Culture, Camp, and The Addams Family Through the Decades

“They're creepy and they're kooky/Mysterious and spooky/They're all together ooky/The Addams family.” This theme song hit the American silver screen on September 18, 1964, and has captivated audiences of queer people ever since. Based on Charles Addams's macabre and gothic New Yorker cartoons from the 1930s, the television series had mediocre ratings and was only on the air for two seasons. However, once it hit syndication it was able to grow a cult following and became an enormously popular franchise with several minor adaptations. It was the 1991 film The Addams Family starring Angelica Huston and Raul Julia, and its 1993 sequel Addams Family Values that cemented the entire franchise’s cult classic status. Despite the immense popularity in counter-culture, the first Addams Family film received only moderate critical success but immense commercial success, and the second film received critical acclaim but flopped commercially. Despite the only middling successes of the franchise, the Addams’ have a rare staying power in our cultural lexicon. Parents Gomez and Morticia, kids Wednesday and Pugsley, extended family Grandmama, Uncle Fester, and Cousin Itt, as well as butler Lurch and disembodied hand Thing, are all familiar figures to modern audiences who may have never watched the 1960s television show or even the movies. The Addams Family are staples of goth subculture and Halloween, becoming a byword for the macabre. The Addams’ cultural endurance comes from its particular way of subverting the nuclear family of the adaptation’s time period. Each new iteration and adaptation satirizes and critiques family and gender dynamics through camp, which has led to its immense popularity amongst queer people.

Writer and activist Susan Sontag coined the term “camp” as we know it in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” It is a hard-to-define concept, especially as the essay is not really an essay, but a series of notes. Notes on Camp was published the same year as the premiere of The Addams Family on television. Camp defined the decade, particularly the television sitcoms that came out. One tenet of Sontag’s definition of camp is to “be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” (Sontag 10) This perfectly encapsulates the escapist television programs of the 1960s. As the Vietnam War raged on in news broadcasts, the world of fictional television was dominated by programs like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie. Sontag may have said that the sensibility of camp is “apolitical”, it has been heavily argued that camp is as much a political statement as it is an aesthetic one. The whole country was able to closely follow the assisination of president John F. Kennedy, and many saw the footage as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. The brutality used against Civil Rights protestors was now being broadcast live into people’s living rooms. Fictional television, and particularly sitcoms refused to mention the violence and turbulence of the outside world. The genre is known for outlandish concepts, bright colors, and a generally optimistic tone. It is a deliberate choice to ignore the seriousness of reality and to contrast it with magic, humor, and bright colors. To understand camp, one need not look further than any episode of Batman or Bewitched. While The Addams Family was dark and gothic visually, it was just as bright and optimistic narratively. These sitcoms are able to live on in the cultural memory longer than a modern television show due to the prominence and popularity of syndication. While The Addams Family may have only been a middling success as it was airing, new generations watched and rewatched the family with fresh eyes and understandings.

