We're the Millers and Faking the Family Unit

by Christopher Barr

 

“People do have special relationships with their families, their communities, and their countries.  This is the standard equipment of humanity, and most people, in all of human history, have seen nothing wrong with it.”   - Philosopher Alan Ryan

We’re the Millers is a comedy about a drug dealer who needs to get to Mexico to export a lot of marijuana back into the States.  He comes up with a plan of forming a fake ‘Betty Crocker-type’ family to divert suspicion away from this very illegal operation.  He enlists the help of a stripper to play his wife, a homeless runaway to play his daughter and a nerdy teenage kid in his apartment building, whose actual mother abandoned him, to play his son.  Together, they are the Millers, a nuclear family from the idealism of the 50’s.

Proto-industrialization marked a point in our history with the preceding development of modern industrial economy, established a fully industrial society.  Family structures were formed much earlier by the influence of the theocratic governments and the all-powerful church.  The modern family was to become a financially viable social unit, birthing a new form of family, socially conservative and compliant to a government in the US that was just cleaning up the mess of a second world war.

The post WW2 consensus was keep-your-head-in-the-sand reform.  With the devastation and atrocities led by the Nazi army, the Japanese army along with many others and ending with a one-two atomic punch by the United States, people generally couldn’t handle that much reality, and chose to solidify the family unit and keep the bigger picture out of their homes and their minds.  The government was largely responsible for this shift, with massive propaganda campaigns to help wash away the previous decade’s inhumanities and to fill it with a future of progress, growth and possibility.

By adopting this social idealized view of a utopian future, many unknowingly, gave up their desire for an actual meaningful life.  A life filled with wonder and discovery, a life when pursued might have clashed with conflicting American values, but was more importantly, one worth living.  Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.  Many kept their heads firmly in the sand, after seeing what happens to those that question the capitalistic hold the government and corporations had over the population.  They have money and investments to protect along with religious dogma and conservatism to disseminate.  Resistance of this was met with intolerance, which in turn was met with persecution, in other words, black listing, excommunication from the structure and so called solidarity of modern capitalistic society.  

This was depicted in the 1998 film, Pleasantville, where a brother and sister are magically transported into a 1950’s TV sitcom utopia, a place so pleasant that all social and family values are all clearly defined and came to you in conservative black and white.  The film was about clashing community harmony with individual expression, the problems of ideals in a seemingly perfect world and social intolerance.  The film was also about having a meaningful life filled with purpose at the cost of perfection.   

This struggle between civilizations and the individuals that populate them is not new and will likely never grow old.  The function and structure of a society, by its very nature, must smother all hope and dreams, to maintain predictability while mass producing products while consumer purchasing can be properly forecasted.   Investors and Wall Street brokers map consuming trends as plans of financial attack against other countries and other corporations, for wealth and prosperity, at the expense of the majority of the population forced to live in poverty and struggle for food and work.

The McDonaldization of America has been met with much resistance, in the form of sub-culture rebellions plotting alternative life styles, to covertly crashing the system, as depicted at the end of 1999’s Fight Club.  Terrorism has become more pervasive with many groups around the world fed up with all the greed and squandering the west has enjoyed over the years.  But the campaign continues within the American government and its corporate sponsors to continue with all the greed and like Star Trek’s Borg race of assimilators, America forges on with invading countries to secure more wealth, with a cost of so many lost lives.

What is happening in the homeland while the military invaders move from country to country, dispatching their very own weapons of mass destruction?  What slutty Miley Cyrus is going to do next, what the fashion police after an award show have to say about celebrity dresses and who will win the next Big Brother season extravaganza?  These things matter in a society that has only expressed its wish to sleep.  Mass shootings and false flag attacks on their own people have become a bi-weekly event, mass media manipulation and government propaganda insures obedience while they rape the world and their homeland of the possibility of a meaningful existence without tyranny.

The family unit has stayed strong in all of this, in spite of some of its hypocrisy; it has maintained its hold over those that make up the sum of its parts.  The fake family in We’re the Millers is a throwback to the pleasant times, and the comfort food we still all love and enjoy.  Where the chaos in the world outside our windows will persist, so there’s no reason why someone can’t find a little happiness in their fake drug dealing, excuse me, drug smuggling family, while trying to pursue a little piece of the American Dream.  

"There is absolutely no humor in the Death of the American Dream. I can't get out from under it; we're caving in... Fuck the American Dream. It was always a lie and whoever still believes it deserves whatever they get.... and they will."   -  American journalist and author, Hunter S. Thompson