And a Happy Banality to you, too…

As you all know, today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of a momentous historical event that has radically reshaped our destiny, and profoundly affected the way we perceive both ourselves and the entire universe.

Yep, that’s right: it was (almost) exactly 50 years ago today that ‘The Addams Family’ first aired on TV on 18 September, 1964.

Dah-dah-dah-dum, click, click!

Honestly, though: can anyone even imagine a world without Gomez and his manic, infectious grin? Or the elegance and impeccable dress sense of Lady Morticia? Or the catatonic somnambulism of Lurch? And would we be talking about things like climate change and alternative sources of energy, if it wasn’t for Uncle Fester giving us all a public demonstration of how to use an energy-saving light bulb… half a century before they were actually invented?

No, I didn’t think so either. Like so many other ground-breaking historical events, the entire vision propping up The Addams Family was simply decades ahead of its time. Five decades, to be precise. The series is almost exactly as old as the country we live in; and if you ask me – which is never a wise thing to do – there is a certain symmetry in the fact that we now celebrate our 50th birthdays together.

OK: before turning to the scarier of these two phenomena – i.e., independence, which as we all saw this week is certainly a very frightening prospect to some people out there – a word about what made The Addams Family such an enduring success in the first place.

I’ve just re-watched a few episodes on Youtube, and – apart from the fact that the show has aged amazingly well, all things considered – I picked up on a few details I never noticed as a child. One of these details concerns how very faithfully the artistic direction manages to capture the spirit of classical Gothic horror. Stripped of its most fundamental characteristic – i.e., its humour – The Addams Family is actually a pretty darn scary thing to watch. Right up there with Nosferatu, The Exorcist, and even Adormidera.

It certainly makes better use of archetypal Gothic motifs than most of what passes for ‘serious’ horror today. But that’s only when you look at each part individually: the bloodcurdling scream of the doorbell, the disembodied hand walking on its fingertips, the carnivorous flower display, or the eerie presence of the tenebrous Wednesday Addams.

Put them all together, however, and the finished result is anything but scary. And this is where the true genius of the series begins to sink in: by presenting classical horror imagery as if it were perfectly normal, the inevitable result is that ‘normality’, by comparison, will begin to look frightening.

And of course, we – the viewers – inhabit the normal world, not the world of Gothic horror. So once the grotesque has been normalised, it is our own ordinary, everyday reality that suddenly seems out of place and vaguely threatening. This is in fact the basic plot device of practically every single episode: ‘normal’ people who come into contact with the Addamses suddenly come across as intruders. They’re the ones who shouldn’t be where they are, not the ghouls and the monsters. They’re the ones who actually have to explain their own existence, and why they are so different from the rest. 

This instantly subverts all the standard, recognisable ‘rules’ of the entire horror genre. Instead of an ordinary human environment invaded by ghouls and zombies, it is actually the ghoulish (and incurably romantic) world of the Addams Family that finds itself invaded by the intolerable blandness of normality. Ordinary humans like you and I become the real villains of the piece; and as viewers we find ourselves hoping that our own mundanity is not contagious. The last thing we would want is for The Addams Family to conform and become ‘normal’. On the contrary, we rather hope it would work the other way round…

This is why I find it such a resonant coincidence that The Addams Family would turn 50 just two days before Malta celebrates its 50th anniversary as an independent nation: and in a week when ‘independence’ – of an admittedly different variety – came to dominate international headlines the world over.

At the time of writing this, the first results of the Scottish independence referendum are beginning to filter through. Personally, I am not surprised that the Scots have voted to reject independence. That is after all the result that all surveys for the past three years (except for one) have consistently pointed towards. It also became somewhat inevitable, when practically every force in the known universe combined to threaten, bully and pressure the Scots into being afraid –very, very afraid – of the consequences of pissing off Mother England.

But it is in the referendum campaign, and not in the actual result, that I see a correlation with the wonderfully surreal and subversive world of The Addams Family. Perhaps I come to this from the bias of having myself been born into a newly independent state; but I just can’t get my head around the way the ordinary scheme of things has been so totally subverted as to make ‘normality’ seem outlandish and scary, while all that is grotesque and monstrous is made to look perfectly normal.

