Middle class teach their kids to hate the poor while affecting a (patronising) concern for them. They hide their problems and so suffer for them unnecessarily when a little honesty in the first place would have saved so much trouble later. The poor here are wastrels who choose not to work hard because those not like them believe that leopards can't change their spots, so what's the point of trying to better oneself when others will try to stop you.
The real pleasure here is that it is the kids themselves who handle the situation best in coming to realise that they have two families, not mutually exclusive ones.
This delightful mockery of contemporary (1988) Western culture presents White racism as terrorism, marital infidelity as an alternate claim of conjugal rights, juvenile delinquency as an excuse for social welfare and the religious hypocrisy (& religiosity) of siding with the powerful as proof of Christian teaching. Apparently, Jesus Christ actually invented love; excusing the authoritarian, pedagogic and ineffective schooling we see here.
The essence of this comedy is the inability of many to commit to others emotionally, especially because they are too busy with their careers for any intimacy other than sex. The bourgeoisie is, as you would expect, presented as emotionally retarded social snobs; the petit bourgeoisie, as emotionally expressive yet wanting to be bourgeois; and, the poor as fully expressive in an insensitive and tactless manner - as well as being welfare dependents. These issues are raised via a simple plot of babies switched in hospital by a nurse seeking personal revenge against a doctor. The son of a rich family is raised by poor parents; the daughter of a poor family by rich. This leads to complex consequences that are difficult, if not impossible, to foresee in this riotous political satire. Much of the humor springs from the fact that the adults are completely nonplused as to what to do while the children themselves take everything in their stride. This makes the latter more instinctively Christian in their attitude towards the poor than the adults.
The poor family is paid off to have their twelve year old son raised by the rich family and this leads to them being exposed as nouveau¬ rich parvenu; taking taxis to the supermarket – blowing their windfall at the earliest opportunity. The rich family is concerned with saving more than spending; making this also a comedy about the relative merits of deferred gratification versus the instant kind. All the social classes here lack any real emotional rootedness and are simply squabbling over what remains of former Western cultural greatness. This conflict is particularly resonant in the casual racism of claiming that someone is French but Jewish and that Arabs should be grateful they are allowed to live in the West, at all. In reality there is no way of truly separating the social classes because the differences are minimal and all social snobbery is little more than the attempt to pretend otherwise.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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