[#MovieReview] "The Addams Family" — A Family Living Not as Madness, but as Aesthetics by Oma [#Podcast Episode Introduction]
"Reel Friends in Tokyo" is a movie introduction podcast hosted by personalities "Mako" and "Oma." In this note, we delve into the hit movies, classics, and even cult favorites featured in the podcast episodes, exploring them from our unique perspectives with behind-the-scenes stories, personal deep dives, and supplementary information for our listeners.
Each time, we summarize the key points of the talks and discussions from the podcast, our own unique insights as Mako and Oma, and even personal movie reviews that stem from our often-tangential honest conversations. Whether you are a listener or not, please feel free to relax and enjoy.
You can listen to the latest episode of the program here ↓
Part 1: "The Addams Family" (1991) — Family as an Aesthetic
There is no daylight in the Addams family mansion.
It is always dim, and the air is heavy and damp. There are old portraits on the walls, taxidermy on the stairs, and spiderwebs on the chandeliers.
Yet, there is a strange warmth in their home.
The candle flames flicker softly, and the gazes of Gomez and Morticia are gentle.
This "warmth of darkness" is likely the essence of the Addams family.
Many people consider "brightness" to be good.
A bright house, a bright person, a bright life.
However, the Addams family doubts that premise.
They believe that "darkness is sincere."
They do not fear death, they do not feign sadness, and they love the beauty that lurks at the bottom of despair.
It is close to what Nietzsche called #AmorFati (love of fate).
"Accept every pain and coincidence of life as love."
Everyone in the Addams family embodies this.
Morticia smiles as she cuts the roses from their stems.
"Flowers are beautiful because they embrace their death."
There is no sadness in her fingertips as she says this, but rather conviction.
Beauty does not reside in perfection, but in the "moment of decay."
#Darkness is not death, but the silence on the other side of life.
The ethics of the Addams family is the "courage to live while staring at death."
And another pillar supporting this family is the "aesthetic of love."
The relationship between Gomez and Morticia is neither dependency nor idealization.
While they worship each other, they do not interfere, and they never neglect the performance.
Their love is always depicted as "sincerity accompanied by beauty."
Kierkegaard stated in "Works of Love" that "love is like faith."
Love with no reason or basis, just conviction.
The love of the Addams couple is exactly that "performance as conviction."
Expressing love is ethics, prayer, and the maintenance of beauty.
That is why they are always theatrical.
It is not acting, but a ritual to "not betray their aesthetic."
On the other hand, what about the world outside the Addams family—the "ordinary people"?
They are clean, bright, and socially correct.
But behind that correctness lies a "stoppage of thought."
As Hannah Arendt showed in "Eichmann in Jerusalem,"
the most terrifying evil is the banality of those without malice.
#BanalityOfEvil is a structure where people who have abandoned thought make the world cold in the name of good intentions.
The Addams family laughs it off.
Who is "crazy"?
Is it them, who enjoy poison and love the darkness?
Or is it the people who judge others in the name of "normal"?
The Addams family are not destroyers.
They do not hate society.
They are simply faithful to the point of "believing in beauty over correctness."
Their presence is like that of philosophers who continue to question the boundary between ethics and aesthetics.
#Aesthetic is superior to good and evil.
Because beauty is the "proof of a sincere life."
It is not about how it looks to others,
but whether you can continue to believe "this is beautiful."
That is the "standard of life" for the Addams family.
In this world, darkness is often hidden.
Tears, pain, and anger are considered things that should not be shown.
But the Addams family treats them all as "light."
They do not mock sadness, they do not fear death, and they do not try to change others.
They simply polish their own darkness.
In that quiet sincerity lies the "dignity of life."
The Addams family is not a glorification of a minority.
They are not beautiful "because they are a minority."
They are beautiful because they "do not betray their own aesthetic."
Their lives are not art or rebellion, but resemble daily prayer.
"Madness" is another name for the courage to remain sincere.
And that courage is,
in a world covered in banality, the quietest revolution.
Part 2: "Addams Family Values" (1993) — "Death of Aesthetics" in an Educational Society
The setting of the second film is a summer camp as a microcosm of society. It is, at first glance, a healthy and cheerful space. White teeth are lined up, uniforms are dazzlingly clean, and children are taught "friendship" and "kindness." But for the Addams children—Wednesday and Pugsley—it was pure terror. Because lurking there is "coercion" disguised as kindness.
This camp is truly a microcosm of the "disciplinary society" depicted in #Foucault's "Discipline and Punish."
"Freedom" and "education" appear not to conflict, but they are actually slightly misaligned. While society says it is "guiding children to live correctly," it simultaneously demands that they "think the same way."
In other words, it institutionalizes freedom through "training." That is the governing structure of modern society.
The summer camp leaders say, "Let's smile brightly." But that is also an order to "not make a dark face."
Here, a "smile" becomes a tool of control.
Wednesday does not smile.
She refuses to smile and remains silent.
But that silence is not indifference. Rather, it is a sharp observation of the world.
The attitude of "not smiling" is also an expression of an intellect that does not blindly believe in the "brightness" of the world.
In psychology, this is #Deindividuation — a state where the self fades within a group and assimilates with others.
The children at the camp find relief in being "the same as everyone else" amidst this deindividuation.
But only Wednesday does not lose her face.
Silence is the "breakwater of the individual" that remains at the end.
In the Thanksgiving play, she screams.
"Your peace is a lie."
That voice is like a lightning bolt striking into gentle violence.
What she burned was not the stage or the enemy, but the "story of hypocrisy" itself.
Borrowing #Derrida's words, it is the practice of "deconstruction."
By burning and reconstructing the given myth, she shows the true form.
For Wednesday, fire is not a device for destruction, but for rebirth.
