Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film (Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life) 3030716473, 9783030716479

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN STUDIES IN FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE

Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film Denise McNulty Norton

Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

Series Editors Lynn Jamieson, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Jacqui Gabb, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Sara Eldén, Sociologisk Forskning, Lund University, Lund, Sweden Chiara Bertone, University of Eastern Piedmont, Alessandria, Italy ˇ Vida Cesnuityt e, ˙ Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania

‘The Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series is impressive and contemporary in its themes and approaches’ – Professor Deborah Chambers, Newcastle University, UK, and author of New Social Ties. The remit of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series is to publish major texts, monographs and edited collections focusing broadly on the sociological exploration of intimate relationships and family life. The series covers a wide range of topics, spanning micro, meso and macro analyses, to investigate the ways that people live, love and care in diverse contexts. The series includes works by early career scholars and leading internationally acknowledged figures in the field. The editors intend to continue publishing influential and prize-winning research. This series was originally edited by David H.J. Morgan and Graham Allan.

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Denise McNulty Norton

Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film

Denise McNulty Norton Deakin University Melbourne, Australia

Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life ISBN 978-3-030-71647-9 ISBN 978-3-030-71648-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to my father, Desmond, my brother, Daniel and my son’s father, Philip—the fathers I have known best.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Kim Toffoletti who steered me through the thesis on which this book is based and who continues to provide advice and support. I also wish to acknowledge my son, Henry, who has been busy growing up while I have pursued this project. I suspect that, given a choice, he would have preferred his movie-watching without a side of sociological critique. He has been with me throughout this project, offering nurture and encouragement when they have been most needed, and I thank him.

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Contents

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Introduction The Film Father Definitions and Situating the Analysis Outline of Chapters References

Part I

1 4 5 8 10

Setting the Scene

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Hollywood Family Films and the Father Protagonist The Emergence of the Father Protagonist The Nurturing Father Child Audiences and the Father Protagonist The Film Set The Disengaged Father Film Demographic Makeup of the Films References

15 16 18 19 22 26 27 31

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Being a Good Father The Essential Father Father Time Father Involvement as Intimate Relationship The Possibility of a ‘Pure’ Father–Child Relationship Agentic Children and the Construction of Family Innocence and Redemption

37 38 41 42 47 50 52

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Conclusion References

54 55

Methodological Considerations Barnes on Agency Defining Voluntaristic Discourses The Agentic ‘Individual’ and Other Statuses Critical Discourse Analysis—Focusing on the Social Critical Discourse Analysis and Films References

59 60 62 63 66 68 71

Part II Changing Expectations of the Father 75 76 80 83 87 88 93 94

5

Choice The Father’s Failure Rendered as ‘Choice’ of Work Nurture and Choice in Father Films Essentialising the Father From Essentialised Tasks to Unique Relationship Choice in Mrs Doubtfire Conclusion References

6

Precarity and Risk Precarity within the Home Winners and Losers in the Workplace Risk and the Other Man The Masculinity Dilemma Conclusion References

97 98 102 109 111 113 114

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Responsibility The Taxonomy of Responsibility The Responsible Mother The Independent Child Breadwinning, Responsibility and the Hollywood Father The Black Family—Deadbeat Dads and Insufficient Mothers References

117 118 120 124 127

Locating Blame Routes to Obligation

135 136

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CONTENTS

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10

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Obligations Based on Being a Breadwinner Obligations Based on Commitments Given Obligation Based on Virtue Responsibility-as-Virtue and the Cowboy Father Responsibility for Securing the Father–Child Relationship Conclusion References

137 139 140 143 146 152 153

Voice The Pure Father—Learning to Listen and to Communicate Emotion The Voiced Child The Agentic Child—The Loss of Innocence and Unconditional Love Conclusion References

157

Conclusion The Father The Mother and Child Final Thoughts References

181 182 185 187 189

158 166 174 176 177

Appendix

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This project maps the contours of father failure and redemption in 40 Hollywood family films released between 1990 and 2015. It began more than ten years ago when, on Sunday evenings, our small family would gather on the sofa to watch as film fathers (with a little help from their children) learned how to be good. And it began with a question: why are so many of the films made for child audiences now featuring the father as protagonist and family problem? Father protagonist family films may differ in plot details, but the narrative arc is unvarying. It follows the father’s journey as he transforms from a poor father into a good one. To say that a thing or a person is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is to make a judgement, and judgements depend on context and serve to delineate the thing judged. The judgement that a father is good depends on what is meant by father (as well as what is meant by ‘good’) in this time and in this place by these people. But conversely, what is meant by ‘father’ is determined by our judgements about whether this man or that is a good father—whether this act or that is an instance of good fathering—whether this act or that is an act of parenting. Judgement is, as Wittgenstein demonstrated, determinate of meaning (1968). At least it is determinate to the extent that if we disagree on whether this person is a good father yet agree as to the facts, we would have to compare our understanding of what ‘father’ means. We would need to compare the expectations we have of fathers. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_1

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By analysing filmic construction of the failing father and the redeemed father over time, I reveal changes to the expectations that surround the Hollywood father and identify the conflicts that prevent the father from meeting these expectations. Amidst sustained scholarly, policy and wider social debate over the changing roles of the father in the West, research into the construction of ‘good’ and ‘poor’ fathering in popular films can contribute to sociological understanding of the conflicts and tensions affecting contemporary families. The aims of this book, then, are: to reveal the central tensions and conflicts of contemporary fathering as these are portrayed in the films, and to explore the resolutions offered in the films for what they reveal of changing constructions of the good father. A secondary aim is to trace how the expectations of the interdependent statuses of mother and child shift in response to changes in fatherhood over the decades. In discussions of how the mother and the child are positioned within these films, it should be remembered, however, that the films discussed here are father films. They are not only films with fathers in them: they are films that, to borrow Stella Bruzzi’s definition ‘offer active discussions of fatherhood’ (2005, p. ix). Consequently, the portrayal of mothers and children is not here taken to indicate current discourses or contemporary concerns surrounding motherhood or childhood. Instead, their constitution is seen in relation to the shifting construction of the Hollywood father as they accommodate and make credible the father constructions portrayed. I explore ‘fatherhood’, understood as the social expectations surrounding fathers, as these are conveyed in filmic dialogue, sequences, plot devices and images. I understand the meaning of social categories such as ‘father’ to consist of the expectations directed towards them. With this in mind, the key questions I seek to answer are: What unmet expectations are associated with father failure in Hollywood family films? What conflicts and tensions are indicated by father failure within the films? How do these films reduce or resolve conflicts in constructing the redeemed or ‘good’ father? What assumptions and affordances do the films make in the constructions of the mother and child in order to accommodate Hollywood (re)constructions of the father?

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This book contributes both empirically and methodologically to sociological exploration of the family. Methodologically, it demonstrates the utility of mobilising Barnes’ social conceptualisation of agency in the study of social differentiations. Barnes’ understanding of agency as ‘status’ brings a new dimension to the study of representations of the family, enabling investigation of the shifting tensions and conflicts that arise at the intersections of statuses (where ‘statuses’ are understood here as social categories of all kinds). I argue that inequality can be located not only in the unequal distribution of privileges and prohibitions attributed locally and historically to a status but also at the intersections of statuses where these involve incompatible expectations borne by one person. I suggest that these tensions and conflicts between incompatible expectations provide the impetus for status shifts to occur—where ‘status’ shifts are understood here as local changes to the social expectations surrounding social categories. Changes in social expectations can be conceived then as adjustments made to reduce or resolve rising tensions between intersecting statuses. These shifts are necessarily ongoing as new conflicts and tensions are created thereby. It is my contention that these conflicts can be explored by analysing the everyday ‘voluntaristic’ discourses that convey social expectations and so construct social categories, and this underlies the Critical Discourse Analysis approach I have taken. Mobilising Barnes’ model of agency, I explore the voluntaristic discourses that are used to attribute expectations within the films in order to build a picture of the Hollywood father (as expectations define him) but also to map the intersecting and interdependent status conflicts the films convey. Exploring the tensions and lines of fracture arising at the intersections of statuses (such as father and worker) through an analysis of discourses of choice and associated risks, I find three separate areas of conflict. Despite the narrative framing of plot conflict as between work and family, I identify the central conflict for the fathers within the films to lie between the expectations of the father responsible for dependent children and the expectations of late-modern ‘individuals’ to construct themselves as autonomous. Domestic models of the father—both the traditional gendered model of the father and non-gendered co-caring father constructions—are in conflict with the status category of the ‘individual’ as it is created within late-modern Western societies. Separate areas of conflict are found between the domestic father and a masculinity that

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is associated with degree of ‘autonomy’; and between the worker and the ‘individual’. Resolution to the conflict between expectations of the contemporary ‘individual’ and the ‘father’ is provided by a reconstruction of fathering that does not include responsibilities towards the dependent child. I have called this model of the father the ‘pure father’ as it accords with Anthony Giddens’ notion of pure relationship. Giddens (1992, p. 87) defines pure relationships in opposition to relationships that involve ‘dependency’ or ‘the need to give nurturance to others’. The reconstruction of the father in terms of ‘pure relationship’ resolves the conflict between the ‘father’ and the ‘individual’ since expectations of the pure father are compatible with the status expectations of the contemporary autonomous ‘individual’. The pure father identified here is not only unencumbered by obligations towards the child, but for the purity to be sustained, he must be unencumbered. The redeemed father is the father who chooses relationship for his own sake—for the satisfaction the relationship affords and with ‘development of self as first priority’ (Giddens 1992, p. 94). The relationship is dyadic and contingent and does not tie the father to domestic obligations or establish a place for the father within a nuclear family. However, a new ‘essentialism’ that constructs the father–child relationship as authentic and unique to the biological father secures the availability of the relationship (at least for the father).

The Film Father This book investigates films, and the pure fatherhood construct found here is a filmic one. The rendition of the pure father identified in these films rests on a lack of child dependency that is contrived through multiple filmic devices including the avoidance of images of the father within a domestic setting; the unlimited availability of the mother (or substitute) within the home; the trivialisation of danger to the child when in the company of the father; the concealment of financial considerations for the family and particularly for the mother; and the creation of the child as precociously self-sufficient when in the father’s sole company. These devices are used to create the conditions under which the audience can accept the portrayal of a ‘pure’ fatherhood. Like Giddens’ notion of pure relationship, this rendition of the pure father is notional rather than practical.

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Despite the films’ reliance on the contrivances noted, this exploration of the conditions under which pure fatherhood is created adds to sociological understanding of the contemporary family by revealing the sources of father conflict and the shifts in the construction of the father that resolve them. It throws light on the conflict between versions of domestic fathering and the status of neoliberal ‘individual’ and demonstrates how intersectional status conflicts for the father are reduced though the allocation of responsibility for children’s welfare solely to the mother. The resolution proffered by the films in the recreation of the father–child relationship as ‘pure’ also has explanatory power for the persistence of gender-differentiated workloads within the home. The resultant domestic burdening of the mother that binds the mother more closely to the home is rendered acceptable in the films by the portrayal of the mother as financially cared for (Chapter 6) at the same time as the films challenge the White fathers’ responsibility to provide financially for the children. Breadwinning continues to be an obligation for Black fathers (Chapter 7), and this has consequences for their ability to fulfil the status expectations of the contemporary autonomous ‘individual’. Pure fatherhood creates resolution to intersecting conflicts for the father through a re-gendering of parenthood—so that parenting is gendered not only at the level of task but at the level of relationship. The value of the pure relationship is its authenticity and this is established in contrast to ‘lesser’ relationships based in obligations (Chapter 8). Pure relationship is valorised because it is not based on obligations, and its achievement depends on freeing the father from obligations based in the child’s dependency and need for care.

Definitions and Situating the Analysis My use of the terms ‘status’ and ‘voluntaristic’ or ‘agentic’ discourses throughout this book requires some clarification. I use the term ‘voluntaristic discourses’ interchangeably with ‘socially agentic discourses’ to denote everyday discourses that attribute or imply the exercise of free will or intention. In doing so, I distinguish discourses that attribute social agency (with its presumption of voluntarism or free will) from attributions of causal agency. For example, the sentence ‘The falling tree damaged the roof’ assigns causal agency to the tree, but would not be understood to attribute free will or intention to the tree. The sentence ‘The woman

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knocked over the vase’ might also be used to assign causal agency. Alternatively, depending on context, it can be used to attribute blame and therefore to imply free will. The sentence implies social agency to the extent that the sentence is understood to attribute accountability to the woman: that she knocked over the vase with ‘intention’, or that she chose to act in a way that predictably resulted in the fall of the vase. Voluntaristic discourses are not characterised by their grammatical composition but by their use. These everyday voluntaristic discourses are ‘performative’ in the sense used within the field of philosophy of language and generally ascribed to John Langshaw Austin. In the William James Lectures of 1955 (Austin 1975), Austin described such utterances as ‘masqueraders’: they appear to state a fact, to describe a situation in the world, while instead being used to perform a social action. The sentence above can be used to attribute blame to the woman while affirming the ‘status’ of the woman as a social ‘individual’ who can be held accountable. Following Barnes, I understand ‘statuses’ to be categories of all kinds that are not defined by what is intrinsic to the status-bearer but created by the expectations directed towards it (Barnes 2000). A social status stands at the centre of the ‘rings of actions and expectations that define powers and prohibitions, rights and responsibilities, entitlements and obligations’ (Barnes 2000, p. 148). Social statuses are relational since they involve the differential distribution of rights and responsibilities within the social group, but ‘status’ in this sense is not used to signify a stratified position within a hierarchy but to signify social categories or divisions of all kinds. The ‘fathers’ within the films analysed bear many statuses; among them: father, man, worker, and ‘individual’. To the extent that social class is attributed to social members based on non-intrinsic factors, I consider social ‘class’ also to be a status. Expectations are conveyed and social statuses re-created through ‘voluntaristic’ discourses and it is through this means that members of a society coordinate action and affect the behaviour of others (Barnes 2000). Within this framework, to say that someone has a choice is not to ascribe to the individual a power or freedom or ability to affect the world but to create the individual as (individually) accountable. Status positions are not understood as differentially bestowing agency or status holders as ‘having’ agency, as if agency is a power or ‘stuff’. Rather status differentiations are the foci of expectations that are expressed in agentic terms (Barnes 2000). They act as foci for the differential assignment of ‘choices’ and responsibilities and rights which are variously distributed

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within society. I understand statuses to be divisible so that while ‘father’ is the overarching term, there are differences in father constructs (such as new father or biological father). I use the term ‘intersecting statuses’ to indicate multiple statuses when held by one individual (such as father and worker) and ‘interdependent’ statuses to indicate the inter-relationality of statuses whose expectations are interdependent (such as mother and father, or adult and child). Understanding social statuses as the foci for the rings of expectations that surround and define them, conflicts can be visualised as occurring where the overlapping rings of expectations associated with intersecting statuses (such as those of ‘individual’ and ‘father’) converge around one person. I locate inequality not only in the unequal distribution of expectations (privileges, responsibilities and rights) that locally and historically surround a status, but also as arising through the intersection of statuses where these involve contrasting and incompatible expectations. Mapping the conflicts and tensions for the father through the attribution of choice and associated risks in everyday voluntaristic discourses, I am able to identify the central conflicts that are associated by the films with father failure, where this is understood as finding where expectations of intersecting statuses are in conflict. This allows me to answer the first two of my research questions: What unmet expectations are associated with fatherhood failure in Hollywood family films? and What conflicts are indicated by father failure within the films? Mapping the obligations and responsibilities attributed in the films in voluntaristic discourses of blame, responsibility and voice, I explore how family associated responsibilities are distributed. This allows for the exploration of shifts in the assignment of family responsibilities between interdependent statuses in answering my final two research questions: How do these films reduce or resolve conflicts in constructing the redeemed or ‘good’ father? and What assumptions and affordances do the films make in the constructions of the mother and child in order to accommodate Hollywood (re)constructions of the father? My analysis (Part II) is divided into chapters that reflect different forms of voluntaristic discourses found within the films, and I have titled these Choice, Responsibility, Locating Blame, and Voice. I also explore the risks that are associated with ‘choices’ in Chapter 6, Precarity and Risk, since status conflicts and expectations can be more finely located through an exploration of what is risked when choices are made. The division of

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chapters is an organisational one that allows for the exploration of expectations attributed in the construction of fatherhood as it is variously expressed. It is not a difference in kind. In particular, the investigation into choice discourses should not be understood as an investigation into individual intention or power or the exercise of opposition to the hypostatised constraints of status expectations. Choice discourses as well as discourses of responsibility and voice are analysed to determine how they differentially attribute expectations and accountability as they operate to (re)construct and define social categories.

Outline of Chapters Part I (Chapters 2–4) sets the scene for the analysis that follows. It addresses conceptual and methodological considerations and locates this study in relation to scholarship around fatherhood and the representation of fatherhood within Hollywood films. Chapter 2, Hollywood Family Films and the Father Protagonist, situates my investigation by mapping the emergence of the father as protagonist in family films in the early 1990s. It also gives attention to the method used in locating and delimiting my film set and distinguishing family films from other genres. The central plot line of the ‘disengaged’ father is identified and described. The final section provides an overview of the demographic makeup of the films. Chapter 3, Being a Good Father, provides an overview of fatherhood in America as it has been conceptualised and portrayed by sociologists over the past four decades. It identifies shifts in the meaning of ‘involved’ fatherhood and explores debates around the centrality of intimacy to conceptualisations of fatherhood. Esther Dermott’s (2008) claim that ‘intimacy’ should be acknowledged as the central component of contemporary fatherhood affords one departure point for the analysis that follows. I detail Giddens’ notion of pure relationship and explore the possibility of a pure father–child relationship. Particular attention is given to the study of Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000, 2016), who argue that the possibility of such a relationship rests on a restrictive understanding of agency. Chapter 4 turns attention to methodological considerations. I take a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to the texts that is informed by Barnes’ understanding of social categories of all kinds in terms of the operations of voluntaristic discourses. This chapter clarifies my use of the term ‘discourse’ and ‘voluntaristic discourse’ and considers the utility of

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CDA for the analysis of filmic texts. I identify the disengaged father films as a film ‘cycle’, and explore some of the particularities and limitations of applying discourse analysis to films. Part II turns to the films, beginning with an exploration of the earliest of those identified as ‘disengaged’ father films. Chapter 5, Choice, explores discourses of choice within the film set and traces the move from the father as nurturer (found in the 1980s) towards the performance of essentialised father tasks in the 1990s. The subsequent change to the choice of essentialised relationship is identified as the shift to a ‘pure father’ relationship. Though Chapter 5 identifies work–family conflict as a central theme of the films, there is no apparent time conflict found between the father’s paid work and the performance of essentialised father tasks, or between work and fatherhood as pure relationship. By examining the contrivances used to create and reduce father precarity in the home and at work, in Chapter 6, Precarity and Risk, I identify the underlying conflicts for the father that are resolved by the shift to pure relationship. Risk is understood in terms of sanctions or loss of status due to failure to meet status-based expectations. The films tie autonomy to the status of the ‘individual’ and also to a hierarchy of masculinity stratified in relation to levels of independence. In the films’ resolutions, tensions are reduced and precarity diminished when fathers demonstrate greater autonomy in the workplace (by freeing themselves from subordinate positions in workplace hierarchies) and in the home (through pure fatherhood and the essentialising of the dyadic father–child relationship that frees the father from the domestic realm). While the previous two chapters explore intersecting status expectations for the father, Chapter 7, Responsibility, reveals how the films create the possibility of pure fatherhood—a fatherhood free from obligations to care for the child—through the distribution of responsibility within the family. Applying van de Poel’s (2011, 2015) taxonomy of responsibility to the discourses of responsibility found within the films, the differential assignment of tasks and responsibilities to family ‘statuses’ is identified. The mother is generally created as responsible for securing the welfare of the child and as sufficient to do so. In two films, Black mothers are portrayed as insufficient and these films indicate a responsibility for Black fathers to financially provide for the family. Chapter 8, Locating Blame asks where the failure of the father lies, given that he is not constructed as responsible for nurture or (if White)

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for breadwinning. It explores discourses of blame and the various routes to the assignment of obligation and blame. Discourses of responsibility are found to affirm the father’s autonomy and to construct the father–child relationship as secured by the fathers’ authentic desire for the company of the child. Authenticity is tied to wanting to spend time together and is set in opposition to the obligation to care for the child. While masculinity requires the father to show autonomy, virtue is re-established for the father by making the right choice ‘authentically’. It is only in the absence of obligations towards the child that the father is free to choose the relationship for its own sake. This chapter also considers whether the mother and the child are assigned responsibility for securing the father–child relationship. Chapter 9, Voice, explores how socially agentic voice is used within the films. ‘Having a voice’ is revealed in the privileges and restrictions that circumscribe not only what may be spoken but who may be heard. Status-associated expectations regarding the right to a voice in decisionmaking are shown in the voicing of preference but also in the extent to which this counts for something. The chapter focuses on having a voice in the construction of family and on the trope of the father who lacks communicative competence. Chapter 10, the Conclusion, pulls together the findings from the five analysis chapters and explores the significance for the father, for the mother, and for the child in the turn to the dyadic ‘pure’ relationship model of fathering found in recent Hollywood family films. The analysis reveals that, despite the display of neoliberal ‘choice’ discourses within the films, attributions of choice, responsibility and obligation continue to be distributed interdependently and differentially according to family ‘status’. As responsibilities are redistributed based on social ‘status’, individuals become unequally impeded in their ability to meet the expectations surrounding the construction of the contemporary ‘individual’.

References Austin, JL 1975, How to do things with words, 2nd edn, J Urmson & M Sbisà (eds), Harvard University Press, New York. Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. Bruzzi, S 2005, Bringing up daddy, British Film Institute, London. Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK.

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Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, https://doi.org/10. 1177/S003803850000047X. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2016, Making families: moral tales of parenting and step-parenting, Routledge, Oxon, UK. van de Poel, I 2011, ‘The relation between forward-looking and backwardlooking responsibility’, in N Vincent, I van de Poel, & J van den Hoven (eds), Moral responsibility, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 37–52, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_3. van de Poel, I 2015, ‘Moral responsibility’, in I van de Poel, L Royakkers, & SD Zwart (eds), Moral responsibility and the problem of many hands, Routledge, New York, pp. 12–49, retrieved 25 June 2016, Proquest Ebook Central. Wittgenstein, L 1968, Philosophical investigations, 3rd edn, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

PART I

Setting the Scene

CHAPTER 2

Hollywood Family Films and the Father Protagonist

Historian John Demos (1994), in his influential 1981 essay on fatherhood, traced changes in the cultural construction of American fatherhood over time, culling representations of fathers and fatherhood from historical products as diverse as religious tracts, comic strips and child-rearing manuals. Since then, scholars in the area Quinn (2006, p. 71) calls the ‘changing culture of fatherhood’ have analysed representations of the father across cultures and genres in television commercials (Coltrane and Adams 1997), and TV programmes (Scharrer 2001; Prinsloo 2006; Pehlke et al. 2009). Others have focused on constructions of the father in cultural products designed for children, including children’s literature (Quinn 2006, 2009), Disney films (Brydon 2009; Haddock et al. 2003; Wynns and Rosenfeld 2003) and cartoons (LaRossa et al. 1991; Yasumoto and Larossa 2010). These studies are premised on an understanding that media products both reflect and participate in the wider discourses in which local understandings of fathering and fatherhood are constantly (re)constructed. At the same time, portrayals of fathers also reflect genre-specific tropes, such as the inept Dad of sitcoms or the absent or uncommunicative father of family dramas (Harwood 1997) that appear from the limited information available, to extend across cultures (Backhaus 2008; Brown 2015).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_2

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My focus on films rests on my understanding that discourses in films, as Hall (2011a, p. 5) says, ‘speak to us’: that they both reveal and inform practices. They inform changing social constructions of the family by producing representations that provide ‘frames for understanding how the world is’ (Hall 2011b, p. 82). Films re-present social life in a manner that is informed by the culture that produces them. Films also reflect the social world, not by reflecting it as if in a mirror, but by revealing our judgements—what we accept to be normal or accept to be ideal, to be just or unjust, good or bad. The family films considered here are not films whose characters are incidentally fathers; they engage centrally with discussions of fatherhood. In their representations of failing and good father models, they reflect and convey expectations of the father at this time in American society. They participate in the construction and reconstruction of social ‘statuses’ (including those of ‘father’ and of ‘individual’) by participating in the discourses that convey expectations: they employ voluntaristic discourses and that is what voluntaristic discourses ‘do’.

