PRAMAGGIORE, Maria

Coupled Cupidity: the Incest Narrative and “The O’Neals”

 

This paper examines the coupled cupidity of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, American film and television personalities whose fame is synonymous with their family trauma and whose star discourses foreground the incestuous quality of a father-daughter relationship predicated upon acting as the family business and driven by a desire not for sexual congress but for continued celebrity status.

Ryan O’Neal established his career in the late 1960s and early 1970s by making a transition from hunky television soap opera star (“Peyton Place”) to big screen heartthrob, with top grossing romance and comedy films such as Love Story (1970) and What’s Up Doc? (1972). His fate was sealed a year later with the casting of his daughter Tatum, then 9, in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973).  In colloquial terms, Tatum stole the show, earning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (she remains the youngest recipient of that award and earned a punch in the arm from her father for that honor) and relegating Ryan to playing slightly less hunky and somewhat more fatherly roles for the remainder of his career.

The highly publicized rocky relationship between these two O’Neals, as well as the tension between Ryan and the other children he fathered with two wives and Farah Fawcett (Griffin, Patrick and Redmond), has come to dominate their star discourses. For forty years, from the mid-70s through 2012, tabloid headlines inevitably proclaim family tragedy to be the defining trope of O’Neal celebrity, and repeatedly place Ryan and Tatum at the center of the fray.

The discourse of family incest trauma converged in a specific way to produce Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s most recent joint reincarnation as reality TV stars on Oprah’s OWN network in the fall of 2011 (“The O’Neals”).  The program, touted as a step toward reconciliation, reinvigorated the father-daughter incest theme through joint therapy sessions that revisit a troubled past, most notably Ryan’s abandonment of Tatum when he became romantically involved with Farah Fawcett.

Jen Shelton argues that incest is “a structure of conflict over control of a child’s body and narrative”(23). This structured conflict animates the public relationship between Ryan and Tatum O’Neal in large part because access to Tatum’s body as a child provided both O’Neals with their most successful Hollywood endeavors. The incest narrative has been reinforced by the publication of Tatum’s two autobiographies (2004; 2011) and Ryan’s admission in the press that he propositioned Tatum, whom he did not initially recognize, at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral.

What’s at stake in the reality television conflict over Tatum’s body and narrative is not family reconciliation, but, instead, the possibility of continued access to fame itself, the substance to which these two are mutually addicted. Fame addiction here is channeled through an incestuous family industrial complex: both Ryan and Tatum offered the phrase “we work well together” as the reason to attempt this Reality TV reconciliation: yet that work history –assuming they were actually referring to on-screen work—amounts to making two films together 36 years earlier. As Misha Kavka brilliantly notes in her work on star damage, when the substance to which one is addicted is fame itself, rehabilitation and redemption can no longer be sought through correction and public confession. Instead, damage control paradoxically demands the hyperperformance of that damage in the context of media culture, which perfectly describes the OWN network’s staging of the father-daughter family romance of “The O’Neals.”

 

Maria Pramaggiore is Professor of Film Studies and Associate Head of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.