From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Eight Is Not Enough
Suddenly, large families are all over the silver screen.
There has been much gloomy beard-tugging in recent years about the demographic decline of Western countries. Though it is true that parents in the U.S. are managing to replace themselves--unlike, for example, Europeans--we do not live in an era of big families.
Today fewer than 10% of Americans live in households of five or more people and only 1.8% in families of seven or more. That means that if your family consists of a mother and father and five children, you live where I do, which is statistically on the lunatic fringe. "Omigod, five kids?" people gasp when I tell them. "Are you nuts?"
There is, however, one corner of the U.S. where family size has suddenly expanded to titanic proportions, and it isn't Utah. It's Hollywood.
Three movies out this season suggest that we are experiencing a large-family pop-cultural moment. "Nanny McPhee" features seven grubby, uncontrollable children who drive away nannies by the score. "Cheaper by the Dozen 2," depicts one family of 12 cereal-spilling children and another of eight. "Yours, Mine & Ours" has a gargantuan passel packed into a lighthouse: "Eighteen kids. One house. No way!" goes the movie-poster tagline.
So what is the appeal of these supersized families now? Last year, cultural commentator David Brooks declared of children that "three is the new two," and anecdotally you can find evidence for this. Thirty years ago it was not uncommon to see a wooden-sided station wagon with lots of arms and legs poking out the windows. Then came the de facto "one child" policy of the Me decades. Today it's not uncommon to see a gleaming SUV hurtling down the HOV lane with three or four heads in the back seats.
Perhaps Americans are beginning to experiment, imaginatively, with departing from the tasteful, carefully planned, one- or two-child households that have been the norm for more than a generation. Perhaps, therefore, filmmakers, and audiences, are more receptive to movies about large broods.
This is not to say that big families have not appeared on screen before. Fifteen years ago we had "Home Alone," which posited a family so large that no one noticed when everyone went off on vacation without little Kevin. "The Sound of Music" (1965), in thematic contrast, also featured a large family but an astonishingly well-dressed and almost supernaturally harmonious one. The small screen brought us such big-clan classics as "Eight is Enough" and "The Brady Bunch."
All these pretend families of course had their madcap moments, but madcap confusion was not their primary trait. Indeed, if a single item in the house was broken, an entire subplot would be taken up with the children figuring out how to replace it without alerting mom and dad. Now, it seems, there must be flying foodstuffs and epic destruction for a large family to appear on film.
In this latest litter of movie features, we are shown that the more children in a household, the more deranged and uncivilized it becomes. A parent must be either fabulously wealthy or some kind of control freak (or, like the boastful Murtagh in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2," both) to have a clean floor with a horde of young 'uns around. To cope, a nanny must be either a witch, like La McPhee, or, as in last spring's Vin Diesel vehicle "The Pacifier," a Navy SEAL.
On film, vast numbers of ankle-biters inevitably means enduring a dreadful mess. Fully laden buffet tables collapse, porridge flies, pitchers of orange juice spray across the room. These are all visual metaphors for the loss of control and decorum that having a large number of children apparently entails.
In "Cheaper by the Dozen 2," for example, the mother serves food, at least the bread rolls, by actually throwing them at children sitting at the far end of the long family dining table. In "Yours, Mine & Ours," the mother nips out to dinner just moments after a watermelon has come hurtling down the stairs and smashed against the banisters. "Home is for free expression, not good impressions," she declares, blithely indifferent to the juicy heap. Actually, of course, a home is for living in, and most families, even big ones, manage to live in theirs without upending trays of liquid wallpaper adhesive on each other.
This idea of loss of control has darker aspects. In the advance publicity for "Yours, Mine & Ours," Dennis Quaid, who plays the father, made it explicit when he told Preview magazine: "Some people may see this movie and say, 'Well, I'm definitely using birth control.' [Laughter] It might be a warning." Drop your guard and the next thing you know you'll have a dozen children? Er, not likely, but Mr. Quaid is touching on something that members of large families do encounter: the awareness that they cause a sensation in public. From some passersby come fond glances. From others, thinly veiled hostility.
"People always tense up when they see a big family coming," observes our 11-year-old, a veteran observer of adult fastidiousness. "Movies like these are cute," she says, "but they don't do anything to lessen the idea that if you have a large family, something is going to explode" (a common occurrence in these movies).
Some adults flare their nostrils with distaste at the sight of even one child. Little wonder then, that large families will come in for hard looks from those who believe that they are overpopulating the planet, or selfishly consuming too many resources, or simply exhibiting religious zealotry.
The odd thing is that, off the screen, large families are seldom the ones with wildly misbehaving children. In real life, they tend to be the orderly people with the polite children, the families in which older siblings can be seen caring for their little brothers and sisters without griping about it. Indeed, onlookers are so taken in by the popular stereotype that they are often surprised to see a large family acting peacefully.
The recent return of big families to the screen is both telling and pleasing. It will be more pleasing still when those families are able to appear not solely amid zany pandemonium but also in orderly accommodation with the rest of society. Then reel life will be a whole lot closer to real life.
Mrs. Gurdon writes a biweekly review of children's books for The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Edition.