While Sontag may have noted that queerness and camp go together, but are not central, many scholars have since argued that queerness is essential to camp. The Addams Family is an excellent example of just how camp and queerness go together. It is the campiness of the family that makes them queer, and it is their queerness that makes them camp. “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." (Sontag 13) This quote perfectly encapsulates the queer appeal of the Addams Family and the subversion of the nuclear family. The whole franchise is camp and queer because of this family’s absolute excitement in getting to be authentically themselves. They are hardly even aware of societal judgments and gender roles. A common plotline in almost all iterations of the franchise is making the family deal with the “real” world, where they are unaware that they are strange at all. They do not know that most people do not feel happiest when the sky is full of thunderstorms, or that funerals would be sad. They are horrified by normality, and they expect everyone else to be as well. However, they are not being antagonistic or adversarial. They genuinely enjoy their lives, and they have trouble understanding why anyone else would not. Heteronormativity demands resignation, it demands conformity. A man must be married to a woman and fulfill his societal expectations whether he wants to or not. So many fictional couples do not actually like each other, or really enjoy spending time with each other. Daniel Lavery wrote in his essay collection Something That May Shock and Discredit You “One gets the idea, watching Gomez, that he delights in getting to be a man, short and boisterous and nurturing and bursting with hope and pocket watches. He’s especially delighted to be a man married to a woman, particularly when that woman is Morticia Addams.” ( 179) This quote is specifically referencing the appeal Gomez Addams has to transgender people, he is someone who so delights in being a man rather than resigned to it it makes understanding gender easier. The same principle can also be applied to Morticia and the other members of the family. No one is resigned to their position in life, they perform who they are with glee. This is what makes them so popular amongst drag performers. The camp sitcoms of the 1960s are popular in queer culture, as the campy female charcters had a queer quality to them. (Miller 2) Dramatic female figures like the mother-in-law in Bewitched or any of the women in The Addams Family have that star power, the one that makes them feel like a drag performance. It is the same principle of camp, performing your role so seriously it becomes unserious. Every single character within the Addams is popular for drag performers to perform as. Each character represents different archetypes of subverting gender roles and doing so proudly.

Every adaptation of The Addams Family takes great care to subvert the family and gender expectations of the period in which it is placed. The shows or films always take place in the contemporary time period of its creation, and it uses that particular cultural context to contrast the Addams Family to the ideal nuclear family. This really began in the 1960s with the television show since the comics were too short for there to be really distinct personalities or storylines. The Addams are a return to pre-war family life. (Morowitz 43) The families of 1950s and 1960s television defined the “nuclear family” as a mother, a father, and two children, all of the same ethnicity and living separately from any grandparents. The Addams Family (1964) subverts this by going back to a family structure more similar to that of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in immigrant and poor communities where all generations of a family would live in the same house. They call back to the past with their Victorian home and gothic fashion. They also differ from the average American family in their ethnic background. Morticia is French and Gomez in the 1960s show is Spanish, and in the newest adaptations Gomez is Latino. Interracial or multiethnic households were rare to see on television, especially given the political climate of the 1960s. Interracial marriage was only legalized in all of the United States in 1967 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia. This particular type of relationship was a popular way to portray an “interracial” relationship, without the messy complications of “miscegination” and controversy. I Love Lucy one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, and particularly of the 1950s, featured Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as a married couple. “At a time when intermarriage was illegal in many states, midcentury audiences were primed to view Desi Arnaz and his Lucy persona, Ricky Ricardo, as culturally Latin, in an exotic, European, or Iberian sense, rather than racially nonwhite; the Desi-Lucy marriage was intercontinental rather than interracial” (DuCille 60) Gomez and Morticia make this even clearer, where Gomez is Spanish rather than Cuban or from Latin America. In the modern context, Spaniards are viewed as White, some still may consider them to be a form of “other” they are still White. While Gomez and Ricky’s pale skin and proximity to whiteness makes them safer from racism, they are still veiwed as exotic. These relationships were shocking and controversial in their day. As well as shocking viewers by subverting expectations of what a relationship is supposed to look like racially and ethnically, The Addams Family queers the television nuclear family, they love each other in ways that most television families did not. Gomez is happy to be a father, excited by the prospects of raising his children. When the kids must be sent to public school in the pilot episode of the 1960’s television show, Gomez asks, “What’s the point in having kids just to send them away?” The kids are not their mother’s duty, like family and gender roles of the time, would suggest. Every single person in the family fulfills a role, but not the ones prescribed by society. Their roles are more like job descriptions like “torturer,” “witch,” and “poison maker.”

