Addams Family Values (1993)

Ashia R:

Hey friends!

It’s Indigenous Day of Mourning, aka Settler Thanksgiving, and after our requisite Ray-family rant about settler colonialism and the whitewashing of Wampanoag thanksgiving practices, we still have like another 10 hours in the day to kill.

After a quick google for ‘Kids Thanksgiving movies from the Indigenous perspective’ (which turned up nothing but adult-centered documentaries) we settled on watching Addams Family Values, for that one iconic scene of summer camp revolt that was super radical in 1993, sadly remains radical in 2022

(With just a smidge of problematic representation that needs some family discussion.)

Also – R2 was asking me earlier today why his school had him singing poems about turkeys and pilgrims but not massacres and genocide in preparation for this weekend, so it feels like he might feel validated by the Thanksgiving play scene in this movie.

It’s been two years since we watched the first Addams Family movie, which means R2 might finally be old enough to sit through this one. And I AM EXCITED because omg I loved this movie as a kid. 

ALSO, the new ‘Wednesday’ TV show came out recently and I am super excited from what I’ve heard about it with Latinx actors and cultural representation.

[December Update: We finished Wednesday with the 10-year-old. It’s fine. 2022 Wednesday is unapologetically Chicana American and it’s gay friendly (yay! Except for a clumsy attempt to equate ‘growing out of’ queerness with werewolf-ness which is… yikes!!!). But 2022 Wednesday is deep into unecessary mean-girl snark and rude to nice folks for no good reason? She’s got Main Character Energy which is less fun than Ricci’s rightful vengeance, in addition to being exhausting to watch. Plus 2022 Morticia is a wet noodle of nervous fidgeting who plays like a caricature of 1993 Morticia so…I am disappoint.]

Back to the movie. We open with Morticia’s pregnancy announcement and immediate delivery of a new Addams podling, who takes after his father with a tiny pencil mustache and severe center part to offset his cherubic face. In keeping with movie standards, this newborn is thicc with the curves and adorableness of an infant at least 100 times his age.

True to the family motto, the elder Addams children lean into sibling rivalry and immediately try to murder it.

We’re like 6 minutes into the movie and at this point both me and Nathan have shouted “Don’t do that in real life” at least 30 times. Even Q contributed a quick “Don’t do that!” when they dropped the infant Pubert off the roof. 

So… yeah. We made the right call waiting until R2 turned 8 to watch this movie.

Catching up – the Addams decide to hire a nanny to keep baby Pubert safe from his siblings. After several interviews with Miranda from Sex and the City and a few other less recognizable actresses, Wednesday chases them away by being delightfully threatening and creepy.

UNTIL! Debbie shows up – a soft-spoken, bubbly vision in a white dress and a cute blonde bob, suspiciously unfazed by her new employers. In reality Debbie is con artist / serial murderer, ‘The Black Widow’ who has chosen Fester as her next victim. So actually she’s a really great fit for this family!

First act of business is to ship Wednesday and Pugsley to camp ‘Chippewa,’ which Wednesday claims means ‘orphan’ but is actually just the British colonial rebranding for Anishinaabe(g) people.

Camp Chippewa is your standard 90’s camp for rich white kids, and the arrival scene is supposed to come off as a caricature parody of real-life elite summer camps but really they don’t go nearly far enough.

Did we have google in 1993? Even if not – surely the script writers could have fact-checked this pretty easily? I mean there are… THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of Indigenous people who identify as Chippewa and (less than now with Indigenous language resurgence, but still), plenty of native speakers of Anishinaabemowin.

Let’s set the context of this movie for Wednesday-aged kids watching it in 1993. I was 11. At this point, my mom had worked her way out of poverty and had earned enough to take me out of state-subsidized day camp (8 hours of van rides, outhouses, and getting eaten to death by mosquitoes) and placed me in rich-kid summer day camp, held at a uber-fancy local private school in our effort to assimilate and become class migrants.

In the movie: Camp Chippewa is full of privileged brats who are basically carbon copies of each other – all blonde, white, skinny, abled, with tans that scream ‘square meals, free time, and too much money.’

It’s supposed to be a hyperbolic parody, but I swear to goodness the camp I went to was SO MUCH MORE RIDICULOUS. So as I watched Wednesday enter this camp with horror and hold a bottle of poison to her lips in an effort to escape, I felt very, very seen.

