Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/384358
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2014 Opinion 18 A s 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 And a Happy Banality to Raphael Vassallo 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.