The American happy family that

never was: ambivalence in the

Hollywood Family Melodrama
Keywords
Jessica H.E. Redman Repression
Ambivalence
Hollywood Family
Abstract Melodrama
This essay examines the portrayal of unhappy American families in American Beauty
Hollywood Family Melodramas since World War II. In particular, it It’s a Wonderful Life
examines the ambivalence towards the family evident in American society Monogamous Family
and films, which arises from the repression of desire inherent within the Desire
modern monogamous family.

Many Hollywood Family Melodramas since World War II have 1 Thomas Schatz,
depicted unhappy families whose members demonstrate ambivalence Hollywood Genres,
towards the family - love/hate, desire/repression - and yearn for New York: Random
House, 1981, pp.
something better, different, or at least more bearable. Using both 223-28.
socio-cultural and psychoanalytic theory, the question I will raise in
2 ibid., p. 228.
this paper is why this type of film occurs so pervasively in Hollywood
cinema, and why it is so popular with American audiences in par- 3 Examples of
Hollywood Family
ticular. Melodramas
I have chosen, for a number of reasons, to focus on films from the include: Father
Hollywood Family Melodrama genre, a genre first defined by Thomas Knows Best (1935);
Schatz in relation to filmic depictions of American families after Father of the Bride
(1950 and 1990);
World War II.1 Firstly, the Hollywood Family Melodrama is a genre Home from the Hill
created and maintained within a particular cultural system and (1960); Cape Fear
directed at a mainly American audience, which means that it can be (1962 and1991);
studied in relation to a particular assumed audience. Secondly, The Family Man
(2000); How To
Schatz argues that it first appeared as a distinct genre in the post- Make An American
war period (when issues pertaining to the family became of primary Quilt (1995); The
narrative importance) and is still present in Hollywood cinema Ice Storm (1997);
Imitation of Life
today.2 This gives a clear focus through which I can examine repre- (1959); Life With
sentations of ambivalence in families. Thirdly, unlike the Western or Father (1947); Long
Gangster film whose appeal seems to have faded with time, the genre Hot Summer
has proven an ongoing relevance to audiences through its persistent (1958); The
Magnificent
popularity, and retains a very similar form to the original 1950s’ Ambersons (1942);
Family Melodrama. This can be taken as an indication of the impor- and Meet the
tance of the role that the Family Melodrama plays in helping audi- Parents (2000).
ences from different eras cope with the feelings of ambivalence
towards the family that psychoanalysis and socio-cultural theory
have demonstrated.
From the range of films in the Family Melodrama genre,3 I have
selected to focus on two films that, between them, span the five

EJAC 22 (1) 49–69 © Intellect Ltd 2003 49

4 Frederick Engels, decades since the genre evolved. The first, It’s a Wonderful Life
The Origin of the (1946) was released in the immediate post-war period, and the
Family, Private
second, American Beauty, is a contemporary Family Melodrama made
Property and The
State: In the Light of in 1999. I have chosen each film as an iconic example of the time in
the Researches of which it was made: both films proved extremely successful at the
Lewis H. Morgan, box office, demonstrating their appeal and relevance to audiences of
New York:
International
their era. With more than fifty years between their release dates,
Publishers, 1972, these films provide strong examples for comparison of the ways in
pp. 108-40. which the Family Melodrama has represented ambivalence towards
5 ibid., p. 138. the family through film for more than five decades.
Having detailed the main psychological, sociological and cine-
6 ibid., p. 137.
matic theoretical work that is of relevance to the paper in Section 1,
7 This theory is I will go on to apply this theory in a detailed discussion of two
opposed to that of
Sigmund Freud, Hollywood Family Melodramas. In Section 2 I will discuss A
(The Standard Wonderful Life, in which ambivalence towards the family is repre-
Edition of the sented in the conflict between the characters’ desire for a life
Complete
outside/without the family and the sense of family obligation and
Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud: responsibility which society has instilled in them. I will contrast this
Volume IX, London: discussion in Section 3, with an analysis of American Beauty, a film
Hogarth Press, that demonstrates ambivalence towards the family as a battle
1973, pp. 101),
who theorizes that
between the desire to transgress society’s ‘rules’ within the family
the family arose and the nostalgic yearning for attainment of a past image of the
because men family.
required regular
genital satisfaction
rather than Repression and ambivalence in American society’s
occasional sex, and monogamous family
that the pleasure The family in society and the society in family
afforded by this fre- The family as an institution is inevitably influenced by the society
quent copulation
transformed into within which it is constructed. In The Origin of the Family, Private
love for a single Property and the State, philosopher Frederick Engels examines the
woman. work of Lewis H. Morgan, and his proposal of how the modern-day
8 James Lull (ed.), family came into being. Morgan sees the family as having developed
World Families through four consecutive stages: the consanguine family and the
Watch Television, ‘pualuan’ family (both arranged around group marriages) were fol-
California: Sage
Publications, 1988, lowed by the pairing family (where informal marriage pairs were
p. 9; A.E. Howard, formed) and finally the monogamous family as we know it today.4
The American Working from Morgan’s theories, Engels concluded that
Family: Myth and ‘monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in
Reality,
Washington: the hands of a single individual’,5 and that it was at this stage that
National the family became the primary economic unit of society.6 By observ-
Association for the ing that the monogamous family unit arose due to developing eco-
Education of Young nomic patterns of society,7 it becomes obvious that today’s monoga-
Children, 1980, p.
5; T.R. Lindlof, M.J. mous family is not a natural structure. The family is a construction of
Shatzer and D. society.
Wilkinson, Engels and others8 maintain that family, culture and society
‘Accommodation of
reflect each other - that one will grow and advance over time only
Video and
Television in the in relation to the other.9 James Lull argues that:

50 Jessica H.E. Redman

 cultures are not found, they are created socially. The family - American Family’,
variously constituted and culturally differentiated - is the inter- in World Families
Watch Television, ed.
personal context in which much of this construction takes place,
by J. Lull,
characteristically influenced by external and historical conditions California: Sage
... and by idiosyncratic patterns of communication at home, Publications, 1988,
including especially uses of language, styles of interpersonal p. 188.
interaction, and uses of mass media.10 9 Engels, op. cit., p.
146.
Lull sees the family as our gateway into the larger social world, as 10 Lull, op. cit., p. 9.
the classroom in which we are ‘taught’ the values of our society.11 11 Lull, op. cit., p. 9.
A.E. Howard adds that ‘the family is not immune to social changes
12 Howard, op. cit., p.
brought about through forces beyond its influence, nor is society 5.
unaffected by changes in family form and function’.12 In other
13 I will use
words, the family is influenced and constructed by the society and ‘Monogamous
culture in which it is formed, but it also contributes to the construc- Family’ and
tion of that society. ‘Nuclear Family’
In this paper, I am interested in the influence of Hollywood interchangeably
from this point. Use
Family Melodramas on American audiences and families. These films by various writers
present images of families that influence the individual viewer’s tends to see these
beliefs and ideals of what society expects or demands the family to terms as essentially
be. Viewers, in turn, will express these beliefs through interaction interchangeable
and my usage of
with their own families. The family, being the primary force behind the terms reflects
the formation of an individual’s beliefs, customs and behaviours, will this trend. Also, I
cultivate these beliefs. Thus, the individual is formed by the family am aware that the
terms definitively
that is formed by the individual who is formed by society (in this
connote quite differ-
case, influenced through the medium of film). In today’s terms, the ent meanings, but
most widely accepted family form in America is still the in this paper I am
Monogamous (or Nuclear) Family13, and individuals are shaped by concerned with the
aspects that they
this family to fit into patriarchal, late capitalist society. hold in common,
and their shared
Nuclear Family fallout reasons for existing:
The Nuclear Family - that is, a married mother and father with one the commitment of
one man to one
or more biological children - has been the dominant family form for woman within a
approximately the last three centuries in Western society, if not single family due to
longer.14 Developed for utilitarian (largely economic15) reasons, and societal and
unnatural in its construction by society, the advent of the economic reasons.
Monogamous Family brought with it a swathe of complications. In 14 Lull, op. cit., p. 11;
this section I will discuss the most important, pervasive and obvious Lindlof, Shatzer and
Wilkinson, op. cit.,
of these: the repression of desire. p. 159. Lindlof et al
The rules and mores of society demand that the family be con- do acknowledge
structed as a sanctuary from sin and transgression, where certain that the ‘nuclear’
desires must be ignored or controlled: incest; adultery; and irrespon- American family of
the eighteenth and
sible actions of detrimental effect to family members. Sigmund Freud nineteenth
argues that ‘the restriction and repression of instincts owe their centuries were,
origin ... to compliance with the demands of civilization’16 and that however, closely
the process of repression and sublimation in society (and family) is enmeshed with
extended kin within
necessary and inevitable.17 Indeed, he believes that ‘human civiliza- the community.

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 51

15 Engels, op. cit., p. tion rests upon ... restriction of our instincts’ and that therefore the
138. only choice left for us to make is between containment and
16 Sigmund Freud, The despair.18
Claims of Theorist Robin Wood agrees with Freud’s basic concept that
Psychoanalysis to repression is inherent within all human society. He explains Freud’s
Scientific Interest,
1913, pp. 188-89, theory of the ‘Return of the Repressed’19, which stipulates that:
quoted in G.
Horowitz, in a society built on monogamy and family there will be an
Repression, Basic and
enormous surplus of sexual energy that will have to be
Surplus Repression in
Psycho-analytic repressed, and that what is repressed must always strive to
Theory: Freud, Reich, return. Containment, then, implicitly accepts monogamy and
and Marcuse, family as natural and inevitable, and refers to the ways in
Toronto: University
of Toronto Press,
which excess energies can be dealt with.20
1977, p. 12.
17 Robin Wood, ‘The
In this paper, I will discuss the monogamous family unit (function-
American Family ing within the greater institution of patriarchal society) as the
Comedy: From Meet repressing force, and the struggle between containment and despair
Me In St. Louis to that we see represented by the characters in Hollywood Family
The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre’, Wide
Melodramas.
Angle, 3: 2 Freud talks about two types of repression, which he terms ‘basic’
(1979a), p. 7. and ‘surplus’ repression.21 ‘Basic repression’ is what helps us to
18 Sigmund Freud, The direct our lives and allows us to coexist with other people. Surplus
Resistance to repression, which is present within the family, is:
Psychoanalysis,
1925, p. 219,
quoted in Horowitz, specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby people
op. cit., p. 12. are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined
19 Sigmund Freud,
roles within that culture. In terms of our own culture then ...
‘Repression’, Pelican surplus repression makes us into monogamous heterosexual
Freud Library Vol. bourgeois patriarchal capitalists ... that is, if it works.22
11,
Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976a, It is surplus repression that leads to our feelings of ambivalence
pp. 154. towards the family. On the one hand society has taught us to crave
20 Wood, op. cit. the security and stable, loving environment of the family; on the
(1979a), p. 6. other we harbour resentment toward the institution that forces us to
21 Freud (1976a), op.
repress our innate desires. We dream of achieving fulfilment and sat-
cit. pp. 145-58. isfaction through our family lives, but instead we often experience it
22 Robin Wood,
as ‘an enslaving nightmare to be escaped’.23
Hollywood From
Vietnam To Reagan, Longing and fantasy
New York: The ambivalence that we feel towards the family is difficult to
Columbia University
Press, 1986a, p. express; society only permits that we express our positive feelings
70. towards the family, our negative feelings must be covered up and
23 Howard, op. cit., p.
repressed. Therefore we resist the temptation to escape or destroy the
2. family, or to give in to socially unacceptable sexual drives. Instead
our repressed desires appear in the form of fantasy (as demonstrated
by the characters’ in Family Melodramas): we long to escape the
family; we long to destroy the family; we long for a nostalgic image of

52 Jessica H.E. Redman

a past family that was happier; we long to be sexually and socially 24 Freud, op. cit.
transgressive. (1976a), p. 151.
Freud explains that repressed desires are relegated to the uncon- 25 Sigmund Freud,
scious, but that what is repressed ‘exercises a continuous pressure in Totem and Taboo,
the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced London: Routledge,
1913, p. 35. In
by an unceasing counter-pressure’.24 The effort required to continu- Totem and Taboo,
ously suppress these desires within the unconscious is substantial, Freud describes the
and moments of weakness allow the desires to emerge - for example, taboo as the prohi-
bition of
in dreams or fantasies. Occasionally, under extreme pressure, they
unconscious, forbid-
will break through into the conscious completely, allowing a desired den desire.
act to be articulated or even fulfilled. I believe that films also allow
26 Barbara Creed,
the conscious mind to let down its guard against repressed desires in ‘Horror and the
a way that is cathartic and non-threatening to the social order. Monstrous-
Cinema can be seen as a way to vicariously live out our repressed Feminine: An
Imaginary
desires, to exercise our ‘taboo’ perversions and thus exorcise our Abjection’, Screen,
longings.25 The cinema experience allows us to imagine - without 27: 1 (1986), p.
guilt or actual consequences - the fulfilment of our own unconscious 48.
desires and fantasies to slip the shackles of family authority. Barbara 27 Michael Medved,,
Creed argues that ‘the viewing of the horror film signifies a desire ... Hollywood vs.
for perverse pleasure’; for pleasure gained through experiencing the America, New York:
Harper Collins
abject and the taboo.26 This theory can be extrapolated to suggest Publishers, 1992.
that the viewing of any taboo material in a film may invoke pleasure
28 Medved, op. cit., p.
and/or release in the spectator. 95.
Some of the unconscious desires arising from our repression are
for: escape from the family (and the subsequent freedoms gained);
destruction of the family; a nostalgic image of a past, more perfect
family; and transgression within the family (incest, adultery, drug
use, irresponsibility). We often see these desires contemplated or ful-
filled in Hollywood films, especially the Family Melodrama.

