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
If you know of any more examples of characters smiling in Fun Home, let me know.
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteThis is a cool blog post, and I love your descriptive prose. While reading your post, it occured to me that many of the examples you give of characters smiling are to do with Alison and her dad (with the exception of Alison and her siblings smiling as kids/Alison and Joan smiling) which is perhaps not super surprising given their relationship is the focus of the book.
Of the smiles involving her Dad, two of them are absurd and caused by Alison (and in one case, her brother) thinking of his death. In the smile you mentioned on the last page of chapter four (p120), Bechdel describes her and her father's photo-frozen grins as "pained," which suggests that the scene in chapter Seven where they are playing Heart and Soul is among the only panels in the entire book where Bruce actually smiles genuinely. Bechdel saving this for the last chapter allows for it to have more emotional catharsis over their relationship—likewise, Alison's smiling around Joan allows for emotional catharsis in her own arc, having successfully accepted herself and found a girlfriend.
Smiling is one of the most human characteristics that expresses happiness. Fun Home doesn’t necessarily lack this trait, but it doesn’t seem to be a popular and promoted trait. In one instance, during a scene with Alison and Joan, there are these oddly painted-on smiles that seem completely fake and slightly creepy. It’s in an instance where they are almost coping with the reality that Alison's father is dead. But the ‘true’ smiles mentioned at college, and other places, are associated with acceptance of identity. In the end, smiles aren’t something that are very prominent in this novel.
ReplyDeleteHi Michael! I really enjoyed reading this blog as I never thought about the illustrations in this way and I also really liked how you described the mouths and style of the drawings in this book. I wonder how much of the not smiling is actually due to her father, and how much is due to her coming of age and more accepting herself and having her father also accept her. Either way, I thought this was a really interesting blog and really enjoyed reading it. Great job!
ReplyDeleteHello Michael! This is an extremely interesting topic for a blog. As a basis, I find the graphic novel format typically very helpful in conveying the emotions of characters specifically through their expression, and due to Fun Home's lack of any real facial variety, I found it to at first only complicate the idea of tracing emotion. However, this perspective on how the lack of smile is therefore used to enunciate a smile is eventually used is really valuable! I also like what you say about the smiles feeling fake when they are present, because I totally agree, pretty phony heh. Great post!
ReplyDeleteWow Michael, first off, I just wanted to say I love how refreshing your prose is. A lot of this book IS depressing as shit! And thank you for likening the mouths of the characters to pimples-- that's a hilarious visual. I don't have a lot to add about the tangible presence (or lack thereof) of smiling in this book, but I did want to express an observation I made while reading. While we read Fun Home, as a class, we agreed that Alison and Bruce were becoming closer as Alison grew up--- sharing more conversations, being slightly more vulnerable, and generally having good experiences with each other. Maybe it's just the fact that I (and presumably most of our classmates) had a happy childhood and closer relationships with our parents, but even this "closer" bond is still PAINFULLY awkward. To me, it felt like a stylistic choice on the part of Bechdel to prefer *describing* how they felt more close over actually *showing* it (with only one scene where they're genuinely smiling together, playing the piano)-- it fits with the cold, analytical tone. I wonder if the lack of smiles in general tie with that. Thanks for writing this--- this was cool to think about!
ReplyDeleteHi Michael! I really liked your analysis of the smile in the novel and the significance of when it does appear. One important aspect I would like to bring up is almost event and drawing that we see are reconstructed from memory. Memory is not very reliable, especially when it comes to details from many years ago. As such, it's likely that these people were smiling much more often than is depicted. But that doesn't mean that the lack of smiling isn't important---in fact, it's very telling that when reconstructing these moments with her father, Alison doesn't remember a smile. I think the lack of smiling shows the lens through which she views them. Even if it was a happy moment in the moment, everything she learns throughout the novel as she tries to understand her father's death colors her memories.
ReplyDeleteI probably mentioned this in class, but I find the minimalist depictions of mouths and facial expressions in _Fun Home_ to be ingenious: Bechdel is able to express an impressively wide range of emotions with a slightly skewed or skeptically smirking mouth, which as you note is always depicted as the smallest possible marking on the face. Bruce's tight-lipped grimace is practically a character unto itself in this book--if this man were to walk into the room right now, I'm sure I'd recognize him based on how Bechdel depicts his characteristic facial expression (although in his case the minimalist smile also includes tense cheek muscles). It's a sharp observation to note that the most memorable smiles in the book take place in "photographs" (reproduced as drawings). With Bruce, especially, there's this sense that he has an expression on his face that Alison has likely never seen before, and that contributes to the idea that he is happier at this time in his life, when possibilities are still open for him, when he hasn't been called back to Beech Creek to take over the family business. There's no evidence at all that he is smiling at a male "lover" in this picture--aside from Alison seeming to "recognize" the type of smile alongside the photo of herself at a happy moment in her young adulthood. In any case, it's virtually the only moment in the whole book where we see what it would look like for Bruce to be happy.
ReplyDelete