The Emergence of the Father Protagonist This project explores Hollywood family films and, in particular, those films in which the protagonist is the father. It was initially sparked by curiosity regarding the emergence of the father as protagonist in films created for child audiences. Such films signified a departure for Hollywood films, not only in featuring a father in the protagonist role, but in featuring a parent in films aimed at child audiences. Within this project, I use ‘protagonist’ to signify the major character, identifiable as the one who has the most screen time and/or the character that serves as the central focus of the character arc. These two descriptions generally coincide and they do so within the films considered here.1 Bruzzi (2005), tracing changes in representations of the father in Hollywood films from the 1940s to the 2000s, found that, though there are any number of films featuring important father figures, there are very few in which the father is cast in the protagonist role. Hollywood films with fatherhood as a central theme almost exclusively take the perspective of the adult child (usually the son) and even narratives that appear to centre on the father are ‘frequently son narratives in disguise’ (Bruzzi 2005, p. 139). The U.S. film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) is a notable exception and has received a good deal of academic attention. Bruzzi (2005, p. 107) calls it

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‘the most influential and important cinematic depiction of the father’. It has been variously acclaimed as a feminist triumph and a backlash indictment of feminism (Bruzzi, p. 109). Despite this acclaim, Kramer vs. Kramer did not immediately usher in the era of the father protagonist in Hollywood films. For the next ten years, Hollywood male leads played indestructible fighting machines: the ’80s was the decade of the Rambo (1982–), Lethal Weapon (1987–) and Die Hard (1988–) series. It was, as Jeffords (1994) has pointed out, all about the bodies: hard, masculine, seemingly indestructible. In the meantime, children of the eighties were watching films about children (Young Sherlock Holmes 1985; The Goonies 1985), or for younger children, films featuring young animated animals (An American Tail 1986; The Land Before Time 1988). In these films, parents were conveniently somewhere else, allowing children to have unsupervised adventures. Though Wood (2003) identifies the eighties as the start of Hollywood’s preoccupation with the father, Harwood (1997) maintains that the father in Hollywood eighties movies was, above all, a failed father, and his failure was overwhelmingly a failure to be present. Where fatherhood occurred as a theme within family and children’s films, it was most often associated with father absence (The NeverEnding Story 1984; E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial 1982; The Karate Kid 1984). The Hollywood absent ’80s father occurred against a background of concern over the rise in single-parent (mother) families and child poverty. In a society where poverty is constructed as an individual family problem, social concern regarding absent fathers in the ’80s was largely framed as a financial concern (Mandell 2002). The term ‘deadbeat dads’ came into use to describe fathers who ‘shirked’ financial responsibilities towards their children (which placed, according to the media discourse of the time, an unfair burden on taxpayers [Blankenhorn 1995, p. 129]), and during this decade, child-support legislation was enacted and strengthened. In the face of father absence, the mothers in eighties family films such as Star Wars (1977), E.T. (1982), and The Karate Kid (1984) take on the provider role, which in this decade was portrayed also in terms of mother absence from the home. The role of ‘paternal cultural transmission’ (Blankenhorn 1995) is provided in these films by male figures who are coded as outside the mainstream (Yoda, ET and Mr. Miyagi respectively). These ‘ethnic’ father substitutes (Brydon 2009) display a sensitivity that is in stark contrast to the rugged masculinity of the dominant White masculine paradigm of the decade. They are both sensitive

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and present, unlike the biological fathers who are portrayed as failing their children by their absence. Anthropologist and gender scholar Elizabeth Traube (1992, p. 144) compares these characters to the ‘feminised’ outsider heroes of the ’60s and ’70s, though in earlier decades, it was women rather than children who benefited from the presence of the male outsiders.

The Nurturing Father While fathers in ’80s movies were most notable for their absence, the eighties also saw the advent of father protagonist films within the comedy genre. Early father protagonist films, Mr. Mom (1983), Three Men and a Baby (1987), and Look Who’s Talking (1989) respond to the theme of mother absence by finding humour in men caring for young children while women are at work. Traube (1992) reminds us that the aim of Hollywood is to make money and, to that end, films must appeal to the widest possible audience. In the ’80s, Traube argues, appealing to the widest audience meant displaying anti-feminist sentiment while simultaneously promoting gender equality. The films achieved this by appealing to fears over women absenting themselves from the domestic sphere (Traube 1992) while simultaneously embracing ‘fantasies of the Father as nurturer’ (Kaplan 1992, p. 184). Three Men and a Baby (1987) gave us the new redeemed father who combines strength (portrayed in the physical body and in earning capacity) with a level of comfort with domesticity that is lacking in the ’80s film mother (Traube 1992). In terms of parental competence, the fathers in Three Men and a Baby amply fulfil the requirements to provide and protect (again in contrast to the mother) while showing, as Traube (1992, p. 145) so aptly remarks ‘what fun mothering can be when it’s done by the right men’. This was the beginning of Hollywood’s ‘new’ nurturing man—mainstream and sensitive. Harwood (1997) comments on the progression of fathers as nurturers over the decade, from Kramer (Kramer vs. Kramer 1979) who can’t find the frying pan (and more importantly, is unable to juggle childcare and his demanding job) to Three Men and a Baby (1987), where the three ‘fathers’ quickly learn to care for a baby and have fun doing it. These early father protagonist films are classed as comedies rather than ‘family’ films in movie databases: ‘family’ was still emerging as a distinct genre in

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the late ’80s and early ’90s (Brown 2012). Nevertheless, these ’80s comedies with story arcs that centre on fathers learning to be ‘good’ were the precursors to the father protagonist family films. By the ’90s, the conflict that was seen in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) between hands-on childcare and a career had been managed. In the 1993 romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle, caring for a child came ‘naturally to the widowed father’ (Harwood 1997, p. 184) who was able to combine fatherhood with a highly successful career. At the same time, the father was being commodified as object of female sexual fantasy (Bruzzi 2005). It was still about the body, but the hard, male body was now portrayed with a child sleeping in his protective embrace. Jeffords, in ‘The big switch: Hollywood masculinity in the nineties’ (1993), identifies action movie Kindergarten Cop (1990) as a film that exemplifies the shift from the ’80s fighting man to the ‘new’ family man. The archetypal ’80s hard-bodied hero of Kindergarten Cop (played appropriately by Arnold Schwarzenegger) transforms during the course of the movie into a kindergarten teacher. The agents of this transformation are the children who ‘heal’ the emotionally wounded eighties ‘soldier’. He gives up the police force and acquires an instant family by marrying a fellow teacher who is also the mother of one of his pupils. As a kindergarten teacher, he learns nurture. The prevailing image of the late ’80s father as erotic object was that of an infant snuggled against a bare male chest, ‘combining’ Bruzzi (2005, p. 147) remarks ‘sensitivity and sex’. It also serves to combine in one image two functions of the parent: protection and nurture, while associating both those qualities with the masculine.

Child Audiences and the Father Protagonist The focus of this book is films made to be viewed by children. Though it is not without competition, Hollywood dominates the children’s film market. Bazalgette and Staples describe Hollywood’s dominance of the children’s cinema market as ‘a cinematic cultural imperialism that has been energetically promoted throughout the twentieth century’ (cited in Wojcik-Andrews 2000, p. 18). Hollywood is considered to have even more dominance with respect to ‘family’ films, understood as films that are designed for child audiences while still being engaging for adults. Indeed, this genre is considered to be peculiar to Hollywood and has not been embraced by other countries (Wojcik-Andrews 2000). Brown (2013) argues that the ‘family’ film can be recognised as a distinct genre

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in films as early as 1930, but it was only in the late ’80s and early ’90s that it came into its present eminence as ‘the most commercially-successful and widely-consumed cinematic entertainment in the world’ (Brown 2012, p. 1). Since the beginning of the ’90s, Hollywood studios have been releasing one or two father protagonist films a year within this highly profitable genre. Little attention has been paid to these films within scholarly literature; however, themes found in related genres point to changes in the portrayal of the father over the ’90s and 2000s. Cultural commentator Lawrence Samuel (2016) reflects on the turn away from the nurturing father in the ’90s. He finds in the media discourses of the ’90s a return to gendered models of parenting, and describes the version of fathering to emerge in the ’90s as one that does not require men to ‘adopt the parenting styles of women’ but ‘celebrates their maleness and their relationships with their children’ (Samuel 2016, p. 102). At the same time, it is, he says, a ‘kinder, gentler’ fatherhood (p. 17) than that of earlier decades. This turn to a gentler fatherhood has been shown in the film trope of fathers learning to express their feelings. The decline of fathering as a social role and the decline of male manual labour in the developed world (brought about by the contraction of the manufacturing sector) created a crisis of masculinity that resulted, Tincknell and Chambers (2002, p. 12) argue, in films that formulate a new ‘modernised’ masculinity in which the father becomes reformed through the ‘performance of a feminized masculinity’. The performance of the feminine is linked to emotional literacy as the fathers, freed from the constraints of masculinity, are able to articulate feeling and so able to form a closer emotional relationship with the child (Tincknell and Chambers 2002). Gillam and Wooden (2008) find a similar re-imagining, not of fatherhood but of masculinity, in Pixar’s oeuvre—which features, they argue, a new kind of male protagonist, one who must leave behind the traditional traits of stoicism and taciturnity and embrace feminine traits of ‘emotional literacy’ (Tincknell and Chambers 2002, p. 12). Gilliam and Wooden (2008, p. 7) characterise three Disney-Pixar films (Toy Story 1995; The Incredibles 2004; Cars 2006) as bildungsroman narratives where the coming-of-age required of such narratives is that of the male hero growing from a traditional ‘alpha male’ (highly competitive, taciturn and riddled with loneliness) to a ‘new man’ who has learned to embrace his feminine side: a feminine side that rests on his

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ability to give and receive care, to ‘privilege nurture’ and to accept the emotional ‘dependence’ that this implies. The three films explored by Gillam and Wooden all begin with the hero striving to maintain an alphamale identity which, through a series of ‘emasculating failures’, becomes untenable. The emasculating failures identified by Gillam and Wooden (p. 5) are, respectively: Buzz Lightyear (an ‘action figure’) is picked up by a girl and played with as a doll; Mr. Incredible is rescued by his wife and children; and Lightning McQueen is chained in the service of a ‘monstrous’ female figure and forced to fix the damage he has done. In Toy Story (1995) and The Incredibles (2004), the characters must also confront and admit their feelings for a child and be willing to reveal the emotional vulnerability that this entails (Gillam and Wooden 2008). This emotional vulnerability is read by Gillam and Wooden as ‘dependency’, and the men in these tales must learn to accept this dependency in order to become caring men. This connection of care and dependency is found also in Giddens’ descriptions of dependent relationship which he contrasts with relationships of loving detachment (see Chapter 3). In Disney-Pixar’s 2003 children’s release, Finding Nemo, Suzan Brydon (2009, p. 131) finds, not the new nurturing father, but a new ‘expanded notion’ of what mothering means—one that, at least in the absence of a living mother, allows fathers to be ‘mothers’. This animated children’s film and its sequel Finding Dory (2016) have together earned more than two billion dollars worldwide, with sixty per cent of that coming from outside the United States (Box Office Mojo 2020). Like many children’s films, Finding Nemo earned more in post-theatre release than at the cinema. The film tells the story of a ‘single dad’ clownfish who cares for his son after the mother’s death, and of the son’s attempt to return home when he is subsequently captured by a tourist and taken to live in an aquarium. Prior to the release of Finding Nemo, Disney creatures who lost their mothers (a not infrequent occurrence in Disney movies) were not nurtured by their fathers. They had to do without or turn to other characters for nurturing (Dumbo to his friend Timothy Mouse [Dumbo 1941], Tarzan [Tarzan 1999] to the gorilla ‘mother’). In contrast, when Nemo’s mother and all his siblings are eaten by a barracuda, Nemo’s father, Marlin, assumes the ‘mothering’ role. Since the death of Nemo’s mother occurs while they are still eggs, we have no opportunity to compare this with his performance of parenting as a ‘father’, though as Brydon (2009) points out, there are indications from

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his conversations with his wife that his role as a father would have centred around breadwinning. Brydon (2009, p. 133) argues that Marlin’s ‘identity appears defined through his relationship with others’—which Giddens (1992, p. 87) associates with the ‘female role’ and ties to dependent relationships (see Chapter 3). Marlin’s mannerisms also reflect ‘what Disney discourse (and other cultural texts …) call mothering’ (Brydon 2009, pp. 138–139). He shows emotion (very often anxiety); uses ‘mothering’ expressions, ‘You are in big trouble young man’; shows fear in the face of danger; interacts physically with Nemo; and hovers close and performs nurturing acts such as feeding and grooming (Brydon 2009). Brydon’s view of the film as demonstrating an ‘expanded notion’ of who can be a ‘mother’ turns on an understanding of nurture as the province of the mother. Nonetheless, Brydon demonstrates that Marlin not only performs acts of nurture, but performs ‘femininity’, particularly in his use of language. A similar assumption of a feminine persona occurs in Mrs Doubtfire (1993) where a father engages in nurture only when dressed as a woman (see Chapter 5).

The Film Set My focus begins with films of the ’90s, when Hollywood’s interest in father films intersected with the growth of the family film as a genre. Nonetheless, in capturing the film set, the initial search was extended to 1960 in order to locate precursor films and establish the boundaries of the trend towards protagonist fathers. This search began by generating a list of the top U.S. box-office family or children’s films released between 1960 and 2015 using the IMDbPro website, with an arbitrary lower cutoff limit of one million dollars in box-office returns. IMDb promotes itself as the leading site for ‘information related to films’. The Pro version (IMDbPro) is designed for industry professionals but also offers better database search options for the researcher. This was cross-checked with Box Office Mojo which tracks earnings. Though Box Office Mojo maintains a distinct internet presence and style, it was bought by IMDb in 2008 (Tarver 2018). In distinguishing family films from other genres, I was guided by Brown’s history, The Hollywood family film (2012). While recognising that family films share a predilection for happy endings and ideologically support the value of ‘family’ and kinship, Brown (2012, p. 3) finds that these textual elements do not serve to define such films. Instead,

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he finds commonality in the manufacturing/marketing process of family films. Essentially a family film is one which is manufactured and marketed as a family film, and this incorporates five ‘processes’: a family film is marketed as having family appeal; it is rated as being suitable for children (though often with a caveat of parental guidance); it is reviewed widely; there are frequently merchandising tie-ins; and it is seen as suitable for a daytime or holiday television time slot (Brown 2012, pp. 6–7). Added to these processes is the ‘implicit’ understanding that these films will have the broadest of demographics, catering to adults and adolescents as well as children, with the associated assumption that they will be deemed ‘morally suitable’ for (and by) a wide demographic (Brown 2012, p. 8). Children’s films are usually more simply defined as films made specifically for the twelve-and-under audience, rated ‘G’, and carrying the assumption of ‘moral suitability’ (Brown 2012). It should be noted that in selecting films for inclusion in this study, the definition was left to the industry with ‘family films’ and ‘children’s films’ being those that were marketed as family and/or children’s films as demonstrated by their inclusion in lists of such films generated by the dominant film industry information sites, IMDbPro (Internet Movie Database) and Box Office Mojo. There is overlap between family and children’s films and it is not always possible in relation to a particular film to distinguish whether it is categorised as a ‘children’s’ or ‘family’. This is particularly true with regard to animated films as they are categorised in film lists as ‘animated’ rather than ‘family’ or ‘children’s’. For this reason, I did not distinguish between the two in the initial search. However, in the process of delimiting my film set to those films in which the father is protagonist, films rated ‘G’ were eliminated, locating the father protagonist within the family film genre. The initial list of 656 high-earning films was used to construct a database that classified film by: year of release; the presence in the films of children and their age; the status of the mother and the father (absent/dead/protagonist/significant character); and whether fathering was a dominant theme of the film. Since children’s films are often animated and frequently have anthropomorphised animal characters, animated films and films featuring anthropomorphised non-human characters were included provided other criteria were met. Plot notes (garnered from the IMDb website, reviews and press releases) were used at this stage to gather this basic information. The list of films

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was also minimised to Hollywood films, defined as films released by one of the major Hollywood film ‘studios’ (production and distribution companies): Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. Where the age of the children or the presence of the father was unclear from other sources, films were watched or, where available, film transcripts read. Films were eliminated if they did not contain a parent or children or if both parents were removed in the exposition (children go away to camp; parents die). This resulted in a list of 128 films that contained at least one parent and a child. Analysis showed that the father began to appear as a major character or protagonist in the ’80s. While no major characters were fathers in the ’70s, there were 8 protagonist fathers in the ’80s. The rise continued over the ’90s (37 major character fathers with 13 of these protagonists) and the 2000s (35 major characters with 18 protagonists). The first half of the 2010s showed a similar pattern with 9 father protagonists in films released between 2010 and 2015. In contrast, the number of mother protagonists found during these decades was: 1 in the ’80s; 2 in the ’90s (both co-protagonists with the father); and 0 between 2000 and 2015. At this stage, common plot lines and broad themes concerning the father started to emerge. The most common were: 1. The disengaged father: In these, the ‘disengaged’ father, generally work-focused, is transformed into an ‘involved’ father. This is frequently effected through the intervention of an animal or a magical character or force. The central theme of these films is redemption of the father. 2. The disappointed father: The father shows disappointment in his son for being in some way ‘different’ until the son proves himself in a heroic act such as saving the world or tribe. I use the term ‘son’ here rather than ‘child’ as, in all films of this type, the child is a boy. In these films, the child is the protagonist. I found none featuring the father as protagonist. The child is generally shown as undersized. Protectiveness as well as a concern over ‘difference’ and masculinity are themes.2 These films were generally animated (all but one) and most are rated ‘G’.

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3. The overprotective father: The overprotective father learns to accept that the child (usually the daughter) is growing up. These films do not generally feature pre-adolescent children. An exception is Finding Nemo (2003) featuring a young male child. The central themes of the overprotective father films are of change and letting go.3 A number of films combine two of the themes identified, particularly where there is more than one child involved—so that a film featuring a teenage daughter and a younger boy might show themes of the overprotective father with regard to the girl and the disengaged father with the boy (as in Ghost Dad 1990). Films for selection were further restricted to those containing children rather than adolescents because the themes of the latter were beyond the remit of this project. This eliminated most films of type 3 (the overprotective father) since, as noted above, this theme was almost always associated with an adolescent or young adult daughter. Films of type 2 (the disappointed father) were eliminated as they did not feature the father in the protagonist role. The remaining 40 films comprise my data set, though this figure reduces to 31 when films with sequels (for example, The Santa Clause movies released in 1994, 2002 and 2006) are treated as one film. Since sequels do not offer distinct families but continue the story of one family, films with sequels are treated as one film with different chapters. These chapters were of interest for what they might reveal in the construction of the father/family over time—not only in relation to the internal story in which the child is older, but in relation to changing social concerns over the years in which the films were made. This established the corpus of 40 father protagonist films consisting of 31 distinct films together with 9 sequels: 12 with the initial film from the 1990s, 14 from the 2000s, and 5 from the 2010s. Of the 31 distinct films captured in this study, I have categorised 26 as ‘disengaged’ father films, understood as films which characterise the father as a family problem due to his failure to be ‘involved’. In one of these (We Bought a Zoo 2011), grief is responsible for the disengagement; the rest feature fathers who are failing to be ‘involved’ because they are work or career-focused—though the extent to which this is driven by workplace demands or by their own ambition differs between films (as will be discussed more fully in Chapter 8). In the five films which I do not categorise as ‘disengaged’, the fathers are shown to be failing because

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they are not successful within the workplace. They have lost their jobs (4 films) or have failing businesses (1 film). Some disengaged films show fathers failing in their career while at the same time failing to be involved because of their pursuit of career success.

The Disengaged Father Film Within present-day Western culture, Gergen (2001) identifies the components that are central to the construction of a coherent narrative to be determined by the narrative goal or endpoint which is charged with ‘value’. The events included in the narrative serve to bring the endpoint closer or to delay it. They are ordered and causally linked and serve to demonstrate their relationship with the goal, which may be progressive (becoming incrementally closer), or regressive (moving further away), or may be a stability narrative (in which the individual’s trajectory is essentially unchanged). The father films identified here generally follow a regressive path (typical also of comedy-romance films) in which the problems of the protagonist escalate until happiness is restored in the denouement, followed by the ‘happy-ever-after myth’—a stability myth which (again like comedy-romances) the films imply will continue after the end point of the film. The family films investigated here do not portray an idealisation of the father or a paean in praise of a particular version of fathering. Instead, this decades-long preoccupation with fathers in Hollywood films, as others have noted (Harwood 1997; Wood 2003), reflects a concern with father failure and redemption. The disengaged father films represent a departure from films of the seventies and eighties which largely show families suffering from father absence (Harwood 1997) or feature fathers as family saviours in homes in which the mother goes out to work (Bruzzi 2005). The change I find in the films of the nineties to ‘present’ but disengaged fathers may reflect a shift of social anxiety away from absent ‘deadbeat dads’ to a concern with the impact of increasing workplace demands on the family. Evidence for concern over the impact of fathers’ work on family life is revealed by the General Social Survey (GSS), a sociological survey conducted by independent research centre National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) at the University of Chicago that has been tracking American societal changes since 1972. In 1994, the GSS introduced a question asking respondents whether they agree or disagree that ‘Family life often suffers because men concentrate too much on

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their work’.4 Since its introduction, this question has generally garnered between 50 and 60% ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly Agree’ responses, though this figure briefly went to 73% in the 1996 survey.5 Since there is no data for the years prior to 1994, it is not possible to determine the significance of the 1996 figure or whether the level of general concern rose in the ’90s— though the very introduction of the question is suggestive of a rising level of discussion. The manner in which this question is framed (‘men concentrate too much on their work’) when combined with discourses of ‘individual’ autonomy implicates the father as choosing to concentrate on work and hence responsible for both the choice and for the consequent debilitation of family life. Disengaged father films take up this notion that fathers concentrate too much on work—and that this is a choice for which they are accountable. Father failure is established as lack of involvement, and conflict between work and family increases as the narratives progress. The increase in conflict is often due to greater and greater demands from the workplace and from the family until the father experiences an epiphany that results in a choice. The films construct his redemption as contingent upon his making the ‘right’ choice and this choice is seen as available to him regardless of family circumstances. This choice often results in the father being fired or quitting his job, or giving up the pursuit of his career ambition (Ghost Dad 1990; The Santa Clause 1994; Fluke 1995; Jungle 2 Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; Cheaper by the Dozen 2003; RV 2006; Night at the Museum 2006; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Despicable Me 2010; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Poppers Penguins 2011). However, the father’s sacrifice of workplace security or ambition in the choice generally results by the film’s end in the father achieving a higher position within another firm or achieving success autonomously.

Demographic Makeup of the Films In capturing the film set, the term ‘father’ was understood inclusively to mean any adult character (human or otherwise) who is identified as male and as having a significant relationship with a pre-adolescent ‘child’. Within the final set, however, there are only two animated films and both show the characters as human. Though the set includes 2 stepfathers, a mother’s potential boyfriend, an adoptive father and an uncle as protagonists, the majority of father protagonists are biological fathers. ‘Families’

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are understood to be any combination of adult and child. Families include single child families, and those with two or three children and one family with twelve children. There are 34 male and 29 female children; in films with only one child, it is more likely to be a boy (11) than a girl (3). No significant patterns were found for gender in relation to age within the films. A list of films showing basic demographic details can be found in the Appendix. Heteronormativity is not challenged by the films, even in the portrayal of minor characters. Though thirteen of the 31 distinct films show separated or divorced biological parents, all films portray conception as occurring within a nuclear family model based on the heterosexual married couple. Biological parents are or have been married, including in the three films in which the fathers were previously unaware that the children had been born. Real Steel (2011) is an exception: the opening scenes establish the father as an old boyfriend of the now deceased mother who nonetheless had known about the child’s birth. Real Steel is also somewhat anomalous on my list in being PG13 + rated. A Dreamworks-Disney production, this film is designated a ‘family’ film in IMDB-Pro. Real Steel had the action-figure tie-ins associated with a family or children’s film but on release failed to earn the family friendly lower rating. In a majority of the films (19), the families appear to be financially well-off based on the size and style of houses and cars; families that are portrayed as ‘average’ nonetheless have large comfortable homes. Below average income within the family is ‘explained’ with a back story. In Getting Even with Dad (1994), the father is a thief who spent time in jail; in Jack Frost (1998), he is a musician on the verge of being discovered; in Night at the Museum (2006), he is an inventor; in Real Steel (2011), he is a boxer and the sport of boxing has now been taken over by robots. In The Longshots (2008), based on a true story, the entire town is depressed due to closure of the factory that was the town’s main employer. Most films are set within large urban areas or satellite suburbs though five are in small towns. Of the 31 distinct films, seven feature African-American actors in the starring role and one stars Dwayne Johnson who is of mixed heritage. No films feature interracial parent couples together, though the deceased wife’s sister of Dwayne Johnson’s character in The Game Plan (2007) is White, and the divorced mother in Imagine That (2009) (played by Nicole Ari Parker of mixed heritage) has a White boyfriend. This information was collected from the online site ‘ethnicelebs.com’ (Ethnicity

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of Celebs) and may not reflect the identification of the individual actors concerned. The site is used here to reflect a public perception of race/ethnicity rather than to attribute race/ethnicity to the individual. The African-American actors are Bill Cosby (1 film), Eddie Murphy (4 films plus 2 sequels) and O’Shea Jackson, the actor and rapper generally known as Ice Cube (2 films plus one sequel). There were no Hispanic/Latino actors, a notable absence since the Hispanic community now makes up 23% of ‘frequent moviegoers’ in the United States (compared with 15% for African-Americans and 51% for Caucasians) (Motion Picture Association of America 2018). The remaining 23 film fathers are mixed-European (non-Hispanic or Latino) or of Ashkenazi (European) Jewish heritage. In the two animated films in the set (The Incredibles 2004; Despicable Me 2010) the father characters have pale skin and blue eyes. The stepfather character in Despicable Me is voiced by Steve Carell (Italian-Polish) who adopts a strong accent that is variously described in reviews as Eastern European, Russian and villainous. The Incredibles ’ father is voiced by Craig Nelson (Northern European heritage). Though there appears to be a strong inclusion of African-American families in these family films, this may not indicate a diminution of White hegemonic paternity. Hamad (2014, p. 113) argues that instead it can be seen as a reflection of a post-racial discourse in which race, like gender, is hidden by the dominant ‘individualist rhetoric’. This rhetoric, which is lauded for being colour-blind, results in films that, she contends, ‘deracinate the paternities’ of African-American fathers (2014, p. 113). Hamad points to a ‘cluster of films’ of the 2000s in which African-Americans play characters who ‘transcend’ race through financial status and education. The cluster of films cited by Hamad match, with only one exception, the films with African-American lead actors captured in this study. Hamad (2014) argues that deracination arises from a discourse in which race is aligned with class and that this creates a frame in which it is not possible to portray African-Americans as middle class without simultaneously challenging their racial delineation. The alternative is to promote stereotypes that ally race with class, which, in an individualised discourse that presumes equal opportunity, constructs African-Americans as both victims and instigators of their own subjection (Hamad 2014). Hamad (2014, p. 124) recognising this ‘double bind’, cites Steele’s (1988) essay ‘On being black and middle class’.

