Focused on the family

The strange alignment of the American pop culture zodiac got just a little stranger for me over the past two days, and not only because I saw Lynch's classic Eraserhead for the first time late last night.

Indeed, earlier in the Memorial Day evening, in a move made largely to please my girlfriend, but at least partially for the purpose of satisfying my own curiosity, I consented to watch my first full episode, and the season five premiere, of the bona-fide TLC reality show phenomena John & Kate Plus 8. For the unacquainted, this is a program that the creators describe, in pseudo-documentary lingo, as profiling "a day in the life" of a contemporary American suburban couple raising eight kids, a set of twins and their younger sextuplet siblings.

I say "bona-fide" and "phenomena" because I've increasingly observed this program dominating the TV screens and conversational topics of collegiate-age young women like my significant other. The ratings figures alone would seem to support my experience, but of course, significant critical attention and tabloid speculation has been lavished on the show as well.

The furor surrounding the show, or rather, the furor surrounding the state of Jon and Kate's marriage has apparently mounted to such an extent that it was played as the central theme of the new season premiere. Shown in a documentary style format, Kate's attempts to mostly single-handedly plan and carry out the sextuplet's 5th birthday celebration were impeded by the appearance of paparazzi, which she (and the editing) portrayed as a kind of group of vaguely threatening bogeymen.

Liberally interspersed within this mini-narrative was scenes of the real one, that of Jon and Kate confessing mostly separately to the camera crew, as opposed to earlier seasons where they were apparently filmed together on the same couch. The conspicuously distraught parents espoused their contentious feelings about each other, numerous reports of infidelity (mostly directed at Jon), their family's growing fame, and their full-time careers as reality-show subjects, agreeing on only the most vague and obvious of commitments- selfless love for and care of their brood. The obnoxious question posed by a member by the crew, "What does the future hold?" was greeted with mutual pauses, shrugs and thinly-veiled threats of divorce. Oh, what a terrible turn of events for the idyllic modern fertility experiment!

Sarcasm aside, my initial reaction was one I am sure many other viewers felt- that of sadness and regret for having caught the kids up in this whole voyeuristic mess. It's barely cynical to expect that they will have their own individual reality shows a few years down the road, when they've developed their own disorders and drug habits.

Even if Jon and Kate don't split up (and the money's saying they won't, as therapy would be a logical ongoing plot point, and two separate "VH1 Love" contest-style shows are unlikely to play nearly as well with audiences) there remains the fact that their home-movies belong to a fucking television company, their offspring's childhoods syndicated, a-la- The Truman Show, as the entertainment of millions of other households around the country and the world. Growing up in suburban America and coming out "well-adjusted" is challenging enough as it is; growing up in a national fish tank has got to provoke some severe existential angst.

But one can't go down this train of thought for very long without putting themselves in the young parents shoes, and conceding that their options were as sparse as their family was large. Clearly, the Jon and Kate could use all the revenue and manpower that that the show provides. And clearly, once they made the decision to allow their family to be televised at all, there was no going back. Anticipating the wild success of the show was not something that anyone could have been expected to do, but there has to be that certain acknowledgment that filming a subject inexorably changes it, and in no small way.

Yes, Jon and Kate consciously made a momentous decision- one that would benefit them greatly on paper, but would have an incalculable cost on their souls. As such, I think there is still time for them to emerge as heroes. If they can somehow regain control of the reality-TV apparatus that has presently swallowed them up, I believe they can craft a more emotionally reasonable situation, one that necessarily increases their family's level of privacy.

But to endlessly scrutinize and speculate on the state of the Gosselin family is to miss the more interesting point, that of what the show means for America. Or rather, what it means as America, as a primary vessel of entertainment for so many in this entertainment-saturated place and age.

For me, this is the ultimate irony, because the basic premise of the show depends instrumentally upon the collectively short-term memory of modern American TV-viewers. As James Poniewozik writes in the May 18 issue of TIME Magazine, "Big families used to be a staple of TV: Eight Is Enough, The Brady Bunch, The Waltons, The Partridge Family. When American families with three or more children were common, these clans weren't outlandish. They were like you, just more so. Lately, TV families have gotten smaller, just like viewers' families." Jon & Kate wouldn't be nearly so successful if the show had debuted alongside all its similar, older predecessors, at a time when most American families were big and struggling to make ends meet.

At the same time, however, both private and televised American families have grown more multi-cultural. Jon's ethnic background includes Korean, Irish and French, and his kids reflect, in varying degrees, a mix of both his and Kate's "Pennsylvania Dutch" physical features.

Most crucially, in a socio-cultural shift in attitudes that would have literally been impossible forty years ago, the show indicates that Americans have seemingly implicitly accepted the biotechnological wonder of human artificial insemination. Procreation by sexual intercourse alone is not to be missed, apparently. The most articulate objections to Jon and Kate are not that they decided to try for kids using artificial insemination, nor that they carried all the embryos to term. Rather, the objections are that they are acting irresponsibly now that they have the kids. And yet, the show wouldn't be compelling if there were any less kids in the family. Biotechnology has thus become doubly profitable, earning revenue not only for doctors but for entertainment producers. Either way, in this case, It's not the means, but the ends that American viewers are concerned with. It is an ends that, as I alluded to before, ironically ignores all beginnings- of life, of family, of TV families.

All of this leads me back to Eraserhead, perhaps the strongest case for abortion ever made in a film. It is nearly impossible to view the alternatively tragically and comically mutated infant in the film as anything but a mistake- of its parents, of God, of life itself. And where Jon & Kate is perfectly content to gloss over the biotechnological developments that created the situation, Eraserhead appears to implicate the increasing industrialization of society with the deformation of human beings and human relations. In a way, despite its date, it is much more forward looking than Jon & Kate, predicting what is now a common dissolution of the American family over child-rearing responsibilities and marital fidelity, now entirely separable from fertility.

Henry Spencer and Jon Gosselin share more than just an obvious dislike for their wives and their domestic situations. Both men are out of real jobs, on perpetual vacations in their respective surrealistic prisons of heavy machinery and glaring cameras, wanting nothing more than to internalize, to retreat into their own self-absorbed, anachronistic fantasies. Mary X and Kate are both emotional basket-cases, wracked with motherhood responsibilities they neither fully accepted nor rejected, misdirecting their anger and frustration at their equally-guilty male partners.

Eraserhead, though, was designed to be dark and troubling. It is unclear what the pleasure in Jon & Kate really is- or more precisely, where it stops- somewhere in the murky arena between the parents genuine desire for their kids well-being and the sordid reality of entertainment economics, i.e. controversy is more valuable than peace and harmony.

If one feels pangs of regret or guilt or experiences any lasting emotional trouble from Jon & Kate, then the day's news regarding California's Prop 8 is certainly food for thought. Why is it acceptable for a young heterosexual American couple to bend the laws of nature to satisfy their desire to have children, resulting a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, when the attempts of homosexuals to marry and adopt are outlawed? Put it another way- whose family is more fucked up, the fictional mutated one in Eraserhead, the "real" one in Jon & Kate, or the hypothetical queer one that exists in American voters' minds? Again, America, or American pop-culture, is often quite a paradox. Let's just hope, like the lyrics of the Who, that in your case, whatever it is, "The Kids Are Alright."