Looking In on the Louds

By Richard Stengel

American Family Revisited, HBO, throughout August

Television is proof positive of the theorem that the mere act of observing something changes the nature of the thing observed. Just look at the Louds. In 1973, millions of viewers did, as a twelve-part, $1.2 million PBS documentary called An American Family recorded seven months in the life of Mr. and Mrs. William C. Loud and their five shaggy children of the California sun. Significant anthropology or indiscriminate voyeurism, the video verite documentary transformed the unprepared Louds into instant celebrities, paradoxically enlarging and diminishing them at the same time.

This month HBO is airing American Family Revisited, an hour-long examination of how the camera changed the Louds from an anonymous well-to-do Santa Barbara family into what some observers labeled the living symbols of a culture in decline. Made by Susan and Alan Raymond, who filmed the original, the new documentary lacks the ragged power and immediacy of the series: a studied slickness supplants the prototype's shaky hand-held camera style. But underneath the gloss there is -- O tempora, O mores! --another expose of the Loud family's habitual self-exposure.

Beginning with a video scrapbook, the hour recapitulates the dramatic highlights of An American Family: an icy Pat Loud informing her philandering husband Bill that she wants a divorce, and the eldest son Lance, flamboyantly sashaying out of the closet, bedizened in silk scarves and blue lipstick.

Next we see the family's progress through the obstacle course of media celebration. Delilah is an overeager guest on The Dating Game, Bill poses in bed for Esquire, and Lance poses in the buff for Screw. It is like watching a Woody Allen parody of Andy Warhol's too familiar conceit that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

The family, assured performers all, became television-wise without gaining the wisdom to explain what television did to them. Mr. and Mrs. Loud, now 62 and 56, had naively imagined that the initial documentary would reveal them as hipper versions of Ozzie and Harriet. "I, to this day, am embarrassed," she confesses. Other wounded and still wondering voices of the Louds linger in the memory. Bill, bristling and unrepentant: "It didn't hurt anybody; it didn't affect anybody." Grant, a singer who went from croaking Frank Zappa to crooning Frank Sinatra: "We're not quite so trusting any more." The last and most poignant word goes to Lance, the dark flower of the family who seemed to blossom on camera: "You look back on it and you think, "That was really life? or is what I remember of it life?' "

After this return visit, it seems clear that when the map of Television Land is drawn, the eight-room Loud ranch house will be as much a landmark " as the Cleaver family's two-story white colonial. Just as the homogenized family sitcoms of the '50s became emblems of that "decade, the Loud family's home movies may be the veristic vision of the polarized family of the '70s. So stay tuned, video voyeurs, for the next installment of the Loud saga. Say in ten years, when the prospective grandchildren are old enough to be interviewed. --By Richard Stengel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.