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Examples of films of both types—those that deracinate AfricanAmerican fatherhood and those that promote stereotypes allying race with class—are found within the film set. The majority of the films that feature Black protagonists are, as Hamad (2014) has noted, characters who, through education and financial success, ‘transcend’ racial stereotyping. A closer look at the films indicates a degree of variation in the deracination of protagonists, however, in the extent to which the Black fathers are shown as socially integrated within Black or White communities. In Dr Dolittle (1998), for example, the father (played by Eddie Murphy) and his immediate family are the only visibly Black characters in the film. They live, work and socialise within an otherwise White (and wealthy) community. The impression in some of the films is that the casting of the protagonist called for a box-office friendly comedian and the casting of an African-American was incidental. Though this may be framed in terms of a laudable colour blindness, it is notable only in the casting of the main character. Imagine That (2009) was made 10 years after Dr Dolittle. It shows a father whose workplace is predominantly White but with a best friend who is also Black (and like the father is also wealthy). The friend plays a significant role in the film, providing the model of the ‘good father’ for Eddie Murphy’s character to emulate. In Are We There Yet (2005) and its sequel, Ice Cube plays a financially secure small business owner who lives and works within a Black social community. However, The Longshots (2008) also starring Ice Cube, is set in a small town in Illinois where the main employer, a factory, has closed and the Black community is poor and largely unemployed or underemployed. This film is based on a true story. I return to issues of race, class and gender as they arise within particular films in the coming chapters.

Notes 1. In films where they diverge, I would give greater focus to the latter descriptor though views may vary. An example of this divergence can be found in Mary Poppins (1964). Though the character of the nanny is present in most scenes, the character arc traces the transformational journey of the father. 2. Brave (2012), the first Pixar film with a female protagonist iterates this theme but with a mother and daughter. In this film, the daughter is the protagonist but the mother has a significant role.

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3. Disturbingly, in more recent films (Hotel Transylvania 2012; The Croods 2013) the father bonds with the daughter’s future husband and becomes reconciled to ‘handing over’ the care of his daughter to a younger male. 4. There is no similar question regarding mothers though there are questions that concern attitudes to mothers working outside the home. 5. This survey is conducted every 2 years but this question was omitted in 1998.

References An American tail 1986, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Are we there yet? 2005, film, Revolution Studios—Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Backhaus, P 2008, ‘Familienangelegenheiten: Ein Überblick’, Japan Studien, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 13–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09386491.2008.11826948. Blankenhorn, D 1995, Fatherless America, HarperPerennial, New York. Box Office Mojo, . Brave 2012, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Brown, N 2012, The Hollywood family film, I.B.Tauris, New York. Brown, N 2013, ‘The “Family” Film, and the tensions between popular and academic interpretations of genre’, Tresspassing, no. 2, . Brown, N 2015, ‘A Brief History of Indian Children’s Cinema’, in N Brown & B Babington (eds), Family films in global cinema, pp. 186–204. Bruzzi, S 2005, Bringing up Daddy, British Film Institute, London. Brydon, SG 2009, ‘Men at the heart of mothering’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 18, pp. 131–146, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589230902812448. Cars 2006, film, Buena Vista—Pixar—THQ, Ahuora Hills, California. Cheaper by the dozen 2003, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Coltrane, S & Adams, M 1997, ‘Work–family imagery and gender stereotypes: television and the reproduction of difference’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 323–347, https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1996.1575. Demos, J 1994, ‘The changing faces of fatherhood’, in SH Cath, AR Gurwitt, & JM Ross (eds), Father and child, developmental and clinical perspectives, Psychology Press, New York, pp. 425–450. Despicable me 2010, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Die hard 1988, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Dumbo 1941, film, Walt Disney Productions—RKO Radio Pictures, Burbank, California. E.T. the extra-terrestrial 1982, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California.

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Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Finding Dory 2016, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Walt Disney Studios, Emeryville, California. Finding Nemo 2003, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. Fluke 1995, film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Furry vengeance 2010, film, Summit Entertainment, Universal City, California. General Social Survey (GSS), NORC at the University of Chicago, https://gss dataexplorer.norc.org/. Gergen, K 2001, ‘Self-narration in social life’, in M Wetherell, S Taylor, & SJ Yates (eds), Discourse theory and practice, Sage, London. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Gillam, K & Wooden, SR 2008, ‘Post-princess models of gender: the new man in Disney/Pixar’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 2–8, https://doi.org/10.3200/jpft.36.1.2-8. Haddock, SA, Zimmerman, TS, Tanner, LR & Lund, LK 2003, ‘Images of couples and families in Disney feature-length animated films’, The American Journal of Family Therapy, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 355–373, https://doi.org/10. 1080/01926180390223987. Hall, S 2011a (1996), ‘Who needs “identity”?’, in S Hall & P du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (ebook), Sage, pp. 1–17, ProQuest Ebook Central Subscription Collection. Hall, S 2011b, ‘The whites of their eyes’, in G Dines & JM Humez (eds), Gender, race, and class in media, Sage, London, pp. 81–84. Hamad, H 2014, Postfeminism and paternity in contemporary US film, Routledge, New York. Harwood, S 1997, Family fictions, St. Martin’s Press, New York. Hotel Transylvania 2012, film, Wayforward Technologies-Game Mill Entertainment, Valencia, California. Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. IMDbPro, . Jack Frost 1998, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Jeffords, S 1993, ‘The big switch: Hollywood masculinity in the nineties’, in J Collin, H Radner, & AP Collins (eds), Film theory goes to the movies, Routledge, New York, pp. 196–208. Jeffords, S 1994, Hard bodies, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, USA. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Kaplan, EA 1992, Motherhood and representation, Routledge, London.

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Kindergarten cop 1990, film, Imagine Entertainment—Universal Pictures, Beverly Hills, California. Kramer vs. Kramer 1979, film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. LaRossa, R, Gordon, BA, Wilson, RJ, Bairan, A & Jaret, C 1991, ‘The fluctuating image of the 20th century American father’, Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 987–997, https://doi.org/10.2307/353002. Lethal weapon 1987, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Look who’s talking 1989, film, Tristar Pictures—Sony Pictures, Culver City, California. Mary Poppins 1964, film, Walt Disney Productions—Buena Vista Distribution, Burbank, California. Mandell, D 2002, Deadbeat dads, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Motion Picture Association of America 2018, Theatrical Market Statistic 2016, . Mr Mom 1983, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Night at the museum 2006, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Pehlke, TA, Hennon, CB, Radina, ME & Kuvalanka, KA 2009, ‘Does father still know best? an inductive thematic analysis of popular TV sitcoms’, Fathering, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 114–139, Academic OneFile Ebscohost. Prinsloo, J 2006, ‘Where have all the fathers gone?’, in L Richter & R Morrell (eds), Baba men and fatherhood in South Africa, Media(ted) representations of fatherhood, HSRC, Cape Town, pp. 132–146. Quinn, SMF 2006, ‘Examining the culture of fatherhood in American children’s literature’, Fathering, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 71–95, Academic OneFile. Quinn, SMF 2009, ‘The depictions of fathers and children in best-selling picture books in the United States’, Fathering, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 140–158, https:// doi.org/10.3149/fth.0702.140. Rambo: first blood 1982, film, Anabasis Investments N.V.—Orion Pictures, Beverly Hills, California. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. Samuel, LR 2016, American fatherhood, Rowman & Littlefield, London.

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Scharrer, E 2001, ‘From wise to foolish: the portrayal of the sitcom father, 1950s-1990s’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 23–40, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4501pass:%5b_%5d3. Sleepless in Seattle 1993, film, Tristar Pictures—Sony Pictures, Culver City, California. Star wars: episode IV 1977, film, Lucasfilm—Twentieth Century Fox, San Francisco, California. Steele S, 1988, ‘On being black and middle class’, Commentary no: Jan, . Tarzan 1999, film, Walt Disney Productions—Buena Vista Distribution, Burbank, California. Tarver, E 2018, ‘Top 10 companies owned by Amazon’, Investopedia, April 12, . The Croods 2013, film, Dreamworks—Twentieth Century Fox, Glendale, California. The Goonies 1985, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. The land before time 1988, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. The Incredibles 2004, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. The karate kid 1984 film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. The longshots 2008 film, Cube Vision—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West Hollywood, California. The NeverEnding story 1984, film, Constantin Film—Warner Bros., Munich, Germany. The Santa clause 1994, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Santa clause 2 2002, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Santa clause 3 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Three men and a baby 1987, film, Interscope Communications—Touchstone— NBC, Burbank, California. Tincknell, E & Chambers, D 2002, ‘Performing the crisis: fathering, gender, and representation in two 1990s films’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 146–155, http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16663. Toy story 1995, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California.

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Traube, EG 1992, Dreaming identities, Westview Press, Boulder, USA. We bought a zoo 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Wood, R 2003, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and beyond, revised, Columbia University Press, New York. Wojcik-Andrews, I 2000, Children’s films, Garland, New York. Wynns, SL & Rosenfeld, LB 2003, ‘Father-daughter relationships in Disney’s animated films’, Southern Communication Journal, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 91–106, https://doi.org/10.1080/10417940309373253. Yasumoto, S & Larossa, R 2010, ‘The culture of fatherhood in Japanese comic strips: a historical analysis’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 611–628, . Young Sherlock Holmes 1985 film, Amblin Entertainment—Paramount Pictures, Universal City, California.

CHAPTER 3

Being a Good Father

The rise of the father protagonist film in the 1990s occurred within an environment of social concern in the United States over father involvement. In a 1995 memorandum, President Clinton told executive heads of government departments and agencies that the ‘future of America’ rested on committed fathers and spoke of the need to strengthen ‘fathers’ involvement with their children’. He ordered a review of government programmes with a view to ensuring that, wherever possible, they show evidence of ‘father involvement’ as a measure of the programme’s success (Clinton 1995). The social anxiety over the absent father that had begun in the eighties with the concern over ‘deadbeat dads’ had become a national crisis. The concern was still with father absence but now it was framed, not in economic terms as in the eighties (or at least not only in economic terms) but as a problem of father ‘involvement’. With the need to show evidence of father involvement came a demand for an accepted means for measuring it. In the mid-eighties, Michael Lamb, together with Joseph Pleck, had developed a model for measuring ‘paternal involvement’ in terms of time. Their model distinguished time spent on three aspects of parenting: engagement, accessibility and responsibility (Pleck 2007). These aspects concern respectively: interaction with the child; availability to the child (while perhaps performing other tasks); and responsibility for ensuring that child-related tasks are conceived and performed (regardless of who performs them). These descriptors for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_3

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father ‘involvement’ were influential but widely critiqued in what became known as the ’90s ‘fatherhood involvement wars’ (Pleck 2007). One criticism was that to measure fathering in terms of time fails to take into account the nature or quality of the interaction. As well, time studies measuring father involvement frequently focused on the engagement aspect (time spent on child-related tasks) at the expense of accessibility and responsibility (Pleck and Stueve 2001). There was also the criticism that all three aspects of ‘involvement’ on this model lead to a ‘deficit perspective’ of fathering (Palkovitz 1997; Pleck and Stueve 2001) since fathers’ performance compares unfavourably with the amount of time mothers spend similarly ‘involved’. In view of the traditional role of the father as breadwinner, which takes place outside the home, many argued that time spent on breadwinning should be included. Responding to this issue, Dowd (2000, p. 176) argued that fathering is a social not an economic relationship and should be measured in terms of nurture, where this is defined as ‘care—physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual’. For the sake of clarity, I will follow Dowd in excluding breadwinning as an aspect of the term ‘nurturing’ in this book; however, I do not restrict fathering (or mothering) to nurture or make similar distinctions between social and economic relationships. I understand both nurture as Dowd defines it and financial provision to be aspects of parenting. In categorising actions of nurture, I employed Lyn Craig’s (2006) categorisation of child care. These types are: interactive child care (teaching/telling stories/reading); physical and emotional care (such as carrying; feeding); travel and communication (attending appointments and keeping track of them); and passive (being an adult presence; maintaining a safe environment; keeping an eye on children while playing).

The Essential Father The ’90s spokesperson for ‘fatherhood’ as a gendered social role, David Blankenhorn (1995), argued that the Pleck-Lamb model fails to take into account those aspects of parenting that are essentially connected to the father, and so reduces involvement to a measure of time spent on nurture (typically associated with mothers). Fathers, Blankenhorn argues, contribute to their child’s development something that mothers and other caretakers cannot contribute. He calls this unique contribution ‘paternal cultural transmission’ which he defines as ‘a father’s distinctive capacity to contribute to the identity, character, and competence of his children’

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(1995, p. 25). Though this can be read as the singular contribution of any individual, it is clear from the development of Blankenhorn’s argument that he sees it as specific to the biological father—something that is essential and that cannot be supplied by a mother or even by a stand-in male (a stepfather or ‘nearby guy’). One version of this ‘essentialism’ holds that fathers are necessary to the formation of gender identity and that their absence will therefore result in poor outcomes, particularly for boys. These are usually described in terms of hyper-masculinity (violence) or effeminacy and homosexuality (Pleck 2007). It is this spectre Blankenhorn (1995, p. 30) raises when he says ‘Boys raised by traditionally masculine fathers generally do not commit crimes. Fatherless boys commit crimes’. Fatherless boys commit crimes1 according to Blankenhorn (1995, p. 30), not because they are more likely to be raised in poverty, but because, without a father, they are unable to separate from the mother and to become ‘the son of his father’ (p. 30). In 1983, Pleck challenged this notion of ‘male gender role identity’ (MGRI) in The myth of masculinity. Later, Silverstein and Auerbach (1999) refuted the wider myth of the ‘essential’ father in their 1999 review of empirical research that purports to support the developmental importance of the father. They coined the term ‘essentialism’ for the position that biological fathers provide something unique and necessary to child development. Silverstein and Auerbach (1999) argue that this belief was responsible for fostering government initiatives around encouraging father involvement at the expense of support for mothers. Since then, essentialism has largely been discredited by research into developmental outcomes in two-parent lesbian families. These have found no significant developmental disparity between these families and two-parent heterosexual families. Pleck (2007) details a number of studies, the most significant being that of Wainwright et al. (2004). Nonetheless, essentialism has, as Pleck (2007, p. 200) remarks, a more enduring presence in ‘our culture’s ethnopsychology’. The father involvement wars were indicative of this enduring presence. If the object of the study of father involvement was to demonstrate the importance of the father to childhood development using empirical evidence, a construct that results in a deficit, non-essentialist model of the father was seen as insufficient to do the job. Father contributions in terms of social capital and financial resources are well-documented and could be understood as ‘essential’ contributions provided ‘essential’ is

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understood as necessary to the well-being of the child rather than unique to the father. While there was antipathy for a model of the father that reduced his contribution to the financial, there were (and are) those who insist that the role of the family provider is distinctly ‘masculine’. Blankenhorn (1995, p. 116) argues that ‘in liberating men from the breadwinner role, the New Father model also seeks to liberate fathers from widely held norms of masculinity’, and he insists that the role of main provider is central to fathering in a way that it is not to mothering. This is a view that Pleck (2007, p. 197) appears, to an extent, to endorse when he says that ‘economic support is now clearly recognised as an aspect of fathering, and to a lesser extent as an aspect of mothering’. There is an argument to be made that breadwinning (which usually occurs at a distance from the family) is in conflict with ‘involvement’ as operationalised in the Pleck-Lamb model and that a construction of parental involvement that includes a measure of parental financial provision could reveal a more balanced mother–father contribution. However, the stress on the centrality of breadwinning to male parenthood goes beyond this argument. That its proponents see breadwinning as a masculine prerogative is revealed in this statement by Geoffrey Dench (1994, cited in Bruzzi 2005, p. 155): ‘men need the status of the main provider role to give them sufficient reason to become fully involved, and stay involved, in the longer-term draggy business of family life’. In this account, ‘status’ implies a certain standing, one that is a man’s reward for sticking to the job. While acknowledgement must be given to the endurance of a companionate marriage construct in which fathers are designated the main provider, it is difficult to sustain a view that economic support is less an aspect of mothering than fathering in twenty-firstcentury America where the individual rather than the family has become the economic unit and families increasingly rely wholly or partially on mothers’ income. By 2013, mothers were the sole or primary breadwinner in over 40% of American households with children aged under 18 (Wang et al. 2013), and in two-parent households, almost 50% of women work full-time (Patten 2015). Blankenhorn finds contradiction in the simultaneous rejection of the essentiality of fathering and the requirement that the father takes financial responsibility. If fathers are not essential, we should not be alarmed, he says, by the growing number of deadbeat dads—let alone criminalise their action (1995, p. 133). This reveals the confusion of ‘non-essential’ with ‘unnecessary’ that seems to underlie pro-essentialist argument. If fathers

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do not contribute something to their child’s development that is both necessary and unique—something that no-one else can provide—then, according to this reasoning, ‘fathering’ is non-existent and fathers superfluous. The flaw in this argument can be seen here if we extend it to mothering, since mothers also do not perform any activity that cannot be done by another. I will be returning to the essentialism of the father in Chapter 5, where I find that, with the turn towards fatherhood as an intimate relationship, the ‘essentialism’ of the father returns in a new form. In the construction of fatherhood as relationship, I argue there, the two aspects of essentialism—necessity and uniqueness—are divided between the two gendered parents.

Father Time Recently, Lamb along with Fagan, Day and Cabrera (Fagan et al. 2014) declared victory for the non-gendered co-parent model, claiming that this model has been embraced by parents in America and Europe. In both the nature of tasks undertaken and of time spent, they claim convergence between fathers and mothers in parenting activities and argue that there is no longer justification for using different descriptors for father and mother involvement in assessing parenting behaviours or their effects. In contrast to Lamb, Pleck considers rather that ‘all sides won’ (Pleck 2007, p. 197) with nurture and breadwinning now seen as aspects of parenting. Maher et al. (2008) propose a new framework for measuring parenting using time that is based not on the individual but on the ‘time economy’ of the family—the interrelated apportionment of the finite resource of time within the family. Such a framework offers the possibility of a more nuanced exploration of the trade-offs of labour within the family under the shifting pressures and influences of external factors such as changes in policy. However, others have found a continuing discrepancy in both tasktypes and time that is unrelated to time availability. A cross-national study by Craig and Mullan (2011, p. 852) exploring time-use data from Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy, found that ‘across the board, gender was the strongest influence on the composition and share of childcare’ and that gender difference in time spent could not be accounted for by the availability of material resources or relative time resources of the parents. Within the United States, Raley et al.’s (2012) extensive study of married mothers and married fathers with children under 13 shows that

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time spent with children continues to be gender-dependent. They find that the amount of time fathers spend with children is not sensitive to the amount of time women spend at work unless the father is unemployed. When mothers spend more hours in employment, the mother’s time with children decreases, with little or no change in the amount of total time spent by fathers (though the amount of solo time spent with children increases). A similar picture emerges regarding time spent performing care tasks. Typically fathers spend about half as much time on care tasks as mothers regardless of the mothers’ hours of paid employment. Where the father is unemployed, time spent on childcare tasks increases for both fathers and mothers. Within this project, ‘time’ features in establishing conflict for the father between work and family, as when the father in RV must choose whether to attend a business meeting or go on a planned holiday; or the father is late to pick up his son for Christmas because he stays too late at an office Christmas party. However, I find that this is not created in the films as a lack of time as a resource but is used to indicate the degree of value the father assigns to work and family (Chapter 6). Relative time availability is connected to hierarchies of masculinity and as a marker to distinguish the masculinity of the biological father and that of the ‘Other man’ (Chapter 6).

