Addams Family Dynamics
by Arezou
Most family fare that I was used to watching as a child had a few fairly predictable tropes. The parents just don’t understand their children. The children want nothing to do with their embarrassing parents. The mom and dad are constantly getting into stupid misunderstandings, can sometimes barely tolerate each other, and ugh, in-laws, amirite? The Addams family does away with all of this, not just in the early 90’s classics The Addams Family and Addams Family Values but in the franchise as a whole.
Though these movies are the entries into the “Addams Family” canon I am most familiar with, I actually grew up watching this creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky family on TV. I regularly watched the 1992 animated series in syndication, as well as the 1998 live-action “New Addams Family” series that committed the egregious crime of changing the iconic theme song. I have vague memories of a direct-to-video movie where Tim Curry plays Gomez. In high school, I found some episodes of the 1960s sitcom and watched those too. So to say I’m familiar with the quirks of the First Family of Halloween is a pretty safe assessment. And what I can say without a doubt is this: the Addams family is a rock-solid unit that unironically, unabashedly love each other in a way we don’t usually see.
Admittedly, it’s pretty difficult to sustain a television series with absolutely no interpersonal conflict, so of course this occurred in every TV iteration. However, the 1960s series sets the tone almost immediately with their first episode. The family members are strange by 1960s suburban reckoning, and their unironic ignorance of why others might find them odd usually leads to enough misunderstandings to sustain a 22-minute episode. This is the source of most of the comedy in all iterations of the Addams family. The people from “normal” society simply do not understand them, but they are never seen as right for thinking this way. This is no different the iconic 1991 and 1993 movies, where rather than having the family at odds with one another, and learning that they do, in fact, love each other by the end (the way other family movies would), both movies instead adopt this “us against the normal world” plot, for which Uncle Fester is the catalyst both times.
“Have you noticed it’s always Fester causing a problem in these movies?”
This observation came courtesy of my mother, during this year’s annual rewatch of The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values. It turns out I had, in fact, noticed this and I think it boils down to the fact that Addams Family is too rock-solid a unit to mess with.
Not a single Halloween goes by (or Valentine’s Day for that matter) where I don’t see memes proclaiming Gomez and Morticia to be “couple goals”, and they really, truly are. How many of us out there aren’t wishing for someone to look at us with hearts in their eyes even after years together, someone who is exactly the right kind of weird to complement your own, who shares the responsibilities of the house and of raising your kids? What set Gomez and Morticia apart in the 1960’s is exactly this: they were a married couple who were still very madly, passionately in love with one another, a contrast to the “lazy husband/nag wife” trope. Their relationship is the foundation on which the family stands, and there is not a crack to be seen. To drive any kind of plot-related wedge between the two of them would be to miss the point entirely. Likewise, unlike most sitcom children, Wednesday and Pugsley actually share their parents interests in the ghoulish and the macabre. So any predictable plot where the children feel misunderstood by their parents simply isn’t possible. And as much as we love Lurch, Thing, and Granny, there just isn’t enough there to drive the conflict of a 90-120 minute movie. Which leaves us with Fester.
Poor Uncle Fester. His role prior to the 1991 and 1993 movies had mainly been one of comic relief, since in a family of weirdos he was arguably the weirdest. However, in both of those movies, the primary action is driven by a scheming individual or individuals using Fester as a pawn to steal the Addams family’s considerable wealth. Though the broad strokes of both movies are the same, they aren’t identical by any means. The first is a very tight story where the entire family undergoes strife together, the second is larger in scope and features a delightful B-story about Wednesday and Pugsley at a very exclusive, mildly racist camp for WASP kids. I could argue that the reason Fester is so easily pulled into these schemes, particularly in the second movie, is because of how picture-perfect the bond between Gomez, Morticia, and their children is. Living with a couple that in love and that happy 24/7 is bound to stir up feelings of loneliness, and it’s only in seeking the same connection that he falls in with the delightfully over-the-top Debbie Jelinski. But even when he’s being used by others from the “normal” world, he never quite loses sight of what makes him weird or different - essentially, the things that make him an Addams.
The one notable exception to all of this is the 2019 animated Addams Family movie, which I saw for the first time this year. Here, Fester has gone back to his role as comic relief, and the antagonist is a woman representing the very face of gentrification, trying to make the Addams family more palatable and “normal”. Unlike in every other version of the story, the family has no interaction with the outside world, and Wednesday longs to know what the world beyond the family is like. This isn’t a Wednesday who knows she shares her parents interests, but one who will come to discover it over the course of the story, and will come to embrace her entire extended family for their quirks. That and other minute changes to the story mean that the family dynamic isn’t exactly what it was in earlier iterations, but the heart is still there. The in-law jokes are kept to a minimum. The humour is still characteristically over the top. We still have a couple that is passionately in love and who care about their kids, and allow them to flourish. Here, we see them accommodate their children’s interests, even if it’s not what they would have chosen for them. This is much like in Addams Family Values, when the kids are sent to camp against their will. Their parents believe they want to go, and so they do the research and send them to the nicest one they can find, even if they don’t necessarily approve. In the 2019 film, Pugsley is allowed to alter a family ritual to suit his skills better, and Wednesday is sent to public school at her request.
My one regret with the animated movie is the fact that it’s animated at all. It’s delightful to see veteran actors Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston having the time of their lives as Gomez and Morticia in the ’91 and ’93 movies, and I would have paid big money to see Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron get to do the same in live action. But I digress.
It shouldn’t be bold to have a family dynamic like this in the media we consume, but then, maybe that’s what makes them so special, and why each generation keeps coming back to them. Each person experiencing this family for the first time or the 100th time probably sees something in them that they want for themselves. It can be the #couplegoals nature of Gomez and Morticia’s relationship, but more broadly it could be that sense of acceptance and love by people who are just as weird as you are.
