Cinefile

The Ambersons. The Corleones. The Skywalkers. The cinema is an ever-expanding document that supports a clear fact: dysfunctional families are an integral part of the movie-going cultural mindset. Anyone can stay home and watch Leave It to Beaver. But real movie lovers would rather spend two hours with Clark Griswold. Why? Because movies can be single serve doses of guidance, rationality, justification or warnings for our everyday lifestyle. So when it comes to the family unit, a moviegoer could find more intellectual and emotional nourishment by investing an evening in the Boggs family from Edward Scissorhands than they would by watching countless seasons of Two and a Half Men at home. The structure of the cinema, both on and off the screen, is built on the family aesthetic; on the screen, groups of actors work together to create a fictional world that seems significant, while off-screen the movie auditorium is filled with a group of people (who don’t know each other) participating in a communal real world experience.

Which is why when the cinema presents us with a dysfunctional family that is so different, crazy and completely jarring, we revel in delight. Such is the case with Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, a bonafide masterpiece sure to scare away as many cinephiles as it attracts. Dogtooth tells the contained story of a nameless Greek family that lives out in the country. There is the father, the mother, the son, the older daughter and the younger daughter. No one has a name. The three children, all grown adults, have been raised—actually brainwashed—to believe that their micro universe is the absolute rendering of a normal existence. They are given daily audiotapes to listen to—but these tapes skew common terminology (e.g. one of the tapes teaches the term “sea” to be defined as a leather couch). Added, these three young adults are never allowed to leave the property; they do not have access to phones and thus are bewildered by any outside force, whether it’s a cat or a plane flying over in the sky. And yet rather than just rest on a Barry Sonnenfeld-esque black comedy that highlights such peculiarities, Lanthimos goes ten steps forward and takes the extremes to frightening levels of tolerance. The closeness of the siblings eventually gives way to approved incest. The inflicted fear eventually gives way to violence. By the end of the film, problems aren’t really resolved. If anything, some are exposed. But Lanthimos, like any great auteur, isn’t interested in the outcome; he wants to see what makes the human being tick and so the real subjects of Dogtooth actually turn out not to be the family onscreen but rather the members of the audience. How much of your sensibility are you willing to give to a film like Dogtooth? What does it say about your sense of ethics? What does it impose on the idea of the functional family unit?

Movies like Dogtooth don’t often get made—well, the truer statement would be that they often don’t get seen. Yet when a more mainstream dark drama comes along, there usually seems to be a strong following. This isn’t by accident. When idols are at the helm, masturbating in the shower wins Oscars (a la Kevin Spacey in American Beauty). A case that proves our need for the dysfunctional movie family comes in 1981. Raging Bull, a film agreed-upon by critics to be the best film of that entire decade, unbelievably loses the Best Picture Oscar to Ordinary People, the directorial debut (albeit impressive) of screen star Robert Redford (who also beat Martin Scorsese for Best Director) which follows a suburban family in turmoil. Timothy Hutton plays the guilt-ridden son whose older brother died in a freak boating accident and whose angst is further spurned by the icy, disconnected relationship he endures with his bitch mother (Mary Tyler Moore). When that film comes to a close, Hutton’s father (played by Donald Sutherland) arrives at the conclusion that he may not love his wife anymore since she can’t bring herself to acknowledge their grief stricken son or her own demons. It’s an unusual remedy for their domestic dilemma but perhaps that is what draws people to these silver screen families: they speak to our deepest fears and perform the bold actions we sometimes we wish we could.

There’s the old saying about how something must be broken apart in order for it get fixed. This is what dysfunctional families in the movies help illustrate. We all have that crazy uncle, that slutty cousin or that asshole nephew. What we all don’t have is the instant capacity to know what to do when things break down. The movies, once again, offer a window into our own lives. To be clear, these films don’t offer a final answer, but they help give an idea of how anxious we can be about trying to figure out our troubles. In the video below, you’ll note that even a family of plants deals with the same kinds of pressures. At the end, you may not agree with the protagonist’s ultimate decision, but you can empathize with why she does it: We do the strangest things for the people we love.