My whole life, I’ve been absorbed in the family photo albums, home movies, and videos, classifying and preserving them, yet each time I look at my mother when she was nine, I stare, rapt: what’s that expression, I wonder. Time passes in looking, I don’t know how long, and the same fantasy occurs: I might see her static face move, speak, explain herself to me; in the videos, when my father sits at the head of the table at holidays, I see his contempt and malevolence and despise him even more. The few photographs I myself shot of him he hated, he said I made him look bad, that he didn’t look like that, and tore them up in front of me. It’s more evidence of his aggression to me.
At home, I study the familiar images, but in the end nothing changes, the movies run along the way they always do, and without close-ups, it’s hard to see their faces, too many people are walking away from the camera, and the photographs don’t open up, either, their surfaces are like closed doors, as mysterious as they were when I first saw them. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, that’s the most honest response to explain my mania. I look and wait. The unguarded moments are the best, they’re most available to interpretation and also to no interpretation, but always they remain unguarded moments that I can make more of, just the way I want to make more of my life. Instead, I’m facing their ambiguity, which may be truer. I also collect snapshots and albums of unknown people. My pleasure is that I don’t know them, their anonymity identifies them to me, and, in a sense, through them, I can recognize my anonymity to others. It’s like making yourself a stranger.
The American family sustains itself and mutates along with its movies, TV sitcoms, photographs, video. Since the 1960s, in tandem with political agitation, media have remade it, blood ties are no longer necessary, but family cohesion still requires loyalty and secrecy. Any gay/straight sitcom pledges allegiance to the same flag. And though the worst things happen in families, the most disgusting and painful, with long legacies, the family is still idealized; there’s no replacement yet. It remains necessary for survival, and if you’re not in one, your fate is usually worse. Children in London, taken away from their parents in the Blitz, sent to the countryside for safety, were more traumatized than those who stayed home during the bombings. No matter what kind of terrorism happens in a family, relatives hardly ever betray their families’ secrets. The exceptions become sensations — Roseanne, La Toya Jackson. A member’s self-interest can break any contract, implicit or explicit, in the name of honesty, to cure the family or to get just desserts.
Uncle Jack tried to sell life insurance after Uncle Jerry’s funeral, and then my father stopped speaking to him. It’s nothing to the big world, but the break reverberated in ours, loud, disturbing, and still does. What about weddings? How does the tribe meet, on whose territory? When my oldest first cousin, Betsy, married a black man, only the adults knew. We kids were told Betsy had done something wrong and went away. I figured she’d had an illegitimate baby, as it was called then, but after three beautiful legitimate kids with him, a nice guy, nicer than Betsy, her bigoted father relented, so she was back in the fold, times had changed — look who came to dinner in the movies and lived in big houses on TV. Her kids have refused to have anything to do with us. I don’t blame them.
In the 1970s, the Loud family fascinated Americans with its psychological honesty, so compared with it, today’s reality TV is a joke; it trivializes whatever reality you’re invested in. The Louds fell apart afterward. TV’s exhibitionists challenge credulity, sanity, yet people humiliate and shame themselves daily. Americans can’t shake their Puritan past, so everyone’s hoping to confess their sins and find God’s grace. Still, it’s hard to understand Judge Judy’s appeal to the characters who want to be judged on TV, and those who watch manifest people’s perverse, insatiable curiosity and schadenfreude. Also, some people miss being yelled at as they were in their families. I’m one of them.
Shame is different from thirty years ago, it doesn’t last as long — Pee-Wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon — they bounced back, and, like history, Americans forget their pasts and sins quickly. Americans have several acts, with shame’s mutation, and if they’re televisual, it helps; if they’re not, some can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery — see Paula Jones and Linda Tripp. “Ugly” is bad, it’s evil — remember what the bad guys in movies look like.
Great Uncle Charley lived with a secret, and there are more in my family: my brother discovered he’d been born an androgyne, changed to a boy surgically, a fact hidden from him by my parents, until he began to date and felt weird emotions; the twins had abortions when they were fourteen, and apart from that “sin,” they had sex with the same man, maybe at the same time; and my father hit my mother. Mom was frightened of him when he drank, she cowered, I remember her crouched, it’s an image gelled in memory. We kids didn’t need to be told, Keep your damn mouth shut, we knew. If I ratted, a term I learned from cop shows, I knew I was betraying Us, and I’d go to hell. So you’re implicated in your family, always.
Mostly, my mother took the pictures. My father thought it was beneath him, he felt superior to us. My brother and I stood next to each other in many photos; he loomed over me until I turned fourteen and shot up ten inches. I became taller. He hated that, you can see it, I can, because I know his expressions. You can see, I can, the power balance shift: in later photos, then no photos, except at weddings, when we stood far apart, especially at his wedding. To my father’s disgust, he married Claudia, born Claude, a male-to-female trannie; only close friends and family knew. My sisters loved being photographed together, they still do. The twins are identical, both pretty, one has fuller lips, the other a wider nose; you can tell them apart easily if you know them. Their entire lives they’ve looked at each other, images of each other, maybe wondering who’s prettier, and whether she loves herself and image more or less than the other twin does.
The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I used in my first book, You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture—is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but everyone says I do. I hate my brother, often we hate our siblings, so a family resemblance colludes against your difference against your will. Blood tells the story, it seems to say, of which you are a part, and like tragedy can’t be escaped.
But what does comedy tell? Like about Great Uncle Charley, the buffoon, comic, teaser, the man who didn’t know that women piss and shit. Or was his life a tragedy? Was there an inevitability to it? In comedy, the only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line; guess it, and it’s not funny. Uncle Charley — his life’s a toss up, he was always funny, everyone said, then he died and his terrible secret came out that wasn’t funny, and it was a surprise. Tragedy can’t be a complete shock; it must build and build to a foreseeable end, which can’t ever be avoided. I can’t see any of it in the family photographs. But a family resemblance shares that attribute — it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you.