You’re not. 
Response deleted. Cervaise beat me to it.
Ah- sorry, overlooked. (I also did a CTRL F and it didn’t pop up.)
Here’s a direct link to the tabloid article that started it all then. Note the before and after pics of the mansion’s interior.
I’ll add the documentaries about the West Memphis 3- Paradise Lost: the Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, films that should be mandatory viewing about a murder case that should be known to everybody as it’s 20,000 times more interesting and relevant and horrifying than Phil Spector/OJ/Robert Blake/etc… These have some of the most dysfunctional folks you could ever hope to see, one of whom may have murdered and sexually mutilated (in some order) an 8 year old boy (but which one is a matter of major dispute, and not many believe it’s the one who’s on death row for it.
West Memphis 3 Links: wiki- official - lengthy crimelibrary article ).
You gotta see it to get it.
He’s just bizarre, and says crazy shit, and a lot of his stories revolve around huffing a ton of gasoline.
But, it fits into “extremely dysfunctional” and also sort of sad because he’s not only poor, but he’s stupid, somewhat violent, has substance abuse problems. . .the gamut of poor stereotypes.
Yet, he’s oddly descriptive, and articulate in his own way which is why it can seem somewhat phony when you first see it.
There’s Grizzly Man, which is about Timothy Treadwell.
It’s a shame no one ever introduced the Bouviers to the Collyer Brothers. Love might have been in the air!
Or at least, something would have been in the air…
Vernon, FL, Errol Morris’s first documentary, about a town in FL where, among other things, some residents run insurance scams by amputating their own limbs.
Gates of Heaven preceded this.
Just saw You’re Gonna Miss Me last night at the Tivoli.
I can’t believe I’m goig to quote Kurt Loder for chrissakes, but he hit the nail on the head. Roky Erickson is one of the great lost vocalist of all time.
A must see, and a picture perfect depiction of a truly disfunctional family.
But I don’t think Gates of Heaven is about dysfunctional people. Unless you think loving your pet enough to buy a grave and monument for it is a dysfunction.
There’s no personal reason I’m bothered that the name of the town where this stuff takes place is Vernon.
A few HBO Undercover Documentaries that stand out for me for their particular dysfunctionality are Small Town Ecstacy, Life of Crime 1 & 2, and Crank: Made in the USA.
My favorite was the Life of Crime gang (Rob, Delkirious, and Freddy)… that was some crazy dysfunctional shit.
Dysfunctional? Titicut Follies fills that bill rather…er…nicely.
Another one, which just re-aired last week (and which I watched at 4:00 a.m. or something, being up with insomnia) was Dope Sick Love, which followed two male/female pairs of addicts as they worked the streets of NYC trying to get money for heroin and/or crack. I don’t know how long the filming took, but a couple of them in particular seemed to age about 10 years, and all of them looked horrible by the end. It was easily one of the most depressing things I’ve ever watched.
John T asserted that Vernon was EM’s first doc. Johnny H’s post simply refuted that assertion.
“Monster Road” about the animator Bruce Bickford. Maybe not totally dysfunctional, but very weird. His father with demetia is quite an amazing character, too.
“In the Realms of the Unreal” about writer/artist Henry Darger. He was a recluse whose epic work was completely unknown until after his death. Apparently he never saw a female nude so he depicted females with male genitalia.
“The Devil and Daniel Johnston” has already been mentioned, but is worth a second mention.
Oh yeah, and there’s “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist”
Hated. Not, absolutely NOT, for the weak of stomach, or spirit.
This movie seemed to have caused a stir at this year’s Cannes film festival:
Zoo: a documentary on horses and the men who love them - especially one man, a Boeing engineer, who died after a passionate encounter in the rural town of Enumclaw, WA.
I wish I could remember the title but I saw a documentary on Sundance about men who opted for voluntary castration. There was an underground community of such men and they could even find people willing to perform such operations. I don’t think they were all transgendered though I believe at least one of them was.
Marc