Hello everyone and welcome to #fridayschoice.
Today I am taking a break from horrors, but I am still staying in the realm of #spookyseason.
Today I am going to be talking about The Addams Family.
I have previously talked about The Addams Family Musical on Katelovesliterature.com, but today I am referring to the 1991 movie version, and the 1964 sitcom.
I have been a fan of The Addams Family since I was very young, and it is probably because my Mam loved the movie, so I grew up watching it.
The Addams Family was created by cartoonist Charles Addams. The family was designed to be a satirical version of the idealised 20th century American family. Gomez and Morticia are the couple at the centre of this delightfully bizarre household. The members of the Addams family are fun, eccentric, macabre loving people. They are a close knit family unit, and they don’t care how odd or strange anyone else thinks they are, in fact I don’t think they even notice when other people are baffled by their gloomy, gothic household.
I have to say that although I love the movie, and the musical, my favourite version of The Addams Family is without a doubt the 1964 sitcom. Carolyn Jones will always be my favourite Morticia. She is beautiful, she is elegant, she is funny, and she delivers her lines in the most charming yet original way. Morticia is a very loving mother, and a very loving wife, she adores her family more than anything, and she is firm in her beliefs.
I have seen people argue that Gomez and Morticia are the perfect couple, and while I very rarely call fictional people “goals”, I do think that Gomez and Morticia are one of the best fictional couples to exist. They are passionately in love, they adore being in one another’s company, they make each other laugh, they would do anything for each other, they love their children more than anything and enjoy spending time with them, but I think the best thing about Gomez and Morticia is that they completely understand each other. Neither of them has to dull down parts of their personality or hide their eccentric nature. They are both weirdly wonderful, and they adore each other for it. I think that Gomez and Morticia are the definition of loving someone completely as they are, and they only add to each other’s quirks instead of attempting to stifle them.
I think that another reason I have always loved The Addams Family is that I love the family motto, which is essentially, to embrace the absurd. So much of what I study goes back to this idea of embracing wonder, curiosity, and the absurd. So much of literature, particularly children’s literature, explores the tension between having to grow up and mature, but without completely losing our childhood sense of wonder. When I discuss Frankenstein at the end of the month, I will be talking about literature in the Age of Enlightenment, compared to literature in the Romantic Age, because there is a tension between logic and feeling. Enlightenment thinking puts forward the idea that anything and everything can be measured and explained with logic, but romantic thinking puts forward the idea that we shouldn’t measure everything because some things can’t and shouldn’t be measured. In the Addams Family home, nothing makes sense. Nothing can be measured. Everything is eccentric, and odd, and delightfully confusing. The Addams Family home is a place where the absurd is embraced and celebrated. Curiosity is encouraged. The imagination can run wild in the Addams Family home.
Everyone can be exactly who they are, and unapologetically so. The children’s interests are never belittled. Gomez and Morticia never try to dampen who their children are, in fact they celebrate the individuals that their children are. Wednesday is quite an iconic character due to her morose nature. I think Morticia and Wednesday have always been my favourite characters, because while all of the characters are funny, and I enjoy the humour overall, I feel that Morticia and Wednesday could be argued to have the funniest, most often quoted lines.
If you don’t like horror but would like to get into the Halloween, spooky season spirit, then I would definitely recommend The Addams Family. It is not scary, it is simply weirdly wonderful. It is different, it is so witty, and funny, and the characters are fantastic. Anyone I’ve recommended it to in the past has come back to me and said they’ve really enjoyed it, so if you’ve never seen it before, or it’s been a while, then why not?
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- If you know you know.
This has been Friday’s Choice. I hope you all enjoyed it. I hope you’re all having a good month. It won’t be long before October is behind us as time is flying. Happy Friday everyone, I hope you all have a lovely weekend.
Kate xo.
Katelovesliterature.com 