Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Introduction: The Munsters and the Addams
by Travis Hedge Coke
We are all familiar with the suspicion we know more about a fictional world than we do our own. We all have our comfort worlds, fictional realms we can revisit, be they from television, prose, comics, on albums or in folktales. We all know the unease of having to explain a favored world, a sitcom or movie wherein the characters or the seeming moral causality of the world are disagreeable, contrary at least to our public ethics.
“Movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative,” only leaves you with variegated audiences who do not necessarily appreciate implication or the use of, “psycho,” much less the demonization of the mentally ill and so on and so on and so forth.
I set out personal reasons for which worlds we explore in Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies. I had to be at least decently familiar, which throws out Super Mario or Star Wars, where my awareness freezes out in the early 1990s. My favorite sitcom, A Different World, attempts to reflect our reality too closely while existing in a fantastically rewarding context. What I love about Princess Prosecutor, Gilmore Girls, the vampire stories of Anne Rice or stories of the Chalet School is that they do not operate on cohesive rules at all, or even fairytale severity. If you tried to live like a Gilmore, you would die broke and alone and I would despise you before your head hit the pillows in the coffin. Dear reader, I could not do that to you.
Talking about Bunheads would require context for the context, we’d be here all night.
The value in your relation to fictional worlds is not one where we get in what we put out. It cannot be the audience’s responsibility to satisfactorily order and justify fictive worlds. Nor, is it any entertainers’ responsibility to target all audiences and all audiences equally. Our relationship to fiction, to serial fiction, to substantially-explored fictional worlds, is not a matter of getting out of it what we put in.
The Waltons maintains a strong right-leaning fandom who have to know, on some level, that the show’s world and characters do not demonstrate a viability of their politics. A Different World nails down the realities of rape, misogyny, and systemic racism in a greater and realer way than the show’s producer and originator, Bill Cosby, has ever demonstrated awareness of. While many television programs are able to indulge in cruel, selfish, or melodramatic characters by avoiding the uglier consequences of those characters’ behavior, other entertainment must keep its characters’ behaviors in check in order to maintain a generally peaceable return to safety and form at the end of each tale.
I am hard pressed to think of a serialized, fictive world aimed at anyone older than seven, with a more comforting tone than the anime, Steel Angel Kurumi, even though I know the atmosphere belies a horrific picture of both characters who are treated as good and a world treated as desirable.
Kurumi is set in an impossibly peaceable the past. The characters constantly blush, sigh, fuss, swoon, get flustered, declare love, deny love while being flustered and blushing. The clothing is cute, the hairstyles and demeanors are cute. It’s a show predicated on being cute and on being harmless. Anything scary in the world is controlled by a dominating sense that all will be okeh.
Kurumi is also a franchise about dangerous military robots programmed to act as devoted (love) slaves while wearing fetishistic maid uniforms, pedophile government officers obsessed with young boys, slut-shaming, jealousy, classism, and the non-existence of trauma coupled with the humorous soul-crushing anxieties of naive robot love slaves.
Is Baby, It’s Cold Outside a rapey song or just not a very good one? To someone, it is their favorite.
The Addams Family and The Munsters debuted within days of one another, in 1964, each lasting two seasons, one derived from the comics of Charles Addams, the other an homage to classic literary and film monsters like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and the werewolf. On the surface, they are the same show, and indeed, we see conflations, especially in dismissive parodies. Each show has a nuclear family of on-the-surface scary people, for whom the show is named, mother, father, children, grandparent. They live in idiosyncratic scary houses with normative and generally uptight neighbors.
The Addams franchise has been the more commercially successful, while their fandom seems bizarrely the more combative in terms of which is superior.
The Addams family have rhythm.
Both worlds – the central families and the moral causality of their stories – allow us to feel invited in, an equal as an outsider or misunderstood. The Munsters and the Addams feel like found family, adoptive family, even though they are related by lineage. They feel welcoming even though both families are intensely judgmental in their own way. The Munsters pity Marilyn, niece to the nuclear family parents, feeling her normative human looks make her ugly. The Addams routinely destroy the comfort of others with their fictitiously inordinate fortune. While Morticia and Gomez remain, in many ways, progressive and loving parents, they indulge in psychological harassment of their children on more than one occasion and Grandmama and Fester Addams both think they are deficient in their roles for not beating their children, for Gomez not beating Morticia.