Myth of the happy family

The idea of film as fantasy-fulfilment is diametrically opposed to the
not uncommon view held by many conservative theorists (such as
Michael Medved27) that films are accurate reflections of reality. The
popularity of Family Melodramas which depict the family negatively
suggests that they are fulfilling a deeper function for their audiences
than simply reflecting a general societal trend. Statistically (as dis-
cussed later in this section) the American family as an institution is
in no more structural trouble today than it was fifty or a hundred
years ago. The negative depictions of families in Hollywood Family
Melodramas are not accurate representations of most real families.28
Michael Medved claims that most Americans believe that film and
television families do represent trends within society. However, he
argues that:

Hollywood no longer reflects - or even respects - the values of

most American families ... For example: Our fellow citizens

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 53

29 Medved, op. cit., p. cherish the institution of marriage and consider religion an
10. important priority in life; but the entertainment industry pro-
30 Medved, op. cit., p. motes every form of sexual adventurism and regularly ridicules
95. religious believers as crooks and crazies.29
31 E.L. Kain, The Myth
of Family Decline: The result is that most Americans believe that the family institution
Understanding is on the brink of collapse, but at the same time they are content
Families in a World
of Rapid Social that their own families are functioning happily.30 They believe that
Change, Toronto: American families in general are in trouble, and their own families
Lexington Books, must be an exception to the rule.
1990, p. 11.
This phenomenon relates to Edward L. Kain’s theory of the myth
32 Kain, op. cit., p. 4. of family decline, which he describes as ‘the notion that families in
Some of these the past were stable and happy and that recent decades have seen a
statistics are
included in Section rapid decay of family life’.31 He argues that we have an image of a
2. happier, more perfect, ‘traditional’ family from the past, which has
now been lost in the chaos and bleakness of modern life. However,
our images of families in the past are often based more on myth
than on reality. Using recent statistical evidence, Kain clearly
demonstrates that our constructed memories/images of the ‘tradi-
tional’ family are a far reach from the actual experience of families
in the past.32
Rather than accurately reflecting trends of society and the family,
Hollywood Family Melodramas help us to deal with our complex
ambivalent emotions towards the family. On the one hand they
provide us with examples of unhappy families with which we can
favourably compare our own situations. On the other, they not only
allow us to identify with characters who are fulfilling the same aber-
rant desires we may have, but include a final narrative element
which acts to appease any guilt we may experience in doing so - the
happy ending.

Happy endings
Hollywood Family Melodramas appeal to us because they mirror our
own struggle with ambivalent emotions concerning the family. They
provide us with characters who fulfil their transgressive desires, who
at the same time are not satisfied by these transgressions. At the end
of almost every film, the family is inevitably reunited and its impor-
tance is forcefully reinstated.
Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry propose that Hollywood
film narratives revolve around the male protagonist’s relationship
with a ‘lost object’. This aspect of Metz and Baudry’s ‘apparatus
theory’ helps to explain the function of the happy ending in the
Hollywood Family Melodrama. The ‘apparatus theory’:

emphasizes the way the cinema compensates for what the

viewing subject lacks; the cinema offers an imaginary unity to
smooth over the fragmentation at the heart of subjectivity.

54 Jessica H.E. Redman

 Narrative structures take up this process in the way they con- 33 Barbara Creed,
struct stories in which the ‘lost object’ ... is recovered by the ‘Film and
Psychoanalysis’, in
male protagonist.33
The Oxford Guide to
Film Studies, ed. by
Barbara Creed implies that the ‘lost object’ is almost always a J. Hill and P.
woman, who is united with the male protagonist by the end of the Gibson, Oxford:
Oxford University
film. However, we could also read the ‘lost object’ as the family, Press, 1998, p. 82.
which is habitually reunited, after many trials and tribulations, by
34 Sigmund Freud,
the end of the film. Perhaps the audience’s real enjoyment comes
‘Beyond the
not from simply identifying with characters who disobey the rules of Pleasure Principle’,
the family, but from identifying with characters who first trans- Pelican Freud
gress, yet then return to the family at the end; or characters who Library, Vol. 11,
Harmondsworth:
‘lose’ their families in order to experience the pleasure of reunifica- Penguin, 1976b,
tion. pp. 283-86. Freud
We feel ambivalence towards the family - love/hate, fulfil- describes what he
ment/repression - and these films allow us to process many of calls the Fort/Da
game based on the
these emotions. Sigmund Freud’s Fort/Da game provides an observation of an
example of how we use mechanisms to process such ambivalent 18-month-old child
emotions.34 Jacques Lacan argues that the reel signifies lack, and taking pleasure
that the game is a child’s way of coming to terms with the irre- from throwing
away a reel of cot-
deemable loss of the mother.35 Like many theorists, Lacan places ton (saying
greater importance on the ‘fort’ part of the game, arguing that the ‘fort’/away) and
game as a whole functions in relation to a fundamental lack, and then retrieving it
‘is aimed at what, essentially, is not there’.36 However, Freud (saying ‘da’/here).
argues, more convincingly in my opinion, that the pleasure that 35 Susan Hayward,
the child gains from the return of the reel (‘da’) is what is really Cinema Studies: The
Key Concepts, 2nd
most important.37 The ultimate pleasure of playing the game Edition, London:
comes from regaining an object that was once lost. The child Routledge, 2000, p.
pushes away that which he loves in order to delight in its antici- 291.
pated and deferred return. 36 Jacques Lacan, The
We experience this same pleasure when watching a Hollywood Four Fundamental
Family Melodrama. We (with the characters) gain pleasure from first Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, ed. by J.-A.
distancing ourselves from the family (by experiencing our repressed Miller, trans. by A.
desires) and then returning to it (accepting a return to and accep- Sheridan, New
tance of the family, facilitated by the happy ending). Our imagined York: Norton,
transgressions only make us appreciate more the security and refuge 1978a, p. 62.
of the family once we return. 37 Sigmund Freud,
Thus, the happy ending, which is present in almost every Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, ed. and
Hollywood film, functions in a number of ways. It can be read as ful- trans. by J.
filling the need to attain the ‘lost object’, but it also reaffirms the Strachey, London:
importance and goodness of the family institution and appeases any Hogarth Press,
guilt we may have felt having allowed ourselves to imagine these 1961, p. 284.
forbidden pleasures.38 Thus it caters to our complex ambivalent rela- 38 This parallels
tionship with the family. We leave feeling released, but also reas- Freud, op. cit.
(1976a), p. 345,
sured that our repression is all for a good cause - the family is an where he explains
indestructible and necessary part of our existence, and compared to the distress
Hollywood families, ours probably aren’t that bad! experienced in

