Family Viewing: Grain and Fuzz

If you’ve seen an Atom Egoyan movie, you know he likes to watch. Or, better put, he likes to show us how we watch. His films are filled with two-way mirrors, camcorders, and screens. Usually, voyeurism features, to use a strong word, as a perversion in Egoyan’s films. Not always and not unambiguously. But to be obsessed with watching is to lose one’s grip on reality, or at least the things that matter.

I turned to Family Viewing (1987), Egoyan’s second feature, to see how these concerns looked closer to the root. I finished my viewing unsurprised: if anything, his interests seem more obvious here than in his better-known films.

Though his concerns may be more transparent, I also found them more urgent. Family Viewing is not a film that abides plot summary, weaving as it does between home-movie footage, family life shot as if on a CRT TV, and more traditional filmic cinematography, but I will try. Van (Aidan Tierney) is a 17-year-old student who lives with his cold father and too-intimate stepmother. He often visits his grandmother, Armen (Selma Keklikian), at a nursing home, where he meets Aline (Arsinée Khanjian), a phone-sex operator who can’t afford to move her own mother elsewhere.

Van’s family can, but his father, obsessed with comfort, refuses to do anything about it. Matters are made more complicated by the father’s obsession with recording everything, including taping over home movies of Van as a child with contemporary sex tapes, often made while on the phone with Aline, his phone-sex operator of choice. Faked deaths, real deaths, private eyes, and benevolent kidnappings ensue.

But what made this particular film feel urgent? We no longer use camcorders much. And, charming as Egoyan’s movie is, it isn’t vastly formally different than his others (match cuts, mood music, and wooden dialogue abound). Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t but reflect on how much more obsessed we’ve become with recording ourselves and others.

We adorn our homes with surveillance cameras. We tape encounters to put them on YouTube or TikTok. Indeed, we carry high-resolution camcorders everywhere we go, or—in a very Egoyan way—as I once heard Jonathan Richman say when a fan tried recording his live show, “put that television away. We’re supposed to be here together!” Family Viewing presents a world in which obsession with the pleasure and comfort brought by recording undoes and remakes a family. For Van and Armen, home videos represent a retreat into a charming past. For Van’s father, they form an effort at total control and self-coddling.

As beautiful as Egoyan makes the scenes between Van and his grandmother, there’s a seductive nostalgia to their co-viewing. A retreat into the past is better than the father’s voyeuristic sadism. But living on the other side of AI Boomer slop, it seems even our candid moments and the feelings about the past they evoke are not free from perversion. AI Jesus running on a treadmill is no home movie. But it marks a desire for a certain kind of past and future, just as the family’s home movies do.

No doubt Egoyan did not intend such a reading. He seems more interested in the ways recording binds and destroys, builds up and knocks down. I hope he’ll forgive me, on the other side as I am, from reading further perversion into his film. Sorry to say, I didn’t record myself watching it.