The Elusiveness of the Smile in Fun Home

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

            When looking for adjectives to describe the tone and plot of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, one of the last words that comes to mind is “happy.” From start to finish, this graphic novel is awash with somber reflection, calculated literary allusion, and dark, twisted humor. “Funny” doesn’t always mean “happy,” and Fun Home is a great example of that. Bechdel’s writing, while eloquent and engaging, leaves little in the way of cheerfulness. The same can be said about the novel’s visuals. The color palate, with its single shade of dull, watercolor blue at various levels of saturation, does a good job of evoking the idea of memory, but not in a particularly positive way. But perhaps the most jarring visual indication of the deep sadness inherent in this novel can be found in the faces of the characters themselves. This particular design choice on the part of Bechdel was very quickly pointed out during discussions of Fun Home. I am of course talking about the distinct lack of smiling throughout the vast majority of the novel’s many illustrated panels.

            The default face of a character drawn in Fun Home features a mouth small enough to be mistaken for a pimple. And as you would expect, it’s kind of difficult to make any particularly emotional facial expressions when your gob is smaller than a dime. On the one hand, drawing mouths in this way is good for communicating the unrelenting emotionlessness of many of the characters in the story (which arises as a byproduct of the conflicted nature of their actual feelings). But on the other hand, being faced with page after page of stone-cold point-mouthed faces is, for lack of a better description, depressing as shit. I found that, while reading the book, my face would naturally shift to the same half-dead expression as the characters’. And on top of it all, it turns out that shrinking your mouth to a dot has the curious effect of dulling your smiles but not your frowns. So, the characters look just as sad and done with life as ever, but the few smiles that do appear scattered among the two hundred-some-odd pages lose a lot of their genuineness, as if the characters are only doing the bare minimum to express their positivity.

            And speaking of which, where can we find these mythical “smiles,” and more importantly, what happens in the story to cause them? For starters, we get a few tenuous smiles from Helen and Bruce during their earlier years in Europe. Some examples can be found on pages 32 and 71. Most of these smiles are from Helen, illustrating her naivety during those early stages of her relationship with Bruce. The Bechdel children are also seen smiling on certain infrequent occasions. In their younger years, they would laugh sometimes while playing, and Alison and John smile uncontrollably during their first meeting after Bruce’s death (46-47). Alison herself also smiles a couple times at college while talking with Joan and her other friends, and she laughs uncontrollably while discussing her father’s death with an acquaintance (227). And I would of course be remiss to mention one of the most obvious and important smiles in the entire book: the two photos of Bruce and Alison at the end of the fourth chapter (120). The primary remark made in the book concerns the similarity between the two pictures. But it’s also important to note that the two images depict Bruce and Alison finding joy at totally separate places and times without the presence of the other. Even in the previous examples we never see Bruce and Alison smiling or laughing together; it’s always either him or her.

            I could only find one significant instance of Bruce and Alison both smiling in the same frame, and it occurs tragically during their very last meeting on page 225. For a couple panels, Bruce and Alison smile together while playing “Heart and Soul” on the piano. I would not consider this their moment of closest connection, but it is certainly their moment of greatest mutual joy (at least among those presented in the novel). And unlike some of the other “joyous” moments previously mentioned, you can tell that the characters in this one are genuinely happy, if only for a fleeting instant. The sheer number of tired, indifferent, frustrated, and sad tiny-mouthed faces featured throughout the book makes positive moments like these even more noticeable. It really makes you wonder what was actually changing during the last few weeks of Bruce’s life, and how many more (or fewer) smiles there would have been if he had stuck around.

MXW

3.28.2026

If you know of any more examples of characters smiling in Fun Home, let me know.