Crazy for dysfunction

Somewhere along the line, we traded the Cleavers for the Osbournes. Family angst and social stigma are new tickets to fame and fortune.

By Douglas Cruickshank

May 3, 2002 | Once upon a time, the dysfunctional family was an aberration, an entity feared and shunned by normal families -- good families -- who modeled themselves on the Cleavers, the Nelsons, the Andersons and the Stones (as in Donna Reed, not Mick and Keith). The designation was uttered almost exclusively by experts in the dreaded "professional help" category. And such was the shame of dysfunction that the dysfunctional would go to extreme lengths to hide their flaws in function, believing an appearance of normalcy might actually move them closer to it, or at the very least make life easier for everyone, most of all the neighbors.

Which brings us, several decades later, to "The Osbournes," a TV family of daunting popularity that features drug-addled dinosaur rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his real-life wife, son and daughter. They go about their daily business before cameras, flipping each other off and peppering their conversations with the F-word. Much to the satisfaction of MTV, every obscenity, drug reference and unadorned outburst of intrafamilial angst brings more viewers, making the weekly Ozzyfest the second most popular show on cable (wrestling is first) and a favorite of President Bush.

Clearly, the dysfunctional family has been rehabilitated. What was once considered dark and unmentionable now constitutes high-quality entertainment. Profane kooks and apprentice psychopaths have become endearing TV stars, while televised confessions of supposed stigmas -- incest, drugs, alcohol, emotional abuse and relationships without civility -- have become a viable path to fame, wealth and warm societal acceptance.

"Lovable but dysfunctional families have been a trademark for Fox going back to the days of 'Married ... With Children,'" wrote Nellie Andreeva recently in the Hollywood Reporter. "The network hopes to keep that string alive." Indeed, Fox has at least five new shows in the works based on the dysfunctional-family premise, Andreeva reports. But the upstart network, which kicked things off with "Married ..." in 1987, now faces stiff competition.

And that's just what can be found in TV Guide. The dysfunctional family is a star of stage and screen, as well as a cavalcade of memoirs that take the very idea of a damaged family dynamic out of the shadow land it inhabited when it was mined only by a handful of high-culture writers such as Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, whose dysfunctional backgrounds served as source material, and into the down-market glare of the popular mass media. Most recently on the big screen, "The Royal Tenenbaums," a film about a tortured clan of social misfits, though not a blockbuster, has -- as of early April -- grossed nearly $52 million -- more than twice its production budget.

Meanwhile, intimate memoirs overflowing with kink and confession, such as Mary Karr's "Liar's Club" and its follow-up, "Cherry," as well as Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss," have given amazing firepower to the literary market niche in recent years. Last and loudest, daytime TV shows such as those hosted by Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones and Sally Jesse Raphael have turned the most revealing personal confessions into a lucrative, if ethically questionable, entertainment product.

But then perhaps we never really understood the meaning of the word "dysfunctional" in the first place. Like a whole passel of other therapeutic terms, this is an adjective that seems to have slipped into the layman's language via the sloppy phenomenon known as psychobabble. Yet just as it is vague when used in everyday conversation, so does the "dysfunctional family" lack a precise definition even in the realm of psychology. The phrase encompasses a vast range of behaviors and can mean most anything the person using it wants it to, but a broad, generally accurate definition is: a family that functions poorly or not at all and communicates or behaves in ways that are emotionally unhealthy; a family that creates a negative environment that can be detrimental, or even catastrophic, to the development of its members.

Great, but what's a family? The nuclear family -- mom, dad, kids -- now constitutes a minority of the adult/child groups living together in the United States. So, not only has "dysfunctional" undergone an apparent transmogrification, the term "family" has outgrown its original meaning. At the same time that the emotional tangles of family life have begun to see the light of day, the nature of families has radically changed to include a growing cast of characters, making the entanglements more complex.

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