Gomez Addams is famed for being the only television program husband verifiably hot for his wife. Herman Munster, less famed for it, also shows considerably stronger examples of adoration for his wife than other contemporary TV husbands. They both knock Leave It To Beaver’s Ward Cleaver out of the running, but while Herman stutters and smiles at Lily, Gomez grabs Morticia, lips perilously close to body. That not only pulls our attention, it seduces us.
The Munsters just try not to be too clumsy.
The Munsters have to be nice. They have to be safe. They live in a middle class house. They live in the suburbs. Herman has a job. A real job. Their kid goes to school. Grandpa has to watch himself in public. The Munsters live on a budget and value being liked.
Herman Munster is stopped outside his home by police, believing he does not belong in the neighborhood, is questioned by neighbors who believe he has the wrong house, and a community organization try to push him and his family from their home because of his skin color.
Herman Munster is green. He is, explicitly, made from body parts of varying ethnicities, and a German immigrant, but he, himself, as an individual person, is not white. And, neighbors want him and his family out, despite the fact they do backbends to be liked, that they are kind, gregarious, generous and civil people, because Herman Munster is not white.
The Munsters’ family doctor – a bigot – is played by real-life racist and closeted gay man, Paul Lynde, who nails the ugliness of his positions. But, the family weather it, because he’s their family doctor.
Herman Munster’s talk to his son, over the dinner table, in the episode, Eddie’s Nickname, that what matters is not your height or handsomeness or skin color but the quality of your heart, in the middle of the 1960s, in the United States of America, is not perfect or perfectly helpful but it is an expression of a genuine working class, check to check, upwardly-mobile coping. (Gomez Addams would have just bought the school.)
To do a storyline like this with an actual nonwhite family would be too confrontational for broadcast television of the era, leaving so-called fantastic racism to stand in, but the actor who originated Lily Munster, Herman’s wife, was not white, and only white-passing, and she understood she was white-passing. For much of her career she played islanders, Natives, white-passing nonwhites, and other ethnic roles, and in her real life, she knew she was not white, or not entirely of white lineage, but she was unsure of the specifics until well into adulthood, when she learned she was Polynesian on her father’s side.
The daughter of Dracula and even Dracula, as a vampire, living on the block is less of a point for these neighbors, but that the Munsters are not white-passing, not white-looking enough; it is that skin that riles the community in which they subside, facial features they hope the children do not inherit, disdain for skin. It is that skin which the neighbors oppose.
The Addams, even when neighbors want them to move, cannot be forced out by simply voting on it and then showing up and being fussy. The first of the newer animated feature films is centered around the Addams’ neighborhood being gentrified, but their money, essentially, being their savior. The 90s movies were launched with an attempt to swindle the Addams out of their fortune by having a henchman pose as the controlling interest in the family moneys (he turns out to be that family member with amnesia), followed by a sequel in which someone attempts to swindle the Addams out of their family fortune and home by marriage to that relative. She dies. The episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies featuring the Addams family focuses on an attempt to fictitious monster to intimidate the family into abandoning their property.
The Addams’ are rich. Herman Munster thinks this is a fortune.
But, the Addams are also distinctly non-anglo. The Roma heritage has been in play – though frequently nebulous and sometimes racist – since the beginning of the television show, as well as the Addams’ familial and social connections to Black, Indigenous, and non-white cultures, as evidenced by their trusting a foreign “witch doctor” over a good white American, or Puglsey attending medical school in (haha, surely, haha) Nairobi (to be a “witch doctor”). These may be jokes to the intended audience, but they are not treated humorously or discourteously by the Addams. The Addams remain proud of their professional and social connections, their extended family and adoptive family, their family traditions and in a general way, all tradition.
