I’m Just Tryin’ to Save My Family

“Tonight’s The O. C. featured music by Air.” So, ok, they didn’t say that. But I was really excited to hear “Universal Traveler” off Talkie Walkie as the background choice during the climax of the episode, the party at Caleb’s. “I’ve got so many friends / Who can care for me” go the lyrics, which was important as Marissa did her reaching out to Summer. As I explained last week, Coop’s been kind of alone lately, and she’s trying to reintegrate herself socially by dating Alex—but she had difficulty making the lines of the song true regarding Summer. All is good now, of course, until next week, I suppose, when Julie finds out. Still, was I the only one who found it hilarious that Alex insisted on Coop’s bringing Summer to a party made up entirely by brunette lesbians?

This show, though, lest we forget, is about incest, and that’s what I’m tracking here. Alex and Marissa is an interesting story, of course, as non-reproductive sex and pairing is a way of maintaining the purity of a bloodline along with incest, but what I want to really focus on are three threats to the family played out in the three sexual plots fueling the show right now: 1. failing to leave your family (Sandy and Rebecca), 2. the danger of leaving your family (Summer and Zach), and 3. the relationship between blood relationships and contractual relationships (Caleb and Lindsey).

Kirsten referred to Rebecca, I think, when the plot first began, as something like the “Jewish girl you were supposed to marry.” As I noted in December, Sandy is an outsider in the Nichol family—he’s marked physically as different (“Jewish”/dark) from Kirsten and Caleb—and most of the rest of Orange County, where other than Seth and Sandy (and, crucially, Summer), the only people with black hair are the yard help. Rebecca was supposed to be Sandy’s wife—her father was like a father to him, the father he never had, and if the two children had married, they could have have a great, big, dark, Jewish family together. (What it means that in Peter Gallagher and Kim Delaney we have two black Irish playing Jews on this show is, well, obviously clear: the Judaism is just for the jokes; they could as easily be the Coogans as the Cohens.) When Rebecca asks Sandy about his wife, he tells her right away that Kirsten is blonde—he explains that he has sinned against his family by not committing incest. He has allowed his blood to be thinned out by Nichol blood. He has miscegenated.

Caleb doesn’t like Sandy since Sandy has never been like a son to Caleb—the son Caleb had but couldn’t get to marry (either) of his daughters was Jimmy, who, in turn, reached out of the Nichol family as well for his wife, but we’ll save Julie for part three. Now, what is attracting Sandy back to Rebecca is the promise of atoning for the fact that he messed up his pedigree. That is why Kirsten has to go see Rebecca. It’s hardly a question of love—Kirsten realises that the legal contract of marriage is not as able to make a family as being siblings can. Twenty years, she and Sandy have been creating a family together—but that’s the problem! Their family is only twenty years old, and it’s based on a scrap of paper. Sandy and Rebecca’s family is centuries old and based on race.

This same thing is what is drawing Summer and Seth back together. Zach, though, of course, a part of the second circle of incest (not a Nichol, but at least Newport), is not like a brother to Summer, as Seth is. He underscores that when, at first, he’s apprehensive about having sex with Summer, since they don’t have permission from the state (in the form of the contract of marriage) to do it. Summer and Seth, as siblings, can’t petition the state for the same permission. Instead, they simply have sex. Their sex play is grown out of shared childhoods, a sort of advanced version of playing doctor that solidifies the bond of the Nichol family (perhaps I misspoke—it’s important that Sandy is Jewish if only because Kirsten’s being Presbyterian means Seth did not fit into the matrilinear genealogy of Judaism).

I made a bit of a deal about Summer’s father’s liking Zach since Zach is not a threat to the blood relationship of father/daughter like Seth (as brother/sister) is. That is, I now see, a contradiction, since Caleb hates Sandy for precisely the opposite reason. I’m not sure I have pieced it all together, but one way out is this: Summer’s father is a plot fiction added to obscure the fact that she is Seth’s sister. They have invented a mother we never see (always whacked on drugs) and an unreadable, silent father to try and give Summer a genealogy that obscures her Nichol genealogy. It doesn’t work, though. Seth and Summer are, as Zach unwittingly pointed out, exactly like Luke and Leia. As Sandy runs to Rebecca, so does Summer run to Seth.

I’ve mentioned the legal contract of marriage above, and the relationship of the state in family formation plays a large role in the third sexual story, that of the relationship between Caleb and Lindsey. It may seem weird to call their relationship sexual, but I’ll stick with it. Julie understands that her entré into the Nichol family is only via marriage, and that marriage is not as strong a bond as the bond between parent and child. Marriage is a legal fiction that can be dissolved. But, as Dick Diver points out in Tender Is the Night, you can’t divorce your children.

Julie understands her tenuous connection, so she’s dead set against increasing the size of Caleb’s family, which would reduce and further distance her control. Now, adoption is a funny thing, since it, too, is a legal fiction. Perhaps Julie senses that a legal connection as well as a familial connection to Lindsey strenghtens her connection to Caleb—after all, that’s why adoption exists. But the point here is that there is a way, in terms of maintaining the bloodline, that it doesn’t matter. Julie’s insisting on the blood test, however, is a clever inversion of my argument—she allows us to imagine that, for Caleb, perhaps legal relationships are more important than familial. Julie may sense this, too, but needs the insurance of having Lindsey out of the picture.

Let me try to rephrase this: if Caleb thinks that Lindsey is his daughter, he doesn’t have to adopt her. He doesn’t need the state’s permission to have him decide that she is in his family. But, as mentioned above, the state has an interest in generating certain sorts of families (without, say, same-sex parents). Caleb’s turning to the state, then, is perhaps a signal of his own lack of confidence in his paternity.

Here we go… Maintaining the bloodline is most important. That’s why he opts for the blood test. He should have right away, but he didn’t want to (perhaps) own up to his own level of miscegenatin’ (Wheeler, also a good Irish name, is, sadly, ultimately of English origin) with Lindsey’s mom. Sandy’s advice, while valuable to how I’m tracking here, is not heeded because Sandy does not follow it himself. He gives Caleb advice both in terms of the state (get the test) and in terms of a parent (don’t get the test). But this is coming from a man who did not heed the wishes of his own father (Mr. Bloom) and married Kirsten instead of Rebecca. Caleb knows that Sandy is a miscegenator, and opts for the test since he understands at that point what’s most important.

How, then, to read Lindsey’s line about how her real father would never ask her to prove her being his daughter? I don’t know, other than that was a really, really well performed scene. Lindsey, however, never knowing what family she was from, has only a constructed ideal image of a father, perhaps, and, as such, can’t be trusted to handle filial obligation correctly.

So here we are, three sexual plots, three different ways of pointing out the obvious: miscegenation is bad, incest is good. I’ll leave you all with two hilarious moments of the episode:

First, I loved Julie’s Eva Perón moment as she announces her magazine. Fantastic stuff.

Second, I’m sure that as some point, I’ve had someone tell me something like, “I’m only telling you this now, so you can plan your freak out accordingly.” I’m going to miss Zach, I think.

PS: to the fellow who found this site by googling “malcolm reese incest,” I haven’t yet done an extensive reading on how Malcolm in the Middle combats the threat of miscegenation with incest, but I’ll look into it.