Lessons From Avalon: The Harmful Way We Live
The 1990 film Avalon, directed by Barry Levinson, is a touching story of an immigrant Jewish family who makes their way to the city of Baltimore. The picture begins on the Fourth of July of 1914 with the arrival of Sam Krichinsky, one of four brothers who eventually relocate from Russia to America. Avalon is the name of the Baltimore neighborhood where Sam and his brothers first settle. Gradually, the Krichinskys pool their resources together to bring over other family members. Over time, each member arrives in Avalon and joins the ever-expanding network of relationships.
The first half of the film highlights the integration of the extended family. There are scenes of siblings and numerous cousins playing in the streets between the Baltimore row houses. Mothers are talking with each other across front porches. Asking when their neighbor will be walking to the nearby market, and if they might walk together. Children are seen spending time not only with parents, but grandparents and aunts and uncles who either live in the same house or closely nearby. Then there is the weekly family dinner, which becomes so large that several tables have to be put end to end to accommodate everyone for the shared meal.
Avalon is a portrait of a robust, relationally rich extended family. Life is lived with others, both in times of shared joy, along with periods of struggles and hardships. People are connected. Conversations are many. Common meals are the norm. Life is rooted not only in relationships with others but also in relationship to place.
About half way into the film, however, something begins to change. The vibrant colors used to paint the picture of a relationally connected life begin to darken. The mood of the story changes. Three forces are introduced into the life of post-World War II Avalon that initiates the fragmentation of their relational connectedness. At first hardly anyone notices. The changes that begin to take place in the life of the family seem right – even commendable. But once the family fully embraces this new American way of living, there is no possibility of holding the pieces together.
The three separate, but interconnected themes that are introduced into the life of the Krichinsky family include the creation of the suburbs, the use of the automobile, and the introduction, for the very first time, of television. It is the birth of the suburban middle class. While each of these issues lead to a similar outcome, in regards to the fragmentation of their extended family, they each take a slightly different route towards the transformation.
The creation of the suburbs provided the upwardly mobile second-generation immigrants the false promise of a better life. More conveniences. More leisure. More space. In one very poignant scene, Michael, Sam’s grandson, played by a young Elijah Wood, first learns that his family will be moving away from the rest of the relatives, out to this new world called the suburbs. He asks his mother, “What’s a suburb?” To which she replies, “It’s a nicer place to live.” He counters by saying: “That’s what it means? A nicer place? Everyone is going to live there too, right? In one house?” In the mind of the young boy, family extended far beyond the relationship he had with his mother and father. The thought of moving away from a permanent, familiar place, full of relationships that were cultivated over a lifetime to a place full of disconnected strangers, simply didn’t make sense.
With the rise of the use of the automobile, fathers were able to travel further and further away from home to work. It was no longer necessary to look for work in Avalon. Instead fathers would drive out of the neighborhood, alone, to work in a place that was no longer connected to where they did life. In some cases, the places of employment were so far away that fathers were late coming home, missing time with their children.
Finally, the use of the television slowly erodes the time families have with each other around meals. Just when they were about to eat dinner together at the dining room table, they realize their favorite television program was about to come on so they all grab their plates and rush into the living room, only to sit, silently, staring at the television. Smaller groups eating off of TV trays replace the large, loud family meal. Family conversations about the specifics of the day were no more.
The final sequence in the film is heartbreaking. Sam, now in the final years of life, sits by himself, late at night. Asleep in his recliner. Alone in the living room with little more than his chair and a television. The room is dark, except for the dim light that radiates from the television that has gone off the air. It is a sad precursor to the way in which our modern families, torn loose of their roots, have left the elderly alone and lonely. The story of the film is the story of how proximity and presence of an extended family is replaced over time by alienation and isolation.
Excerpt taken from “Next Door As It Is In Heaven” by Lance Ford and Brad Brisco
