Homemade Gothic – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Wednesday series about the adventures of a goth girl from the Addams family was aired, in which, with the blessing of Tim Burton, normal people are forcibly made from refined freaks and misanthropes of the Addams.
Eccentric puberty teen Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) gets kicked out of a public school for letting piranhas in the school pool (for good reason!), and macabre parents Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán) decide to her to an unusual school. At Nevermore, there are those who are called “outcasts” – werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires – but even among them, Wednesday is categorically unwilling to adapt. She communicates with other teenagers only for the purpose of a detective investigation: when one excessively quick bespectacled man dies, torn to pieces by a mysterious monster, Wednesday undertakes to solve the crime. Under her feet, the sheriff of the neighboring town (Jamie McShane), founded by pilgrims, and the school principal Larissa Weems (Gwendolyn Christie) are annoyingly confused – so preoccupied with the good name of the school (which was first croaked by a raven in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe!), That sweeps any trash, including murder and self-mutilation. Soon, Wednesday begins to be tormented by visions in which she sees the prehistory of this place: once the leader of the pilgrims Craxstone (Will Houston) became interested in hunting for witches and tried to destroy all the outcasts en masse, and he almost succeeded. And now, apparently, his descendants are operating in Nevermore.
At first glance, it seems that we have the same Addams, which were invented in the 1930s by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, popularized the cartoons and TV shows of the 1950s, and in the 1990s Barry Sonnenfeld films were turned into a pop culture icon. Morticia still has a wasp waist and raven hair, bald-headed Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) grins silly, a giant butler (George Boursi) accompanies the family on trips, and Wednesday in Nevermore is watched over by a sentient hand without a torso named Thing (Victor Dorobantu). All these features are lovingly collected and polished in the first four episodes of the new series by Tim Burton, who was once supposed to direct The Addams Family instead of Sonnenfeld, but did not work out. But what we have now is a bunch of pop culture clichés from teen shows, spiced up a bit with the Addams mythology. Only a lazy critic failed to notice that Wednesday, although filmed for Netflix, was made according to the canons of the CW channel – the domain of soap operas about teenagers with a touch of devilry and superheroes, which, as a rule, do not sin with originality. Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar worked there, filming the long-running Smallville about Superman’s youth.
The Addams Family stories were from the beginning a comedy that put the typical dark black-and-white horror characters in the setting of a family sitcom, and it worked. The commitment to black magic simply helped them to tame and decorate a boring family life, it was, albeit black, but still humor. What we’re seeing now is the Addamses in teen melodrama hell with a touch of social unrest cinema. Wednesday should have been placed in St. Trinian, a British college for bad girls, where the same rabble had gathered. But instead, by the grace of the unifier writers, she finds herself in an unfinished Hogwarts for the “outcasts”, full of teenage puberty languor and cuteness. Even a school ball does not save the situation, where, according to the precepts of “Carrie”, blood is gushing from the ceiling. From about the middle, when Burton almost imperceptibly evaporates from the show, and with it the crumbs of misanthropic humor, Wednesday Addams becomes the heroine of the Disney teen movie format, which, as we remember from Addams Family Values (1993), she fiercely hates and considers torture.
But the main thing here, perhaps, is the Addams ideology rewritten exactly the opposite. These beautiful refined nonhumans were the kings of gesture, despised socialization and, instead of hypocritical generally accepted rules of behavior, adhered to their own. These renegades in the coffin saw your rosy cheeks and were convinced that kindness is punishable, and normality should be treated simply because the human community is rotten and worthy of contempt. The creators of Addams opposed them to the townsfolk, all these Normans and Normins. In the current series, people without magical abilities are also called “norms”, but the story about the adventures of Wednesday in “Nevermore” is imbued with slobbering political correctness: they say, all these outcast kids are also norms. Vampires and werewolves, they are only in appearance, but in fact they also deserve to be considered normal, because we are all essentially the same, it’s just that some howl at the moon at night or feel a rusty taste of blood in their mouths, while others have hair on their heads stand on end, like Gorgons have snakes, but that’s nothing. All this, of course, excellent Disney lies – we will never be the same. And those who agree to unify and be like all the Addams from the series (touchy Wednesday allows himself hugs by the end and turns on his smartphone!) are impudent impostors. Once upon a time, a family of these characters, intended for homely horror films, managed to escape from there to a misanthropic sitcom, but now they were again forcibly driven into a mediocre teenage horror film … And the raven croaked: “Never!”
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