Little Miss Sunshine and the Avoidance of Tragedy

Abstract

I have coined the term “family trauma cinema” to refer to US fi ction fi lms dealing with these subjects. This term was conceived independently of, but has affi nities with, Janet Walker’s (2005) “trauma cinema,” her designation for documentary fi lms about the Holocaust and incest. Walker employs theories of memory and post-traumatic stress disorder in analyzing nonfi ction accounts of these two types of traumatic experience that are especially likely to produce memory distortion. Walker’s discussions of documentary fi lms and television movies that demonstrate the ways in which experiences of incest provoke fantasies or are misremembered or “disremembered”(Walker 2005: 3-29) parallel on the analytic level a prominent structural feature of family trauma cinema: the actual depiction of traumatic events is often displaced-projected onto other characters or situations, sublimated,or portrayed symbolically-in order to make these fi lms more palatable to viewers. In an extreme case, although probably not immediately recognizable as such, family trauma is displaced by humor. Little Miss Sunshine ( LMS ) (2006), the indie hit written by Michael Arndt and co-directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, follows the fortunes of the Hoover familyRichard and Sheryl, their seven-year-old daughter Olive, Sheryl’s teenaged son Dwayne, Sheryl’s brother Frank, and Richard’s father Edwin-as they travel in a dilapidated Volkswagen bus from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Redondo Beach, California, so that Olive can compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant. The fi lm was so successful that it now, according to Amy Taubin (2007: 62), “confi rms the [Sundance Festival’s] status and functions as a Holy Grail” for fi lmmakers and buyers alike.