American Dream Machine

Producer Craig Gilbert's television documentary "An American Family" was an ambitious project; nothing quite like it had ever been tried. Gilbert and a crack camera crew moved in with the William C. Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif., in early spring of 1971 and spent seven months recording the day-to-day lives of the seven family members. From over 300 hours of raw film. Gilbert prepared a series of 12 hour-long documentaries that have been airing weekly on educational television since the first of the year.

Gilbert's original subject had been the "American Dream", and the family he chose to film exemplified that dream: Bill Loud, aged 50, a mining consultant who had firmly established his niche in the upper middle class: his wife Pat, aged 45, a Stanford graduate become housewife; and their five children, ages 13 to 20, attractive, articulate, and very "with-it." Confident and secure, the Louds welcomed the cameras and sound recorders into their home and offered their private lives to a very public scrutiny. Seven months later, Bill and Pat had separated on their way to a divorce, and two of their children had left home. With uncanny luck, Gilbert had captured not only the dream, but its collapse.

Television has explored the American Dream and the American family in one incarnation or another since the early fifties. For the most part television producers have restricted their perspectives to the outlook of the situation comedy where bumbling parents and sophisticated kids wade through one suburban cliche after another or the soapopera where the sappy organ music aptly complements the artificial emotional crises. Television's presentation of the collapse of the American Dream was typified by Beaver Cleaver flunking fourth-grade math, or more recently by Archie Bunker confronting black neighbors with more education than he. Except for occasional glimpses into the personal lives of renowned families such as Edward R. Murrow provided in his "Person-to-Person" series, or the televised tragedies of political assassinations, the airwaves have been empty of families that look, sound and "feel" like real people.

Against this background, Gilbert's material, and his approach to it, would appear almost certain to capture that adjective he seems most to be struggling for: "refreshing." Almost everyone who has ever watched American television has wished that just once a character would stutter, stammer, deliver an inappropriate line, allow a sentence to trail off unconvincingly, show a real emotion, be, for once, human. The Louds do all these things, unconsciously, and Gilbert does provide a fascinating portrait of a sitcom family without their one-liners.

But Gilbert's comedie manque does not refresh. Like real life, it can even be quite a bore. Gilbert struggled manfully with the fact that the life he was filming did not lend itself easily to a dramatic format, that like most lives it essentially lacked the clear developments and resolutions of fiction. Not only did he edit his 300 hours of film down to 12, but he arranged his episodes out of chronological order, beginning with the last day's filming, New Year's Eve, 1971, and then recapitulating the previous seven months. From the first episode, Gilbert tried to exploit the audience's morbid curiosity about marital failure (bred of long years of afternoon suds drama) by making the Louds' separation the touchstone of his story. He counterpoints a painful phone conversation between Bill and Pat four months after their separation by flashing back to a breakfast at the start of the filming to show the couple "at the beginning of the end." Gilbert goes to such pains to dramatize the action, that one may forget it is real. And even so he bores.

The first program of the series opens with a scene of Gilbert standing on a hill overlooking Santa Barbara with the wind ruffling his longish hair and rustling the microphone. "I didn't set out to prove anything," says Gilbert. "I had faith that if we stayed with the family long enough, certain universals would surface." Gilbert has misplaced his faith, unfortunately. The universals do not emerge because the context of his family's life is never fully established. Why is the American Dream disintegrating? Gilbert says that the Louds are "neither typical nor average--no family is." The Louds own an expensive suburban house, several cars, endless gadgets; the children have "all the advantages," the parents travel where they will. Study of their life reveals little about the great social upheavals tearing at this society's guts; their lives show only the indirect effects-- moral uncertainty, aimlessness, most of all boredom.

The second episode--in which Pat visits her 20-year-old son Lance who is living in a New York hotel while looking for a "creative" job--typifies Gilbert's pointlessness. Lance is a lazy vapid young fellow with more than his share of pipe dreams and illusions. Pat is clearly sharp enough to see through his pretensions, but she does not make the effort: no Stanford graduate who has taken to frying eggs and making beds wants to tell her son that he should abandon his dreams. All of this becomes obvious almost from the time Pat arrives and begins making an overt effort to "understand" her son's patent inadequacies (like his helplessness in seeking a job). For the remainder of the hour, the point is ground home with unbearable repitition.

Even heavily edited, the Louds' life is scarcely more interesting than the lives of any of your neighbors. If the camera brings us closer to them than we normally get to our friends, we really learn no more: how many people, for instance, do not know that breakfast table conversations in even the most articulate homes tend to be trite and bitchy? How many people do not realize that when husband and wife start taking separate vacations and the kids start choosing sides, the marriage is on the rocks? How many people want to know that the Loud daughters take dance lessons which are just like the ones every middle class American girl takes?

Anthropologist Margaret Mead has hailed "An American Family" as "a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others." But the documentary fails to provide anything "new" except the idea of filming a real family. In fact, one wonders what the point of all this effort is. Real life is all around. We may expect more from television than "Leave It To Beaver" or "Days of Our Lives," but we also expect that if we won't be entertained, we will be enlightened. For all his skill, and luck, Gilbert shows us nothing new. We have all been here before.