She lit the fire not to defeat "evil," but to "burn the lies."
What is questioned here is what "education" is.
The education depicted in this film teaches "correct behavior" but does not teach how to "live beautifully."
The Addams children know that "having an aesthetic" is the power to live.
But the adults at the camp call it "rebellion."
A child who does not smile, a child who is silent, a child who finds different things beautiful, becomes a "target for correction."
Education is supposed to support freedom, but here it has become a device for the exclusion of freedom.
As #Baudrillard says, modern society is built on "good as a simulation."
The world maintains itself by continuing to copy "good-looking" actions rather than genuine good.
This camp is truly a "factory for copies of good intentions."
Everyone smiles, sings the same songs, and claps at the same time.
It looks like happiness, but in reality, it is "happiness without the other."
What Wednesday rejected was not happiness, but its imitation.
There is no fear in her cold expression.
It is not a cynicism that does not believe in the world, but a silence that believes in herself.
Psychologically speaking, it is a state at the pinnacle of #SelfEfficacy.
She decides for herself, "I don't have to smile."
This self-determination is a "discipline of beauty" deeper than ethics.
The Addams family does not challenge society.
They do not destroy the world, nor do they try to persuade anyone.
They simply maintain the stance of "not imitating the world."
That is the quietest and strongest form of resistance.
The fact that Wednesday never smiled until the end
is not a sign of despair, but of conviction.
Not smiling means being sincere and being free.
It is not about ethics or morality, but an "aesthetic of living."
When the world commands you to "smile,"
the choice not to smile becomes a revolution.
And the reason we are drawn to her cold gaze
is that her silence overlaps with our own pain somewhere deep down.
Final Chapter: It is the world that is crazy
The Addams family is not crazy.
They simply believe in "beauty" more than "correctness."
From the perspective of social standards, they appear heretical. But to them, it is the world that looks crazy.
We have, before we knew it, made "correctness" our absolute measure.
Yet, that is often two sides of the same coin as a "lack of beauty."
The darkness drifting through the Addams mansion is not a symbol of fear, but of sincerity.
They despise "feigned light."
The brightness of society is built upon excluding someone.
We know that words like "let's be bright" and "let's live positively"
can sometimes become violence that silences the pain of others.
Even so, fearing to take off the mask of good intentions,
we continue to protect the phantom known as "normal."
The laughter of the Addams family dissolves that phantom.
They do not laugh at others.
They only laugh at the lies of the world.
With the poison of humor, they slowly dissolve the membrane of hypocrisy
covered in the names of "goodness" and "brightness."
Laughter is not their weapon, but their prayer.
To laugh without denying pain—that is the first step of the "philosophy of darkness."
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Addams family is a "community without repression."
#Freud called the repression of impulses during the process of human adaptation to society the "price of civilization."
However, in the Addams family, there is no repression.
Anger, sadness, and even the scent of death are accepted as they are.
In other words, their "abnormality" is actually the pinnacle of human naturalness.
A family without #repression. The laughter born there is not pleasure or rebellion, but the sound of pure liberation.
Compared to that, what about our society?
In our zeal to protect "correctness," we have managed our emotions and excluded the darkness.
We turn sadness and anger into "bad things," and call brushing off the pain of others "compassion."
Amidst #socialrepression, we gradually lose our "power to feel."
At that moment, the existence of the Addams family reflects like a mirror.
Their darkness is the ghost of the emotions we have buried.
What Wednesday burned in "Addams Family 2"
was not someone else's story, but the powder magazine of "conformity."
We are all trapped in some "summer camp" or another.
There, we are told to "smile" and "be positive,"
and silence is labeled as "dark" or "unhealthy."
Yet, protecting the "freedom not to smile" like she does
might be the most radical practice of aesthetics in the modern age.
The aesthetic of the Addams family lies in the "acceptance of discomfort."
Accepting the darkness of others, and not viewing death or pain as defilement.
That is the attitude modern society is worst at.
In an era where "correctness" is excessively circulated,
their quiet heresy shines more sincerely than ethics.
And then we realize.
Their "madness" is actually nothing more than the pinnacle of sincerity.
"Those who can laugh at the darkness do not fear life."
What this phrase symbolizes is
a stance of living while embracing sadness, death, and absurdity, rather than excluding them.
That is the laughing philosophy of the Addams family,
and perhaps the "dignity of living" we have forgotten along the way.
We have, before we knew it, made "living so as not to go crazy" a virtue.
But that "normality" can sometimes torment others and trap oneself.
"It is the world that is crazy"—this phrase is not a provocation, but a prayer.
When the world becomes too orderly, a little madness gives it breath.
That madness is not anger or violence, but the "independence of aesthetic consciousness."
The courage to leave behind the gaze of others and believe in one's own beauty.
It is a quiet, small revolution.
And finally, there is a remaining question.
To what kind of "brightness" are we submitting right now?
Under the pretext of what kind of "good intentions" are we pretending not to see someone's darkness?
If, when we take off that mask, the face that remains there
is even slightly as sincere as the Addams family—
then we will surely be able to hear that laughter echoing from their mansion,
softly, deep within our own hearts.
Podcaster Mako (@_macobana) brings the movie discussions held on the podcast program "#YomoyamaKobanashi" (#Makobana), where she talks solo about various things that don't fit into her main channel "Pocket ni Numa wo" (#PokeNuma ), to a dedicated channel.
There is no end to the movies I want to talk about!
Episodes will be released weekly or bi-weekly.
Please share your thoughts with #ReelPal #ReelPal in your tweets.
Tweets received may be featured on the program.
Click here for the theme talk submission form↓
Click here to send a direct message↓
Thank you for your continued support of the program.