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 55

 dreams of It’s a Wonderful Life: Let me out of here!
exhibiting (being The 1940s and 1950s are often thought of and depicted nostalgi-
naked). He argues
cally, as an era when Nuclear families were simple, happy and inno-
that this is a ‘reac-
tion of the second cent. Images from TV sitcoms of the time (Leave It to Beaver 1957;
system against the The Ruggles 1949; Mama 1949; Father Knows Best 1954) still res-
content of the onate in our ‘memories’,39 reminding us of how wonderful life once
scene of exhibiting
having found
was, and how contented families once were. Recent films such as
expression in spite Pleasantville (1998) and Blast from the Past (1999) play with such
of the ban upon it’. stereotypes, and contrast these happy-go-lucky times with a darker
The unconscious and seedier present. However, it is important to remember that ‘the
desires the wish,
but self-censorship
way we were is seldom the way it was’40 - our vision of the past
makes you guilty never matches up with the way people of the time saw their own
about experiencing lives.
the fulfilment of
desire in your
dream. America in flux
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was Frank Capra’s first post-war film.41
39 Whether those
memories be actual The late 1940s were a time of change and shifting attitudes for
or culturally America. Elation at winning the war conflicted with feelings of doubt
constructed. The and unease following one of the hardest and most difficult decades of
imagery of these American history. Following the war came unprecedented shifts in
eras pervades mod-
ern culture, and is the evolution of society:
recognizable to
many of those who Long established demographic trends toward smaller families,
were born decades later marriages and increased divorces were actually reversed
later.
during the Fifties as young men and women, seeking comfort
40 J.R. Taylor, ‘Were and security within the confines of the home, established fami-
Those the Days?’,
American Film, 3: 1 lies at an unprecedented rate. Old living patterns disappeared as
(October 1977), pp. millions of people flocked to the suburbs to create new commu-
20-22. nities awash with children. Young women sought their identities
41 L. Quart and A. as homemakers, ignoring - or indeed rejecting - the promises of
Auster, American equality that had moved earlier generations of women. Young
Film and Society men, facing an increasingly bureaucratized world, sought their
Since 1945, 2nd
Edition, New York: identities in a newly defined role as husband and father.
Praeger, 1991, p. Whatever this was, it was not the ‘traditional’ family.42
24.
42 Jean E. Hunter, Contrary to Jean Hunter’s opinion, I think that a reversion to ‘tradi-
‘Adjusting to tional’ family values is exactly what these reforms indicate. When
Changing Familial we think of a ‘traditional family’ today, it is in terms of a Nuclear
Roles: 25 Years of
“Can This Marriage Family with mother at home with the children and father as primary
Be Saved?”’, in The breadwinner. In the uncertainty of the post-war period, people
American Family: returned to such traditional family stereotypes, rejecting the progress
Historical made in previous decades in terms of gender equality and more
Perspectives, ed. by
J.E. Hunter and liberal family relations, in favour of an imagined and idealized secu-
P.T. Mason, rity.
Pennsylvania: Unlike other genres, the Family Melodrama of the 1940s and
Duquesne
1950s produced a host of films that presented seemingly conflicting
University Press,
1991, p. 157. representations of American life. Films that seemed optimistic on the

56 Jessica H.E. Redman

surface - How Green Was My Valley (1941), It’s a Wonderful Life and 43 Schatz, op. cit., p.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - could also be seen to raise ques- 227.
tions about America’s confidence in the institution of the family.43 44 ibid., p. 223.
‘No other genre films ... projected so complex and paradoxical a view 45 Mark Nicholls,
of America, at once celebrating and severely questioning the basic ‘Small Towns,
values and attitudes of the mass audience’.44 Families and The
The paradoxical views of America presented in these films Repression We Had
to Have: Lasse
demonstrate what can be read as a backlash to the post-war rever- Hallstrom’s What’s
sion to traditional values. A society that had seen itself steadily pro- Eating Gilbert
gressing towards a more liberal culture as far as issues of family Grape?’, Metro
Education, 13
structure and gender roles were concerned, now had to cope with
(1997), p. 6.
the side effects of a fear-driven leap backwards. America’s reversion
to traditional values and renewed focus on the family, monogamy, 46 Wood , op. cit.
(1986a), p. 70.
children and the father as breadwinner, combined to reproduce the
deleterious effects of repression that came with the first monogamous
family (as discussed in Section 1).
Mark Nicholls argues that ‘representations of the family in
popular American cinema are traditionally riddled with ideological
contradictions’,45 and these contradictions can be seen to represent
our ongoing feelings of ambivalence towards the family. Our feelings
about the family have been a complicated mix of love/hate,
desire/repression, fulfilment/obligation, longing/oppression since the
evolution of the Monogamous Family, and the Family Melodrama
explores these persistent ambivalent emotions towards the family
more conspicuously than earlier genres ever did.
It’s a Wonderful Life epitomizes the capability of the Family
Melodrama to express America’s emotional ambivalence after the
war, presenting a facade of reassuring normality - the affirmation of
family values and the attainability of the American Dream - under-
scored by an altogether darker and more sinister message. The char-
acters in Wonderful Life feel compelled to uphold traditional family
values, to the extent that they sacrifice their own happiness and
desires to do so. They are torn between the feelings of family obliga-
tion fostered by society and their own repressed desires to escape
from the family, and even to destroy it altogether.
The ambivalence caused by surplus repression within the family46
is embodied in the character of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.
George longs to leave Bedford Falls, he longs to be a successful archi-
tect building bridges and skyscrapers, he longs for women, he longs
to travel the world. We see George express these unfulfilled desires in
two main ways in the film: through his numerous attempts to escape
from the family; and when those fail, through his last-ditch effort to
destroy the family completely.

George Bailey longs for escape

When they are still just children, George tells Mary (who later
becomes his wife): ‘I’m gonna go out exploring some day, you

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 57

47 J. Diski, ‘Curious watch. And I’m gonna have a couple of harems, and maybe three or
Tears’, Sight and four wives, wait and see!’ George maintains the desire to leave his
Sound, 4 (August
home town of Bedford Falls throughout his adolescence and adult-
1992), p. 39.
hood. Talking to Mary at her high-school dance, George passionately
expresses these desires once more:

I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and
I’m gonna see the world! Italy, Greece ... then I’m coming back
here to go to college and see what they know. And then I’m
gonna build things. I’m gonna build airfields, I’m gonna build
skyscrapers a hundred storeys high, I’m gonna build bridges a
mile long!

However, no matter how hard he tries, George never quite manages

to escape the confines of small-town America. At every turn, his
path is blocked by commitments to his family.
At the outset, George’s parents seem to understand and support
his need to leave ‘home’. Soon after he’s finished school (and on
the brink of a round-the-world trip) George explains to his father
Peter why he would never want to run the family building and
loan company: ‘I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my
life in a shabby little office, I’d go crazy. I want to do something
big, something important!’ However, when Peter Bailey dies sud-
denly of a stroke, George is forced to give up his overseas trip to
sort out the family business and support his mother. This is the
beginning of the end for George, the first of many instances when
his hopes and dreams of escape will be thwarted by family respon-
sibility.47
Predictably, when George’s brother Harry returns from college
(the education George always dreamed of but had to give up), it is
not to relieve George of his family responsibilities. Instead he arrives
with a satisfied grin, a new wife and a great job to boot.
Any remaining hopes of escape are dashed when George falls in
love with Mary. George’s ambivalent emotions towards the family
are most obviously demonstrated through his relationship with
Mary. George loves Mary, desires her and wants to possess her, but
also feels bound to conform to the pressure of society’s rules and
customs by marrying her and starting a family. George wants the
freedom to travel, be successful and have sexual relationships with
different women, but everything society has taught him tells him to
stay and play the role of the breadwinning father.
George is constantly torn between his love for Mary, his obliga-
tion to uphold society’s family values, and his longing for freedom
and independence. This ambivalence is demonstrated in the scene
following the flirtatious Violet’s humiliating refusal of George’s invi-
tation to go walking barefoot in the mountain grass. George goes to
Mary’s house, beating a stick along the fence. His desire to attract

58 Jessica H.E. Redman

her attention wars with his growing resentment of the seemingly 48 Robin Wood,
inevitable trap of a domestic life.48 ‘Ideology, Genre,
Auteur’, in Film
These ambivalent emotions come to a head when George enters
Genre Reader, ed. by
Mary’s house. With emotional and sexual tension thick in the air, B. Grant, Austin:
George finally grabs Mary and blurts out, ‘I don’t want to get University of Texas
married, ever, to anyone! I wanna do what I wanna do! Oh Mary!’. Press, 1986b, p.
64.
Giving in to the one desire that society will permit him to fulfil, he
kisses her. However, his submission to this desire demands that he 49 Wood , op. cit.
(1986b), p. 65.
forfeit all his longings for escape and independence. George gives in
to the overwhelming pressure he feels to conform to society’s rules, 50 ibid.
and represses his desires for freedom and personal fulfilment. Soon 51 Engels, op. cit., p.
after their kiss, George and Mary get married, use their honeymoon 138.
money to save the building and loan company, have five children -
and George never leaves Bedford Falls.

