“All happy families are similar to each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” says the beginning of the novel “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. More than a typology of families, a classification between two types, this phrase has to be better understood in the sense that, outwardly, in the public world, families appear to be happy and, to a certain extent, happiness is faked. similar way everywhere (smiles, friendliness, education and respect), while the dirty laundry is hidden.
Every family has a hidden side; Rather, families are known for what they hide, for their narcissistic contracts and negative pacts, for their silences and secrets. An old film entitled “The Celebration”, the first of the Dogma 95 movement, caused a stir when in 1998 it brought to the screen the story of a father’s birthday who, at the time of the toast, found that his eldest son made a revelation unexpected around everything that family kept in the shadows (an incest) in order to survive.
In the field of series, during the ’80s there were two great references: on the one hand, “Blanco y negro”, which began to be shown towards the end of the ’70s and had its last episode in the mid-’80s; on the other hand, “Family Ties”, which was on screen throughout the last decade. If the first explored the question of adoption with novelty and problematized the multicultural horizon, the second developed the intrinsic conflict of the family a little better, based on generational differences, the exposure of children to the exogamous world, etc.
With their achievements, it can be said that these two series remained within the ideal of the united family. The living room of a house had finally reached television, which duplicated the scene of the viewers in a mirror; It was as if they were being told: “Don’t worry, nothing can be that serious.” However, around the turn of the decade, “Married with Children” arrived, playing to go one step further and during the ’90s (in the United States) put us in front of the miseries of a dysfunctional family, so that we could see each other in our own cultural reflection.
In our country, there is also a specific sequence to go through to reach the local adaptation and explain its success. Just as I mentioned Tolstoy before, now I could mention the Argentine band Viuda e hijas de Roque Enroll, which in the post-dictatorship situation made a hit with the ironic title “La familia argentina”. In the lyrics, a mother highlights the values that keep the family group together, but that do not correspond to what, at the same time, she narrates: “Dad arrives without saying hello, today I forgot to cook, that’s why we’re not going to fight , turn the TV on. The boys know how to respect, they have no vices or evil, they always use a walkman, I can’t talk to them, they never listen to me”. Thus, a united family is one in which everyone does their own thing and everyone ignores each other.
Silver DNA
Guillermo Francella had already had his leading role with “La familia Benvenuto” (which was a return of “Los Campanelli” from the ’70s). During the first five years of the ’90s, every Sunday at noon we sat at the table with the phrase: “Family comes first.” That is why his conversion into Pepe Argento is more than an adaptation of a foreign product, it is a redefinition of our cultural history, in the passage from a family of Italian descent to a very local family; no longer extended family, but marriage and children in much less defined roles from an ideal. It was time to enter the B side of that bond we call “family”.
By the way, saying “Married with children” is an excellent way to unseat the weight of the family name. Not even “The Simpsons” were so encouraged.
The series was not called “Los Argento”, but from its title it already put us in front of the asymmetry of roles. On the one hand, we have a couple with two well-defined roles: a husband whose role as father overwhelms him; that he feeds children that he considers hindrances; that he does not know what else to do to ignore the demand of his wife. This is her, for her part, she does not act as a self-sacrificing mother, but rather she is a woman who does not renounce the enjoyment of her and who is very clear that her husband is not the cause of happiness her. Let us remember that in the year 2000 “I will not be happy, but I have a husband” was published, the best-seller by Viviana Gómez Thorpe. New and good winds were already blowing to question married love, at a time when divorce had recently become legal.
On the other hand, we have the children: a frivolous and narcissistic girl, a half-dumb boy; both advantageous and instrumental, far from the typical problems of adolescence (such as first love, insertion into the world of work, etc., all issues that the previous series had investigated). Between parents and children, there is no succession or transmission of values, except the negative ones; it is as if a symbolic affiliation had not prevailed, by which the latter tend to identify with the former, in order to assert their ideals and the expectation of repaying them in the future for the sacrifice they made for them.
In “Married with Children”, at times the generational difference is annulled and, as occurs in current families, adults and young people seem to be on the same horizontal level and there is no one who respects anyone, one’s problems become problems of everyone, the inside is reinforced before a threatening outside, to which you no longer have to go out to earn a living, but from which you must defend yourself. If a child fails an exam, it is no longer a question of introducing him to the cultural importance of the study, but of finding a way for him to pass, period. The family thus becomes a defensive group, of which they can be extremely united, but at the slightest coercion, they can panic and each one shoot to their side.
ID
The inevitable question is: how can we become attached to people who show us such a negative side of ties? A psychoanalytic response lies in emphasizing that, through artistic representation, we reconcile with a part of us that we generally don’t want to know much about and, through a game of identifications, we integrate a psychic aspect. This is the miracle and the truth of fiction.
A personal response, although related to Argentine history, is to recognize that this series came at an opportune moment, for a society that needed to review rigid norms and stereotypes (especially parents-child), regarding which the most effective criticism is that of humor, which allows one to take distance and restructure, through anti-heroic characters, what seemed like a destiny.
In the cultural industry, there are two kinds of products: those that create needs for a non-existent audience; those who know how to interpret what a society still does not know about itself. The former have instant and fleeting success. The latter cross generations, as happened with “El zorro”, “El Chavo” and, in this case, “Married with children”.
Why is this a fundamental series of the local collective unconscious? Because with a family traversed by narcissistic contracts and negative pacts, it reinstates the power that the family can have as a space of trust and security. In other words, wash the clothes and hang them in the sun, so that no one is ashamed of their humanity.
*PhD in Psychology and Philosophy
by by Lucien Lutereau*
