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oa Carla en Frank van Putten, moeder en zoon - Een narratologische analyse van de Van Kooten en De Bie filmpjes
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Volume 16, Issue 3, Sep 2013, p. 44 - 53
Abstract
In the first half the 1990s, Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie appeared in twelve television skits as Carla and Frank van Putten, mother and son. Each instalment follows a fixed narrative development, in which Carla’s domineering behaviour causes deep frustration with Frank. I investigate how these skits relate to Momism: a psychiatric and sociological discourse that ascribes a large number of ‘disorders’ with men – including asthma, autism, homosexuality, and schizophrenia – to an incorrect upbringing by a mother who either suffocates (too hot) or neglects (too cold) her son. Van Kooten and De Bie are commonly thought to make subversive satire. However, by way of a narratological analysis I show that, with the exception of the first two skits, the viewer is consistently invited to laugh at Carla as a bad mother.