AN AMERICAN FAMILY: A Televised Life.

By Jeffrey Ruoff. Univ. of Minnesota Press. 184 pp. $19.95

Of all the phenomena that An American Family, Craig Gilbert’s 1973 documentary series on the life of the upper-middle-class Loud clan of Santa Barbara, California, did not seek to promote, one was surely the law of unintended consequences. Yet, as An American Family: A Televised Life makes clear, that law reigned supreme. Not the least of those consequences was the first instance of the hall-of-mirrors effect that has become so achingly familiar in the age of O. J. and Monica, the remarkable way in which people and concepts ricochet back and forth between unbearable earnestness and self-parody, in which folks who’ve been on TV programs about themselves then turn up on other TV shows and write books to defend or explain themselves, after which the whole process repeats till exhaustion. Published at the same time as the death of the first openly gay TV personality, Lance Loud, a member of the eponymous American family, this book can be regarded as perhaps the last faint note of that extended symphony of reverberation.

Among those echoes, I feel constrained to disclose, were two of the earliest mock-documentary feature films, both of which I helped create: Real Life (1979) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984). In the case of Real Life, cowriters Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson, and I were consciously reacting to Gilbert’s 12-part series. We were comedically making the point, stressed by many reviewers of the show, that having a camera crew around the house inherently taints the "reality" one is trying to depict. In our film, a documentary maker’s cameras so distract a veterinarian, played by Charles Grodin, that he botches an operation and kills a horse.

In this thorough and largely readable history and analysis of An American Family, film scholar Ruoff suggests that such Heisenbergian critiques are just as applicable to other shows. Who, after all, thinks the camera doesn’t affect an interviewee on 60 Minutes? Yet Gilbert, who devised the series, chose the family, hired the crew, and supervised the editing, was drawing on the tradition of observational documentary to present at least the illusion of something less constructed than a network newsmagazine feature.

As Ruoff points out, it was in large part an illusion. Though he dispensed with narrators, voice-overs, and interviews, Gilbert still felt the need to impose storyline, suspense, focus, even music, on the raw footage of reality. His colleagues in public television went further, offering in the publicity materials a series of analyses, comparisons, and conclusions that, though disavowed by Gilbert, provided the substance for a great deal of what reviewers and commentators eventually wrote about the broadcast. Ruoff is at his best here, exposing the umbilical cord that runs between cleverly devised publicity and the ensuing coverage and criticism.

Some of this material seems downright quaint now. The critics, wondering whether the Louds were a unique breed of idiots for letting a crew film their life for the better part of a year, hadn’t experienced the intervening period in which, thanks to Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer and Fear Factor, it has become grotesquely obvious that many Americans will do anything to be on television. And what seemed such sensational TV in 1973—the dissolution of an apparently ideal marriage, the efflorescence of a gay teenager—seems commonplace now. What remain goofily interesting are some of the details: how, for example, some years after the broadcast, the Los Angeles public television station offered, as a pledge-drive premium, a weekend with the splintered Loud family.

I look forward to talk-show appearances in which I can explain what I really mean in this review, and subsequently, one can only hope, a documentary on the making of one of those shows.

—Harry Shearer