No Place Like Home: America the Dysfunctional

Throughout fiction, from Medea to King Lear to Fanny and Alexander, have we ever met a "normal" family - one that actually works? Family dysfunction may well turn up in cave paintings, but what explains the proliferation of films and literature in this vein over the past decade? Has a new idiom been forming as artists thrust upon us ever more sardonic, raw, and darkly humorous depictions of dysfunctional families? And why do we watch? Are we really a society or neurotic, unhappy, materialistic, unfulfilled people with fragmented lives and an inability to relate even to our own families? Has our therapy-driven, ideologically rootless culture of self-improvement brought out our darker nature-and in art, uprooted it from the privacy of subtext? Panelists will include (schedule permitting) Catherine Hardwicke, Peter Hedges, Neil LaBute, Campbell Scott, and others.