This subversion resonated with queer audiences because they could see different versions of family and life, these people were not conforming to heteronormative definitions of the family, and they were still in a loving happy family. They presented an opposing view to the nuclear family, one less frightening to heteronormative society than what was coming out of protests in the streets. In her essay “The Monster Within: The Munsters, The Addams Family and the American Family in the 1960s” Laura Morowitz wrote “While flirting with elements of the counter-culture or ‘freak’ culture, the [...] Addams contained them within the larger matrix of a loving family.” (52) While people, particularly at the time, may note that this is a watering down of feminist rhetoric, many people could interpret the exact same thing as a source of hope. While television was not governed by the exact same rules as film, a major influence on all entertainment was the Motion Picture Production Code otherwise known as the “Hays Code.” Created in 1934 by William Hays, the Code is a method of self-censorship by Hollywood to avoid being censored by the government as the industry received tremendous scrutiny. While any reference to homosexuality was forbidden for most of the Code’s life, starting in the early 1960s the rules were relaxed to allow for some portrayals of homosexuality. To be able to show homosexuality on screen, it was to be shown to be something wrong. This involved many films showing that homosexuality was a social ill, something that would lead to a sad and lonely life, a life that often met a painful death. (Bridges 125) In this context, it becomes much clearer as to why The Addams Family has stayed around as long as it has. When queerness was forbidden or doomed, a family of non-conforming goths provides much comfort, even if the queerness is not as explicit as what a modern audience is used to seeing. When being queer meant being kicked out, potentially losing your job, and having children being completely off the table, The Addams Family provides a sort of dream, one where happiness and domesticity are a possibility. This is aided by the countercultural movements and the popularity of “gayborhoods” in large cities. So many of the most popular cities for countercultural development like New York City and San Francisco also became hubs of the burgeoning Gay Liberation movements. These communities have been quite noted for their political importance, from the election of Harvey Milk to President Bill Clinton’s Campaign. Their cultural and personal importance cannot be overstated. These were places where people who did not really have anywhere else they could be accepted could go to be themselves. They were able to find family there, even if it did not fit the narrative they were used to.(Ghaziani 4) This can be connected to The Addams Family, as they are also a loving nonconformist family. One critic noted, “They become television’s first countercultural role models in an age when non-conformity was beginning to be regarded as an asset, not a liability.” (Morowitz 51) This nonconformity is their asset, it is what makes them appeal to everyone, but especially to the outcasts. It is one of the few pieces of media where outcasts can get a happy ending, in a time where happy endings were the only products being sold by fictional television. The 1960s camp sitcoms were supposed to provide comfort and distraction from the news, but so rarely did queer people and those in the counterculture get to see themselves directly in those stories. The Addams Family provides it through winks and clues, but it still acknowledges that there are different ways to live, and they can be happy.

This particular story of the family becomes especially important in the context of 1990s films. They come on the heels of the Reagan administration, and in the middle of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. These were the first elections where the Religious Right became an organized voting block with specific political goals in mind. The conservative revival in the country had family and gender roles back to being one of the main national conversations. This conversation was mainly critiques of nonconformity, and social problems were blamed on anyone who did not conform. Emphasis was put on traditional families, which “were the key to social order and national progress. Good families were those that conformed to the ideal of the so-called “traditional” American family, a family form that seemed to flourish among the white Protestant middle class in the XIXth century, and allegedly reached its twentieth-century apex, or “golden age,” in the 1950s.” (Tyler May 12) It is exactly this movement and philosophy that the Addams Family films of the 1990s are trying to subvert. The title of the second film is literally Addams Family Values, and in both films they make several connections to current events. In the first film Morticia is at back to school night talking to Wednesday’s teacher. She is showing her the different people that the children have chosen as their heroes. When the teacher pointed out that it was “sweet” one girl chose George H.W. Bush as her hero, Morticia makes an almost affronted face. The opposition is clear, this is not a family born of the Reagan Revolution. They do not conform to gender or family roles, this is particularly seen in Addams Family Values. The central antagonist of the film is Debbie Jelinsky a gold digger and black widow married to Uncle Fester who is after the Addams family fortune, she exemplifies a camp love of the feminine that is popular in gay culture. Her villian monologue explaining her consumerist motivations has become a popular monologue for drag queens to perform to. She is the embodiment of over the top performances of femininity and consumption. Her parents got her the wrong Barbie doll as a child, and she was so enraged she killed them. She justifies her actions by saying, “So I destroyed one innocent life after another. Aren't I a human being? Don't I yearn and ache...and shop? Don't I deserve love...and jewelry?” The 1980s was full of consumerism and Gordon Gekko “greed is good” philosophy. The cultural context of the 1980s and early 1990s is particularly important when you take into account the popularity and obsession that children’s toys had in the decade. The Addams are rich, but they are not consumerist in the way that culture was at the time. They had a mansion, but it is ragged and Victorian, not clean and minimalist. They have money, but they never seem to spend it on anything. As well, the film takes a particular stand against ahistoric portrayal of Native Americans. When Wednesday and Pugsley are at a summer camp performing in a play that takes the side of white colonizers, Wednesday uses it as her opportunity to get her revenge on the leaders of the camp who had been trying to make her and the other campers conform. The scene can be quite uncomfortable in a modern context, with lots of non-Native children dressing up and mimicking Native Americans. However, it was not all that often that popular media would challenge colonization, and Wednesday does not just reference genocide of the past, but the ways that reservation life was affecting contemporary Native Americans.

