From J-Ro’s review of The Flintstones:

For audiences of films d’art in the 1900s film was just an excuse for other artworks, and for audiences of Hollywood pictures in the 1990s film is mainly an occasion for revamped versions of things we’ve seen before, most often on TV and video. The Flintstones appears alongside Maverick, another TV spin-off, and when I caught up with it last week it was preceded by trailers for The Shadow, The Little Rascals, Baby’s Day Out (hawked as a Home Alone variant), and Radioland Murders (which both looks and sounds like a cross between Radio Days and Manhattan Murder Mystery).

The moral and philosophical chaos lying at the heart of such light entertainment, once people become interchangeable with objects, is aptly spelled out by a statement ascribed to Elizabeth Perkins (Wilma Flintstone) in the movie’s press materials. It deserves quoting in full. (Whether such a statement actually comes from Perkins herself or from a publicist-ventriloquist is not important.) Compare the first paragraph to the second and you have all the makings of a full-blown schizophrenia:

_“One of the things that Brian Levant pushed us towards was to make these real people with real feelings and real emotions and real love and most of all, people with real family values’ Perkins explains. “As much as you can get the look down and get the walk and the hair and the voice and the make-up, it has to be really grounded in some kind of reality or else it’s just an impersonation.’

“‘The goal of playing Wilma is to be true to the cartoon,’ adds Perkins. She studied hours of Flintstone episodes to master the physical aspects of the role and emotional tone. ‘She had a very distinctive way of carrying herself,’ Perkins observes. ‘One of the things that’s really recognizable with Wilma and Betty is that everything they do, especially when they stop walking, their bodies go into poses — almost like mannequins.’”_

Real people with real feelings and real emotions and real love who are true to cartoons and slide into poses almost like mannequins: the description is supposed to apply to actors in The Flintstones but I think it also applies pretty well to people who watch the movie and force themselves to laugh occasionally at its lame jokes, myself included. Through the miracle of movies, we all join the The Flintstones in becoming living, breathing, snorting garbage disposal units, and most of all, people with real family values.

A phrase like “family values” seems intended to help promulgate the cherished belief that family life invariably provides a refuge from the brutality and cruelty of corporate capitalism. But given the pivotal and semiparental role television plays in American family life, it’s hard to know how such a separation can be maintained — unless one assumes, as many apparently do, that television exists to promote “family values” rather than corporate capitalism. It’s no coincidence that Bruce Coville, perhaps the closest thing that the world of contemporary children’s literature has to Henry Miller, opens his masterpiece My Teacher Was an Alien with the lines, “’Hey, Geekoid!’ yelled Duncan Dougal as he snatched Peter Thompson’s book out of his hand. ‘Why do you read so much? Don’t you know how to watch TV?’”