Father Involvement as Intimate Relationship Tracing shifts in the conceptualisation of father involvement since preindustrial times, Michael Lamb (2000) recognised significant ‘defining motifs’ of American fatherhood as (in historical order): moral guidance; breadwinning; sex-role modelling; marital support; and nurturance. In 2008, sociologist and fatherhood researcher Esther Dermott argued that intimacy should now be added to this list and be recognised as the central dimension of contemporary western fatherhood. This section is devoted to a more detailed exploration of the shift from nurture to intimacy. Dermott (2008) argues that attention should be placed on intimacy as a framework for studies of fathering, arguing that focusing on fatherhood as intimate relationship ‘provides a way of resolving the apparent gulf between “culture” and “conduct”’ (p. 143). LaRossa (1988) first discussed the discrepancy between the conduct of fathering and the culture of fatherhood in the eighties. He found that, contrary to a

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widespread belief in the ‘new involved father’, the behaviour of ’80s fathers was not very much different from that of their own fathers. LaRossa lamented the lack of attention from family researchers and practitioners to this dichotomy between the conduct of new fathers and the cultural norms of the new ‘nurturing’ father. This lack has since been addressed and, reviewing the resultant literature, Dermott (2008) found that this conduct-culture ‘paradox’ has been explained variously as resulting from: a lack of supporting social structures for the new fatherhood; a time lag between culture and conduct; mother-bias in the design of studies measuring father involvement; and mother-gatekeeping practices that discourage father involvement at a practical level. Dermott’s phrase ‘the apparent gulf’ between conduct and culture points to an alternative explanation of the culture-conduct disparity that deserves consideration: that there is no discrepancy. Dermott argues that the conduct of fathering reflects rather than neglects the current cultural ideal of fatherhood. While fathers may strive to be good involved fathers, the apparent paradox of the lack of change in the gendered division of care tasks is resolved if ‘involvement’ is not understood to mean involvement in care. While Dermott (2008, p. 1) does not claim fatherhood to be wholly unrelated to caring tasks, she argues that the extent that the performance of tasks plays a role depends on what is ‘sought from and offered’ in the relationship of particular fathers and children ‘in terms of practical caring’. She considers practical caring as being a dimension of the intimate relationship, but only, as it were, contingently. Dermott considers that the emphasis on emotions and the ‘exclusivity’ of the dyadic relationship operates at the expense of father participation in the work of childcare (Dermott 2008, p. 143). A similar point is found in the works of Gatrell (2007) and of Neale and Smart (2002) who find that fathers may lay claim to activities that support relationship-building by claiming the free ‘quality’ time of children while leaving the ‘work’ of caring for the child to the mother. While Dermott (2008) concedes that some level of participation in practical tasks might flow from the intimate relationship, intimate relationship in the context of parent and child does not imply involvement in care tasks. I find support for this move from nurture to intimacy in a discursive shift in the use of ‘nurture’ and ‘nurturing’ as an aspect of father involvement within sociology literature and government family policy

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documents. The change in use can be understood in terms of the ‘discursive drift’ identified by Lombardo et al. (2010), wherein concepts employed in the promotion of gender equality become ‘bent’ so that they serve instead to undermine gender equality aims. When used to describe fathering (though not mothering), the terms ‘nurture’ and ‘nurturing’ have come to signify sensitivity and warmth, rather than aspects of care, with consequences for how studies of fathering are conceived and understood. One example can be found in the account of Gillam and Wooden (2008) (discussed in Chapter 2). Gillam and Wooden find men in Disney-Pixar films privilege ‘nurture’ and this is instanced by valuing relationships over success. The use of ‘nurture’ by Gillam and Wooden can be contrasted with that of Kaplan (1992, p. 184) writing ten years earlier when describing the ’80s as a time when Hollywood embraced ‘fantasies of the Father as nurturer’ where ‘nurturer’ is used to indicate participation in everyday acts of care. The claim that both parents are involved in nurture has little import if ‘nurture’ is used differently in discussing the activities or responsibilities of fathers and mothers. Certainly, the Pleck-Lamb measure of father involvement developed in the ’80s does not cite intimacy as a descriptor for measuring father involvement; indeed, one criticism directed at the model was the lack of attention to aspects of ‘involvement’ that can not be measured in terms of time. Hamad, tracing the historical chain in the development of postfeminist fatherhood, points to ’70s feminist (at that time) writer Farrell (1974 cited in Hamad 2014, p. 9) and his call for fathers who ‘offer warm positive affection’, along with a sufficient ‘respect for the domestic setting to participate in it’. Writing in 2014, Hamad (p. 9) claims this as evidence of Farrell ‘valorising affective qualities like sensitivity, nurturance and emotional articulacy’. This characterisation of nurturing (in the context of fatherhood) as an affective quality could be a recognition that ‘nurturance’ carries an implication of both care work and affection and or it may reflect the extent to which discourses of the intimate father have colonised the literature. Dermott considers warmth and emotional involvement to be central to ‘nurturing fatherhood’ while the link to care tasks is ‘hazy’ (Dermott 2008, p. 75). Evidence for the turn to intimacy as the central dimension of fatherhood can also be found in the discourses of government policy documents in Australia and in Europe such as those regarding the introduction of paternity leave and father involvement initiatives. In Australia, the productivity commission for the introduction of Dad and Partner

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pay (Productivity Commission 2009) recognised that ‘given overseas evidence, [paternity leave] will not have appreciable impacts on fathers’ willingness to participate in child-related domestic tasks’ (p. xxiv). The Commission frames the benefits of paternity leave instead in terms of ‘developing a relationship’ between the father and child (section 2.43). In Britain, Val Gillies (2009, p. 53) finds that government-sponsored literature ‘makes clear [that] involved/good fathers are emotionally attached to their children and spend quality time with them’. Though time is still emphasised, it has shifted from time spent on care-giving to ‘quality time’, with emotional attachment as the desired outcome. The idea that intimacy is central to family life is not new. Lynn Jamieson, writing in 1998, speaks of the centrality of intimacy to interpersonal relationships including family relationships. Demos (1994) also found ‘intimacy’ understood as closeness and disclosure as aspect of the father–child bond in the eighteenth century. What is new in the work of Dermott is the suggestion that we recognise a shift of ‘father involvement’ away from an optimistic vision of a gender-neutral model of parenting and towards one which acknowledges a contemporary construction of fatherhood as, in Dermott’s words (2008, p. 20) ‘a close relationship that is disassociated from equal co-parenting and shared childcare’. The advantage of this construct of fatherhood, Dermott (2008, p. 93) argues, is that it creates a role for the father that is not ‘second-class’ to motherhood at the same time as maintaining the ‘primacy of the mother–child bond’. Rather than indicating a greater democratisation within the family in the sharing of burdens associated with parenting, contemporary fatherhood, Dermott (2008, p. 93) contends, ‘constitut[es] itself as being primarily about the negotiated, individual relationship between father and child’. The focus on intimacy as a dimension of fathering should be seen in the context of a greater focus on intimacy generally in late-modernity. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) connect a greater concern with intimacy to the erosion in late-modernity of traditional societal and institutional constraints. As these constraints fall away, individuals are required to ‘stage manage, not only one’s own biography but the bonds and networks surrounding it’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 96). This requirement in late-modernity to self-reflexively create a ‘life of one’s own’ results in a ‘longing for’ intimate relationships while at the same time making it difficult for intimacy to be sustained. Whereas, historically, family was shaped largely by societal definitions, now ‘[kinship] is no longer given as a destiny’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 96).

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The dissolution of institutional constraints and sanctions results in an alteration of our understanding of family. The lack of traditional supports in terms of social and institutional sanctions means that family relationships are not given—or at least not only given—but must be created. The longevity of relationships, even familial relationships, comes to depend on the quality of the intimacy itself—an intimacy that is constantly in conflict with a requirement to build a life of one’s own. The longing for intimacy that Beck and Beck-Gernsheim see as consequent on the dis-embedding of the individual from social structures has made children more valued as a source of love. In a study of how White British fathers viewed ‘doing fatherhood’ and the ‘meaning of children’, Featherstone (2010) found that the important aspects of fathering for the fathers interviewed were emotional connection and the exclusivity of the bond. The fathers in the study were unanimous in viewing children as inherently loveable and vulnerable and as sources of unconditional love. This unconditional love they saw as available from the child (and specifically not available from the mother though they saw it as given by the mother to the child). Many fathers viewed fatherhood in terms of ‘rights’, particularly the right of access to the children as sources of unconditional love, and viewed women as having power that men lacked in gaining access to this unconditional love2 (Featherstone 2010). I return to this topic of the child’s unconditional love and consider the move to animals as sources of love and innocence in Chapter 9. The emphasis on father–child intimacy can be seen, then, as coming from two somewhat contradictory directions. First, from the greater importance of intimacy in constructing and maintaining a bond between the child and the adult, a bond that cannot be taken for granted and is under constant threat, particularly from the mother who is perceived as having more developed ‘intimacy’ skills as well as a more privileged position in accessing children. Second, from an increased focus on the child as a source of intimacy, of love—a source that is more trusted and enduring than that derived from other relationships, one that, unlike other sources, can be taken for granted. As Jenks (2005, p. 111) puts it: children have become seen as ‘primary and unequivocal sources of love’ and this in a world where love has become both precarious and sought-after in response to the isolating effects of individualisation. Yet,

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as Harwood (1997, p. 127) points out, this bond cannot secure family stability since it relies on the child, who over time will grow and leave.

The Possibility of a ‘Pure’ Father–Child Relationship Dermott (2008, p. 142) says of contemporary fatherhood that it is ‘closer to the ethic of the pure relationship than an ethic of caring responsibility’. Pure relationship can be understood in terms of a relationship that is not bound by obligations but is ‘entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another’ (Giddens 1992, p. 58). Giddens suggests that the processes of detraditionalisation result in a change in notions of love, particularly of marital love: a shift from a concept of romantic love, with its idealisation of a ‘special person’ and its promise of ever-after, to a model of ‘confluent love’ (Giddens 1992), a love that is contingent, and ‘active’, and gives primacy not to a special individual but to the rewards of the relationship itself. Yet pure relationship depends upon ongoing evaluations on both sides and presumes an equality that forecloses dependency. This ‘equality’ that is cast as a lack of dependence—a lack of the obligations that dependency incurs—makes contingent relationship between a parent and child problematic. The problem can be divided into two interrelated issues—problems with the conceptualisation of the father relationship as free from obligation and problems with the construction of children as capable of entering ‘equally’ into non-dependent relationships. In this and the following section, I will address these problems in turn. Giddens (1991) characterises pure relationships as supported by trust with no ‘external supports’. Without external supports, trust must be grounded in intimacy and ‘mobilised only by a process of mutual disclosure’ (1991, p. 6). He distinguishes such a relationship which has as its first priority the ‘development of the self’, from the more traditional ‘romantic’ relationship, which he characterises as dependent and addictive (Giddens 1992). In characterising pure relationships, Giddens (1991) draws on the pop psychology notion of co-dependency. The notion gained strength in the eighties within self-help groups, particularly those dealing with alcohol and drug ‘dependency’. Based on ‘crude and simplistic adaptations of systems theory’ (Dear 1994, p. 285) the term

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‘co-dependent’ was originally used to describe the partners of alcoholics. The theory considers partners and (adult) family members of alcoholics to be psychologically disturbed (with children growing to become so). The idea of co-dependence is premised on the notion that, in continuing relationships with those who are chemically dependent, family members are also demonstrating ‘dependence’. Co-dependence as a concept has been criticised for victim-blaming when applied to survivors of domestic violence (Dear 1994). Giddens applies the co-dependency concept to relationships themselves, holding that dependence on a relationship to secure personal identity creates a dependent or ‘fixated’ relationship wherein one’s individual identity is found through others, and he ties this notion of dependency to the giving of nurture to a dependent other. While acknowledging that it is possible to apply the term ‘co-dependent’ to either sex, Giddens (1992, p. 87) considers that it describes the ‘female role’ as it signifies carers ‘who need to give nurturance to others’. He contrasts this with intimacy in pure relationships which relies on a freedom to choose the relationship from a position of ‘loving detachment’ and with the principle of self-development as the ‘first priority’. Intimacy, he claims, cannot be sustained where dependency exists. For Giddens, negotiated ‘pure’ relationships within a detraditionalised society offer the promise of greater equality since a balance of power will enable individuals to negotiate on an equal footing and so establish relationships that offer mutual benefits. As traditional gender and class-based constraints ‘melt away’, individuals (conceived within Giddens model as equally endowed with ‘agency’) are required to exercise ‘self-reflexivity’ in the creation of their identity. Individuals will, it is assumed, then negotiate equally in accordance with their own project of the ‘development of self’ (Giddens 1992, p. 94). The ability of individual negotiation within intimate relationships to overcome gender norms and lead to equality within families has been challenged by many, not least by those who find that empirical evidence does not support these optimistic predictions. The lack of empirical support for such claims can be, as Jamieson (1999) concedes, explained away as a result of society in transition— though there are, as she notes, few reasons to hold such an optimistic view. Gillies (2009) argues that the claim results from a focus on the interpersonal that ignores wider economic and political interests. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) also do not consider the individualisation process of late-modernity to promise equality but rather to reflect a

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change in governmentality. As I have argued elsewhere, detraditionalisation only appears to promise equality when it is framed through libertarian conceptualisations of agency that construct individuals as already equal (McNulty Norton 2021). Nonetheless, the notion of a greater equality emerging from a lessening of hypostatised constraints has wide acceptance as individuals become ‘liberated’ from traditional methods of controls and punishments. Within the family, detraditionalisation results, on Giddens’ account, in a greater equality between partners who can then negotiate the sharing of obligations, including those related to children. Yet a sharing of responsibilities based on a relationship that lasts only until partners are dissatisfied invites the question of what happens to the obligations when the parental relationship ends. One possibility is the extension of the intimate relationship to the parent–child bond. Giddens considers this to be possible with older children, along with a ‘stress on intimacy replacing parental authoritativeness’ through ‘a process of mutual disclosure’ (Giddens 1992, p. 6). However, for young children, who lack ‘agency’, he says, ‘the picture is more complex’ (1992, p. 98). Jamieson (1999) has pointed out the internal contradictions arising from extending the pure contingent relationship to children since, within Giddens’ own account of pure relationship, the ability to build trust via mutual disclosure rests on the ontological security built up in childhood where care can be ‘taken for granted’. Writing in 1999, Jamieson finds that there is ‘little take-up’ of the notion of pure relationshipwith regard to parents and children, and characterises it as an ideal of middle class White mothers who attempt to foster relationships akin to intimate friendship with children with an emphasis on listening and understanding and mutual disclosure. She finds that rather than developing intimacy, ‘disclosure’ can be experienced by children as a form of surveillance as mothers seek information with the goal of providing protection. Jamieson (1999, p. 489) also argues that trust and acceptance do not depend on constant mutual disclosure but can be built by caring action and with ‘relatively few words’. A shift in the parent–child relationship to one in which intimacy replaces authority has particular ramifications for the father in view of Giddens’ (1992, p. 62) contention that intimacy based in mutual disclosure tends to present particular problems for men since their ‘capacity to be made thus vulnerable’ has been inhibited by their traditional reliance on women to do the work of intimacy. He describes men as lacking the

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communicative competence to establish an intimacy that is ‘mobilised only by a process of mutual disclosure’ (1991, p. 6). This lack of masculine communicative competence is a theme of father films of the 2000s and I return to it in Chapter 9. Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000, 2016) also challenge the extension of contingent relationship to the father–child bond, saying that it relies on an underlying restrictive conceptualisation of agency. They argue that the concept of an adult (understood as a competent member of society) is not only that of rational actor but includes what they term a ‘moral dimension’ (2000, p. 789). In their study of parents and step-parents, they find that it is part of the definition of adulthood ‘that there is a non-negotiable moral obligation’ placed on adults with respect to children in their care (2000, p. 791). They find that both fathers and mothers are subject to this moral obligation—but the nature of the obligation is gendered, reflecting gendered constructions of mothering and fathering. They also find that the ‘moral bypass routes’ by which lapses of responsibility are explained show gender differences, with men more likely to reference a competing ‘individualistic discourse concerned with a responsibility towards one’s self’ (2000, p. 795). They conclude that the individualistic ethic of prioritising self-development that is associated with the pure relationship is incompatible with that of responsibility for children.

Agentic Children and the Construction of Family A further objection to conceiving of the father–child relationship as pure relationship is the requirement that both parties within the dyadic relationship ‘have’ agency. The ’90s and especially the 2000s saw a slow but gathering change towards the construction of children as ‘agentic’ which requires consideration. Sociologist David Oswell, author of The agency of children (2012) traces the ability of children to be agentic (which he defines in terms of the power to make a difference to the world) to the development of networks that endow children with ‘power’ with the result that they are increasingly being treated as ‘democratic subjects’. However, for children, this ‘power’, he notes, is generally constructed not in terms of independent choice but as ‘voice’. This is reflected in policies and laws that aim to ensure that children’s voices are heard. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child frames recognising the voices of children as a tenet of modern democracy (James 2007, p. 261). Within

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the practice of sociology, James and Prout (1997, p. 8) call for sociologists to adopt a research methodology that recognises that children have views and opinions. As ‘subjects of’ a democratic family, children are, at least in theory, endowed with a voice, where ‘having a voice’ is understood according to the discourse of democracy as having opinions that count for something—that can be expressed in a way that results in some effect on the world—that result in children ‘doing’ (or at least ‘doing family’). Having a voice, as various authors have pointed out (Smart 2004; James 2007; Oswell 2012) therefore requires not only the capacity to speak, but the ability of others to listen. It requires, Oswell (2012, p. 104) says, both ‘infrastructures which…endow children with the capacity to speak and the capacity of others to hear them’. Both Harwood (1997) and Tincknell (2005) have written on children’s agency within Hollywood films where ‘agency’ is understood as the ability to ‘make a difference’. In family adventure films,3 Tincknell (2005, p. 102) finds that children are at times shown as having agency or the ability to acquire it, though only if the child is male and White: ‘most of these films privilege the point of view and narrative position of male child characters—and white characters at that’. ‘Agency’ as the ability to make a difference is more clearly ascribed in films in which adults are out of the picture and children are portrayed as having their own social community, such as in ’80s films E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (1982) and The Goonies (1985), or the later Harry Potter series (2001—). Rolling Stone’ s reviewer Michael Sragow (cited in Harwood 1997, p. 152) wrote of E.T. that children ‘in suburbia (are) an embattled majority, dependent on often absent parents for food, money and transportation. E.T. inspires them to rise above their circumstances and take fate into their own hands’. These films all show children ‘making a difference’—but not making a difference to the construction of the family. Though reconstituting the nuclear family is a major theme in these ’80s films, this is not always achieved, and not clearly achievable through the agency of the child. Harwood finds indications that ‘sons can actively construct new families for themselves’ (Harwood 1997, p. 129) in the films Look Who’s Talking (1989) (in which a male foetus/baby sets out to acquire a father for himself) and Back to the Future (1985) (where a teenage son goes back in time to recreate his family)—but neither of these are unproblematically tales of children. In Look Who’s Talking, the body is that of a baby but the

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voiceover is supplied by Bruce Willis and displays the speech patterns and thoughts of an adult male, while in Back to the Future the teenage son is old enough to drive a car.

Innocence and Redemption Harwood (1997) also finds that children can act, not as ‘agents’ in family construction, but as catalysts in the restoration of the family. Their ability to restore the family is based not in their agency but in an innocence which allows them to take the part of redeemer in fatherhood films without agentic ‘power’. Harwood contends that the children are not unknowing: rather, they are invested with a different, special form of knowledge, with ‘truth’. Their oracular powers derive from the knowledge they (uniquely) can access because their innocence gives them insight into ‘utopian realities’ (Harwood 1997, p. 138). Nonetheless, Harwood (1997, pp. 127–129) argues, the child has no narrative ‘power’. They may comment on the narrative and frequently act as catalyst for family restoration, but they cannot restore or constitute the family. Children are powerless except as truth-sayers: ‘It is the constant paradox of the childhood paradigm that children speak the truth but only adults can act on it’ (Harwood 1997, p. 128). In Hollywood father films, she finds, only adults have the ability to act and only the father (not the mother) ‘has ultimate authority over familial closures’ (p. 128). This distinction between action and speech, as if speech is not an action, or at least not one that is creative, that has power, seems on the face of it to limit ‘action’ to a very narrow realm. Yet if the child’s speech act is portrayed as truly oracular, then the child is only a portal for speech, and the truth is depicted as coming not from them, but through them. The child can then speak the truth while maintaining unknowing (that is, ‘innocent’). In film, the transformative and redemptive power of innocence is an enduring Hollywood trope. Aronson and Kimmel (2001) remind us that the transformative power of a good woman’s love has been one of Hollywood’s most enduring themes. It is not femininity or love alone that holds this transformative power, but love combined with innocence. The love of a good woman—an unworldly woman—could ‘change bad men into good men’ (Aronson and Kimmel 2001, p. 44). However, in a postfeminist society, women have gone out into the world and are no longer ‘unknowing’ so cannot now be created to fit this trope of innocence (Aronson and Kimmel 2001). If men are to be saved, if they are to be

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turned into good men, then it is up to children to be their redeemers, and Aronson and Kimmel see the rash of ‘fatherhood fables’ as ‘backlash’ films against women who have abandoned their natural role. Children must now take on the role of redeemers themselves if they are to be protected (2001, p. 46). This is taken up in Chapter 8 where I consider how children within these father films are made responsible for the redemption of the father and whether mothers are held accountable for failing to fulfil this role. The child when created as existing in a state of innocent grace is also the ‘unknowing’ child as ‘Notions of knowledge and responsibility are so intertwined that we seem to find it difficult to treat children who “know” as children, since their innocence has been compromised’ (Burman 1994, p. 244). Like Adam and Eve in paradise, the innocent child is without accountability, since being accountable depends on knowledge denied them. Yet this innocence, framed as a lack of knowledge, is held to be of value, something to be protected: children have the ‘right to be childlike’ as Chambers (2012, p. 76) puts it. For Robinson and Davies (2008, p. 343), adult concern with preserving the innocence of children is essentially nostalgic and childhood innocence a ‘concept that is manufactured by adults for adults’. Following James Kincaid (cited in Robinson and Davies 2008, p. 344), they hold that innocence is enforced as part of a binary that constructs children as other, dependent, powerless and somehow existing in a space beyond or outside the adult world. However, the last thirty years has seen a growing demand for the recognition of child agency to ensure child rights and to ameliorate the power differential between adults and children. Results include the adoption in 1990 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which acknowledges children as citizens, and the ‘effective creation of children as a powerful consumer constituency’ (Tincknell 2005, p. 80). This shift in power, Tincknell claims, has constructed a ‘new moment in which childhood is in the process of being reinvented or perhaps even uninvented’ (Tincknell 2005, p. 80). Yet culturally the construction of the child as innocent, natural and unknowing is still powerful. Crediting children with agency also burdens them with accountability since it implies the ability to take responsibility for one’s actions, which presupposes (however mythically) an understanding of the consequences of those actions. The accountability aspect, as Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000) note, cannot be altogether separated from attributions of agency.

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Pryor and Emery (2004) find children reluctant to take ‘responsibility’ by adding their voice to major family decisions such as living arrangements after divorce. They argue that policies that are designed to provide children with a voice might serve to force unwelcome responsibilities onto children and that the choice to stay silent should also be available (Pryor and Emery 2004). Staying silent as a choice arguably still involves agency, yet this principle (that children although ‘agentic’ in having a voice should be protected against a requirement to assume the responsibilities of adulthood) highlights the need identified by Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000) for a less restrictive model of agency: one that incorporates the ‘moral dimension’. The next chapter explores Barnes’ conceptualisation that does not frame agency in terms of power but of accountability.

Conclusion This review of the changing construction of fatherhood since the ’80s reveals the shifts in understanding of father ‘involvement’ ending with Dermott’s recognition of the centrality of intimacy to current cultural understandings of fathering. The ‘pure relationship’ described by Giddens with its valorisation of the contingent relationship sustained for the benefits it delivers has been influential in conceptualising intimacy. It associates pure relationship with individual ‘agency’ and frames it as incompatible with nurturance of dependent others. The conflict I find in my analysis between domestic fathering and the status of ‘individual’ can be seen as latent in Giddens’ association of individual ‘agency’ with a freedom from dependency of all kinds. Despite growing acceptance of children as ‘agentic’, casting children in the role of independent ‘agents’ within a pure relationship poses considerable difficulties. In addition, the ‘radicalising possibilities’ of the pure relationship as a force to bring about the ‘wholesale democratisation of the interpersonal domain’ (Giddens 1992, p. 3) rests on a particular picture of agency, one that does not encompass the aspect of accountability that is associated with the agentic individual (Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2000). This reveals the need for different conceptual and evaluative tools for exploring ‘agency’ within the family. Contesting the restrictive theorisation of agency in terms of power to make a difference, Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000) find that the obligation of care for dependent children is ascribed to adults as moral agents

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and that this attribute of ‘moral agency’ is at variance with a model of the father–child relationship as a contingent bond entered into by the father as reflexive agent. Nonetheless, I will show in the analysis chapters (Part 2) that the contingent father–child relationship is found in Hollywood family film narratives in which fathers are brought to engage in relationship by ‘realising’ the benefits of association with their children.

Notes 1. Blankenhorn offers no empirical evidence for this assertion, though he does refer the reader to studies that show high levels of single woman households as one of the predictors of community crime (1995, p. 31). 2. It should be noted that many of the fathers in the study were not living with the mothers of their children. 3. Family adventure films are characterized by Kramer (1998) as family films with a large dose of action adventure and designed to appeal to audiences young and old.

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Demos, J 1994, ‘The changing faces of fatherhood’, in SH Cath, AR Gurwitt, & JM Ross (eds), Father and child, developmental and clinical perspectives, Psychology Press, New York, pp. 425–450. Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Dowd, NE 2000, Redefining fatherhood, New York University Press, New York, . E.T. the extra-terrestrial 1982, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Fagan, J, Day, R, Lamb, ME & Cabrera, NJ 2014, ‘Should researchers conceptualize differently the dimensions of parenting for fathers and mothers?’, Journal of Family Theory and Review, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 390–405, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/jftr.12044. Featherstone, B 2010, ‘Writing fathers in but mothers out!!!’, Critical Social Policy, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 208–224, https://doi.org/10.1177/026101830 9358290. Gatrell, C 2007, ‘Whose child is it anyway?’, The Sociological Review, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 352–372, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00709.x. Giddens, A 1991, Modernity and self-identity, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Gillam, K & Wooden, SR 2008, ‘Post-princess models of gender: the new man in Disney/Pixar’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 2–8, https://doi.org/10.3200/JPFT.36.1.2-8. Gillies, V 2009, ‘Understandings and experiences of involved fathering in the United Kingdom’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 624, no. 1, pp. 49–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/000271620 9334295. Hamad, H 2014, Postfeminism and paternity in contemporary US film, Routledge, Ney York. Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone 2001, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Harwood, S 1997, Family fictions, St. Martin’s Press, New York. James, A 2007, ‘Giving voice to children’s voices: practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials’, American anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 261–272, retrieved 29 September 2018, . James, A & Prout, A 1997, ‘A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood’, in A James & A Prout (eds), Constructing and reconstructing childhood, Routledge Falmer Press, London. Jamieson, L 1998, Intimacy, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Jamieson, L 1999, ‘Intimacy transformed? A critical look at the ‘pure relationship’’, Sociology, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 477–494, https://doi.org/10.1177/s00 38038599000310. Jenks, C 2005, Childhood, Routledge, New York. Kaplan, EA 1992, Motherhood and representation, Routledge, London.

