They connect with their kids by celebrating their own bizarre past. They believe that love motivated their actions, and express joyful satisfaction with their grotesque breeding methods.
Though the parents develop the idea to deform their kids as a way of raising their bottom line, they don’t treat the children any differently than, say, a family of aerialists might. Yet ignorance and addiction don’t play as much of a role in Al and Lil’s construction of their family unit as does unabashed love of their own absurdity. The chemical cocktail Lil downs, which includes “cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic,” calls to mind real images of reckless pregnancies of the past, from Jacqueline Kennedy smoking while carrying John-John to Larry Clark’s photograph of a pregnant woman shooting heroin. These parents cherish their sons and daughters’ imperfections and take delight in their kids’ ugliness everyone considers Lil’s addiction, self-harm, and prenatal poisoning clever rather than psychotic. What sets the Binewskis apart has everything to do with intention and attitude-having a child who grows up to be a sideshow attraction seems unfortunate but not perverse guiding one’s child into such a life inverts many of our most dearly held beliefs about beauty, children, and parenting, especially motherhood. Geek Love is a carnivalesque reversal of “traditional” family values, executed with such ghoulish enthusiasm that comparisons to The Addams Family rush past in a blur: The Binewskis make Gomez, Morticia, and their brood look like the Cleavers. His megalomania eventually destroys the family’s livelihood, but it may not prove strong enough to destroy the family. Then there’s Arturo the Aqua Boy, the firstborn, who makes up for his four flipper-limbs with so much off-the-charts charisma that he spurs a cult of able-bodied people to cut off their appendages to imitate him. A blessed-or is that accursed?-few achieve a measure of success on the stage. Many don’t make it (but are displayed nonetheless, as part of the “Mutant Mystery” exhibit) some-like Olympia herself-are odd but possess neither sufficiently theatrical disfigurements nor star quality. Her mother, Crystal Lil, agrees to ingest heaps of toxic chemicals and drugs during a gaggle of pregnancies in order to deliberately induce deformities in her offspring. Olympia’s parents are circus performers seeking a cost-effective solution to the financial throes of a moribund industry. She makes this declaration with a burst of filial pride, as part of a family bred purposefully to serve as sideshow freaks. A true freak must be born.” Or so says Olympia Binewski, the bald albino hunchback narrator of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989).
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