The opening scene of Francois Ozon's first feature film SITCOM (1998) shows a mansion in the sunny French countryside, the idyllic home of the bourgeois family. Arriving home from work, the father (Francois Marthouret) is greeted by his family singing “Joyeux Anniversaire”. Before the birthday song is over, the father shoots each family member dead. All the action takes place inside the home, outside of the audience's view. Not until nearly the end of the film, after a long sequence of flashbacks explaining the events leading up to the killings, do we actually see the father shooting the family, with blood staining the family portraits placed on the mantelpiece. However, as also often happens in American soaps, the shooting of the family turns out to be just a dream. In the end, the father has not shot the family; rather, the family ends up killing the father.

In this chapter, I will examine how SITCOM reworks the image of the normative family, from the destruction of the bourgeois family to its replacement by an alternative “queer” family. SITCOM takes the perfect situation comedy (sitcom) family of the 1950s as its starting point, only to play with the conventions of this Anglo- American and globally mediated television genre. Using Warren Susman's notion of the “dual representation” of the American suburban family in popular media such as television and film, I will discuss Sitcom by showing how the image of the perfect American sitcom family is effectively used to problematize the distinction between the public (the conventional image presented to the outside) and the private (the secret desires exposed within). Particular attention is paid to the “coming out” of the gay son, and by extension, the Spanish maid and the African gym teacher, all characters who tend to be marginalized in the conventional sitcom family. Both the “sexually non-normative” and the “racial other” trigger the exposure of hidden desires, thereby “queering” the presentation of the sitcom nuclear family.