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Kramer, P 1998, ‘Would you take your child to see this film? The cultural and social work of the family-adventure movie’, in S Neale & M Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Routledge, New York, pp. 294–311. Lamb, ME 2000, ‘The history of research on father involvement’, Marriage & Family Review, vol. 29, no. 2–3, pp. 23–42, https://doi.org/10.1300/J00 2v29n02_03. LaRossa, R 1988, ‘Fatherhood and social change’, Family Relations, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 451–457, https://doi.org/10.2307/584119. Lombardo, E, Meier, P & Verloo, M 2010, ‘Discursive dynamics in gender equality politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 105–123, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506809359562. Look who’s talking 1989, film, Tristar Pictures—Sony Pictures, Culver City, California. Maher, JM, Lindsay, J & Franzway, S 2008, ‘Time, caring labour and social policy’, Work, Employment and Society, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 547–558, https:// doi.org/10.1177/0950017008095105. McNulty Norton, D 2021 ‘The responsibilised “agent” and other statuses’, Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520986037. Neale, B & Smart, C 2002, ‘Caring, earning and changing’, Centre for research on Family Kinship & Childhood, viewed 22 April 2018, . Oswell, D 2012, The agency of children, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Palkovitz, R 1997, ‘Reconstructing ‘involvement’’, in AJ Hawkins & DC Dollahite (eds), Generative fathering, Sage Publications, New York, pp. 200– 216. Patten, E 2015, ‘How American parents balance work and family life when both work’ Pew Research Center viewed 30 November 2018, . Pleck, JH 1983, The myth of masculinity, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Pleck, JH 2007, ‘Why could father involvement benefit children?’, Applied Development Science, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 196–202, https://doi.org/10.1080/108 88690701762068. Pleck, JH & Stueve, JL 2001, ‘Time and paternal involvement’, in K Daly (ed), Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley, UK, pp. 205–226. Pryor, J & Emery, R 2004, ‘Children of Divorce’ in K Pufall & R Unsworth (eds), Rethinking Childhood, Rutgers University Press, New York, pp. 170– 188.

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Productivity Commission 2009, ‘Paid parental leave: support for parents with newborn children’, viewed 1 April 2017, . Raley, S, Bianchi, SM and Wang, W (2012) ‘When Do Fathers Care?’ American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 4, pp. 1422–1459, https://doi.org/10. 1086/663354. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, https://doi.org/10. 1177/S003803850000047X. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2016, Making families: moral tales of parenting and step-parenting, Routledge, Oxon, UK. Robinson, KH & Davies, C 2008, ‘She‘s kickin’ ass, that’s what she’s doing!’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 57, pp. 343–358, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/08164640802233294. Silverstein, LB & Auerbach, CF 1999, ‘Deconstructing the essential father’, American Psychologist, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 397–407, https://doi.org/10. 1037/0003-066X.54.6.397. Smart, C 2004, ‘Equal shares: rights for fathers or recognition for children?’, Critical Social Policy, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 484–503, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0261018304046673. The Goonies 1985, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Tincknell, E 2005, Mediating the Family, Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury, USA. Wainright, JL, Russell, ST & Patterson, CJ 2004 ‘Psychosocial adjustment, school outcomes, and romantic relationships of adolescents with same-sex parents’ , Child Development, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1886–1898, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00823.x. Wang, W, Parker, K, & Taylor P 2013, ‘Breadwinner Mums’, Pew Research Center viewed 30 November 2018, .

CHAPTER 4

Methodological Considerations

Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000, 2016) recognise that we hold adults accountable for their choices in a way we do not hold children, and part of what it means to be an adult is to be a moral agent. Drawing a distinction between agency as simply the capacity for action and agency as accountability, they argue that the notion of pure relationship relies on a restrictive conception of agency, one that ignores this ‘moral dimension’. In this chapter, I argue that Barry Barnes’ model of agency incorporates the ‘moral dimension’ and allows for an exploration of the construction of the Hollywood father in terms of accountability. Barnes’ conceptualisation of agency opens the way for the methodological approach I develop here—one that allows me to unpack the differentiated but interrelated privileges and obligations of social statuses through the discursive analysis of the ‘voluntaristic’ discourses that assign them. Accountability is accountability for something and what we hold people accountable for depends very much on the various statuses they hold (as adults, as parents, as workers). The approach I develop here allows me to explore the differential responsibilities and privileges of individuals according to their multiple statuses, and identify the tensions between them.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_4

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Barnes on Agency Barnes challenges prevailing libertarian models of agency that conceptualise agency in terms of the power to ‘make a difference’ and explores the meaning of agency through the everyday voluntaristic discourses that assume free will. Barnes distinguishes between social agency and causal agency (the agent as causal actor). He focuses on the former and has been described as pioneering ‘a new field of sociological inquiry: the sociology of free will’ (Kusch 2008, p. 131). Barnes’ (2000) account has its antecedents in Durkheim’s social action and in the linguistic turn of Wittgenstein, Kripke and Searle. He argues that voluntaristic discourses are not used to describe a state of affairs that exists, but operate performatively to create individuals as responsibilised social agents. They function to assign a ‘status’ rather than to describe a ‘state’. Barnes challenges the picture of accountability as based on a previously established power of rationality that is internal to the (adult) individual—the notion that we first (somehow) establish competence as a state and then, on the basis of this, assign responsibility. In Barnes’ view of agency, attribution of these internal states is made on the basis of an assigned status—the status of an agentic ‘individual’ member of a social group. It is possible to see the influence of Kripke as Barnes makes the analogy: Our dominant form of naming and classification refers to context and confers status. Our dominant paradigm of naming and classification imagines that reference is made to the nature of the thing classified. The tendency to ask what in the banknote makes it so much money is ever present. (Barnes 2000, p. 148)

He describes voluntaristic discourses as the means through which social agents ‘communicate their expectations of each other and thereby affect each other’s actions’ (Barnes 2000, p. 2, emphasis added). Voluntaristic discourses attribute choice and responsibility while assuming free will and so are the means through which social members can hold one another accountable and socially coordinate action. Barnes’ model rests on the distinction between state and status. Barnes (2000, p. 147) says of statuses that they are ‘amongst the great inventions of humankind … Institutions are built around statuses. A practice is instituted: at its focus stands a status, the necessary basis of co-ordination

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and co-operation’. Statuses are the foci of the differentiated rings of expectations that enable social interaction as these are conveyed through voluntaristic discourses. As an epistemological discursive construct, ‘agency’ is locally and historically dependent and subject to constant reconstruction. It is not located in the individual but is ‘smeared across the whole of the collective that recognises it’ (Barnes 2000, p. 148). Barnes’ model is thus fundamentally social and monistic. Social order is not understood as emerging from the actions of individuals all separately (and privately) following social ‘rules’, but arise from the actions of individuals adjusting their behaviour in response to other social members. Agentic individuals can be held to account because they have a choice—but ‘having a choice’ is not grounded in different actions being available. Within voluntaristic discourses, ‘individuals with rights to choose are easily rendered as individuals natively imbued with powers of choice. What is treated as autonomous becomes what is of its nature autonomous’ (2000, p. 149) using ‘processes of naturalisation, reification and hypostatisation’ (p. 149). Within this model, to be agentic is to be accountable and susceptible to the wider group. Barnes considers the recognition that the individual ‘could have acted otherwise’ as a recognition of ‘susceptibility’, a recognition (by the community) that the individual’s action was not inevitable. The notion of susceptibility allows some flexibility with regard to the judgement of whether, situationally, the individual is accountable. In situations in which an individual may express that they had no choice (for example, in the grip of phobia or extreme coercion), the agent may be judged to have no responsibility for the action despite alternative actions being available. To say of someone that they ‘had no choice’ is not to say that alternative actions were not possible, but that the individual within that moment was not susceptible to the social influence. Voluntaristic discourses convey judgements and expectations and so influence the actions of social members. To the extent that a social member is open to this influence, they have ‘free will’, and it is this that accords social agency its ‘moral dimension’. Members of society are deemed competent and so able to be held accountable as long as their actions are intelligible in relation to the rules (whether conforming or resisting). It is only in the face of a lack of intelligibility that questions of competence would be raised or agency denied. A competent individual can be held responsible, and it this function of

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the status of ‘individual’ that has a social use. There may be situations (as in a court of law) where the individual’s competence is in question. Barnes suggests that it is usually only in the face of great risk that an individual would seek to give up their status as competent and accountable member of society since this too has consequences. The avoidance of blame implicitly suggests status degradation with the accompanying injury to self-esteem (Barnes 2000, p. 116). Though Barnes does not speak of children, their competence and responsibility can be seen to be legally aligned. It is interesting to note that when the consequences of a child’s actions are great, there can be a push within the community towards endowing children with the status of competent ‘agent’ in order to hold them legally accountable. Barnes’ theory would account for these periodic calls from communities for children to be tried as adults in terms of the collective’s response to high risk to the social group. A high risk to the collective results in a stronger need to patrol the assignment of accountability.

Defining Voluntaristic Discourses Within this book, I distinguish causal agency from voluntarism or ‘social agency’. Following Barnes, I understand agency in relation to notions of choice, responsibility or blame in terms of social accountability, not the ability to make a difference to the world. We assign social agency only to people. The butterfly as it beats its wings notoriously makes a difference to the world and it could, of its own accord, have acted in a different way—and yet we do not hold the butterfly accountable for its ‘choice’. At the same time, I recognise the importance of work done by those who define ‘agent’ as ‘the source of an action, regardless of its status as a human or non-human’ (Doolin and Lowe 2002, p. 72). Though it is of vital importance to distinguish between the two uses of ‘agency’ in sociological discussion, it is not always possible to distinguish between the assignment of causal and social agency in everyday discourses. To say that a person is ‘to blame’ is clearly to ascribe accountability and so social agency. However, a sentence such as ‘She dropped a vase’ can, depending on the context, be used to describe causal agency; to assign social agency; or to do both simultaneously. Following Barry Barnes (2000), I conceive of voluntaristic discourses as the means by which collectives variously apportion responsibilities, rights and freedoms to members and in doing so create statuses as the foci of these expectations. I define voluntaristic discourse widely

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to be linguistic and non-linguistic collective practices that function to convey and attribute expectations and accountability through attributions of blame, responsibility and choice. Since voluntaristic discourse is a functional category, I do not presume that only those statements that follow a certain grammatical or lexical structure are examples of voluntaristic discourse. Voluntaristic discourses convey expectations and assign blame based on status, including the status of (accountable) ‘individual’. They might, in the appropriate situation, include such phrases as ‘You chose the restaurant’ or ‘Go help your mother with the dishes’ as well as less everyday phrases: ‘He murdered him’ and ‘He is a poor father’ (that is, he has failed to meet an expectation associated currently and locally with ‘father’). I do not understand these discourses to be limited to verbal expressions. Actions also communicate expectations and accountability—such as when one adult passes a baby to another. As I will demonstrate in my analysis, understanding the status of father as the focus of a ring of expectations allows for an investigation of the allocation of expectations between the father and interdependent statuses (such as mother and child) as well as the conflicts that arise between intersecting rings of expectation borne by one individual (father and worker or father and ‘individual’). Though statuses are the foci of rings of expectations, I do not wish to imply that a status, for example, ‘father’ is singular and fixed. I understand statuses to come in all sizes (just as groups come in all sizes) creating overlapping and interlocking rings of expectations. I do not consider ‘statuses’ as I use the term here to be essentially hierarchical; nor do I conceptualise status in terms of power. I understand statuses to be relational where the relationship is one of the distribution of responsibilities and privileges among the members of a social group. For this reason, I understand ‘class’ also in terms of status.

The Agentic ‘Individual’ and Other Statuses I deploy Barnes’ model of agency, which understands ‘agency’ as a status of the individual, for the possibility it offers of moving beyond the conceptualisation of agency in terms of individual power or resistant choice and towards a consideration of the inequalities created when status-based expectations intersect. As I argue elsewhere (McNulty Norton 2021), Barnes’ model of agency allows for an understanding of the late-modern process of individualisation (as described by Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) as a shift in the local construction of the status ‘individual’. In late-modernity, the ‘rings of actions and

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expectations’ that surround the status of ‘individual’ and ‘define powers and prohibitions, rights and responsibilities, entitlements and obligations’ (Barnes 2000, p. 148) now includes the obligation to construct successes, failures and problems within voluntaristic discourses in which individuals create themselves as accountable in discourses of choice. This shift in the expectations surrounding the status of ‘individual’ creates new tensions at the intersection of the status of ‘individual’ and other statuses while requiring individuals to reconcile these conflicts at an individual level (McNulty Norton 2021). Barnes’ model allows for an exploration of the impact of individualisation as it variously and differentially affects intersecting statuses (which is to say, all other statuses). Within an individualised society where ‘the right to choose’ is a socially constructed absence of constraint that confers responsibility, there is also a socially constructed requirement to individually balance intersecting statuses without benefit of collective recognition of status peculiarities or of the imposition of unequal burdens this creates. The result, as others have highlighted (Gill 2007; Harris and Dobson 2015; Schwiter 2013), is a silencing of critical voice as individuals take responsibility for biographies in choice dialogues. When an expectation of social members is that they take responsibility for their own biography, the individual who raises their voice against institutional inequalities risks a degradation to their status of competent ‘individual’. Barnes does not explore the interrelationship of the status of responsibilised ‘individual’ and intersecting statuses. He also leaves unexplored questions regarding how changes in the expectations associated with one status affect expectations of interdependent statuses. I argue that Barnes’ understanding of status when extended to other statuses provides a means by which to investigate how a change to the expectations associated with one status also requires a shift in expectations of interdependent statuses. The value of Barnes concept of status is that it shifts the focus from the individual and opens the way for a perspective that can consider differential tensions and conflicts that arise between statuses. This allows for the investigation of how shifts in the status of the father, for example, affect the construction of the mother—as revealed in voluntaristic discourses. At the same time, it also allows for the investigation of how shifts in the status of ‘individual’ create new tensions and conflicts with regard to the status of ‘father’.

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It should be noted, however, that Barnes views the changes in latemodernity somewhat differently from Ulrich Beck, particularly with regard to risk. For Barnes, the assignment of ‘agency’ operates within the tension between the collective’s interest in assigning responsibility to an individual and the individual’s interest in avoiding risk. It is in the interplay of these two interests that ‘individual agency’ may be seen as [re]constructed. Barnes sees the greater devolvement of ‘responsibility’ to the individual as underpinned by the professionalisation of what were once family or community responsibilities. In late-modern society, many tasks traditionally associated with the family and assigned as responsibilities to a particular family member have been taken over by technical experts such as nurses and teachers. He argues that this should not be seen as the simple shift of responsibility from one individual to another (paid) individual. Within the context of the workplace, Barnes (2000, p. 94) says, individuals (as employed experts) are becoming ‘millions of micro “limited-liability companies”’ in which the greater part of the responsibility is borne, not at the individual level, but by the company or by the insurance company that underwrites the company. As a result, though individual responsibility might still be, in principle, assigned to a particular person, this ‘can be of but slight significance to the actual individual involved’ (p. 94) as the ‘response’ part of responsibility occurs at the institutional level. It is within the context of this ‘systematic extension of the insurance principle’ (Barnes 2000, p. 94) that individuals can be constructed as having greater choice, since the individual ‘cost’ of the choice is reduced. Barnes says that ‘It is just when alternatives differ little and the risk inherent in the choice is consequently slight that individuals will be inclined to say that they “have a choice”, and to regard what they do as more than an obligatory response to circumstances’ (p. 96). From the perspective of the collective, as individual responsibilities become institutionally borne, there is less need for the enforcement of accountability at the individual level. He argues that this reduces the need for collective enforcement on individuals, resulting in a greater ‘choice’ for individuals since the risks to society of their choices have diminished. This serves to recast social problems as individual problems while reducing the accountability at an individual level to effect institutional change. This explanation of the alignment of greater ‘choice’ with reduced risk/responsibility has particular resonance with regard to my finding that in Hollywood’s construction of the family, it is fatherhood rather

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than motherhood or parenthood that is constructed as pure relationship—as a choice that is more valued than obligation while being free from the responsibilities that come with an other’s dependence. I find that the construction of the father as pure relationship, while supporting the status of the father as autonomous, relies in part on the assignment of the responsibilities (and consequent risks) of parenthood to the status of mother, who is constructed within the films as ‘sufficient’ parent (see Chapter 7).

Critical Discourse Analysis---Focusing on the Social Key author in the field, Ruth Wodak (2001, p. 2), offers this definition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): ‘to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signalled, constituted, legitimized and so on in language use (or in discourse)’. This definition neatly sums up this school of analysis while being sufficiently broad to allow for the wide range of approaches and theoretical orientations that fall within it. Practitioners may differ in their approach and in how they understand ‘discourse’, but they share an interest in critical investigation understood as an interest in social inequalities and with revealing these through an analysis of ‘discourse’. The goal of CDA is frequently described in terms of uncovering or revealing that which lies hidden. The description of what lies hidden varies—though it is often cast in terms of power or ideology. Thus Michael Meyer (2001, p. 15) says of CDA that it ‘endeavors to make explicit power relationships which are frequently hidden’ while Tenorio (2011, p. 188) describes CDA’s aim as ‘demystifying texts shaped ideologically by relations of power’. Wodak (2001, p. 13) frames it as an empowering of agents by making them ‘aware of hidden coercion’. Focusing more on the textual elements, it is also described by Wodak (p. 6) as showing ‘the discursive nature of much contemporary social and cultural change’. In CDA, the conceptualisation of ‘what’ is revealed is less important than the approach itself. Critical Discourse Analysis, while concerned with what has been variously framed as power, ideology or inequality (variously defined) takes a grounded, or bottom-up approach by beginning with the texts. Rather than focusing on a detailed semiotic analysis of text as does narrative-based discourse analysis or taking a top-down approach by

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looking for evidence within texts of specific ideologies or issues, Critical Discourse Analysis begins with ‘an ear to the texts themselves, and in a spirit of openness to the patterns that may emerge’ (Macdonald 2003, p. 2). In analysing the discourses in these films, I do not consider my project in terms of revealing rules that frame how individuals understand ‘fatherhood’. A social practice cannot arise from individuals separately and privately grasping and following rules (Wittgenstein 1968; Barnes 2000). In my analysis of the voluntaristic discourses within the films, I conceive of this project as revealing expectations that differentially surround and create statuses and are the means by which individuals influence others and coordinate their behaviour with that of others. I do not understand an individual to orient themselves to the ‘rules’ but to participate in a practice which is an ongoing orientation to each other. The focus of my analysis is the discourses within the film set that assign and express expectations and so create the status of ‘father’ and other prominent interacting ‘statuses’ conveyed in the films (worker, individual, man, mother, child). Macdonald (2003) argues that, in the practice of CDA, an ideological perspective (understood here as the researcher’s orientation towards a political framework) should be recognised. Without this, Macdonald (2003) says, we can give no reason to prefer one discursive practice over another and without such a preference, the analysis loses its raison d’être. At some point, an ‘ideological’ or personal-political perspective must be acknowledged—if only, one could argue, to prevent the charge of disingenuity. This amounts to a demand that the researcher acknowledges the perspective they bring to the project. In employing CDA, I acknowledge my own perspective as framed by the goal of revealing social inequalities and the means by which they are created and sustained. I consider this the central concern of sociology. I understand inequalities to be the effect of discursively constructed differentiations that unequally assign expectations (privileges and responsibilities) to status groups. I also consider inequalities to arise from the unequal burdens imposed by the conflict of expectations associated with intersecting social statuses. I suggest that the tensions and conflicts of incompatible expectations provide the impetus for status shifts to occur. These shifts involve the redistribution of responsibilities and expectations to interdependent statuses—creating, in turn, new tensions and burdens. Individuals evaluate each other through status but also through the competent performance of status and balancing status with the competent performance of

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status is part of the ‘drama of everyday life’ (Barnes 2000, p. 116). I argue that this creates unequal burdens for individuals in balancing conflicting statuses and the aim of my analysis is to reveal these differential burdens. Failure to successfully balance conflicting status expectations may result in status degradation, and this has particular significance when one of the statuses that is in conflict is that of an ‘individual’ as member of the social group.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Films In analysing films, attention must be paid not only to dialogue, but to other elements of the texts. The early development of CDA by linguists has meant a tendency to focus on verbal and written texts, though there is no reason to privilege the spoken or written word over other methods of signification. This is particularly true today when technological developments are resulting in a revival of more pictorial forms of communication. Van Leeuwen (2008) has developed a taxonomy of discursive transformations that can be applied across semiotic objects, though he focuses on the micro-analysis of texts rather than, as I do, a broader analysis across texts and over time. Nonetheless, I incorporate aspects of his semiotic principles. The most significant of these for my study are the exclusion strategies of backgrounding and suppression which serve to omit or hide actors (and their actions), and inversion (in which social actors violate norms by engaging in actions normatively associated with a different social status—generally in order to affirm the norm) (van Leeuwen 2008). Gergen’s (2001) work on the structure of Western narratives was also useful in identifying the value-laden endpoint of the films. Gergen (2001) identifies the central elements in coherent Western narratives to be determined by the narrative goal, so that, working backwards, it was possible to gain a greater insight into the endpoint value of the film by paying attention to the events chosen for inclusion within the narrative. For instance, where a film ends with the father’s affirmation of the choice of the child but then goes on to contain an epilogue that hints at a possible reconciliation of the parents (for example in Liar Liar 1997) a decision was required as to which ‘endpoint’ provides resolution, the choice of the child or the implied reconciliation. If the events that make up the narrative are scenes of the father and child bonding and not of the father and mother becoming reconciled, the father–child reconciliation was judged the endpoint. The endpoint-value often produced further questions. For

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example, the requirement for the father to self-actualise raises the question of the social underpinnings of this demand while the requirement for the autonomy of the ‘successful’ father raises questions regarding the relationship between autonomy, masculinity and fatherhood. I understand actions that the films associate with good fathers (or mothers) to discursively convey expectations of the ‘father’/‘mother’. ‘Fathering’ and ‘mothering’ actions were largely constructed visually by the films and without linguistic commentary. I was also attentive to actions which were not shown (where it could be expected they be shown) and actions that were not shown but must be presumed to have occurred—such as when the characters are shown sitting down to a homecooked meal. In respect to this, I acknowledge both Hollindale’s (1988) recommendation to pay attention to what is invisible in the narrative and van Leeuwen’s (2008) work on the importance of exclusions. In keeping with the aims to explore the father relationally, I also noted the mother’s nurturing actions (noting invisible assumed as well as visible) and also the actions of the child as these related to nurture (where the child performed nurturing or protective actions towards the father). Consequences in the form of blame or sanctions associated within the films with the non-performance of actions also discursively convey expectations of a status. In addition to dialogue and actions, I pay attention to the larger discursive patterns across films at the level of plot. The films I investigate show commonality with regard to elements of plot as well as in themes and images, and this is typical of film ‘cycles’. I understand this corpus of films to capture a film cycle and this has repercussions for their analysis in a number of ways. Cycle studies is an emergent field. It distinguishes itself from genre studies in that it examines the historical, cultural and discursive context in which a production trend emerges. Key researcher in this area Amanda Ann Klein (2011) argues that film cycles differ from genres in that, rather than persisting over time, they are situated in a historical moment. They ‘take place as part of specific historically located social and cultural discourses’ (Hamad 2013, p. 100) and last only as long as the public discourses that inspire them (Klein 2011). Film cycles are fuelled by a concern for profit. They emerge, Klein (2011) claims, in two ways. The first is in response to the financial success of an ‘originary’ film, which serves to establish the cycle’s themes, plot formulas and images that are then more or less slavishly replicated in an attempt to cash in on the original film’s success (Klein 2011, p. 4). They can, however, also arise when two or more film-makers independently

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release films on a topic in the public zeitgeist (Klein 2011). The success of these films results from tapping into the cultural concerns of that particular moment. These film cycles, Klein finds, are short-lived, lasting no more than five to ten years after which they cease to be financially viable; however, this life span can be extended if the cycle is sufficiently updated or altered. Hamad (2013) has commented on the surprisingly enduring nature of Hollywood’s concern with the father, which seems to reflect an ongoing and unresolved concern with the nature of fatherhood. It should be noted that there have been variations within the cycle—sufficient, I believe, to conform with Klein’s claim that the cycle must be renewed if it is to continue to be financially profitable. Understanding the father family films as a film cycle accounts for the high degree of commonality between the texts at the level of narrative structure and themes and to some extent images. This commonality I would explain as re-contextualisation of the originary texts rather than intertextuality as the term better captures the recasting of one text to another, rather than the perhaps weaker interrelationship understood by the term intertextuality. Understanding the films as interrelated—as a film ‘cycle’—allows not only for a reading of semiotic patterns within the text and across texts, but for a recognition of discursive patterns and changes that occur over time. This commonality then can throw into sharp relief the changes within this cycle over time, as in order to continue to be financially rewarding these films must ‘refresh themselves’ by offering new possibilities of solution or by being responsive to new developments in the public discourse (Klein 2011). Consequently, I give attention to patterns and changes over time (such as the falling away of father tasks in the late ‘90s and the importance of learning to listen from the 2000s), not only at the micro level of image and words, but also across the films at the macro level of trope and narrative. When a plot line is repeated across a number of thematically related films, it ceases to be particular and takes on the quality of a trope. An example of this would be the early Hollywood trope in which sexually active women were invariably killed off by the end of the film. As my analysis will demonstrate, plot lines and tropes, along with other discursive practices, play a discursive role in conveying status-associated expectations.

