Children and Parents

Kevin Wilson creates a wonderful caricature of the typical family in the Fangs.  Every parent wants to share a passion and form a bond with their child and every child grows up and deals with the consequences of their parents’ actions.  This natural phenomenon is taken to a whole new level in The Family Fang. 

                The Fangs consist of performance artist parents, Camille and Caleb, to whom art is the quintessential aspect of life, and their children, Annie and Buster, who are used as props by their parents in their art pieces.   

                In the present time, Annie and Buster are young adults trying to build their careers and hone their own art outside of the family, Annie with acting and Buster with writing.  However, both struggle to do so because of their unconventional upbringing.  All parents leave their mark on their children by forcing, whether consciously or not, their morals and values on their children, but the Fangs did more than that by forcing their children to appreciate their chosen style of art and participate in it, to the detriment of their upbringing.  Child A and Child B, as Caleb and Camille call their children, did not grow into mature, self-assured adults.  They still crave the chaos and excitement they and their parents generated with their performance art.  Annie turns everything into a movie, like with the detective work around Hobart’s home and her escape from her ex in the airport while Buster makes elaborate stories of what could have been in his head, like he told the creative writing students.  The Fang children need and despise the drama they grew up with.

                Meanwhile, Camille and Caleb only began using their children in their performance art to become closer as a family.  Caleb had trouble feeling a bond with newborn Annie because his mentor, Hobart, taught him that “kids kill art” and art is the only thing the Fang parents care about, Caleb even compares newborn Annie to art, “the baby was a hummingbird inside of his cupped hands, and Caleb could not hold on tightly enough to believe that she was real.  It was a form of art for which he had no innate talent.”  When Caleb realized that Annie could be a part of his performance pieces, he relates to his child for seemingly the first time, calling her “his daughter” for the first time rather than Annie, the baby, or her.  Then again, when Camille agrees to use Annie in their performance art, “they stood, a family, and walking out of the mall,” it is the first time the term family is used to describe the Fangs.

                The Fang family is unconventional and extreme, but at its heart are the same values all families share, Camille and Caleb did what they believed best for their children by sharing their passion for art with Annie and Buster alternately hating and loving it, as evidenced by the Romeo and Juliet fiasco versus Annie’s first film role and Buster’s beauty pageant.  Parents undeniably leave their marks on their children forever.  Fortunately, most families don’t take these things to the same extremes as the Fangs and as a result, most kids don’t grow up to be as screwed up as Annie and Buster, though many are just as lost and confused.