Intimacy at The Fun Home

First, my apologies for being so tardy to the party this week.   A week of severe sleep deprivation followed by working until 3:00 a.m. over the weekend rendered me incapable of critical thinking.  My attempt to even look at my computer last night sent me straight to bed.

I was struck by the sense of intimacy that Alison Bechdel manages to convey in Fun Home.  The artwork gets very close to the people within.  The opening of the book shows Alison's father playing "airplane" with her (3).  Obviously, the way a book opens is going to set the tone for the reader's interpretation of the rest of the book, and Bechdel seems to be aware of that.  The three panels show a father and daughter playing a game that requires physical contact.  They are touching, in an increasingly intimate manner in each of the three panels.  There is only one word balloon on the page, containing "oof!" and one caption within a panel that gives information about acrobatics.  We can see from the first panel that Alison's dad has been reading, perhaps lying on a rug in a room hung with artwork and long curtains.  In the third panel we can see he has been reading Anna Karenina.  His sweater, button-down shirt and glasses give him a rather professorial look, and Alison's very casual and androgynous clothing match her very casual and androgynous hairstyle.  So much information is conveyed on that very first page.  The caption over the third and largest panel tells us something that sheds new light on the activity in the panels:  Alison is happy to be uncomfortable with her father's feet pressing her stomach, as long as she has the opportunity for "rare physical contact."  Now we know that what may be implied in the artwork, that they have a physically comfortable relationship, is not true.  We can continue reading the book with the knowledge that they are not a physically affectionate family, and l found myself intrigued about why, and how else they related.  Most of the time, throughout the book, the artwork and the captions seem to reflect each other; one does not seem to contradict the other, but on this first page, they do, to some degree, which also makes this page stand out to me.

One other place I see this sort of contradiction between text and pictures is on page 103.  The large, lower panel shows several people walking around, and captions contained in the panel point to various scents that are being produced.  None are pleasant, with the exception of pasty stop.  The smells that are labeled also lend to the idea that it must be a hot day.  These are all scents that one would expect to just hang in the hot air.  The caption confirms this, but in a funny, ironic way:  "In the hot August afternoon, the city was reduced, like a long-simmering demiglace, to a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity" (103).  One would expect a demiglace to smell pleasant, but we can be sure that's not what is happening here.  The caption both confirms and contradicts the captions within the panel.  This page also lends a sense of intimacy, in both the wink-wink tone of the caption over the artwork and in the labeling of the scents; I know what that particular blend of scent would smell like.  Bechdel has effectively pulled me into her world.

Another way Bechdel keeps the reader in an intimate space is through drawing other forms of media in her panels.  This pulls the reader into Alison's world by forcing us to see from her perspective.  Page 27 has a newspaper in the first panel, the newspaper announcing her father's death, while the last panel contains a picture of Albert Camus' A Happy Death along with another newspaper. That newspaper gives us a solid sense of setting, because it is dated, and because the headlines tell us what was happening in the world outside Bechdel's home at this time.

There is a drawing of Bechdel's first grade school photo on page 35, and, as her caption claims, she looks like she is in mourning.  Again, seeing the photo, as opposed to only reading about it gives a sense that I am sharing her experience, or at least getting a real peek into it.  She's sharing reading materials and photos and really letting the audience into her life.  These pictures also confirm her reliability as a narrator:  "I'm not just saying it.  Look, here, it's real.   I have proof."

The picture of a dictionary page in the first (and largest) panel on page 57 again brings us into Alison's experience, her perspective.  We see the dictionary page exactly as she does.  We also see that the entry for "queer" is missing the meaning for which she is looking.  She has been left out, as has her father, from existence, in a way.  If it doesn't even exist in the dictionary, it must not be real or valid.  This experience would not have been conveyed nearly as effectively without this image.  To see the entry and all that it is missing, in that panel, pulls us into her reality.   We see many bits of her world through her eyes, instead of simply through her pen, and it makes it more believable and makes her a very sympathetic character.