This scene shows the way that The Addams Family appeals to queer and marginalized people. Wednesday leads a revolt against the adults in charge of the camp and the people who have bullied her and several other people. She leads a coalition of Jewish, disabled, Asian, and fat campers to set the camp, counselors, and bullies on fire. While it is at times uncomfortable as our cultural standards of what is appropriate has changed, it is ultimately a story about resisting forced conformity. The resistance to heteronormativity and 1980’s era polite society, in combination with the loving family aspects as discussed above make it especially appealing to a queer audience during the HIV/AIDS Crisis. While not specifically referenced, the cultural context of the time makes it an interesting lens to view both these specific films and the franchise as a whole. According to the CDC from 1981-1990, the total number of people who had died due to complications with HIV/AIDS was 100,777. This famously hit gay and bisexual men particularly hard. Lots of people were disowned, many sick and dying were kicked out by their family. The Addams Family can be seen as another queer domestic fantasy, one where families do love each other unconditionally, and where children are accepted. The central plotline of Addams Family Values is that Morticia and Gomez have another child, Pubert, who ends up being a normal blonde haired blue eyed baby. While Gomez and Morticia are confused and a little upset about their child’s seeming normality, they ultimately accept Pubert. His nursery does not match the rest of the house’s gothic aesthetic, and is something that looks straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. Morticia reads him The Cat in the Hat, admittedly enthusiastically, but still doing what she can to raise her child as needed, despite his differences. The Addams reject traditional family roles, and that also means rejecting forced conformity in any direction. Ultimately Pubert does have a magical transformation and becomes a mini version of Gomez, but they still loved him and did their best. It can be seen as an allegory for what many queer people wished theur families had done.

The Addams’ have graced our newspapers and screens for almost a century now. They have been a comfort to those obsessed with the dramatic and macabre since their inception. The camp qualities of their on screen depiction has made them resonate with queer culture. However, it is not just the campiness that solidified their place, they are some of the first nonconformists on television. It is not just that they will not conform to the family and gender roles of the day, they are happy while doing it in a time when nonconformity was seen as tragedy. This continues through the adaptations, the franchise is a response to the culture it comes out of. While the 1960s focused so heavily around themes of family, the 1990s focused more on consumerism and rejection of capitalist greed. Their place in both queer culture and camp is due to the strength of the family. They all love one another unconditionally, and when you’re an Addams that means to be as dramatic and macabre as possible, but to do it authentically. Dolly Parton is another example of camp and becoming a queer icon on the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum. She once said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” This is the secret to both a good Addams Family adaptation and camp. The creators must know who the Addams family are, know the current political and cultural landscape, and to make the Addams be who they are on purpose.

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