Fun Home

Fun Home


Not to sound tacky or take the easy joke here but Fun Home really hit home. It seems like in most of my points I go back and talk about the bad times in my life thus far. Maybe because this is labeled as a family tragicomic, it’s easy for me to relate. Why is it that the positive events in our lives outnumber the negative yet the negative tend to have a longer lasting effect? Why do the negative events in life tend to shape a persons psyche? Is it merely a chemical process? Our brains can’t produce major amounts of serotonin all the time. Our brains would become overly saturated and start to develop a dependency. So positive moments get pushed away into a blur of chemical happiness and possibly we are left to dwell on the negative forever? Because the brain can remember pain and heart ache more efficiently? I ask this in a confusing manner because I'm in between on the matter.
If Alison Bechdel would have had a Pleasantville life she wouldn’t ever have experienced all that this pseudo autobiography in tales. One of the most fascinating aspects of this comic to me is how Alison has manifested her father and mothers characters as those of characters that she know they’ve idolized. She knows her fathers obsession with certain book characters and manifests her actual father as a character in her own life book. I find myself doing this far to often. Maybe to the point of it having a negative affect. I admittedly have an unhealthy obsession with Star Wars, to the point where I can justify behavior and actions based on the fact that I have idolized certain characters that there attributes mirror my own. That there beliefs are the same as mine. Am I simply the product off the idiot box? Or is this a defense mechanism? Is the slightly delusional way that Alison views her parent an acceptable way for people to cope? Or is it acceptable because the little of a little lesbian girl who manifests life truth based on fictional or semi fictional writing and plays is a caricature? Maybe that is why some people are artists. We have become so narcissistic that we have to create our own world and ideas in an attempt to escape the one true reality that we all are forced to cater to. Or I am simply looking way to far into because of my own baggage. Its almost completely impossible for some to walk up to any piece of art and looks at completely objectively. It more like walking up to a painting and holding up a huge dark screen of all of your own personal beliefs moral and ideas then the work of art. Does one have to take this into account when producing?