The family consists of the married couple Caleb and Camille Fang, parents of Annie, the eldest known as Child A and Buster, the youngest known as Child B. The family Fang creates art, performance art, frustrations, and involvements. Both Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists; Caleb is a professor in one of the colleges in the city. He fell in love with a woman named Camille. Camille is one of his students and together they both left the academic world and decided to travel around the country, staging and filming fake wedding. When Camille became pregnant with their first child Annie, they decided to marry for real and added the event to their film. Baby Annie soon became a part of their art. Annie and her younger brother, Buster, both became part of it. For Caleb and Camille, their art is everything not considering of the toll it will bring to their children. Their technique involved doing something unexpected to draw out a feedback from the public. They used Annie's fear of Santa Claus to disturb a shopping mall entirely. They both take their Santa-fearing daughter to every mall they can find so she will scream when she touches the happy man's lap.
Later, Caleb set himself on fire as planned, he ran through to a mall while carrying his infant son, while Camille filmed the entire scene. When Buster is older enough as a child, his parent enter him in a pageant, the Little Miss Crimson Clover pageant disguised as a little girl and won the pageant. Buster grows so uneasy regarding what his parents deeds. Everything delights Caleb and Camille who had simply put their children in a situation to witness what would come out. Caleb has always told their children that his wife Camille and him as their parents will always tell them that something is going to happen even if they do not know exactly what it is and they are always part of it and part of them. Caleb and Camille put their children in a situation and even without trying, they made their children something happened and created something amazing. However, Annie turned to her parents accusingly and said that her parents made his brother anxious that caused his sickness. In a beach vacation, both Caleb and Camille faked their identification. They both sat apart from their children, Annie and Buster on the plane and they pretended not to know them. At the same time, they pretended as unmarried couple so that Caleb could stage two fake and public marriage proposals to Camille. Camille’s different responses affected the mood of everyone else on both flights. Once, as instructed by their parents, Annie and Buster pretended to be raising money for the surgery of a nonexistent dog. While Annie and Buster sang and played a song on the street, their parents provoked the crowd to alternately cheer and boo the performances. Caleb and Camille always insisted that their children are free to perform or not as they chose. However, things never go, as it is their children are under their control. They both conveniently ignored every pressure used to make their children participate in their art. Many people certainly do not call it art; the art they have included acts that are illegal, dangerous, and merely upsetting to their children.
However, as Annie and Buster grow up, like all children, they find the behavior of their parents as an embarrassment. They spent their childhoods performing in a multiplicity of uncomfortable, upsetting, and embarrassing public shows. Annie and Buster had a very strange childhood. Their parents Camille and Caleb Fang are performance artists whose art involves staging bizarre public events that Annie and Buster are forced to take part of it. Their parents set up upsetting situations in public places. Annie and Buster are both trained from birth to involve themselves in these events: An impromptu rock concert that features Annie and Buster that goes purposely skewed as their father starts to interrupt them. Both Caleb and Annie are handing out free sandwich coupons from a local chicken restaurant, Annie, and Buster acting as the so – called roles in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. All of the Fang happenings involved humiliating Annie and Buster; however, their parents do not really seem to care for them at all. Above all, the only thing that is important to Caleb and Camille is creating their art.
Annie and Buster, as adults are struggling to find their place in the world that is full of hardship and challenges for them. Growing up, Annie and Buster Fang are both known to those who followed the performance art of their parents. In an effort to confirm that marriage and children do not kill art, Caleb and Camille made Annie and Buster always part of their art from a very early age; doing things together as a family is a good thing. Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. Annie and Buster are not dedicated on participating in some occasions that more often than not required them to act things they are not certain of or made them uncomfortable. Growing up in a constant work of art did not show the way to contentment and delight. Never a moment of in their lives they are happy and they are always been isolated from everybody around them. As they mature, Annie and Buster realized that their lives are not exactly what they, really wanted and seemed not normal compared to others. Their parents never realized that their obsession in art, sometimes being heartless, drive their children away from them.
Eventually, Annie and Buster do grow up and that leave away from home. They flee the first time in their lives and the first time they disobeyed their parents. Annie left home after high school and has become an actor. Annie portrayed an acting career for herself in Hollywood and she gave notable performances in bad movies. Annie is a star in the world of indie filmmaking and nominated for an Oscar. She has become a movie star with a role in a famous action – movie franchise. An incident where she is butting heads with her director of current film who wants her to come out topless for a scene in the movie. She is upset about being asked to do a nude scene not written in the script. She halfheartedly calls her parents for advice, contrary to what she really expected from her parents, Caleb and Camille is of them encouraging her to go topless and to do it instead. Her response to her director caused commotion and controversy. Later, after her relationship with her female co – star and the on – set incident made her publicity fodder. Her publicist advised her to show charm not over – revealed herself. However, she ended spilling her moral fiber to the writer itself, slept with him, and her career imperiled facing a celebrity scandal. Annie found herself unemployed after some damaging publicity.
Buster supported himself as a gonzo journalist, a freelance writer, and sometime novelist. He wrote novels that received little critical and no commercial success. He has become partly successful in his novel works and written some jobs in a magazine company. He is coping with a succession of low-paying freelance jobs and his books have a narrow effect to the audience. After a dangerous event that left Buster with big amount of his medical bills incapable to pay, he fled the hospital. In Iowa, Buster interviewed a group of soldiers who are unemployed and created a huge potato gun. Buster is involved and let him for it dearly, and has no choice but to return home.
Annie and Buster both tried to create a life and career for themselves unfortunately are unable to make it work. When both their lives start to fall apart, there is nowhere left to go but to return to their home in Tennessee. Finally, the family are brought back together after a decade and surrounded by the keepsakes of their strange upbringing; Buster and Annie are forced to face not only their artistically ambitious parents, but also the commotion and confusion of their childhood. With the family, back together Annie and Buster with their effort to understand their childhood, when their parents used them as pawns in performance art pieces, that brought the family ill reputation, but also did a messing up any chance Annie and Buster had at a normal childhood they ever wish. They discovered that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance, their magnum opus as to whether or not their children agree to participate. Their ambition strains disagreement has brought the Fang family to face the hard choice regarding what is ultimately more important, their family, or their art. It appears that the years have not been kind to Caleb and Camille. Their last event is indeed a failure. Soon after, both parents leave home and do not return. Evidence suggests they are the victims of a serial killer or a horrific murder as suspected by the police. Although the police believed, their parents are dead. The mysterious disappearance of Caleb and Camille, Annie and Buster are left speculating the fact on how to accept the death of their parents and how they died. They are also thinking if the absence of their parents is, just a decisive performance awaits to be revealed in the name of art.
At a certain point, the art created by Caleb and Camille turned strange and dark. After spending so many years turning their family into living art, the Fangs faltered when the children seemingly abandon the lives they built. After years of telling their children go with it, could they do the same thing themselves? It travels around the meaning of family, parenthood and the value of art. Caleb and Camille are people who chose a unique way to raise their children. Did they simply choose their own trail of parenting? Are they neglectful and abusive in their own manner? What do parents be obliged to their children? What do children be obliged their parents? What commitments do siblings have to one another? It is the never – ending imagination, lively prose, sharp wittiness, and enthusiastic intelligence of the multifaceted performance that make known in the relationships of people who love one another, The Family Fang.
Reference
Wilson, K. (2011). The Family Fang. United States of America: Ecco.
