Gomez gives out better relationship advice than like 90% of dudes.
Gomez Addams is a suave motherfucker who loves his wife more than his own life.
Everyone should want a Gomez. Heās p cool.
Gomez and Morticia Addams actually have a very loving and extremely healthy relationship, both in the old TV show and in the more recent movies. They were also one of the first television couples to be shown to have an active (albeit offscreen) sex life. Their frank attitude towards sexuality was shocking in itsā time, but their relationship and their family dynamic is actually more functional and moreā¦dare I say itā¦sane than most families portrayed on TV.
The comedy in the show came from the familyās āoddā lifestyle, rather than from infighting and petty bickering, or worse, as was common on other shows of the time, thinly veiled references to spousal abuse. They didnāt make fun of each other or act like their children were creatures from another world. Were they strange and outside of social norms? Yes. Were they united in creating a loving home and being good, supportive parents? Absolutely.
These two support and adore their children, care for an aging mother and an estranged brother, put family before everything, and they love each other, wholly, fiercely, without reserve. They are every bit as much in love after at least a decade of marriage as they were the day they met.
Relationship goals. LIFE goals.
Just remembered in the second movie when their third child became ānormalā for a period and although they were shocked and didnāt know how to handle it, they didnāt mistreat the child or love it any less. They accepted the difference, even though it was hard for them.Ā
Reblogged for truth.
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Posts about Gomez and Morticia Addams are almost always uplifting and Iām happy to have them on my dash, but I think my favorite bit about this conversation is what Gomez is actually saying to Fester.
Itās nobodyās surprise that many of the aesthetic and thematic elements of The Addams Family in its various incarnations are influenced by Gothic tradition (not goth, that mostly came later. And not Goth, that was much much much too early), and I think Gomezās words are a dead bullseye in terms of Gothic mentality.
āMake her feel like sheās the most sublime creature on earthā
The sublime is a recurring theme throughout Gothic literature. Although the word (like āawesomeā) has lost a lot of itās original luster over the intervening decades, sublime doesnāt really mean elevated and lofty (or even heavenly) as itās often used today, but rather something possessing the power and grandeur to induce awe and veneration in the mind of the beholder. Although less than divine, something sublime possessed a wildness and power that transcended human ability to controlā¦or even to comprehend.
Sublime is standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon leaning as far as you dare over the railing and still not being able to see the canyon floor below. Sublime is warrior-queen Galadriel being tempted by the One Ring. Sublime is waking up in the middle of the night in the heart of a wild thunderstorm.
āMake her feel like sheās the most sublime creature on earthā
Gomez isnāt advising Fester to treat a woman he fancies like a princess, or even elevate her to pedestal of angelic nature (whoās idea was it to equate femininity with purity anyway? What a laughable and historically damaging idea. Shame on whatever dead (probably) white dudes promoted that!)
Gomez is advising Fester that if he truly loves a woman he must do everything he can to remind her of how sheās an untameable force of nature whoās grandeur brings him to his knees in awe and terror. Just like Morticia, for Gomez.
Iāll sign off with one of my most favorite quotes of all time, because it feels suddenly very relevant:
āWhen I find myself surrounded by so much beauty, I feel as if I am the eye of a hurricane.ā
- -Sanjay Kulkarni
I was just reworking a paper (for the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference in Manchester) that discusses potential visual references to the Addams Family in David Smallās Stitches: A Memoir, which isĀ a comic about, among other things, a 1950s American family. Charles Addamsās political cartoons about the āAddams familyā (on which the show and films are based) are a perfect satire of the mid-century American ānuclear familyā: working father, stay-at-home mother, roughly two kids, living in a home they own. The satire of the Addams family is that they have all of these wonderful loving and supportive relationships, even if their actual activities are macabre and (as the above commenter noted) based in the Gothic tradition. This is a commentary on the facade of the idyllic nuclear family: those families might have appeared to be wholesome and loving on the outside, but some were dysfunctional, troubled, or even abusive behind the scenes. (This is, of course, true of many families in America and other countries today.)
I posted some awesome Addams family New Yorker cartoons in my original post about the first iteration of the StitchesĀ paper when I was doing my MLitt.
