29 Coontz, p. 25.
ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviours that never existed in the
♦ 11
same time and place.’ What the suburban nuclear family apes is its own representation; it is a simulation. It has consistently failed to keep pace with its idealisation in popular culture, not least because the principles it attempts to smuggle into the realm of tradition are internecine, particularly for women. ‘The hybrid idea’, writes Coontz, ‘that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a
1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilisers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.’32 In Coupland’s novel, Janet, the matriarch of the fractured Drummond family now living with HIV due to a bizarre shooting
accident involving her ex-husband Ted and her prodigal son Wade, spends much of the novel reflecting on the demise of the values she grew up with in post-war Canada. To her children, Janet’s breezy ‘gee-whiz’ English seems entirely fictional, even
otherworldly:
I f l squint I can still see the cool immaculate housewife I once dreamed o f becoming. I ’m Elizabeth Montgomery starring in Bewitched. Em Dina Merrill lunching at the Museum o f Modern Art with Christina Ford. {AFP, 9)
Wade even refers to her mockingly as ‘TV mom’, sounding as she does like a character from Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) or I Love Lucy (1951-1957). In spite of the oppressive influence of television and nuclear family representations, however, Coupland refuses to allow Janet to be a total anachronism:
31 Coontz, p. 9.
‘Mom,’ Wade said, ‘the thing I can’t figure out about you is how you can be so moral and TV mom about life, but not believe in anything at the same time. I don’t understand.’
‘What made you think that those TV moms believed in anything, Wade?’
‘Uhhh-’
‘They didn’t. Not really. We weren’t robots but we weren’t complete people, either.’ {AFP, 164)
Along with Janet, it is Wade who falls into a nostalgia trap here insofar as he clearly believes human nature fundamentally alters with each successive generation; a
conviction shared by Ballard, as we shall see. As a consumer of a hyper-mediated past, Wade appreciates the 1950s as an animatronic display in a theme park. It is also a source of intentional hilarity as the broken and fading inhabitants of the novel cling to the familiar tropes of the familial in the most bizarre situations. However, Janet’s confession that she was ‘... a dumb bunny’ and that she ‘... believed the script [she] was handed’ leaves ample room for pathos and indeed sympathy to ameliorate the viciousness of the critique {AFP, 235). Also, while Janet is clearly the most
sympathetic 1950s refugee, she is not alone. Her ex-husband Ted is also an unwitting victim of a suburban nuclear family ideal for which he was encouraged to be nostalgic even as it was presented to his generation at the time:
Dad - oh, man. Still the hypocritical prick acting out some corny 1960s idea o f manhood. Wade knew that his father had dropped his mother quite cruelly
and was now living the life of Mr. Salt-and-Pepper Chest Hair, with his shirts wide open... (AFP, 28)
With the tragic foreshortening of life HIV/AIDS occasions, the present becomes an ever more pressing concern for the Drummonds. To deny it, they shore up their past with nostalgia, even as the present accelerates away from them. As Wade says of his own worsening condition, ‘I figure this virus is merely resetting the clocks to where they ought to be reset. Senior citizens are unnatural’ (AFP, 70). Attempting to keep pace with a nostalgic chimera of domestic harmony is presented as a disease in itself. The melancholia so essential to nostalgia pools in the inevitable gutter between the true, flawed nuclear family and its finessed representation. Nicole Sully complements this thesis, adding, ‘Foucault state[s] that “people are not shown what they were, but
q -j
what they must remember having been.’”
For the protagonists of All Families are Psychotic, cognizance of the past can be noxious or redemptive. The emphasis placed on the characters’ HIV cannot pass without comment in this bipolar context. The family’s HIV brings them closer
together, papering over the cracks in their relationships. Janet, Wade, Nickie and Ted’s HIV undermines and encrypts their respective nostalgias. Following Ballard’s The
Unlimited Dream Company (1979), it also raises the disquieting issue of incest.
Following the chain of infection from Wade to Nickie (who sleep together initially) to Janet (who is struck with the same HIV-tainted bullet as Wade) to Ted, who marries
33 N icole Sully, ‘An Everyday Nostalgia: Memory and the Fictions o f Belonging’
<http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/cfel/docs/Sullv FV.pdf> [accessed 26 October 2007] (paragraph 2 o f 30).