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References Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. Beck, U 1992, Risk society, Sage, London. Beck, U & Beck-Gernsheim, E 2002, Individualization, Sage, London. Doolin B & Lowe A 2002, ‘To reveal is to critique: actor-network theory and critical information systems research’, Journal of Information Technology, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 69–78, . Gergen, K 2001, ‘Self-narration in social life’, in M Wetherell, S Taylor, & SJ Yates (eds), Discourse theory and practice, Sage, London. Gill R 2007, Gender and the media, Polity, Cambridge. Hamad, H 2013, ‘Hollywood fatherhood’, in J Gwynne & N Muller (eds), Postfeminism and contemporary Hollywood cinema, Springer, London, pp. 99– 115, . Harris A & Dobson AS 2015, ‘Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times’, Continuum, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 145–156, . Hollindale, P 1988, Ideology and the children’s book, Thimble Press in association with Westminster College, Oxford, UK. Klein, AA 2011, American film cycles, University of Texas Press, Austin. Kusch M 2008, ‘Barnes on the freedom of the will’, in M Mazzotti (ed.), Knowledge as social order: rethinking the sociology of Barry Barnes, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 131–146. Macdonald, M 2003, Exploring media discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. McNulty Norton, D 2021 ‘The responsibilised “agent” and other statuses’, Sociology, . Meyer, M 2001, ‘Between theory, method, and politics’, in R Wodak & M Meyer (eds), Methods of critical discourse analysis, Sage, London, pp. 14–31, ProQuest Ebook Central Subscription Collection. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, . Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2016, Making families: moral tales of parenting and step-parenting, Routledge, Oxon, UK. Schwiter, K 2013, ‘Neoliberal subjectivity’, Geographica Helvetica, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 153–159, . Tenorio, EH 2011, ‘Critical discourse analysis’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 183–210, .

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van Leeuwen, T 2008, Discourse and practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK. Wittgenstein, L 1968, Philosophical investigations, 3rd edn, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK. Wodak, R 2001, ‘What CDA is about—a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments’, in R Wodak & M Meyer (eds), Methods of critical discourse analysis, Sage, London, pp. 1–14, ProQuest Ebook Central Subscription Collection.

PART II

Changing Expectations of the Father

The methodological framework established in Part I allows for an exploration of the cultural construction of fatherhood through the voluntaristic discourses that attribute expectations to the ‘father’. I now begin the investigation of voluntaristic discourses found within Hollywood family films released between 1990 and 2015 and featuring the father as protagonist. The analysis section that follows is divided into five chapters based on the type of voluntaristic discourse. These are Choice (and the Precarity and Risk that accompanies choice), the attribution of Responsibility, Locating Blame and having a Voice. These four areas interact but are considered separately here to allow for a more focused investigation of the expectations that are conveyed. While choice, responsibility, blame and voice are all voluntaristic notions, I understand risk in terms of the consequences that are associated within the films with the failure to meet status-based expectations. Revealing the consequences in terms of degradation of status and related sanctions assists in answering my second research question: what [status] conflicts are indicated by father failure within the films? While each chapter will discuss commonalities across films, in each chapter a few films are highlighted and explored in greater detail—either because they are representative of the larger group of films or because they diverge from the trend. Despite this disposition of the films within the chapters, there is also something of a chronological movement, with the earlier-released films that first establish the film cycle having more prominence within the choice chapter (Chapter 5), and later films being

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given more attention in the later voice chapter (Chapter 9). This ordering reflects a shift found within the films themselves, with the late 2000s showing a growing concern with the father’s ability to build intimacy through communication (as in the films Imagine That [2008] and Mr. Popper’s Penguins [2011]). Voice does not replace choice in redeeming the father in these films but becomes an additional theme.

CHAPTER 5

Choice

This chapter explores choice discourses as they are employed in the films to assign expectations to individuals within the family. It traces the shift from the ’80s nurturing father hero to the failing father of the early ’90s, where failure to be involved is constructed as failure to choose to perform ‘essentialised’ father tasks over work-related tasks. By the late ‘90s, essentialised tasks fall away and the choice is between work and ‘relationship’ with the child. The shift from good fathering as the performance of tasks (however defined) by a relationally fixed father to good fathering operationalised in the choice of the relationship itself is, I argue, a profound one, and it is here I find the move to a pure father model. Though this chapter investigates choice discourses while later chapters focus on discourses of responsibility and blame, this is not to imply that choice and responsibility operate independently. Voluntaristic discourses interact in the assignment of responsibility, as when the father in Mrs Doubtfire (1993) says to the mother, Miranda: ‘You chose a career’. The attribution of the choice of career to Miranda operates to assign ‘responsibility’ to Miranda (as an ‘individual’) for the consequences of her ‘choice’ of work, and in particular for the difficulties she faces in balancing a career with care work. This chapter is concerned not to distinguish actions freely ‘chosen’ from discourses of responsibility or obligation but to uncover the expectations associated with statuses, including those associated with

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_5

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the status of ‘individual’. Choice discourses convey accountability (generally to an individual) and establish the boundaries of choice with respect to statuses of all kinds—and this is often delineated also in what is not available to be chosen. Though choice can be expressed in dialogue as in the quote from Mrs Doubtfire above, it is also indicated in narrative and in action sequences, and attention is paid in this chapter to which actions are created as choices (and how that is constructed) and what actions are not presented as available to be chosen. Attention is also paid to instances where choice is denied as in the case of Miranda above and in the films Ghost Dad (1990) and RV (2006) discussed below. In exploring discourses of choice, this chapter identifies an emergent trend in family films: the essentialising of the biological father. This trend establishes the bond of the child with the biological father to be unique and irreplaceable (but not necessary to the child’s welfare). Given that the father is the protagonist in what can be characterised as bildungsroman narratives that trace his moral and emotional growth, a note of caution must be introduced here. The protagonist in such narratives very often is required to make a life-changing choice towards the story’s end. This choice frequently is in contrast to earlier choices and acts to affirm the moral growth of the character and indicate the future beyond the story’s end. Care must be taken then to distinguish father prerogative of choice from the narrative device of highlighting protagonist-choice in order to demonstrate the character arc. The fact of the father (as distinct from the mother or child) being shown to make a choice therefore should not be given undue significance. Instead, I investigate the nature of the choices available. Where a choice is rendered, attention is given to what the choice is shown as between or for and its availability to family members.

The Father’s Failure Rendered as ‘Choice’ of Work Disengaged father films frequently establish the father’s failure in terms of prioritising work over family in the opening sequences and this is constructed as an individual choice of work over family. The choice is constructed in sequences that show the father choosing work over family ‘involvement’ (Ghost Dad 1990; Hook 1991; The Santa Clause 1994; Fluke 1995; Jingle All the Way 1996; Liar Liar 1997; Jack Frost 1998; The Haunted Mansion 2003; Are We There Yet 2005; RV 2006; The

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Shaggy Dog 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). In Hook (1991), for example, the father’s choice of work is established in an opening sequence of short scenes that show work-related phone calls interrupting the father’s time with his family (his daughter’s school concert; bedtime with the children; an argument with his wife). The argument with his wife is about his lack of attention to the children, and when the phone rings, the father says he has to answer the phone as there is a problem at work that he has to ‘fix’. His wife responds by saying ‘You have to fix your family first’. He meets her eyes and answers the phone, establishing his ‘choice’. The Santa Clause (1994) opens with divorced father Scott at the office Christmas party accepting the accolades of his peers though he is due home to meet his son who is staying with him over Christmas. In the opening scenes of Jingle All the Way (1996), the father works late taking sales calls though he is aware he has promised to be at his son’s karate exam. In Jack Frost (1998), the father misses his son’s hockey game and then leaves his family over Christmas to pursue dreams of career success. While Hollywood films of the eighties frequently condemned the mother who ‘chose’ to work for neglecting the naturalised duties of a mother (Chapter 2), the father’s position in these ’90s films is more equivocal. Since traditional family models construct the father as family breadwinner, the father’s desire to succeed is not always displayed purely as an individualised desire for self-actualisation. Instead, in these films, the responsibility for the lack of father involvement in family is at times shared with the (corporate) workplace, which is drawn as inimical to family life. While some father films show the father as complicit, Ghost Dad (1990), the earliest of the disengaged father films identified, constructs the father as a victim of a system that forced him to cash in his life insurance policy and mortgage his home in order to pay for his (now deceased) wife’s medical care. Released in 1990, Ghost Dad is a family comedy with the protagonist a widowed father of three. Openly political, the film ascribes negative qualities to the ‘Republican’ child who lives nearby and who attempts to blackmail the father. The workplace is constructed as bullying and demanding and finally shown to offer the father no return for his years of hard work and loyalty. Ghost Dad earned neither critical nor popular acclaim and only a fairly modest 25 million dollars at the box office (Box Office Mojo). The lack of significant box-office success would suggest (following Klein 2011) that this film’s theme was indicative of prevailing social discourses or anxieties

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rather than this being an ‘originary’ film (such as occurs when a significant box-office success triggers a film cycle). In the construction of father failure as a failure of involvement in family due to work, and in the resolution to the central conflict, Ghost Dad is typical of the disengaged father films that follow and can serve here to demonstrate these features. In the opening sequences of Ghost Dad, the father, Elliot Hopper, is killed in a car crash. The remainder of the film follows his attempts as a ghost to fake life so that he can complete the business contract he has been working on for his company and so secure a promised promotion that comes with an insurance policy. With only 72 hours before his ghost will fade, Elliot must choose between spending his time at work ensuring the promotion that will provide for his children’s financial future, or repairing the relationship with his children which has suffered because of his long working hours. Though he tells his children in the opening scenes (when he is ‘alive’) that he will be more available once he earns his promotion, the children hold him accountable for the lack of attention. The conflict established here between the demands of the workplace and the requirements to be a child-centred father establishes the central problematic for the disengaged father films that follow. The film constructs two conflict lines—one with the son (Danny, 11) who is hurt by his father’s lack of attention; the other with the eldest daughter (Diane, 16) who is resentful both of the burden of household work and care-giving that falls to her in the absence of the mother (and father), and of his overprotectiveness with regard to a potential boyfriend. In this film, it is the relationship with the son that establishes the father as a disengaged father while the conflict with the daughter typically follows the trope of the overprotective father who struggles over his daughter’s interest in other males (see Chapter 2). Ghost Dad differs from other overprotective father films in showing a separate source of conflict with the teenage daughter: that of the daughter’s resentment of the expectation that she will shoulder the unpaid domestic and care labour in the absence of her mother. The youngest child in the film (a daughter aged 5) is something of a cypher in the film, her main purpose to amplify the degree of responsibility and risk, both in the present and in the future should the father die with no insurance policy. Despite his fears for his children’s future, the father in Ghost Dad is portrayed as having choices, and his virtue as a father is established as dependent on making the ‘right’ choice. A choice is established for the ghost father between going to his son’s show-and-tell (which saves his

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son from the humiliation of failing at his magic trick before the class) and attending the scheduled work meeting which will secure the promotion and his children’s financial security after he is gone. Attending the showand-tell is constructed as the right choice and resolves the conflict with the son. This is explained when Elliot says to the son: ‘You are more important’ (than the business meeting). Typically of disengaged father films, the choice of the activity with the son over workplace demands is not clearly grounded in any measurable benefit to the child other than the affirmation of being ‘chosen’. An insurance policy that would ensure that the children are provided for in the absence of the father (here immanent) offers significant benefit, and the film does nothing to argue for any comparable benefit that comes from the father’s choice of spending time with the son. In the end, the son, Danny, affirms the father’s choice, saying he is not sorry that his father lost his job and that ‘When you were alive, you wouldn’t have left the meeting to come help me’. The use of the child’s voice to affirm the father’s choice is further explored in Chapter 9. As the father ghost begins to fade, he expresses grief that he is leaving his job of father unfinished but is not shown to regret the choice he has made. The story arc of the disengaged father is brought to a close by this resolution. The Ghost Dad storyline, since it positions the family as critically dependent on the father’s work, offers the possibility of a resolution in which the ‘choice’ of work could be framed as an act of love or justified as a lack of choice based on the children’s very real need. This is particularly so in this film where the father is ‘dead’ and there can be no implication that the father is driven by ambition or personal goals of any kind. Despite this, the film constructs the ‘right’ choice (the choice that allows the father to become a good father) as the family or child-centred choice even though this leaves the children orphaned and destitute. Providing for the family’s financial needs even when done reluctantly for the purposes of family welfare and under the unpleasant, coercive and bullying workplace conditions shown in this film is not offered as a family-centred option or an expectation of ‘good fathering’. In subsequent disengaged father films, as in Ghost Dad, the centrality of the breadwinning role is challenged by the requirement for the father to choose between being a good provider and a good father. Nonetheless, rather than constructing breadwinning as a role of the father, the films construct work as an individual ‘choice’ with father redemption tied to choosing the family over work. Though fathers are frequently shown to

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be the sole financial support within the family, the majority of films do not overtly link the father’s work to the family’s financial welfare. In only two films (Ghost Dad 1990; RV 2006) do the fathers explicitly draw attention to the importance of their work to the financial well-being of the family. In both these films, the family is shown not to accept the father’s claim of ‘having to’ attend to work in order to support the family, and the father is held accountable for his neglect of the family. In both films, the father is redeemed when he chooses the family and loses his job.

Nurture and Choice in Father Films I turn now from breadwinning to examine the expectations conveyed in choice discourses concerning participation in nurture, understood here as participation in activities related to the well-being of the child as detailed in Chapter 3. In disengaged father films, I find that care work is not performed by the father and that this is not created as a choice the father makes (and for which he is then accountable). Care work can also be created as an expectation in discourses of responsibility that surround a status and I will examine how these are created for the mother in Chapter 7. A model of the ‘involved’ father that gained increasing favour during the nineties was of the gender-neutral parent sharing equally in care tasks. As noted in Chapter 2, Pleck and Lamb were advocates in the ’90s for this model and their descriptors of parental involvement became widely used to measure father (and mother) involvement in terms of time spent with or on children (Pleck 2007). Lamb along with Fagan, Day and Cabrera (Fagan et al. 2014) recently claimed that—in both the nature of tasks undertaken and of time spent—there has been convergence between fathers and mothers in parenting activities in America and Europe, a claim that has been challenged by others. In Hollywood, however, the brief flirtation with nurturing fathers during the ’80s in films such as Three Men and a Baby (1987) was short-lived, and, in family films made since 1990, there is no such convergence of parenting tasks displayed. Though the fathers might choose to become more ‘involved’, this involvement is not displayed as involvement in care tasks. Almost without exception within the father films investigated, domestic and child-related tasks are naturalised to the mother or the need for them is hidden. If the mother is deceased, nurture is carried out by another woman. In Mrs Doubtfire (1993), the father is shown to carry out nurture

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and domestic labour but only when in a female bodysuit. Where children are shown in the sole company of their father because of the temporary absence of the mother, the need of the child for care and protection is hidden and the father is shown as inept in the performance of basic tasks such as providing breakfast, with no improvement over the course of the film and no suggestion that he will take on more of these tasks in the future. In Ghost Dad (1990), the central conflict with the teenage daughter results from the daughter’s resentment of her role as child nurturer and domestic drudge. Despite attending high school, the daughter in Ghost Dad is shown to undertake all domestic tasks in the home including those related to her younger siblings’ care. In scenes shot within the home, she is shown as always busy: tidying, cooking and washing. Though the daughter’s tasks within the family are not acknowledged by the family, they are made visible to the viewer. The only domestic task undertaken by the father is the traditional male one of taking out the rubbish. Her siblings are not shown to help (except when helping the father to take out the rubbish). One may presume the other children are excused by their age (the younger girl is 5), and possibly also by gender (the boy is 11)—though they do not perform even those tasks they are old enough to undertake such as pouring their own cereal at breakfast time. Despite the storyline of the daughter’s despair at her ‘crappy life’, there is no point where the film implies that the father or others should help her. The assignment of domestic duties to the daughter is unchallenged even when, later in the film, the daughter’s despair is such that she wishes to end her life. In other films where the mother is deceased (Getting Even with Dad 1994; The Game Plan 2007; Real Steel 2011), an aunt takes over the full-time care of the child after the mother dies. The conflict in Ghost Dad over the performance of childcare tasks is not, in the end, resolved by easing the daughter’s burdens. Instead the father demonstrates his ‘love’ through a choice. When the daughter falls down the stairs towards the film’s close, she is rushed to hospital where it is discovered that the father’s body is still alive but in a coma. The daughter is also unconscious and the disembodied spirits of daughter and father meet in the hospital where the father urges the daughter to return to her body quickly. She refuses to return to her ‘crappy life’. Rather than attempting to alleviate the conditions of her life, the father spirit refuses to enter his body until she enters hers. This is taken by the daughter as a demonstration of ‘real love’, not just ‘father stuff’. This proof of

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love in the choice of the daughter over himself is taken to resolve the daughter’s storyline. It is notable, however, that she immediately resumes her caring role, helping her father’s fading ghost to find and re-enter his body before she re-enters her own. The film ends with the daughter’s situation unchanged and with the father alive but still uninsured and now also unemployed. Ghost Dad serves also to demonstrate the hollowness of the claim that a shift from the primacy of role to relationship will usher in a ‘more democratic phase to family life’ (Chambers 2012, p. 34). As principal breadwinners in many of the films, fathers may be understood to claim privilege regarding the non-performance of nurturing and childcare tasks based on reduced time availability. Within a traditional structure, Elliot may have been privileged to claim the labour of the daughter by virtue of his financial support, but the end of the film does not offer any promise that the daughter will have either choice or voice regarding the distribution of tasks within a family bound by ‘love’. Instead the film provides resolution to the daughter’s storyline in a similar manner as for the son’s: the father ‘chooses’ his daughter. While the film challenges the traditional practices of fathering in its overt rejection of breadwinning as the primary role of the father, the concomitant presumption of the ‘other’ who is family caretaker is retained. Similarly, while mothers are created as accountable when their ‘choice’ of work interferes with their performance of nurture (see Chapter 7), they are not created as accountable for loss of income for ‘choosing’ nurture over work. The naturalisation of the father as principal breadwinner and the mother as nurturer sits uncomfortably alongside a choice-based rhetoric regarding work and family involvement since the choice to not work or not nurture assumes an ‘other’ who will perform those tasks if one chooses not to take them on. Unlike films of the late eighties that showed the ‘feminized “new”’ (Bruzzi 2005, p. 147) father, with very few exceptions, family films since the ’90s show fathers performing only higher-order child-related tasks— those that could be considered to involve ‘quality time’ with the children, such as reading a bedtime story. These higher-order tasks are those that are associated with building relationship, highlighting the growing importance of relationship over the traditional parenting roles of breadwinning and nurture. However, the mechanism by which specific tasks become associated with the father is not shown in the films. In many films, the tasks relate to sport—for example, attending a child’s weekend game

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(Hook 1991; Jingle All the Way 1996; Jack Frost 1998). In one film (Liar Liar 1997), the task is a unique game that the father plays with the young child. What these father tasks have in common is that they occur outside standard work hours (on weekends or in the evening) and that they cannot be performed by another. While understood by the family as belonging to the father, the tasks are not shown as ‘chosen’ by the father as an exercise of ‘debilitative power’ as described by Neale and Smart (2002) and Gatrell (2007): a claiming of children’s unencumbered quality time at the expense of the mother. Instead, it is the father’s failure to perform these tasks that generally constitutes father failure in the films’ opening scenes. Mothers are shown prompting and persuading fathers to carry out these ‘fathering’ tasks. In Ghost Dad, the father tasks are reading the bedtime story to the youngest child at night and helping the son with his preparation for his class show-and-tell. Outside these severely limited nurturing/parenting tasks, his role is earning the family income. When the film opens, he is failing both. He is failing to fulfil the child-related tasks because he works long hours; he fails as provider when he dies in the opening sequences of the film three days before securing the promotion with its promise of life insurance.

Essentialising the Father While there is no suggestion (even in extremis) that the father in Ghost Dad could take on some of the domestic tasks that have been designated as belonging to the ‘mother’/daughter, there is also no suggestion that the special ‘father’ tasks of reading the bedtime story could be done by the daughter. While the father is busy at work, the daughter Diane (who is in high school during the day) is shown cleaning and cooking and doing the laundry. But she does not read the bedtime story to the 5-year-old or help her brother with his school project, even as the films show the children as saddened or angry that their father is not performing the tasks and also show Diane as aware of this. Instead these tasks are left undone, and, for the younger children, the failure of the father is a failure to accomplish these (fathering) tasks. Though Diane worries about the potential danger to her brother that arises from one instance of the father’s neglect of ‘his’ parenting role (of helping to prepare a magic trick for the class show-and-tell), she phones the father to urge him to attend to the task

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rather than do it herself. These tasks require the father: they cannot be performed or usurped by another. The daughter’s inability to perform the tasks privileged to the father adds another layer of stress to her life and saddles her with the additional ‘mothering’ responsibility (shown in many of the films) of being the prompter who keeps track of the family tasks, including the father’s privileged tasks, reminding the father of these and persuading him to fulfil them. There is the appearance of symmetry here between the daughter’s inability to take on the ‘father tasks’ and the father’s inability to take on domestic work. This symmetry might be read as the naturalisation of a division of labour. Suwada (2014) discusses the naturalising of gendered parental roles that results in the association of tasks with the male or female parent. Basing her analysis on Connell’s concept of gender naturalisation, Suwada analyses the process of negation of similarities and the transformation of the biological into socially gendered difference that are then ‘naturalised’ (understood as natural/biological) within the gendered bodies of the father/mother. Barnes’ (2000) understanding of agency as status is, I think, useful here. We can see the process of naturalisation as related to the persistent transformation of a status to a state. A status (understood in terms of expectations provisionally, temporally and differentially allocated) becomes understood as a state—an intrinsic property—when what ‘individuals are allowed and expected to do is made visible as precisely what they are equipped by nature to do’ (Barnes 2000, p. 149). Attributes that are rendered as belonging to a status can then become associated with other markers or attributes associated with the status (such as age or gender). However, the apparent symmetry between the daughter not undertaking father tasks (such as reading the bedtime story) and the father not undertaking domestic tasks goes beyond what we generally understand to be gender naturalisation since these tasks can only be accomplished by the father—others cannot fill in for him. I argue here that these father tasks are ‘essentialised’ rather than naturalised to the father. While many tasks are naturalised to a particular status on the basis of expectation, my claim is that there are some tasks that are essentialised to a particular status. An example that illustrates this is the status of marriage celebrants. Anyone can go through the actions or say the words of the marriage service—but the achievement of the task can only be afforded when performed by a person of appropriate status.

