugh at a neighborhood barbecue brought about by the advent of a boy who has scissors for hands and who lives at the home of the local Avon lady...

...Running away in imagination from the all but inescapable reality of papalessness is a worse sin...

...If you can get over the Romantic flapdoodle about what we have since learned to call "Native Americans" or, better still, if you're a bit of a flapdoodler yourself (as which of us is not...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 35...

...Now that even our most immediate families are so often living along way away—now that, as some sociologists warn, the step-family will be the most common sort of household in America by the turn of the century—we look to the popular culture of the cinema and television to provide us with images of unconventional families that, somehow, work...

...Yet their fists and guns and knives are mere toys compared to the tools of emotional dominance that their mother, grandmother, and aunt employ against them...

...Burton constantly emphasizes the absurdity of his vision, placing the gothic mansion of the mad scientist, for example, at the end of a street of suburban ranch houses and effecting the discovery of his grotesque hero by the determination of an Avon lady sniffing out a sale...

...This, too, is a woman's film, but in the sense that I simply felt excluded from it...

...Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands offers us a curiously lighthearted version of suburban gothic romance which plays off the banality of everyday life in a middle-class housing development against the grotesquerie of a modern Promethean creation rather in the way that Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein did back in the seventies...

...it's like television...

...Just as the U.S...

...In one memorable passage, the aunt recalls the underside of life on the home front during the Second World War when, as the men engaged in another of their macabre games of war, serious-minded women heartlessly held the social fabric together...

...Cavalry is a convenient symbol for the evils of civilization in Dances with Wolves, so a British boarding school, run on Dickensian lines, serves the same function in Three Men Mark II...

...A more interesting and at the same time frightening version of the feminist parable is to be found in The Krays, which recounts the real-life story of the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, who were dominant figures in the underworld of London in the 1960s...

...When he first realizes that he is alone, his excited reaction is that "I've made my family disappear...

...The film's point of interest is in the relationship between the divorcing mother and her step-sister, the pregnant mother, who is with half her mind the disapproving moralist and guardian of family values and with the other half the fascinated woman who envies her friend the romance and excitement of an affair with a glamorous artist...

...And just think what a job he couldhave done on those buffalo hides...

...Cavalry are ugly, violent, stupid, and in touch with nature the way a bulldozer is...

...There is something serious about this farrago of absurdities told in the form of a fairy tale, but we are not quite sure what it is...

...Naturally, there is a feminist side to the whole question of innovation in family structures...

...If they drained that lake," she says, "they'd find nothing but bullets and babies...

...The new Cher vehicle, called Mermaids for reasons that are never quite made clear, states it very succinctly: fathers may be nice but they are more often absent and always unnecessary...

...Shakespeare's Tempest makes much the same point...

...On the one hand, America was settled by people wanting nothing more than to escape from the claustrophobic, quasi-tribal world of various European agricultural backwaters...

...on the other hand, the social fragmentation that they encountered here created a nostalgia for belonging which has always tended to express itself in sentimentalizing that simpler world they left behind...

...That is another reason why we are so ready to believe in the virtue, or at least 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 the non-vice, of the unconventional family in films like Three Men and a Little Lady: so long as a child's sense of personal worth is fostered by a loving mama and a pack of indulgent uncles, what other sort of nurturing do you need...

...Small wonder that Kevin Costner's character, U. John Dunbar, decides to forsake the latter for the former, to commit cultural suicide instead of the physical kind that eludes him on a Civil War battlefield...

...This is 1963, remember...

...So much so, indeed, that she immerses herself in patriarchal religion (pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism) and aspires to become a nun, although the family is Jewish...

...At one point, Costner/Dunbar tells us in voice-over that the words that most often came to mind to describe the Lakota way of life were "family" and "harmony," and here lie the keys to understanding why the appeal of the James Bowman is The American Spectator's movie critic...

...Bullets and babies...

...Here is the ultimate in illusory "control": two tough-guy brothers and their all-male criminal gang who inspire such terror in those with whom they come in contact that their rule of the streets is unchallenged...

...There is something of the same, European attitude about Diane Kurys's film C'est la vie, in which divorce is not an unfortunate calamity but a mere given, an inevitability in certain intractable circumstances...

...primitive remains so powerful even in a world about as far removed from that of the Indian tribes of the Great Plains as it is possible to imagine...

...Well, at bottom it is yet another example of American schizophrenia about social and familial cohesion...

...Manners...

...There is a deep, old-world pessimism about this English film when you set it beside the rather tediously optimistic American versions of attenuated family relationships...

...Needless to say, he has an innate ethical sense which, while it is not approved by civilized morality, is a higher and better thing because it is more authentic, more compassionate, more in tune with primitive loyalties...

...But Shakespeare makes an accommodation with reality that I think more important than Kevin Costner does, since he refuses to engage in sentimentally idealizing Caliban...

...The film's ethos is summed up in thegnomic maxim of the hard-bitten old granny that "men are born children and they stay children...

...Edward (Johnny Depp) is another kind of Noble Savage: the ideal blank slate created by a comically weird Frankenstein figure (Vincent Price) and untainted by contact with civilization...

...If the benign tolerance of a female-headed-household produces no worse social mutation than the eccentric but lovable sisters of Mermaids, it produces something much more disturbing in The Krays...

...When the wicked British would-be stepfather filially reveals himself in his true colors, it is to snarl that the eponymous "little lady" (the baby of Mark I, now five years old) "will learn some manners at school...

...Some kind of family life here remains intact, but at a terrible cost in secret ruthlessness, horror, and abortion, all of which must be borne in impassive silence...

...Just now the Noble Savage is having one of his periodic comebacks, and the results are visible in Kevin Costner's epic, Dances with Wolves...

...We love that olde worlde gothic mansion and the paradoxically purer form of humanity it contains, but only if we don't have to live too close to it...

...As George Burns said, the most wonderful thing in the world is a warm, loving, close-knit family that lives a long way away...

...It's perfect...

...you will enjoy this warm tribute to the native virtue of our savage brethren...

...N ow they've at last got around to making the inevitable sequel, called Three Men and a Little Lady, and it is as relentlessly heartwarming as the by James Bowman original...

...Family" is especially problematical...

...It was so cute and wholesome that it was as if June Cleaver had decided to take the Beaver and go live in a commune...

...Only its consequences, not its roots, are available for examination...

...The film's simple-minded moral is disturbingly at odds with the cinematic sophistication with which it is brought to the screen...

...Here the Lakota (better known to the shoot2em-up genre of Western as the Sioux) are as handsome, gentle, wise, and in touch with nature as the US...

...Moreover, it includes the most ludicrous caricature of the English since Dick Van Dyke tried to impersonate a cockney chimney-sweep in Mary Pop-pins...

...they think they are in control, but they don't know the half of it...