Longing for destruction of the family

In his article ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’, Robin Wood explains that
Wonderful Life does affirm the value of bourgeois family life, but that
it also reveals through the course of the narrative George’s intense
resentment of his entrapment within the family.49 Wood goes so far
as to argue that George actually longs for the destruction of his
family.50
George longs all his life for escape from the responsibility, com-
mitment and repression of the family. However, it is not until his
Uncle Billy loses 8000 dollars belonging to the building and loan
company that George realizes how inextricably trapped he is. He is
betrayed to the police by his nemesis, Henry Potter, and risks losing
everything - his job, his respect, his friends, his house and his family.
At this moment, George is the closest he’s ever been to escaping
his family. Uncle Billy’s mistake gives him the one opportunity for
freedom that he could legitimately take while still abiding by
society’s rules regarding family loyalty - once arrested he would
never have to long for escape again. But George’s socially unaccept-
able desire to escape the family is by this time so repressed that his
conscious mind recoils from the proffered opportunity. With escape
from the family therefore deemed entirely impossible, George decides
to commit suicide. Although George’s death would epitomize the
ultimate escape, it would also mean the destruction of his family.
Without a father, the notion of the economically determined Nuclear
Family implodes and cannot function in a society that uses such a
model as its fundamental building block.51 Without a father to
support them financially and emotionally, his wife and children
would have to struggle to survive.
In the famous film-noir style ‘nightmare’ sequence that follows
George’s ‘rescue’ from suicide by Clarence Oddbody AS2 (Angel
Second Class), George is shown what life would be like if he’d never
been born. Neon lights advertise girlie bars and sleazy clubs; the

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 59

52 Wood, op. cit. streets are dirty and filled with drunks, prostitutes and police;
(1986b), p. 64. shadowy figures lean in every darkened doorway. Narratively, this
53 Freud, op. cit. scene works to show George the importance of his existence, and as
(1976a), p. 109. justification for all that he’s sacrificed. However, the sequence also
54 S.B. Girgus, acts as a metaphor for the dark, repressed tensions that lurk within
Hollywood American society. ‘The film recognizes that behind every Bedford
Renaissance: The Falls lurks a Pottersville’, and within every picture-perfect George
Cinema of
Democracy in the Bailey father lurks a man with the ability to destroy his family.52 The
Era of Ford, Capra, film’s message is stark and clear - if we give in to our repressed
and Kazan, desires to escape or destroy the family, society as we know it will
Melbourne:
perish.
Cambridge
University Press, A Freudian reading of the nightmare sequence might assume that
1998, p. 94. the entire episode is just that, a nightmare: George is dreaming or
55 ibid. hallucinating. If we read the Pottersville sequence as George’s dream,
it enables us to observe the growing resentment he harbours
56 I will discuss the
complex functions towards his family situation. George’s dream symbolizes his repressed
of the Hollywood wish to destroy his family and fits Freud’s hypothesis that ‘A dream is
Happy Ending in the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish’ (author’s
detail in Section 3.
emphasis).53 The dream allows George to experience a life without
his family - the fulfilment of his suppressed wish; but the fulfilment of
this wish is disguised by the feelings of intense anxiety and guilt he
feels at the utter devastation his absence has brought on to his
family and town. The dream allows George to experience his
repressed wish, but prevents any pleasurable sensation by stressing
the selfishness and immorality of such a desire.
Sam Girgus argues that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life indicates the
growing failure of the family to cultivate security, freedom, and love
resulting in an ensuing flight into social and cultural ennui and
chaos’.54 Although this ‘crisis of the family’55 can be seen as a
symptom specific to post-war America, the feelings represented in
Wonderful Life are demonstrative of the ambivalence we have felt
towards the family since the evolution of the Monogamous Family.
It’s a Wonderful Life presents us with an example of a man who
must contain his desires within the walls of the home. He desires
Mary, but to possess her he must conform to the rules of society;
marry her and be faithful. In exchange for the fulfilment of this one
desire, society demands that he relinquish every other desire - for
other women, for freedom and success. He is forced to repress his
longing for escape from the family, to a place or time where he can
indulge in his every fantasy without guilt. When the impossibility of
escape becomes obvious, the only option left is to destroy both the
family and himself.
The film shows us the unhappiness of a man trapped by his
family commitments, but it reaffirms our belief in ‘the system’ by the
end.56 At the film’s conclusion, Mary and their friends prove to
George that he occupies a valuable place within his family and the
town despite his ‘failures’. At the end of the film he finally ‘accepts

60 Jessica H.E. Redman

and relishes his castration and reaffirms his allegiance to the system 57 Girgus, op. cit., p.
that has so repeatedly wounded him’.57 George concedes that: 92.
58 ibid., p. 93.
society’s basic institutions [including his family and small town 59 Like her parents,
America] are acceptable prisons for him because they provide the daughter char-
more security than life on the outside, away from Mary and the acter, Janie, also
children who mediate the oppressive power of the patriarchal demonstrates
ambivalence
state for the purpose of perpetuating the very institutions of pain towards the family.
and imprisonment.58 Due to restrictions
in word length, I
will focus on the
The film shows us that the Monogamous Family is indeed a repres-
parents in the fam-
sive and claustrophobic prison, but also demonstrates why society is ily.
so adamant that it remain the dominant cultural unit of our society.
60 Kain, op. cit., p. 11.
We must accept our containment or face disaster.
61 ibid., pp. 6-9.
American Beauty: Please, take me home!
Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) is a contemporary film which
presents us with a depressing image of modern family life; confused
and ambivalent family members each strive to cope with a repressed
existence within the American home.59 Unhappy with each other,
they yearn to violate society’s family ‘rules’ regarding sexuality,
responsibility and obedience - but they do not desire to leave or
destroy the family (like the characters in It’s a Wonderful Life). In
fact, their desire to break the family ‘rules’ wars with their equally
strong nostalgic craving to regain an ideal, happier past image of the
family.
The complex emotions of the characters in American Beauty allow
us to process our own ambivalent emotions towards the family. We
experience the fulfilment of tacit desires; we participate in the char-
acters’ longing for a return to past ‘traditional’ family values; and
yet, ultimately, our belief in the beauty of the family is reaffirmed
with the film’s (unique twist on the) happy ending.