The Addams and the Munsters carry the old country into an implicitly white place called America that has never been a white place.
With the casting of Raul Julia as Gomez, in two of the 1990s feature films, the franchise cemented a concrete and immobile sense of Gomez Addams as both Latinx and unambiguously ethnically ambitious. Raul Rafael Carlos Julia y Arcelay, stage name, Raul Julia, was of Black, Indigenous, and white descent. Julia’s casting and his performance, his radiance as Gomez Addams was so palpable and palpably not white, that even in a movie series where Christopher Lloyd, as Fester, played his brother – note that, prior to these movies, Fester was Morticia’s relative by blood and Gomez’s by marriage – the Addams’ line, the Addams’ lineage, becomes nonwhite. It becomes implicitly Latinx, and implicitly Latinx of that they didn’t all come from Western Europe type.
Meanwhile, the tradition of explicitly white actors portraying Herman Munster (who is, it must be said, portrayed less often than Gomez Addams), has meant that the implications of his skin color, as a character, as a person living in that fictional world, has become dulled and lost its political and social meaning.
This highlights a few things: a) real world ethnicity, or the ethnicity of an actor, does not equate to the ethnicity of a character in their fictive world; b) fantastic bigotry may reflect a real world bigotry but it does not replace or equal it; c) the ethnicity of fictional characters is transitional. All three of these clauses are true because whiteness, itself, is a transitive fiction with generally arbitrariness and unequal from circumstance to circumstance.
We see the danger of equating that Herman and Gomez are, in their world, mixed-ethnic and nonwhite characters, with the idea that all outsiders or those who feel outside are subject to oppression and violence in the way that ethnic characters are, in the complicated case of Wednesday Addams’ redface.
It does not behoove the characters, in either franchise, to know or act better, because they are performing morality plays for us. It behooves us to be capable of interpolating new data and to be willing to reassess our evaluations. Repeatedly.
Real life Raul Julia was of Indigenous descent. He is playing the father of a character who is of nebulous – but Roma and Latinx – ethnicity. That character is played by an actor, Christina Ricci, who identifies as Scots-Irish-descent (“The Italian blood has been bred out of me,” she has said). That character is cast in a summer camp play as a Native American, and reroutes the performance into an insurrection, leading characters who are Jewish, disabled, and so forth, but not explicitly actually Native.
How we react to that scene in the moment of viewing, as part of a movie we are earnestly invested in as audience, and how we react abstractly may be vastly different, and it is fair if those reactions are vastly different. It is fair if that scene feels a certain way on the first viewing, or during the first months of its existence as a released film, and how it feels on the tenth viewing or twenty years after release or after the seventy-third gif you saw in a particular November as we approach the American holiday of Thanksgiving.
In the 1960s sitcoms, The Addams Family and The Munsters, the laugh track can cue us to when something is definitely meant to be racist, because it was assumed we might find that racism funny (The Addams Family is, arguably, the worse of the two in this respect), but the characters cannot here or heed canned laughter and the characters may not be participating in the same racist judgment that is assumed the audience will be, similar to the arguments in The Addams Family over domestic abuse as a sign of love.
The engagement of race and racism inside the world of either family, either franchise, is interdependent with the racism and racial ideas of our world, but they need not correlate, while audiences will be, by nature, affected by both.
Sometimes you cheer for the unkillable slasher, not the victims, without ever once losing sight of the killer being wrong and the victims not deserving their fate. You exaggerate your emotions to feel drama, you allow emotional association, you may even feel protected from a character’s violation of good taste or outright cruelty because they are incapable of directly hurting you.
Like the casting of an Asian actor to play a white-read man playing an Asian-coded terrorist in Iron Man 3, reaction can and should fluctuate as we descend down any number of possible rabbit holes. Or, the lamp-shading of white dominance and orientalism in Gregory Hatanaka’s Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, a movie about white dominance American martial arts movies of the 1980s through the lens of an Asian-descent Hawaiian raised in that era. That is, in all three cases, not a judgment of value, but an appraisal of state. The judgment of value or valorization is up to you.
