ABSTRACT
One sunny afternoon in August 1994, I was watching the big summer movie of that year, True Lies, with a friend in Munich, and in the midst of all the magnificent mayhem on the screen, he suddenly turned round to me and said: 'Wouldn't family therapy be much cheaper?' What he referred to is the peculiar raison d'être for the action in this biggest and most expensive of all action movies: the hero and his wife have to learn to understand, and interact with, each other in a new way so as to revive their marriage, and once this is achieved the action-hero has to go through the motions all over again to overcome the alienation of his daughter. It was both annoying and strangely touching to realize that the spectacular attractions brought to the screen with the help of a reputed production budget of $120 million was ultimately geared to the completion of the simple dramatic feat of turning mummy and daddy and child into a happy family again. 1 Therapy would indeed have been cheaper. Yet, buying a ticket to see the family drama played out on the big screen is, of course, cheaper still, and in response to my friend's comment I wondered whether a trip to the cinema wouldn't have made the True Lies family just as happy as all the adventure they got involved in. It also occurred to me that, by offering itself to the audience as a substitute for the adventures undertaken by the family on the screen, this was perhaps what the film was trying to tell us, if it was trying to tell us anything at all: Enliven your family life — go to the movies together once in a while. Maybe, then, my friend and I became so self-conscious about, and frustrated with, the film's machinations and our own position as spectators precisely because we had left our families behind and thus had already failed to heed the advice True Lies was giving us.