Myth
Edward L. Kain argues that modern America lives with the ‘myth of
family decline - the notion that families in the past were stable and
happy and that recent decades have seen a rapid decay of family
life’.60 However, although many significant changes and advance-
ments have been made concerning technology, science and educa-
tion, the last fifty years have not witnessed significantly more
change in the structure of the family than would be expected over a
similar amount of time in any other era.61 Conventions of society
and the family have always been in a constant state of evolution.
There is no one ‘traditional family’ that has reigned supreme
throughout the centuries, and which has now been ‘lost’, or ‘cor-
rupted’. The Nuclear Family has been the dominant form for several
centuries (since the evolution of the Monogamous Family), but

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 61

62 ibid. many of the myths we cultivate about its historical evolution are
63 ibid., p. 7. simply false.
Kain dispels some of these myths in his book The Myth of Family
64 ibid., p. 4.
Decline. For example: there are not more single-parent homes now
65 Howard, op. cit., p. than there were a century ago (divorce is higher now, but mortality
1.
is lower); many women (one in five) were involved in paid employ-
66 ibid. ment outside the home in 1900; the number of people getting
67 As discussed in married in the last one hundred years has not been steadily decreas-
relation to Freud in ing (the proportion of single people today is lower than one hundred
Section 1 of this
paper, the only years ago); and the most common household type in America today
choice we have is still a two-parent family with two adult wage earners.62
within the family is As Kain explains, ‘most of the changes occurring in families in
between the United States are not revolutionary but evolutionary - they are
containment and
despair. changes that have been happening over a long period of time, and
they do not represent a radical change from patterns in the past’.63
How then do we explain the persistence and prevalence of this col-
lective feeling that the family is in a state of disintegration and
despondency? Perhaps we prefer to blame changes in society for our
own feelings of discontentment within the family, rather than con-
front the possibility that people from every era feel ambivalent
towards the family. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective, it might be
argued that discontentment within the family is not a recent phe-
nomenon, but reflects a timeless sense of pathos. In Freudian terms,
such discontentment results from the surplus repression inherent in
being part of a society built around the monogamous family unit.

The perfect family that never was

Kain associates the widespread perpetuation of myth with the
family’s longing for ‘a return to traditional values and the traditional
family structure that we remember from the past’.64 The social per-
petuation of myths about how families were in the past is what
enables us to maintain our belief that families were happier once
upon a time, and to heighten our nostalgic longing for a return to
such times.
In his book The American Family: Myth and Reality, A.E. Howard
also argues that many Americans, from all eras, yearn for a ‘roman-
ticized’ image of family life in the past (as an example he uses Meet
Me in St Louis: made in 1944 but set in 1903, it depicts a powerful,
reliable father and loving, homemaker mother).65 He suggests that
many people ‘judge the desirability of every change [in the structure
of the family] against an illusion of a more stable and orderly past -
an illusion of a golden age of family stability’, and that discontent
with modern-day ‘changes’ leads to nostalgia for better times.66
Our nostalgia for past images of happier families is a symptom of
our ambivalent feelings towards the family; it allows us to tolerate
containment within the family rather than fall into despair.67 We
feel trapped within the family, but society has conditioned us to

62 Jessica H.E. Redman

believe in the integrity of the family institution. Therefore we con- 68 Howard, op. cit., p.
vince ourselves that a monogamous family structure must be 16.
capable of providing happiness - if not for us ‘now’, then for 69 Peter Braunstein,
someone else ‘once-upon-a-time’. Nostalgia allows us to ignore and ‘On the Last Days
deny what is most threatening of all to us, the terrible truth - that of Retro’, Village
Voice New York, 14
there never was a period of ‘golden stability’ in the families of any July 1998, p. 52.
era.68 We have felt ambivalent emotions about the family since the
70 Girgus, op. cit., p.
Monogamous Family has existed as an institution, and we will con- 89.
tinue to do so for as long as society’s customs, legislation, mores and
71 Quart and Auster,
expectations enforce the dominance of this repressive environment. op. cit., p. 4. Film-
The way in which people become disheartened and frustrated makers were
through containment within the family is often dealt with in constrained by
Hollywood Family Melodramas in the context of nostalgia. Critic forces such as the
studio system
Peter Braunstein has argued that ‘1990s culture consisted almost which dominated
entirely of nostalgia for previous decades’.69 He cites filmic examples from the 1920s
that are set in, evoke, and fetishize previous eras: Last Days of Disco through to the
1960s, genre
(made in 1998, set in 1981); The Ice Storm (made in 1997, set in
conventions, collec-
1973); Boogie Nights (made in 1997, set in late 1970s/early 1980s); tive screenwriting
and The Brady Bunch movies (made in 1995 and 1996, about a and rewriting, the
1970s’ family in a 1990s’ setting). Sam Mendes’ American Beauty is star system and
censorship (the
set in the American present (1999), but evokes nostalgia for past Hays code of the
decades (particularly the 1950s) through its imagery, sets, themes 1930s, and
and narrative. subsequently the
We must remember that nostalgia for past images of the family in Breen office).
film is not a phenomenon peculiar to the 1990s; like the other forms
of desire I have discussed thus far, nostalgia is evident throughout
the fifty years of the Family Melodrama. In It’s a Wonderful Life, nos-
talgia is evoked from the beginning, with stylized illustrations in the
film’s opening credits showing traditional images of Christmas -
snow scenes, holly, Christmas trees, presents, sleds and Santa Claus.
Such ‘cultural clichés’ are mirrored later in the body of the film
when we see children enjoying winter sports.70 At one point
Clarence is seen reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The film’s script evokes these cultural emblems in order to create a
sentimental feeling and attitude toward the past in the audience.
Family Melodramas of the past and of the present both often
portray themes and images which evoke nostalgic ‘memories’ of
happier times and happier families. However, film-makers in the past
were more restricted in terms of the ways in which they could
express and experiment with their ideas in their films71 and were
forced to bury many subversive and socially unacceptable meanings
under layers of apparent conformism. In recent decades, the restric-
tive elements of the film industry have radically diminished and the
director has gained a much greater degree of artistic licence.
Therefore we begin to see our society depicted in a less sugar-coated,
more realistic and often much more negative way. The negative
images of the family presented in modern films are not an indication