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Everyday tasks such as reading the bedtime story, once they have become designated by the family as father essential tasks, become delimited to the father in a similar way as performing a marriage ceremony is a status task delimited to marriage celebrants. Though another person can read a story to a child, this does not accomplish the task. I suggest that this is why the daughter in Ghost Dad does not undertake the task— because she cannot. The task is not the story but the father’s reading of it. This implies a difference in type with regard to these tasks, and I will use the term ‘essentialised tasks’ here to capture this difference. Though the father could (if he so chose) cook a meal or do the laundry with the result that the task would be achieved (however unskilfully), others are unable to accomplish the tasks that are designated as father essential tasks. They are not tasks to be accomplished in relation to the care of the child, but the performance of relationship. Nor can these ‘father’ tasks be performed by the mother as is demonstrated in Hook (1991) released the same year. A sequel to Peter Pan where Peter has grown up and ‘become a pirate’, Hook begins with the father (the adult Peter Pan) neglecting his fathering tasks (defined here as attending his son’s baseball game) for his business interests. The mother, who does attend the game, is not a substitute for the missing father. This inability of the mother to fill in for the father is also shown in Jingle All the Way (1996), Liar Liar (1997), and Jack Frost (1998). Liar Liar and Imagine That (2009) also show a potential new stepfather as unable to accomplish the biological father tasks. Though the actions may be attempted (the mother or stepfather can attend the game), the children in these films are not shown to accept the substitution. It can be seen that the father’s ability to perform fathering tasks (and Diane’s inability) proceed not from any physical ability or skill or the lack thereof (nature) but from her lack of the appropriate father status. The discourse that constructs certain tasks as father essential tasks at the same time limits the accomplishment of these tasks to those with the status of the biological father. While another can perform the same actions, they cannot accomplish the task: their performance does not ‘count’. I found no similar instances of tasks essentialised to the mother. In her absence, either temporary or permanent, others can perform ‘mother’ tasks. The two meanings of essential that we saw combined in Blankenhorn’s (1995) model of fatherhood in Chapter 3—that of ‘necessary’ and ‘unique/irreplaceable’—are here divided between the mother and the father. The mother, as primary carer, is ‘necessary’ to the welfare of the

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children but is not ‘irreplaceable’. The mother can be replaced by another who can fill her role (though this does not relieve her of responsibility for the outcome as shown in Chapter 8). It is by means of essentialised father tasks that the father in ’90s films is constructed as irreplaceable. This essentialising of certain tasks to the father precludes the possibility of the negotiation of father tasks between the parents since the mother is unable to perform them. At the same time, the essentialised tasks obviate the need for the father to secure his place within the family through the performance of care tasks. Tasks that are essentialised to the father serve also to essentialise the biological father. The father’s irreplaceability is secured by the essentialised tasks, but, to be a good father, he still needs to perform them. Watching from a distance as a child plays baseball is not clearly connected to the creation of intimacy, but it does operate to indicate a choice the father makes. The choice is reflective of the central ‘obligation’ of contemporary fatherhood identified by Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000) and discussed in Chapter 3 to ‘eschew individual pleasures’ in favour of spending time with the child. Putting children’s needs first, they find, is a moral imperative for both parents but is gendered in that, for the father, it is accomplished by the choice of the child ahead of other more self-centred activities (for the mother, they find, putting children first is tied to securing the child’s welfare). The sacrifice of time in the pursuit of individual interests is seen to constitute the fulfilment of the moral imperative to put children’s needs first.1 Though in these films the fathers are choosing between the child and work (generally constructed in the films as tied to the father’s selfinterest) rather than personal amusements, nonetheless, it is by this choice that the father establishes himself as being ‘good’. During the father involvement wars of the ’80s and ’90s father essentialism was a central concern and this was displayed in attempts to demonstrate that fathers offered something unique that others could not provide. I argued in Chapter 3, that this grew from a confusion between essential as necessary and essential as unique, with the lack of unique contribution taken to imply that fathers are unnecessary. In the new iteration of the essential father, the essentialising of certain tasks is used to essentialise the father as irreplaceable. The absence of the father is not linked in the films to poor developmental outcomes. Though fathering tasks may be essentialised to the father, the father in these films may or may not engage with these tasks. If the father does not perform the

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essentialised task, it may sadden the child—it may be experienced as a lack of relationship—but it is not shown in the films to materially or developmentally affect the child.

From Essentialised Tasks to Unique Relationship Over the course of the ’90s, the essentialised father tasks begin to fall away. Instead of the performance of specific father tasks signalling a reorientation of the father towards the child and the progression from failing to ‘involved’ fathering, the choice starts to become a direct one: the father chooses the relationship. This can be seen already in the 1994 release, Getting Even with Dad. In this film, the father is presented with a choice—not a choice to perform an essentialised task or a choice regarding how he will father but a choice of whether he will father. In this film, the father has a history of theft and commits a robbery early in the film. At the crisis point of the film, the child presents him with an option: if he chooses to keep the money he has stolen (and so fulfil his dream of opening his own bakery), the child will leave. The consequences of father failure are created as loss to the father—loss of the valued relationship of intimacy with the child. In Fluke (1995) and Jack Frost (1998), the father dies early in the films, and rather than choice requiring the father to turn away from greater wealth or success, the stories focus on the fathers’ regret for lost opportunity as they attempt to spend some time with their children before ‘moving on’. By the late ’90s and the 2000s, in films such as Jungle 2 Jungle (1997), Dr Dolittle (1998), The Game Plan (2007), Imagine That (2009), Old Dogs (2009), RV (2006), Real Steel (2011), and Mr Poppers Penguins (2011), the ‘essentialised tasks’ of the father have disappeared, and the choice is framed as a choice of the child or the relationship for its own sake and for the satisfaction it brings the father. This shift to the choice of relationship gives rise to the trope of the wise child who ‘teaches’ the father the benefits of the father–child relationship in order to aid the father in making the right choice—where the right choice is shown to bring happiness and self-actualisation to the father. This change could be seen then, at least to some degree, to burden the child with responsibility for the father’s redemption and selfactualisation. I will return to considerations of the attribution of blame and responsibility in Chapters 7 and 8.

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In a number of films, a declaration of love accompanies the choice of the child. In Imagine That (2009) in which the father walks out of a job interview to race to his daughter’s school concert, the students burst into the Beatles song, ‘All you need is love’ (1969) as the father walks in the door; in Old Dogs (2009), the father, after turning down the job contract that would require him to go to Japan, gives as his reason: ‘I love them’ (the children). In The Game Plan (2007), the expression of love stands in for the choice when the football-star father (who has frequently expressed his abiding love for football) tells the cameras: ‘There’s nothing I love more than my daughter’. In this case, this expression of the choice obviates the need for him to make one, and the child’s presence supports rather than challenges his career. The pure relationship that is operationalised in an unbounded choice (free from dependency) fits comfortably with a father ‘choice’ of the child as constitutive of good fathering. The choice itself creates the father as good and, since the biological father relationship is irreplaceable, the possibility of becoming a good father is always open. At the same time, the father’s ability to choose to opt in (or not) creates him as a fully autonomous ‘individual’ ‘unconstrained and freely choosing’ (Gill 2007, p. 75). However, the freely chosen relationship is precarious since the choice is ever open and the performance of good fatherhood requires the choice to be ever demonstrated. The resultant precarity of the father relationship will be taken up in the next chapter. This requirement of the father to demonstrate his autonomy in the choice of family or child also positions the father as outside the ‘family’ within a discourse of choice that positions the ‘family’ or child as an object available to be chosen. This also has consequences for the child that will be explored in Chapter 8.

Choice in Mrs Doubtfire Before leaving this chapter, I want to give attention to the choice discourses in ’90s film Mrs Doubtfire (1993) in which the father, though failing, is not ‘disengaged’. Of the 31 distinct films considered, five are not categorised here as ‘disengaged father’ films. These are: Mrs Doubtfire (1993), Daddy Day Care (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Night at the Museum (2006) and Despicable Me (2010). While the fathers in disengaged films are frequently required to choose to lose their jobs in order to demonstrate their choice of family, these five films in which fathers are ‘engaged’ construct the father as failing both as men and as fathers

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because they do not have a job or successful career. In the opening sequences of Night at the Museum (2006), for example, we are told the divorced father, a failing entrepreneur, keeps changing jobs and apartments every few months. The mother, concerned over the lack of stability, says ‘I don’t think Nicky [the child] should stay with you … just until you get really settled’. In Mrs Doubtfire (1993), the father, far from being disengaged, tells a custody hearing: ‘I have to be with my children’. Nonetheless, he is denied access except for visitation rights until he can demonstrate his ability to hold down a job. Mrs Doubtfire (1993) takes up the notions of choice and status expectations within a late-modern family and explores the tensions that the lack of institutionally defined roles creates for the family. The film has earned over 440 million dollars, with half of that coming from international sales (Box Office Mojo). It shows the process of family breakdown and divorce and is unique in this set in featuring the mother as a major character with significant screen time. It provides a more sophisticated engagement with choice and expectations within families and is more adult-oriented than most family films. For this reason, it somewhat challenges the definition of a ‘family’ film. Two scenes in which the parents argue in front of the children were cut pre-release as being too harrowing for child audiences. Even so, on its first release it failed to earn the desired PG rating in the United Kingdom: it was rated as suitable for children over 12, which meant families with children under 12 were turned away at the cinema (the law at the time not allowing children to attend even with a parent’s consent). Consequently, further changes were made to the film and a scene with sexual language was cut. IMDb categorises it as a family film (hence its inclusion in my film set) and also as a drama—an unusual combination. Mrs Doubtfire engages with the inter-relational nature of ‘status’ while challenging the model of the father as ‘playmate and provider’ (Walzer 1998). Like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), it follows a couple through the process of divorce and much of the drama of the story concerns the custody of the children. The father, Daniel Hillard is the irresponsible fun father. He is married to Miranda Hillard, a hard-working and successful partner in an interior design firm. In the set-up, Daniel quits yet another job and returns home early where he flouts Miranda’s decision that their twelve-year-old son will not have a birthday party this year (a punishment for his failing grades). When a neighbour calls Miranda’s office to report a wild party in progress, she returns from work to find her husband and children dancing on the furniture while other children swing from the

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chandeliers and a horse eats the birthday cake. The father tells the children ‘the party’s over’ (because the mother has come home) and, in the subsequent argument, she expresses her resentment at her lack of choice with regard to family roles and with being ‘made out to be the heavy’. Miranda: You have all the fun and I get whatever’s left over. Daniel: You chose a career. Miranda: I have no choices here, Daniel. I have no choices. Even when I try to do something fun, you have to do it 10 times bigger … why am I the only one who feels there has to be rules? Why do you always make me out to be the heavy? Daniel: I don’t make you out to be anything. You do it yourself.

The brief argument encapsulates the contradiction between the assignment of ‘agency’ as an individual (and equal) power within an individualised frame, and the relational nature of socially agentic discourses that are used to distribute expectations among the members of a group. Rather than being freed within a post-traditional family to negotiate her roles and relationships, Miranda Hillard, like the daughter in Ghost Dad, finds her choices constrained by the choices of the father as well as by social expectations of the ‘mother’. In the dialogue reproduced above, the film confronts the idea that choice within a family can be individual while at the same time showing how ‘choice’ is related to status expectations. The dialogue displays the operations that convey underlying social expectations that, in effect, assign choice (along with accountability) to some and not to others (who are thereby free of accountability). Daniel is able to disclaim the constraints his actions impose on Miranda by appealing to the notion of Miranda’s individual ‘agency’ framed as freedom of choice. In so doing, he allocates responsibility to Miranda for the result of her ‘choices’. While Daniel frames Miranda’s career as a personal choice, her choice to work does not require that Daniel make a choice to assume more of the household burden. There is no indication that Miranda would wish not to work, and she is successful in her career. Nonetheless, since Daniel has shown himself to be an unreliable breadwinner, his insistence that Miranda’s work is a choice has a hollow ring here, and serves to further highlight the unfair burden she is seen to shoulder as default principal carer and breadwinner.

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Though the film shows the privilege of the father within the family, it creates this as an individual problem rather than a societal one. It is connected in the films to Daniel’s individual flaws—his inability to be serious and his irresponsibility which forces Miranda to shoulder the burdens of breadwinning, childcare and domestic labour. Daniel’s commitment to his children makes him a likeable character despite his faults and the film is able to convey both parents sympathetically. In the end, Miranda is shown to have a choice only over the construction of the family. It is by rejecting the nuclear family model when she tells Daniel she wants a divorce that Miranda is in a position to redistribute ‘responsibility’ for family tasks—which she does by hiring a housekeeper/nanny (a post taken by Daniel in the guise of the eponymous ‘Mrs Doubtfire’). In the custody hearing, Daniel finds his access to the children restricted when the judge temporarily awards full custody to the mother until he can find a job, though the judge is shown affirming the desirability of joint custody. He gives Daniel 90 days in which to show himself a ‘responsible’ parent by finding and holding down a job and renting a home in which the children can stay with him. In the meantime, Daniel is to see his children only on Saturdays. Daniel’s failure to hold down a job is seen by the judge as a sign of individual irresponsibility rather than a decision within the family regarding who the main breadwinner may be. The gendered nature of the decision to punish Daniel for having no job or home is not questioned by the film. This reading is supported in the scene when the mother rolls her eyes as the judge says Daniel must hold a job for 90 days. While the film encourages sympathy for Daniel for being denied access to his children, the audience is not invited by the film to consider gender equity with regard to the decision. Instead, Daniel’s character arc requires that he learn responsibility and this drives the rest of the film. Daniel, in a female bodysuit, and in the lower-status role of employee who now must please Miranda to secure his position, treats his children very differently. Adopting the persona of an older and old-fashioned British woman, he sets boundaries more strictly than their mother had done. Mrs Doubtfire, like fathers in films of the late ’80s, shows ‘what fun mothering can be when it’s done by the right men’ (Traube 1992, p. 145). He requires the children to do homework, to stick to a schedule, to help with household chores and to eat only healthy food. He learns to cook and takes on the cleaning. Miranda returns from work to the kind of greeting that fathers enjoyed in the sitcoms of the ’50s: the house is clean, the happy and well-behaved children have finished their homework, and

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Mrs Doubtfire is placing a gourmet meal on the candle-lit table. Under this regimen, the children and the mother thrive. The 12-year-old boy starts passing all his classes, and the children are happy: this is partly attributed within the film to a relaxed and happy Miranda and partly to the child-centred attentions of Mrs Doubtfire, who as well as setting strict rules spends time with the children in healthy outdoor pursuits. ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ also develops an intimate friendship with Miranda, encouraging her to be disclosing and offering emotional support. This rendering of the ideal family as a breadwinner plus homemaker provides a reactionary discourse that subverts that of the message the film provides at the close: that happy families can take many forms and sometimes when parents separate ‘they can become better people. And much better mummies and daddies’. Mrs Doubtfire presents us with Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) new version of the family wherein the couple, unable to successfully negotiate the distribution of family burdens within a nuclear family structure, and presented with an inapt institutional response, reflexively arrives at an individual family solution. In this case, the solution is for a divorce with shared care. Nonetheless, the successful model of the family demonstrated in the film is that of a working parent freed from responsibility for childcare by the presence of a ‘woman’ in the home. One significant distinction between the eighties films that challenged female domestic hegemony and the films in this cycle is the lack of any visual images of men performing domestic tasks. Despite Daniel’s role as housekeeper, this film does not defy this trend. Daniel only performs domestic and care work when in the female bodysuit and in the persona of Mrs Doubtfire. There is one scene where the children visit Daniel in his new apartment. The children infantilise Daniel by praising him for putting a meal of spaghetti on the table. Later, when Miranda arrives to collect the children, she also expresses surprise at the clean apartment and the meal on the table. Though first assuming he has hired a housekeeper, she congratulates him when she discovers he has learned to accomplish these tasks by himself. Nonetheless, the film does not show Daniel engaged in these tasks: we only see the end product. As in other films in this set, the father in Mrs Doubtfire when shown in his male body is not filmed performing domestic tasks except badly. Mrs Doubtfire offers no insight as to the manner in which Daniel will parent without the prosthetic aid of his female bodysuit and, in the end, fails to reconcile nurture and masculinity. The lack of images of fathers

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in post-’90s film engaged in nurturing or domestic activities points to an incompatibility between images of masculinity and domesticity that will be examined in the next chapter.

Conclusion Investigating choice discourses around breadwinning and nurture, this chapter traced the move away from the model of the involved father as nurturer found in late eighties films. Fathers in family films post-nineties do not engage in family care tasks and this omission is not created as a choice for which the father is accountable. The early ’90s saw a shift from displays of fathers engaged in nurture and towards the performance of what I have called ‘essentialised’ tasks—tasks that are uniquely connected to the status of father and could not be accomplished by another. In the late ’90s, these tasks fall away and the relationship itself becomes essentialised as irreplaceable. Though there is no obligation placed on the father based in child ‘dependency’ (since fathering is not associated with tasks that affect the child’s welfare), the irreplaceability of the father ensures the continued availability to the father of the ‘choice’ of relationship. The father can opt in to the relationship or can opt out without harm to the child. This shift creates the relationship itself (and not just the tasks) as ‘chosen’. Though there is work still to do in the following chapters in unpacking the dynamics of this change, it is in this shift that I find the creation of the ‘pure father’. In finding no clear link between the father’s choice of work and the welfare of the child, this chapter leaves the conflict between work and fathering still unexplained. In order to throw light on the nature of status conflicts that underlie the work–family conflict, the next chapter will explore the risks or ‘consequences’ that are associated with the ‘choices’ of the father as well as the contrivances used in the films to reduce risk. Choice cannot be fully explored without also looking at the risks associated with the choice—and also at the discourses of responsibility and voice that interact with the choice discourses to express obligation and responsibility. This ‘choice’ chapter should not be understood to stand alone but to draw the first bolder strokes of the picture that subsequent chapters will refine and shade.

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Note 1. As well as the obligation to put needs first, Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000) find that there is a responsibility to provide financially for them.

References Are we there yet? 2005, film, Revolution Studios-Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. The Beatles (1969) All you need is love. Abbey Road. Beck, U & Beck-Gernsheim, E 2002, Individualization, Sage, London. Blankenhorn, D 1995, Fatherless America, HarperPerennial, New York. Box Office Mojo, . Bruzzi, S 2005, Bringing up Daddy, British Film Institute, London. Chambers, D 2012, A sociology of family life, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Daddy day care 2003, film, Revolution Studios-Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Despicable me 2010, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Fagan, J, Day, R, Lamb, ME & Cabrera, NJ 2014, ‘Should researchers conceptualize differently the dimensions of parenting for fathers and mothers?’, Journal of Family Theory and Review, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 390–405, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/jftr.12044. Fluke 1995, film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Gatrell, C 2007, ‘Whose child is it anyway?’, The Sociological Review, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 352–372, doi/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00709.x. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Gill, R 2007, ‘Critical respect’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 69–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506807072318. Hook 1991, film, Amblin Entertainment—Tristar Pictures-Sony Pictures, Universal City, California. Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. IMDbPro, . Jack Frost 1998, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Jingle all the way 1996, film, 1492 Pictures-Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California.

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Klein, AA 2011, American film cycles, University of Texas Press, Austin. Kramer vs. Kramer 1979, film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Neale, B & Smart, C 2002, ‘Caring, earning and changing’, Centre for research on Family Kinship & Childhood, . Night at the museum 2006, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Pleck, JH 2007, ‘Why could father involvement benefit children?’, Applied Development Science, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 196–202, https://doi.org/10.1080/108 88690701762068. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, https://doi.org/10. 1177/S003803850000047X. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. Suwada, K 2014, ‘How to be a dad nowadays’ PhD Sociology thesis, Polish Academy of Sciences, . The game plan 2007, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The haunted mansion 2003, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Incredibles 2004, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. The Santa clause 1994, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Three men and a baby 1987, film, Interscope Communications – Touchstone— NBC, Burbank, California. Traube, EG 1992, Dreaming identities, Westview Press, Boulder, USA. Walzer, S 1998, Thinking about the baby, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, .

CHAPTER 6

Precarity and Risk

The father’s position within disengaged father films is established as a double bind. The conflicting demands of the family and the workplace are rendered as irreconcilable so that, rather than the father striving to create a work–life balance, he is faced with a work–family choice. Work–family conflict for the mother was a theme of films of the ’70s and ’80s, reflecting social concerns around the working mother (Traube 1992), and 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer featured a single father who was unable to keep his highly demanding job while being the sole carer for his young son. In these earlier films, the conflict between work and family was created in scenes showing children’s care or work-tasks neglected as parents tried to juggle conflicting responsibilities. These post-90s disengaged father films do not follow this pattern. The fathers have no care tasks within the home that would create a time conflict with even a very demanding job (Chapter 5). Essentialised tasks associated with the father in the early films of the ’90s could be accomplished outside work hours—while fatherhood in later films is not rendered in terms of tasks but as choice of relationship, a choice that takes but a moment and that is protected by being essentialised to the biological father. The precarity of the father both at home and at work are central themes within the films and yet the underlying conflicts that lead to this precarity are not clearly evident. By exploring the risks that are associated in the films with the choices of the father as well as the contrivances used to create and reduce father precarity, this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_6

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chapter aims to identify the sources of status conflict that drive the shift to pure fatherhood. The term ‘precarity’ (from the French précarité), used first as a term signifying the insecurity associated with poverty (Waite 2009), has been taken up by social theorists and social activists in relation to the increase in employment insecurity within the Post-Fordist ‘flexible’ labour market. At times used to signify a more general societal malaise resulting from neoliberal economic policies, the term is now employed more widely in relation to an unequally distributed precarity associated with work and citizenship (Näsström and Kalm 2014). Judith Butler (2009) connects precarity negatively with ‘belonging’—of who counts as a subject and who does not. In family films, the father’s position is constructed as precarious within the workplace and the family: hence I will be using the term ‘precarity’ in connection to the experience of positional insecurity within these two spheres. I argue that father precarity in the films is not connected to conflict between the statuses of worker and father. Precarity is created by the intersection and collision of expectations between the father and the late-modern autonomous ‘individual’, but also separately between the ‘worker’ and the autonomous ‘individual’. I found also an association between the unfettered autonomy of an individual and a hegemonic form of ‘being a man’, so that loss of autonomy was also reflected in a degradation of status on a hierarchical scale of masculinity.

Precarity within the Home As shown in the Choice chapter (Chapter 5), the redeemed father is framed as the father who ‘chooses’ the child or family over other conflicting choices. Though the mechanism of irreplaceability of the biological father reduces the ‘risk’ to the biological father even in the face of changing family forms, it introduces, I argue here, a new form of precarity—one associated with an intimate relationship. While the essentialism of the father and the construction of the child as an object of choice leaves the choice always available to the father, it is, nonetheless, a contingent choice: one that exists only ‘until further notice’ (Bauman 2003, p. 41). For the father who is expected to demonstrate good fatherhood in the ‘choice’, this can become a demand to ever demonstrate the choice.

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A number of films show the father under threat of exclusion from the family for what can appear quite minor transgressions where these are constructed in terms of failure to demonstrate the choice of the family. This occurs in The Shaggy Dog (2006) where the mother tells the father that she doesn’t know ‘how we’re going to get past this one’ when the father fails to turn up for their anniversary dinner (in fact, he was there but transformed into a dog); or in RV (2006) when the mother and children leave the father who has lied to them rather than admit that he changed the location of a family holiday in order to attend a work meeting. Though these incidents are shown as part of a pattern of similar events, they nonetheless create a sense of father insecurity and imply a need for the father to constantly demonstrate his choice of the family over other possible ‘choices’. The precarity of the father’s position within the home contrasts with the mother’s position as family protector. As the child’s advocate and protector, the mother has the authority (based in the best interests of the child) to dismiss the father from the family, or at least from the family home (Liar Liar 1997; Getting Even with Dad 1994; The Santa Clause 1994; Night at the Museum 2006; The Shaggy Dog 2006; RV 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Daddy’s Home 2015). While the films resolve the narrative conflict and redeem the father through the trope of the ‘choice’ that indicates a reformation of the fathers’ values, the choice provides no guarantee of happy-ever-after. Some promise of future stability is often indicated by a resolution that reduces father precarity by preserving or increasing his autonomy. Within the family, one means of reducing precarity is by establishing a dyadic father–child relationship that is independent from and unmediated by the mother and does not rely on the father’s position within a nuclear family home. Examples of films ending with a dyadic unmediated relationship can be found as early as the ’90s in films where the mother is deceased (Getting Even with Dad 1994), or, oddly, the father is deceased (but reincarnated) (Fluke 1995; Jack Frost 1998). It is also found in the resolutions of the two 1997 releases Jungle 2 Jungle and Liar Liar, where the relationship of the child and father is established without the need for the parents to reconcile.1 The contingent dyadic relationship may also be tied to the changing legal status of the father. While mothers’ social relationships with children continue to be automatically conferred by pregnancy and motherhood, the means by which fathers establish their connection has shifted. While

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once the socio-legal relationship and the obligations of fatherhood were conferred by ties to the mother and by legal demonstration of ‘stability of care’, now the father’s acknowledgement of paternity is becoming more significant (Collier and Sheldon 2008). The focus on children’s rights to have a relationship with their father is increasingly giving primacy to the importance of the biological father and this has led, UK law professors Collier and Sheldon (2008) suggest, to a change in the conception of the relationship itself, so that the father’s relationship to the child has become increasingly a direct one ‘unmediated’ by the mother. As well, the biological connection is increasingly considered to be determinant of fatherhood (United States’ laws regarding this differ from state to state). These two factors—one choice-related and the other biological—are reflected in the essentialising of the biological father and of the choice-based father relationship found in the films. In contrast to the changing legal basis for fatherhood, the mother’s relationship and the primacy of that relationship is grounded, not only in the body, but in her role as the primary carer. Where once ‘stability of care’ was a significant factor in the attribution of fatherhood as well as motherhood, the move towards biological fatherhood has lessened the importance of this factor for fathers (Collier and Sheldon 2008). Stability of care grounds what Gatrell (2007) calls the ‘situational power’ of the mother, endowing her with greater knowledge of the children and their needs, interests and concerns. Family father films frequently highlight this greater knowledge by showing mothers explaining the children to the father, whether resident or separated—as in Furry Vengeance (2010) in which the mother explains that their son is missing his friends; or in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), where the mother identifies a boy (the subject of the daughter’s conversation) to the father by mouthing the words ‘the love of her life’. These sequences occur in the early stages of the films and are used to highlight the failure of the father since his lack of knowledge of these intimate details is evidence of his neglect of ‘relationship’.2 In the early 2000s, films briefly return to a concern with the restoration of the nuclear family as a unit, and in the films The Haunted Mansion (2003), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), The Shaggy Dog (2006), RV (2006) and Evan Almighty (2007), the mother is confirmed in her role as advocate for the family and supporter of the father–child relationship. Though these mothers are shown to have the authority to dismiss the failing father, these films end with a restoration of the nuclear family.