It is, after all, ‘normal’ for a nation to try and achieve its own independence. Especially when that nation is also governed by a ‘Nationalist’ (in the real sense of the word) Party. Yet just look at how the rest of Britain – and the rest of the world, for that matter – reacted to this perfectly normal state of affairs. Shock. Horror. Outrage. The prospect of Scottish independence was portrayed as preposterous, an affront to ordinary human decency. So all the people demanding it – basically around 45% of the population of Scotland – must by definition be ‘fools’, ‘ingrates’, ‘masochists’ or simply ‘insane’ (believe it or not, all those insults are lifted directly from various articles in the British press).

Speaking of the British press: I don’t think I’ve ever seen such unbridled mass hysteria slapped across the front pages of all a country’s newspapers at the same time. One Telegraph editorial even compared Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. Why the comparison, one might ask? How many innocent people did the Scottish first minister imprison or kill, to deserve a comparison with one of the world’s most reviled and hated dictators?

None, of course. Salmond’s grave crime was to threaten to do what any nationalist leader – of any country, at any epoch in history – would after all be expected to do, and steer his country in a different direction from the one recommended by the Telegraph.

And that’s a conservative paper, by the way. The astonishing thing about this referendum was how it was covered by even the traditionally more anti-establishment of the British media. The Guardian went positively overboard with endless nightmare stories of what independence would actually mean for the Scots. Loss of currency, the relocation of banks south of the border… price increases in everything from mortgages to supermarket commodities to postage stamps to tartan fabric… the depletion of oil reserves… loss of the NHS… a revolt by the Shetland Islands… even Nessie would abandon Scotland in disgust.

And on it went: one headline after another, day after day, week after week, all suggesting that Scottish independence would be the single greatest threat to Life on Earth.

And incredibly, the rest of the world followed suit. The European Commission stuck its oar in, too, and generously gave the No campaign a leg-up by suggesting that Scotland’s membership in the EU would be automatically null and void should the country choose independence.

This all adds up to a remarkable volte-face from the same British press (and the same European Commission) that roundly supported Kosovar independence just a couple of years ago… and which generally champion democracy in all other scenarios except their own backyard. Makes you wonder what it is that frightens the establishment so much… not just in Britain, but also in Brussels and even across the Atlantic (Bill and Hilary Clinton likewise campaigned against Scottish independence too… though strangely, they stopped short of advocating a return of their own United States to its pre-1776 status of British colony).

But the one that clinched this extraordinary sentiment – this naked fear of and undisguised contempt for anything that threatens the precious status quo – was a headline in the New Statesman: “Scotland would be selling itself short if it opts for the banality of independence”.

Got that, folks? The ‘banality’ of independence. The ‘banality’ of seeking to emancipate oneself from foreign rule. The ‘banality’ of a dream that has motivated millions of people worldwide since time immemorial… a dream that men and women have fought and died for, and continue to fight and die for to this day.

Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard such an outrageous and egregious insult heaped onto all the nations of this world which have tried, successfully or otherwise, to carve out their own destiny throughout history. But then again, insults such as this have been the hallmark of the world media’s coverage of this campaign from day one. So I suppose it shouldn’t really surprise us that newspapers would now cheapen and devalue the idea that a nation should aspire to such trifling banalities as ‘freedom’. The same ‘banality’ we are all celebrating today as a milestone of our own identity as a nation.

And this is where the two anniversaries we commemorate this week start to echo each other. In practice, our attitude towards such issues as ‘independence’ is no different from our attitude towards such issues as ‘normality’ when watching The Addams Family.

Think of it this way. Surely, you would all be surprised and alarmed to discover that your next door neighbour was in reality a vampire, a ghoul or a werewolf. But if you were living in The Addams Family universe instead of the real world, not only would you expect that to be the case… but you might even be dismayed or disappointed to discover that your neighbour was perfectly normal instead. 

Well, the shift in global perspective with regard to the self determination of nations is no different. Traditionally, ‘independence’ has always been viewed as a good thing: a noble aim for any nation to aspire to, and something worth fighting and even dying for. Yet this week we all saw the same concept reviled, spat upon and humiliated: held up as an object of terror and the stuff of nightmares, or reduced to nothing more than a trifle, a childish self-indulgence for the selfish and the spoilt rotten... or as the New Statesman put it, a ‘banality’.

So what’s there left to say? Happy Banality, everyone. Here’s to another 50 years of horror and despair…