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 63

72 Alexandra that Americans today are less happy in their families than
Marshall, ‘What’s Americans of the past. Instead, artistic freedom allows contemporary
Wrong With This
directors to lay their thoughts and opinions about the repressive ten-
Picture’, The
American Prospect, dencies of the family out in the open, rather than covering them up
11: 2 (6 December as they were forced to do in years gone by.
1999), p. 49. However, these new, raw, gritty, and often negative depictions of
73 S. Eisenhuth, ‘A the family retain two important qualities of older films. They still
Spacey Odyssey’, make us hanker for past images of the family, and they still almost
Bulletin with
always conclude by reaffirming the status of the family as an impor-
Newsweek, (25
January 2000), p. tant and essentially ‘good’ institution.
83.
74 S. Feneley, ‘A Nostalgic for a lost American Beauty
Nightmare Critic Alexandra Marshall argues that ‘it’s odd for American Beauty
Hollywood Calls the even to rank as a film of the ‘90s, when it so powerfully evokes the
American Dream’,
The Age, 1st Edition,
past 50 years without seeming to have evolved along the way’.72
(8 February 2000), American Beauty is brimming with images that immediately get the
p. A15. audience reminiscing about the happy-go-lucky suburban families of
75 P. Deneen, 1950s’ film and television.
‘Awakening from Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) lives with his wife Carolyn and
the American daughter Janie in what looks like the American Dream. They reside
Dream: The End of
Escape in American
on a tree-lined street in the white-collar suburbs of an anywhere
Cinema’, town in America. They live a double-income lifestyle in a spacious,
Perspectives on picture-perfect house surrounded by a white picket fence hedged
Political Science, 31: with perfect (odourless) scarlet roses.73 Carolyn (Annette Bening)
2 (Spring 2002), p.
102. plays the perfect American mom - she chats to the friendly gay
couple (Jim and Jim) next door while she prunes her roses, wearing
76 I. Nathan,
‘American Beauty’,
gardening clogs that match the handles on her pruning shears (and
Empire Online, 128 ‘that’s not an accident’). From the outside, this family could be living
(February 2000), out a Leave it to Beaver existence for the 1990s. The audience is
www.empireonline. immediately propelled into the fantasy that life in the 1990s can be
co.uk/reviews/revie
w.asp, (retrieved 5 like it was ‘back then’ (or at least the way we like to think it was).
May 2002). Yet all is not as it seems in the Burnham household. Behind the
red gloss of the front door is revealed a family crumbling with con-
tempt, loathing and dissatisfaction.74 The self-confessed highlight of
Lester’s day is masturbating in the shower. He hates his job and his
life in general, and knows that his wife and daughter just think he’s
‘this gigantic loser’ - and that they are right. ‘Lester’s existence is
portrayed as sterile, predictable, and wholly uninteresting’.75
‘Look closer’ at the cinematography of the film, and we begin to
see the unhappiness of the suburban family lifestyle seeping into
each frame. Ian Nathan describes the Burnham’s ‘anywhereville’
as depicted ‘with a worndown quality, all saturated colours and
blank walls’ with director Sam Mendes ‘throwing in outlandish
angels to evoke the skewed normality of these fractured lives’.76
Richard Alleva argues that Mendes and his cinematographer
Conrad Hall deliberately make the suburb look as ‘bright and as
sterile as a full-page spread in Good Housekeeping’, and this tech-

64 Jessica H.E. Redman

nique serves as a visual rationale for Lester’s yearning for romance 77 Richard Alleva, ‘No
and transgression.77 Leave it to Beaver’,
Commonweal, 126:
Not only the cinematography but the entire narrative focuses on
19 (November
the family’s dissatisfaction with life and with each other. Their daily 1999), p. 19.
interactions are littered with arguments, digs, power games and
78 G. Hentzi, ‘American
tongue-lashings. Lester and Carolyn seem to have fallen out of love a Beauty’, Film
long time ago, and Janie is so withdrawn and reclusive she barely Quarterly, 54: 2
talks at all. (Winter 2000), p.
46.
Carolyn’s nostalgia for a past image of the family is clear in her
passionate longing for a ‘perfect’ family image. All her energy goes
into creating a flawless façade of the happy American family - at
least in terms of the trappings. From the pristine presentation of the
house and garden to the sensible family car, it seems the perfect
family image that Carolyn is trying to create is straight out of the
post-war era. Even the ‘elevator’ music that Carolyn insists on
playing while they eat their ‘nutritional yet savoury’ meals harks
back to the show tunes of the Eisenhower era78 (the soundtrack
includes such ‘middle-of-the-road’ icons as Lawrence Welk, Rogers
and Hammerstein, and Bobby Darin). This is probably the kind of
music her parents used to listen to when she was growing up, which
hints that the family she may be nostalgic for is not actually Andy
Hardy’s or the Cleavers’ but her own family as she remembers it
from her childhood. Carolyn is trying to convince herself that if she
can create a archetype of the ideal family she is so nostalgic for, she
will attain emotional fulfilment and be able to ignore the feelings of
repression that plague every adult member of a monogamous family.
Lester’s nostalgia is displayed by his longing to return to the days
of his youth when life was simple, happy and ‘all (he) did was party
and get laid’ - the days before responsibility, family and a mortgage.
Through almost two decades of marriage this nostalgia was enough
to sustain him, but when he falls for a 16-year-old blonde beauty his
repressed desires to transgress the rules of the family begin to break
through into his conscious mind. Simple nostalgia for the happy
days of his youth is superseded as Lester starts taking steps to make
his fantasies of a return to adolescence come true. Through re-adop-
tion of remembered symbols of the past, and the creation of a new
personal ‘reality’ based around them, Lester begins to act out his
deviant desires from within the family itself.

Lester longs for life

When Lester spots Janie’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari) in the school
cheerleading squad and develops a hopeless adolescent infatuation
with her, his mundane life begins to change. As he fantasizes about
her covered in nothing but rose petals, Lester realizes that he’s ‘been
in a coma for about twenty years’ and is only ‘just now waking up’.
Lester’s ‘coma’ has been due to the powerful force of his conscious
mind repressing his socially unacceptable desires. As Freud would

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 65

79 Freud, op. cit. have predicted, his repressed desires make an inevitable ‘return’,79
(1976a), p. 154. and nothing will ever be the same. He quits his job writing for Media
80 Note that the desire Monthly, threatens his boss with a sexual assault charge in order to
to commit incest is obtain a year’s salary plus benefits, buys the car he’s ‘always
displaced on to his wanted’, gets a job flipping burgers like he had in high school, and
daughter’s friend
Angela and is not starts working out and smoking dope which he buys from his new
consummated - teenage neighbour Ricky Fitts.
Lester could not The unhappiness and repressed desire that have built up over
break down that
years of sterile family life spill out and overflow all at once for Lester.
stalwart psychologi-
cal barrier. His nostalgia for the past has transformed into an uncontrollable
urge to transgress the rules of society and the family, not by escap-
81 By quitting his job,
buying a sports car ing from the family, but from within. He decides to fulfil all the
and getting a drug desires he’s repressed for so long: desire to commit adultery and to
habit. commit incest;80 desire to forfeit family responsibility and to relin-
82 David Ansen, quish his role as provider of emotional and financial support.81
‘What “American However, by remaining in the home (rather than trying to escape or
Dream”? A Darkly
destroy it) Lester reveals the ambivalence he still cannot deny.
Comic Peek at the
Bleak Underbelly of The intensity of Lester’s desires, once released from the shackles
Suburbia’, of the unconscious, drives Carolyn to the brink of a nervous break-
Newsweek, 134, 13 down. In a state close to hysteria, Carolyn’s nostalgia and desire for
(27 September
1999), p. 68.
the perfect family become confused with her own repressed desires
for sexual fulfilment. Imagining Buddy Kane ‘King of Real Estate’ as
83 Deneene, op. cit., p.
104.
the perfect combination of ideal fantasy husband and potential outlet
of sexual frustration, Carolyn engages in a frenzied affair. Carolyn’s
repressed desires, like Lester’s, have broken free from the uncon-
scious to enjoy full realization.
David Ansen explains that American Beauty is a film that ‘exam-
ines a malaise that’s been plaguing the affluent, deracinated middle
class since the suburbs were invented. It’s about the power of the
images we have in our heads, and the painful gulf between those
fantasies and the reality we can’t seem to grasp’.82 Lester, Carolyn
and Janie each have an image in their minds of what the family
should be, and of how they wish to be as individuals within the
family. They want a life and family that live up to the myths perpet-
uated by society through films, television and cultural legend.
Problems arise from the disparity between these cultural fantasies
and the reality of actual family life.