“Surely,” I thought, this will pop our bubbles and bring to light the horrors of forced theater and J Crew flat-front khaki shorts!

(It did not.)

I kind of assumed Wednesday’s experience was meant to validate the experience of every misfit, but I just nodded to Nathan and was like “THIS WAS MY EXACT EXPERIENCE!” 

And instead of him being like “I know, right?” This white man’s response is “I don’t know what you’re talking about – I LOVED camp!”

I will admit going to rich kid camp for a couple summers taught me how to drop my Boston accent, serve a tennis ball, and practice the infinite patience required to deal with entitled white people. But holy cow I cannot fathom enjoying the experience of being surrounded by wealth and privilege for months at a time.

And now Nathan and I are actively having an argument about whether this is an accurate depiction of camp and he’s insisting (despite the singing and the archery and crafts and outdoorsness of it all!) that it’s inaccurate. I DISAGREE. This is EXACTLY what 90’s white people camp was like. 

I swear to gosh – the same exact blonde ringleader was at my camp, but there were like twelve of her. And everybody walked around clutching tennis rackets, wearing brand-name swimsuits with sweaters tied around their necks. 

You know – I’ve been struggling with how to raise kids with the right level of fear without threatening to beat them or put them up for adoption like my mom did. I feel like “I will send you to camp with WASPS” strikes the right level of threat without classifying as actual child abuse. Let’s try it and make millions when we publish a parenting book.

Anyway in between the arguing about whether a WASP summer camp would be childhood joy or trauma for our kids, we get to see two love stories as they embark on shipment – Fester & Debbie, and Wednesday & Joel.

Joel is all the nerdy Jewish stereotypes from the 90’s – he’s unathletic, lanky, clutching a Stephen Hawking book and afraid of everything.

So I know the actor playing Joel is Jewish – but he’s a kid. So this could be a murky puddle of problematic representation OR an attempt at joyful self-mockery on the part of the producers, similar to what Fresh off the Boat is to America-Born Chinese adults today. 

And you know what – it can be both!

The camp councilors have decided to stage a play based on the first colonist thanksgiving, with all the Pilgrims played by the carbon copy blondes and all the Indigenous folks played by the misfits – the Black and brown kids, the chubby kids, the kids with glasses and non-white names. This is supposed to be a joke but this really is how white educators grouped us for everything back then.

Meanwhile, now that Debbie’s locked down Fester, her true personality is oozing out and frankly I love her. She’s like your standard Karen except extra – with a fluffy house robe. She’s gone so far into embracing her entitled bitchiness I have nothing but respect.

There’s no white tears, there’s no pretending to be nice, just openly threatening to call the cops on Gomez & Morticia for daring to exist near her. She’s not even a Karen. She’s her own thing. She’s a Debbie.

We would all be better off if our Karens just embraced who they are and got honest about what they’re about. Lets just push all the Karens until they completely lose their marbles and turn into Debbies.

Debbie’s practicing her fake grief for Fester’s eventual funeral and prepping some explosives to make him go kaboom, and really she’s just #WifeGoals as a woman who knows what she wants out of a relationship.

Back at camp, the… Pilgrim Glorification Play or whatever it’s called… is going on and Wednesday has no patience for it. In punishment, she, Pugsley, and Joel are locked in a cute little cabin with perky musicals. 

The children are horrified. (Fact: This is the appropriate way to feel about musicals.)

White girl playing a pilgrim: “These savages are our guests.” “Thank you, our primitive guests.”

Q: “SAVAGES?! PRIMITIVE?!!!!”

Ashia R:

See if you rant and rave enough, you don’t even have to say anything. The next generation truly is our greatest gift to the world.

The scoffing! Q is so riled up he’s standing up on the sofa. He has started to rant in indignation.

So Wednesday’s going off-script and has decided to ‘scalp’ the pilgrims and burn their village to the ground. So we’re making sure to point out the burning, scalping, and pillaging was instigated by the white folks and this day marks the massacre of colonists trapping hundreds of Pequot people in a community building and burning them alive, also the Lincoln hanging, the broken treaties and betrayals, etc etc etc.