Nickie while oblivious to the fact he has indirectly contracted HIV from his own son, the shared blood of the nuclear family turns as toxic as the constructed nuclear family unit itself. However, this deferred incest, perhaps an attempt at uncovering a more sinister dynamic underpinning the suburban nuclear family, is still not enough to snuff out this nostalgic construction. Instead it emerges, like the Drummonds themselves, stronger. While it was never Coupland’s intention to dispense with the nuclear family altogether (merely one of a series of ideological formations) it still emerges
triumphant, augmented and above all stable in its recognised instability. As Andy Medhurst elegantly puts it, ‘suburbia is still a given’.34 Coupland’s novel is part of a wider liberal tendency, arguably prompted by the success of The Simpsons (1989-), to reconfigure the suburban nuclear family in a manner that incorporates dysfunction into the nostalgic paradigm. The nostalgic fiction is not thrown out so much as buttressed against further erosion through an acceptance of the porosity of the nostalgic images. Dickinson writes:
[A] constellation of recent suburban movies offer audiences spatial visions of nostalgically tinged suburbs that place individuals into the bosom of imperfect but loving and white families and remake home and away, self and Other, on foundations of security and comfort.
34 Andy Medhurst, ‘Negotiating the Gnome Zone’ in Visions o f Suburbia, ed. by Roger Silverstone (Routledge: London, 1997), pp. 240-268 (p. 258).
35 Greg Dickinson, ‘The P leasantville Effect: Nostalgia and Visual Framing o f (White) Suburbia’, Western Journal o f Communication, 70 (2006), 212-233 (p. 213).
If Dickinson is correct, then many reconfigurations of the nuclear family maintain nostalgia by accentuating the imperfections that were only minor in the presentation of the suburban family in previous decades. The Cunninghams in the 1970s nostalgic evocation of the 1950s’ Happy Days (1974-1984) had their imperfections, but none were profound enough to truly threaten the sanctity of the family unit. It may be surmised that among other factors, soaring divorce rates have meant that the nostalgic narrative has had to incorporate (and thereby neutralise) an increasing number of contemporary issues that were formerly considered chiefly urban (and therefore ‘authentic’ according to the reductionist discourses against which Coupland inveighs) in order to survive. ‘Tied together in [...] suburbia [...] then, are profoundly difficult contradictions’, Dickinson contends. ‘[T]he most fundamental of which is that between the risks of deeply felt “true” emotions and human attachments on one hand, and the safety and security of living a normally and socially accepted life on the
36
other.. . The Ballard story that comes closest to confirming Dickinson’s claims is ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977), which appeared while less complex depictions of the nuclear family such as Happy Days were still on air. Ballard posits a future in which all individuals are legally bound to remain isolated from each other. The nuclear family survives, but no member of a given family is allowed to interact with any other member other than through the television. ‘A ll... activities’, the
paediatrician narrator tell us, Tike our family life itself, were made possible by television. At that time neither I nor anyone else had ever dreamed that we might actually meet in person.’37
36 Dickinson, p. 227.
37 J.G. Ballard, ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ in J.G. Ballard: The Com plete Short Stories: Volume 2 (London: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 442-451 (p. 443).
Despite his conviction that this forced separation creates conditions under which citizens are ‘spared all the psychological dangers of a physically intimate family life’, the narrator begins to yield to the temptation of meeting his wife and two children in the flesh for the first time.38 In a perspicacious, if ambivalent take on the television’s ideological role in the nuclear family configuration, Ballard has his narrator arrange a clandestine meeting between all four family members. ‘ [We] would all wear make-up, modelling our behaviour as closely as possible on our screen life together,’ his narrator proposes. ‘Accordingly, three months later, Margaret and myself, David and Karen, that unit of intensive care, came together for the first time in my sitting room.’39 The nuclear family is here revealed as the intensive care unit of the title; that which requires constant monitoring and external support, and could expire at any moment. Far from the distancing effect one would expect, television proves to be the binding agent keeping the nuclear family on ideological life-support, a now ubiquitous-trope to be found in satirical cartoons, from Family Guy (1998-2001) (2003-) to South Park (1997-). ‘Affection and compassion demanded distance’, claims the narrator
regarding the family’s telemediated relationship, and possibly to irony itself. ‘Only at a distance could one find that true closeness to another human being which, with grace, might transform itself into love.’40 The physical encounter with which the story climaxes proves to be both a confirmation and a subversion of this claim.