Happy endings despite the grim outlook

Despite the bleak and vulnerable underbelly of American family life
that is exposed to us in American Beauty, the film ends by reaffirming
and promoting faith in the family institution. Lester’s second
epiphany (his first being the realization of his repressed desires while
watching the cheerleading performance) comes when he tries to
seduce Angela and discovers that she is a virgin. Forswearing the
relationship, he seems to achieve a moment of true transcendence,
realizing the ‘shallowness of his rebellion’.83 After comforting Angela

66 Jessica H.E. Redman

like a model father figure, he asks her about Janie. Hearing that 84 Alleva, op. cit., p.
‘She’s really happy. She thinks she’s in love’, he smiles and says 19.
‘Good for her’. The happiness of his daughter seems to bring him 85 Freud, op. cit.
contentment, and we perceive that he is also remembering what it (1976b), pp. 283-
felt like to fall in love for the first time. 86.
When Lester takes an old family photo from the kitchen bench 86 Creed, op. cit.
and gazes with dreamy eyes at the image of the happy family they (1998), p. 82.
once were, we realize that he has reverted to his previous nostalgic
state. Only this time he does not feel nostalgic about his lost adoles-
cence, but about the happiness of his earlier married life. The audi-
ence recognizes, as Lester does, that the most important and best
moments in life are with our families.84 Lester’s desires to deviate
from the rules of society within the family have once more been
repressed into his unconscious. Once again he sustains his contain-
ment within the family with memories and images of an imagined
time when life was happier. Perhaps he even believes that he can
regain that happiness again, now that he’s realized how much his
family means to him.
Lester’s changing moods throughout American Beauty are indica-
tive of the ambivalence he feels towards his family, and his flagrant
actions actually help him to deal with his ambivalent emotions. Like
a child playing the Fort/Da game85, Lester deals with his ambiva-
lence towards the family by throwing away his family and then
pulling it back towards him. He deliberately alienates his family
through acts of transgression (his family becomes the ‘lost object’)86
but then takes great pleasure in reclaiming them as his own. By
pushing his family (and himself) to the limits of emotional tolerance,
he enhances the enjoyment of their protracted reunion. In this way
Lester satisfies both aspects of his ambivalence: he fulfils his desires
to disobey the rules of society; but he also gains pleasure from
remaining within the family unit that society insists will gratify him.
The Hollywood Family Melodrama also provides a means for its
audience to work through their own feelings of ambivalence towards
the family. Identifying with the films’ characters, the viewers gain
pleasure from first distancing themselves from the family and experi-
encing their forbidden desires, and then reclaiming it through reuni-
fication at the end. Like Lester, our (imagined) transgressions only
make us appreciate the security and support of the family much
more when it is eventually reunited. The enjoyment of watching a
Hollywood Family Melodrama like American Beauty comes from iden-
tifying with characters who first transgress, yet then return to their
families at the end; characters who ‘lose’ their families in order to
experience the pleasure of regaining them.
Unfortunately Lester is given only seconds to delight in the possi-
bility of having his family returned to him. Enthralled by the images
of his beloved family and most likely imagining their emotional
reunion, he is shot in the back of the head by his neighbour Colonel

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 67

87 Deneene, op. cit., p. Fitts. Lester dies with a small smile of contentment playing on his
104. lips, frozen in a moment of nostalgia for the lost family of his past.
88 ibid. As Lester dies, we see the most significant images of his life pass
89 ibid. before us in a narrated black-and-white montage sequence. Almost
every image is of his family - Janie, Carolyn, his grandmother, the
street where he grew up - confirming our suspicion that Lester’s
faith in the family was restored before his death:

I had always heard that your entire life flashes before your eyes
the second before you die.
First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all - it stretches on
forever, like an ocean of time.
For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching
falling stars ...
and yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street ...
or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like
paper ...
and the time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird ...
and Janie ...
and Janie ...
and ... Carolyn ...

This memory sequence demonstrates Lester’s nostalgia for his purer

past, ‘a past that symbolized the true happiness of his life’87 - the
happiness of childhood, of adolescence, and of a time when he appre-
ciated the beauty of marriage and children. We learn that ‘one can
only relive the past through memory, not through the literal attempt
to recapture an adolescent past as an adult’.88 This is something
Lester realizes only moments before he dies, when he relinquishes his
socially unacceptable desires to his unconscious once more, and
reverts to nostalgia for the past.
The film represents Lester’s varied but ongoing indulgence in nos-
talgia for things past. Even after death he longs only to return to and
relive the happier moments of his life. He dwells on a year when he
felt that his family, his job and his life in general were a prison of
repression and inescapable boredom. But it was also a time leading
up to the most important moment in his life - a Gestalt flash of
understanding at the moment when he realized the beauty and
meaning of his family, the moment one second before his death.
Lester Burnham has experienced a revelation comparable to that of
George Bailey. ‘Lester understands that he led “a wonderful life”, but
one that looks wonderful in retrospect, not as it’s lived.’89
In death, Lester can finally appreciate the beauty of his life, some-
thing he tells us we can’t understand ... at least not yet: ‘I guess I
could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard
to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world ... You have
no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, you will

68 Jessica H.E. Redman

some day.’ The film’s Happy Ending provides catharsis for Lester and
the audience: having entertained socially transgressive desires, the
audience’s sense of guilt is appeased; Lester mentally regains his ‘lost
object’ (the family); and the importance and goodness of the family
institution is reaffirmed. However, this Family Melodrama adds an
additional twist to the Happy Ending, implying that the constant
repression of the Monogamous Family ensures that we will never
fully appreciate the wonder and beauty of life within our families
until it is too late.

Conclusion
It’s a Wonderful Life and American Beauty are Hollywood Family
Melodramas that depict families in turmoil; families caught up in
society’s game, trying to look happy in an attempt to forget and deny
how terribly unhappy they really are. These films show us the
repression and entrapment that is inherent in being part of the
monogamous American family. They show us characters who
express the depth of that repression in their desires to: escape from
the family; destroy the family; disobey the rules of the family; and
feel nostalgia for mythic past images of happy families.
In the end, however, the true message of these films is not that
the family is a doomed institution whose inevitable failure dictates
our social and cultural profiles. Paradoxically, they allow us to work
through our ambivalent emotions towards the family. Through iden-
tification with the characters we experience the fulfilment of our
repressed desires, and the Happy Ending allows us to do so without
guilt. Like Lester, we play the Fort/Da game and leave the cinema
having vented our frustrated desires and then enjoyed reunification
with the family. We go home and ‘look closer’ at our relationships
with our own family. We replace our longing for escape, destruction
and transgression with nostalgia for the past. We remember how
good the family once was, and begin to imagine what a ‘wonderful
life’ it could be again.

(Thanks go to Mark Nicholls for his invaluable contribution to this

article.)

...ambivalence in the Hollywood Family Melodrama 69

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