You Love to See It: Addams Family Values (Patreon)

In all of film there’s nothing quite like Addams Family Values, a campy collection of gothic and violently absurd vignettes loosely joined together by a single gleeful, frustrated, malevolent thread. That thread is live-in nanny slash serial murderess Debbie Jelinsky, the film’s antagonist. As played by the great Joan Cusack, Debbie is an inimitable character, a kind of organic Barbie doll animated solely by the most venal, miserable concerns of WASPish square culture. As an intruder in a clan of depraved but somehow childishly innocent ghouls, Debbie represents all that is crass, modern, and covetous about the world outside the happy Addams bubble of cartoonish invincibility. 

Cusack’s body language — flirtatious but reserved while working on her con, flouncy and exaggerated by feathers, hanging sleeves, and pastel silk after she marries Fester — has something of the cartoon about it as well, as do her Bambi stare and babydoll voice, which she can snap like a whip mid-sentence. There is an edifice of Debbie, an elaborate contrivance of traits, outfits, and mannerisms, but beneath everything — her accessories, her cupidity, her vicious, roach-like survival instinct — is the absurdly specific and oddly touching ache of having spent her life being misunderstood. There is a bizarrely genuine vulnerability to her stories of receiving the wrong doll for her birthday as a child and being denied a new car by her husband

When the Addamses, held captive in electric chairs and a thrown switch away from incineration, hear her complaints they react with empathy. As fellow lunatics driven by motivations more or less inscrutable to the rest of the world, of course they see Debbie as one of their own. Yet a happy merging of their two demented clans is not to be, thwarted not by the family but by Debbie herself in a poorly timed final effort at revenge. Debbie’s tragedy is that for all that she regards herself as the world’s sole victim, she has no idea what to do with sympathy when it’s finally handed to her. It’s the square world that poisoned her so irrevocably, that placed her beyond integration even with the other freaks and monsters. Her real problem isn’t that she’s a serial killer at all; it’s that she’s a normie.