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Films of the late 2000s and 2010s again moved away from the resolution of nuclear family restoration and generally end with the creation of a direct father–child relationship, unmediated by the mother. These later films (Night at the Museum 2006; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011; Daddy’s Home 2015) construct narratives where the relationship of the father and child is independent from the father’s relationship with the mother and the restitution of the nuclear family is not guaranteed by or required for the happy ending. In a number of other films from this time, the mother is deceased (The Game Plan 2007; Despicable Me 2010; We Bought a Zoo 2011; Real Steel 2011) and in these, unlike films of earlier decades (Harwood 1997), there is no final romance promising a new nuclear family at the end of the film. This was foreshadowed in the 1994 film Getting Even with Dad which perhaps provides the clearest example of the unmediated relationship. In this film, the choice of the father to have a relationship with his son is followed by an explicit rejection of the possibility of creating a new nuclear family with the potential new mother/romantic interest character. It is made clear in this film’s resolution, that she would be an unwelcome third wheel in the intimate relationship established between the father and son. Though there is an element here perhaps of male bonding ( the film ends with the two playing basketball together), other films in which the child is a daughter have similar lines of closure (The Game Plan 2007; The Longshots 2008). Hollywood’s three-decades-long obsession with the restoration of the father has been understood in the literature as resting on a concern for the nuclear family, for, as Wood puts it a, ‘guarantee [of] the perpetuation of the nuclear family and social stability’ (Wood 2003, p. 152). This move to a resolution that does not assure the future nuclear family directly contradicts this understanding, indicating a shift away from the nuclear family (or of the promise of the nuclear family) as offering closure. As noted above, the legal status of ‘father’ is no longer dependent in many places on either the relationship with the mother or on continuity of care, with the result that the nuclear family does not underpin the status of the father as it once did (Collier and Sheldon 2008). The direct relationship between the father and child reduces the risk to the father attendant on his failure to satisfactorily perform domestic fatherhood. It reduces the conflict between being a ‘father’ and being an autonomous ‘individual’ and ‘man’. The instability of the ‘Final Romance’ found by Harwood (1997) in her analysis of films of the ’80s and early

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’90s now finds its answer not in the reassurance of father redemption, but in embracing new family forms that, for the father at least, do not depend on obligations and mutual responsibilities but on the quality of the dyadic father–child relationship itself. A pure dyadic relationship between the father and child is no longer tied to the stability of the family; the relationship can be secured—and some of these films suggest can be best secured—outside the nuclear family structure. The consequence of this shift in terms of the distribution of roles and responsibilities within the family (and for the way the ‘child’ is created to allow for any absence of the care-taker mother) will be examined in the next chapter. Considered in terms of the distribution of risks, this dyadic turn potentially creates greater financial risk for the mothers as they are rendered as primary carers and therefore unable to offer the individual ‘flexibility’ required within the modern workplace. The manner in which the films treat this will be discussed in the following section.

Winners and Losers in the Workplace Though the films construct the central conflict as between work and family, and its resolution in the ‘choice’ of family, there are no scenes showing the child’s welfare affected by father absence. Tasks that the films associated with good fathering are infrequent and are performed generally on a weekend or in the evening, while the safety and welfare of the children are secured by the mother. The conflict then is not established between the father’s absence from the home and the welfare of the child. Instead, what I find in post-’90s family films is the portrayal of conflict between the requirement for the father to demonstrate in the workplace that he is unencumbered and to the family/children that he ‘chooses’ them over the workplace. Many of the films construct the father as subject to an almost constant experience of job insecurity, largely due to his engagement in a precarious entrepreneurial workplace that demands ‘the willingness to discard other ties’ (Connell 2005, p. 257). This precarity at work is created by the threat of dismissal, a threat that is actualised within a number of films: ‘You’re fired’ (Ghost Dad 1990); ‘I think I’m fired’ (Liar Liar 1997); ‘You’re fired’ (The Incredibles 2004); ‘You’re fired’ (Night at the Museum 2006); ‘You’re fired’ (RV 2006); ‘Popper, you’re fired’ (Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). The threat can also involve losing a longed-for promotion, or—if the father is already head of his firm—the threat of losing the ‘deal’ (Hook 1991; Old Dogs 2009).

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In considering the nature of father precarity, it is useful to consider, as Traube (1992) did with ’80s films, the balancing act that Hollywood accomplishes in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. Traube (1992) showed that the requirement to appeal to a wide audience means accepting contradiction. In the ’80s mother films she investigated, this meant, on the one hand, promoting the idea of gender equality and the ideal of the new nurturing father, while on the other, appeasing antifeminist sentiment. This the films achieved by promoting the rights of mothers to have careers (with the resultant need for fathers to take more of a nurturing role within the home) while encouraging fears of the consequences to the children of mothers pursuing ‘selfish’ career goals (Traube 1992, p. 126). In appealing to a wide audience, the chief conundrum in post-90s disengaged family films is that of creating fathers as having conflict between work and family life without the implication that the redeemed father is anything other than a fully autonomous ‘individual’. The contradictions in the films can be seen then as an attempt to appeal to both sides of the fatherhood involvement debate by espousing the father’s turn towards the new more ‘involved’ father (with involvement rendered as relationship) while at the same time confirming/retrieving the individual autonomy and ‘masculinity’ of the father which had been challenged by the display of fathers engaged in nurture in ’80s films. The films achieve this by creating a workplace for the father that can be categorised as ‘entrepreneurial masculinist’ and requires an unencumbered always-available individual. Biological fathers (not all men—the ‘Other man’ will be discussed below) frequently work in a corporate culture that is constructed as competitive, demanding and even bullying. The workplaces demand long hours of overtime as well as a willingness to put the company’s needs ahead of personal/familial needs (Ghost Dad 1990; Jungle to Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; RV 2006; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Imagine That 2009; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). Bosses are quick to punish any infractions concerning these requirements with dismissal regardless of previous performance in the workplace. This is highlighted in a number of films (Ghost Dad 1990; RV 2006; Furry Vengeance 2010; Liar Liar 1997; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011) where the protagonist’s previous contributions to the firm are pointed out only to be dismissed by senior management. These workplaces frequently involve the father in a level of dishonesty in the workplace that is at odds with

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the moral values associated with the family (Hook 1991; The Santa Clause 1994; RV 2006; Jungle to Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). In Risk Society, first published in 1986, Ulrich Beck highlighted the manner in which, within an individualised society, children impose risks— ‘occupational, financial and existential’ (Beck 1992, p. 124) which must be divided between the parents (or other carers). Beck points out that the current market requirement for unencumbered individuals creates little conflict with the traditional male role of breadwinner who is not responsible for day-to-day nurture. He contrasts this with a greater conflict between the traditional mother role and that of ‘unencumbered individual’ (Beck 1992, p. 112). The family films released since the nineties have, with few exceptions, recreated rather than resolved this disparity related to status conflict. They do this by creating the father as autonomous (and so able to fulfil the requirements of the Western neoliberal ‘individual’ and worker) and the mother as responsible (see Chapter 7). This is largely achieved by a gendering of the workplace. Father workplaces within the films are constructed as ‘masculine’ as there are few visible women and those few occupy subordinate positions within the company structure, typically as personal assistants to the main character. The fathers’ workplaces can generally be categorised according to the definition of sociologists Tammy Comeau and Candace Kemp (2011, p. 60) as ‘entrepreneurial masculinist’ workplaces. The term reflects Connell’s (2005) use of the term ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’ to evoke a new hegemonic masculinity that is both ‘post-patriarchal’ and ‘rhetorically gender-neutral’ as modern neoliberal economic regimes reward unencumbered entrepreneurial individuals. In rewarding ‘the willingness to discard other ties’ (Connell 2005, pp. 256–257), such workplaces create ‘new patterns of hegemony in gender relations’ that do not ‘valorise the family or the husband/father position for men’ (p. 256). These workplaces value ‘a highly competitive macho ethic’ requiring ‘the exhibition of a virile and confident business aura, a drive to succeed and conquer, and a rather unbending attitude to do whatever it takes to complete the project, make the deal’ (Comeau and Kemp 2011, p. 63). Within entrepreneurial masculinist workplaces, long hours and immovable work deadlines are the norm (Comeau and Kemp 2011, p. 60) and no allowance is made for family responsibilities.

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Some films show the fathers at the top of this type of competitive hierarchy as CEOs of their own firm: (Hook 1991; Fluke 1995; Jingle All the Way 1996; Old Dogs 2009). More show fathers as still answerable to older higher-status men (Ghost Dad 1990; The Santa Clause 1994; Jungle to Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; The Shaggy Dog 2006, Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). A few films have fathers operating smaller independent businesses and working to make these a success (Beethoven 1992; Dr Dolittle 1998; Are We There Yet 2005; We Bought a Zoo 2011). With few exceptions (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; Daddy’s Home 2015), the films create work as the focal point of the father’s life and identity, and, despite the promise given at the end of the films that the fathers will become more childcentred, the centrality of work to masculine identity is not contested. Though the father might quit his job or be fired, by the end of the movie, with the exception only of Ghost Dad (1990) which ends with the father coming back from the dead, and the two films where the father is deceased (Fluke 1995; Jack Frost 1998), the father has found a replacement job. The replacement job is of higher status and/or offers greater personal autonomy (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; The Santa Clause 1994; Liar Liar 1997; Daddy Day Care 2003; The Incredibles 2004; RV 2006; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Despicable Me 2010; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). With greater autonomy, the father is also freed from the requirement to adopt morally questionable practices associated with his previous workplace (Hook 1991; Getting Even with Dad 1994; The Santa Clause 1994; Jungle to Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; RV 2006; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). In entrepreneurial masculinist workplaces (as Comeau and Kemp [2011, p. 60] found of some IT workplaces) ‘traditional notions of motherhood and fatherhood seem to structure how flexible employment conditions are conceived and operationalised’. We can see this return to traditional mother roles in conjunction with entrepreneurial masculine workplaces in films released since the ’90s. By the ’90s, with few exceptions, the issue of mothers balancing work and family has been resolved by the mothers’ return to their primary positions within the home. Only two of the films in my data set indicate any residual concern with the issue of mothers working, and both construct the return to work of the mother as the cause of family problems and as seriously threatening the welfare of the child. This occurs in Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) where the mother’s

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absence on a book tour leaves the father struggling to cope and results in the eldest son failing at school and the youngest running away from home; and in the subplot of Beethoven (1992) where the mother’s reluctant return to work to support her husband’s ambitions in growing the family business results in the near death-by-drowning of their youngest child. Both mothers return to the home. Many of the mothers in the films do work, but they do so in an alternative work culture, one that is constructed as less demanding and competitive than the father’s and not in conflict with family life. They often work in the non-profit sector (Liar Liar 1997; Imagine That 2009; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011), in design (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; The Shaggy Dog 2006) or teaching (Liar Liar 1997; Furry Vengeance 2010). Frequently the exact nature of the mother’s work is obscured—revealed only accidentally and unclearly as not central to the mother’s identity. These ‘non-corporate’ workplaces must be presumed to allow a greater workplace flexibility than that shown in the corporate sector—or that which exists perhaps in the world—since these mothers’ paid work does not interfere with their apparent ability to be full-time carers. The films frequently leave the viewer uncertain as to whether her work is parttime, full-time or volunteer, yet the job precarity and low income that frequently accompanies workplace flexibility is hidden. The question of whether the mother works at all is avoided in The Santa Clause (1994), Fluke (1995), Jingle all the Way (1996), Dr Dolittle (1998) and Night at the Museum (2006). In both The Shaggy Dog (2006) and Jack Frost (1998), the audience could assume throughout the bulk of the movies that the mother does not work: it is only revealed towards the end of these films that the mothers have jobs. Up until that point, the mothers are shown only in domestic spaces and in scenes consistent with a non-working mother: preparing breakfast for the family while the father rushes off to work; keeping track of children’s homework, and school and sports appointments. In The Shaggy Dog (2006) when we finally see the mother at work, she is shown in a corridor talking to a younger woman who could be assumed to be her assistant, or equally a colleague or a superior. The positioning of the two, in a hallway, is carefully ambiguous. Unlike fathers, where even minor demands of the family pose a threat to the father’s job, this mother appears able to drop work on demand and the next scene is

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of the mother in the car with the children as she responds immediately to their need for her. The mothers’ jobs take on the aspect of hobbies—something the mother does when not occupied with her primary care duties. They are easily discarded or transported if the career needs of the father (Furry Vengeance 2010) or alternate male (Liar Liar 1997) require this, and there is no hint of financial risk to the mother or to the family associated with the mother not working or working ‘flexibly’. In most films, financial arrangements between the parents are not revealed, and in the films where they are, it is to indicate that the father’s financial status has been negatively affected by divorce while the mother’s has not (The Santa Clause 1994; Mrs Doubtfire 1993). Where parents are separated or divorced and the mother has not remarried, the source of the mother’s continued financial security is not disclosed (Liar Liar 1997; Imagine That 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). Only two films show the mothers struggling to juggle paid and care work: Are We There Yet (2005) and The Longshots (2008). In both, the mothers are shown to ‘need’ to work and, in consequence, the mothers must risk the welfare of their children due to the demands of earning a living. In both, the biological fathers are constructed as irredeemable and in both they are Black—indicating an expectation associated with Black fathers to financially support the family. In these two films, the protagonists are not the biological fathers but other men who provide care for the child in the form of adult supervision while the mother works to support her family. Though the biological fathers are irredeemable, the choice of relationship is shown as still open and both films display the children as always hopeful of their biological father’s choice. The two men who take a care role with regard to the children are, respectively, the mother’s new boyfriend and the father’s brother. I will return to these films in the next chapter with a discussion of the irredeemably irresponsible Black father and the insufficient Black mother. The lack of visible risk for mothers who do not work, or who work ‘flexibly’, is reinforced by most mothers’ apparent lack of concern for their own or their children’s financial future. Rather than showing anxiety over risks to the father’s job security, the mothers in family films are frequently shown urging the father to work less and are infantilised as oblivious to the connection between the father’s job and the family’s financial security. While the father is frequently shown as oppressively threatened by his workplace precarity, the mothers and children, with few exceptions, show

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an almost militant lack of concern for their financial future should the father lose his job, and indeed often encourage the father to rebel against job demands, as in RV (2006). In this film, the father, Bob, is faced with the choice between his boss’s demand that he attend a meeting, and a holiday his family has planned. When Bob discusses his dilemma with his male colleagues, they advise that he must do what the boss says, but they also assume this will result in Bob’s divorce. The twin concepts of ‘flexibility’ and ‘precarity’, once understood as intrinsically tied together, have, French sociologist Beatrice Appay (2010) points out, become not only disconnected but seemingly associated with different academic fields. ‘Flexibility’ in the workforce is used positively by economists, Appay explains, to refer to the transfer of the risks of the marketplace to the workers which allows business to respond more easily to changes in the marketplace, while ‘precarity’—understood as the experience of workers that results from this transfer of risk—is primarily the concern of sociologists. Yet workplace flexibility (for example, flexible working hours) can also be cast as a positive attribute for the individual, or at least for the individual with the skills and social position to take advantage of that flexibility. In these films, workplace flexibility is implied as available to the film mothers and allows them to balance work and family. The fathers in contrast display the worker ‘flexibility’ demanded of entrepreneurial workplaces, a flexibility that, as Beck pointed out, is incompatible with the demands of parenting (Beck and Willms 2004, p. 163). The apportionment to the mother of the financial risks and care responsibilities of children that underlies the autonomy/entrepreneurial masculinity of the fathers in these films is concealed by the naturalisation of the mother as carer and as financially cared for. While the parental burden (and hidden financial risk) is apportioned to the mother, the fathers are burdened with the ‘intense and inescapable’ work practices that the notion of a flexible workplace often disguises—where ‘flexible work hours’ translates as unpaid overtime and carries an implication of personal choice that obscures the requirement to show yourself to be an ‘engaged’ worker (MacEachen et al. 2008). Mothers exchange financial security for the other side of flexibility; they are gifted with the work– life balance that the marketplace promises, but at the cost of a greater exposure to financial risk and the forfeiture of career advancement on a par with the unencumbered father. The films both hide and display the risk in the naturalisation of the mother as a nurturer. Though the

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mother’s position as carer positions her as financially dependent, the films do not display this dependence. The new ‘flexibility’ of the marketplace, which shifts the financial insecurity of the market to the worker, is in this manner, mimicked in these films by the family—the flexibility offered to the workplace by the father shifts the financial precarity to the mother. The portrayal of the entrepreneurial workplace and its demand for the unencumbered worker could be viewed as a subversive critique of the modern workplace, but only the demands on the father are challenged, and the films construct an individualised solution (see Chapters 8). By constructing mothers as financially cared for and mothers’ workplaces as providing rather than requiring flexibility, the films leave the risks to the mother of assuming the burden of unpaid work unproblematised. In the 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer, the conflict between the demands of the workplace and the need to care for the child was resolved when the father exchanged more time at home for a reduced ability to present himself to the marketplace as a flexible unencumbered worker. The result was a lower wage. More recent films instead offer resolution in an even greater workplace autonomy for the father. The ‘mother-choice’ of taking up work in a non-entrepreneurial workplace is not an option. While this could be considered as tied to a financial imperative to support the family, the films do not generally offer it as such (although RV [2006] briefly flirts with this connection). Instead, what blocks the father from taking on less demanding work is the threat to the father’s autonomy. This autonomy is not only linked to his status as an ‘individual’, but is tied in the films to masculinity. This becomes apparent when viewing those films which feature an ‘Other man’. In the next section, I will show how the Other man—the less masculine man—is used as a foil for the father’s masculinity.

Risk and the Other Man The ‘Other’ man—the mother’s new partner or potential partner—is present in a third of the father films. Where the parents are separated, he is the mother’s new boyfriend or husband or potential new husband. If the family is still together, he is trying to establish himself as a rival to the father as in Jingle All the Way (1996). He can serve as a device to increase the tension and to bring the father to the point of choice as in Liar Liar (1997), in which the father’s moment of choice comes as the mother and child are leaving town to follow the potential future stepfather to his new

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job in Boston; or in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), where the mother is about to leave on a vacation with her new boyfriend. Primarily, though, the Other man provides a contrasting version of masculinityand fathering to that constructed for the father—his ‘best quality’ being that he is ‘not like’ the father (Liar Liar 1997). With few exceptions, the alternative fathers presented in these films can be seen to serve more as cautionary tale than competition, with their main function to act as ‘pretenders to masculinity’—a phrase Peter Lehman (1998) uses when discussing the role ‘small dick’ jokes in ’90s films have in bolstering belief in the ‘phallus’. By identifying some men as lacking masculinity, the audience is reassured that some versions of masculinity do measure up (Lehman 1998). The primary ‘risk’ to the father in choosing his family is made apparent in the construction of the Other man. It is not a risk to his livelihood but to his position within a hierarchy of masculinity. In the father films considered here, the Other man—the more family-oriented man who is shown occupying domestic space—is constructed as phallically challenged. This is created in his construction as holding less phallic ‘power’ by direct reference to the size of his penis (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; The Santa Clause 1994; Daddy’s Home 2015); by his work in a less masculinist workplace (The Santa Clause 1994; Liar Liar 1997; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011; Imagine That 2009; Daddy’s Home 2015); and by displaying him within a domestic setting (Jingle All the Way 1996; Liar Liar 1997; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). In the face of successful masculinity (and what can be more successful than the act of fathering?) these more ‘domestic’ men both embody and subvert the promotion of the sensitive more ‘involved’ father that the films ostensibly promote. The lack of phallic power of the Other man is primarily signified by his status within the workplace. The relative wealth, corporate position, and associated markers of masculine hierarchical positioning that signify phallic power (Buchbinder 2012, p. 75) are used in the films to construct the alternative father as lower in the hierarchy. The Other man works in areas that are framed as less competitive and less ‘masculine’ than that of the father. He may hold a relatively undemanding mid-level whitecollar position of some unspecified kind (Liar Liar 1997; Daddy’s Home 2015). He sometimes works with the mother, as in the films Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011) (in the non-profit sector) and Imagine That (2009) (in the Arts). In The Santa Clause (1994), he is a psychiatrist. In Jingle All the Way (1996)—set in the two days before Christmas—the job status

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of the Other man, like that of the mother, Liz, is not clarified, but they both have time to spend at home preparing for Christmas. This time availability is a significant feature of the Other man and is at variance with the father’s busyness. The lack of time of the biological father constructs him as entrepreneurial in line with contemporary constructions of success and the ‘macho ethic’ described by Comeau and Kemp (2011 p. 63). The Other man is shown most often within a domestic setting (generally the mother’s home), in contrast to the biological father who is shown almost exclusively at work or outside. Nonetheless, the Other man rarely interacts with objects traditionally deemed feminine: he doesn’t pick up a dishcloth or a saucepan or a grocery bag. Within the domestic setting, he is shown performing tasks that are coded both masculine and domestic— such as cleaning out the gutters (Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011) or hanging Christmas lights (Jingle All the Way 1996). On the whole, Other men would not be out of place in a ’50s sitcom. The association of the Other man with a ’50s image of the father is also constructed by his costume, which reflects that of an earlier era. The versions of the father being compared here are a traditional family man in a nine-to-five job who performs masculine ‘tasks’ in a domestic setting, and the unencumbered, highly achieving, successful, work-oriented ‘individual’. The portrayal of the Other men in these films reveals the risk to the father of a turn towards the family. In choosing to be family-centred, he must turn away from achievement within a hierarchical structure of masculinity, with the resultant loss of status. The status degradation this risks is that associated with the autonomous ‘individual’ as well as with a hegemonic masculinity cast also as unencumbered. The Other man then represents—not just a model of a family-centred, involved man—but of an emasculated ‘domestic’ man.

The Masculinity Dilemma The dilemma posed by the films is that fatherhood cannot be attained by a man without masculine credentials and cannot be performed by a man with masculine credentials—where masculinity is understood to involve autonomy and commitment to the public realm, and even small acts of domesticity that are traditionally associated with the ‘man of the house’ threaten status degradation. The films seek a resolution that will enable the father to remain involved with his family (given some understanding

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of ‘involvement’) while the father retains (or increases) his autonomy and his success within a patriarchal order. One device the films use to achieve this is to show the father achieving a greater masculinity that balances the reduced masculinity of ‘involvement’ with the child. This greater masculinity is achieved through greater autonomy in his working life or a higher position within the workplace hierarchy. By increasing his autonomy, the father is able to reduce the workplace risk. At the same time, greater autonomy raises the father’s ‘masculine’ credentials. In Mr Popper’s Penguins, the father wins the contract that was his goal—but he wins it for himself rather than for the firm and so establishes himself as autonomous professionally. This enables him to promise to have more time for his family by balancing the greater (professional) autonomy against the lesser (personal). In Imagine That, the father walks out on the final interview for his dream job in order to attend his daughter’s concert. This act wins him the respect of the CEO and the position he desires—but on his own terms; he claims the time he wants with his daughter and by doing so asserts his autonomy from the workplace hierarchy. The CEO tells him the only two people who had previously stood up to him now run key divisions within the company. Films where there is no Other man show a similar trade-off for the father: Dr Dolittle (1998) shows the father rejecting a company’s offer for his veterinary practice, choosing instead to retain full control; in RV (2006), the father quits his job and is offered one where he will be in charge; in The Shaggy Dog (2006), the father wins his promotion to District Attorney. Another device is the ‘hero’ father who defeats villains in physical combat or flies through the air or both. The fathers in Hook (1991), Beethoven (1992), Jingle All the Way (1996) and Old Dogs (2009) are already fully autonomous, the head of their own firms. For them, the commitment to spending more time with their children comes after they establish themselves as fully masculine men by taking on the role of superheroes (in all but Beethoven they fly through the air) or by defeating the villains in physical combat (in all but Old Dogs ). Thus, the reassurance of masculine status and workplace autonomy balances and permits the promise of more ‘involvement’ with the family, with its implication of the reduced masculinity that must accompany more time spent in a domestic space. Nonetheless, only Liar Liar takes the risk of showing the redeemed father in that space (in the epilogue, he attends his son’s

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birthday party). The other films stop short of showing the more childcentred father occupying domestic space by opting for final scenes of the family out of doors—at the South Pole (Mr Popper’s Penguins ); or in street scenes (The Santa Clause 1994; Jingle All the Way 1996; Imagine That 2009).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that father precarity within the family has its roots in the requirement for the father to sustain himself as autonomous freely choosing ‘individual’. The ‘status’ conflicts are those between, variously, the autonomous ‘individual’, masculinity, fathering, and the worker as subordinate in a hierarchy. The films generally create resolution to the precarity of the father in the home and at work by endowing the father with even greater autonomy. Exploring the risks associated within the films with father choices, I find that this greater autonomy is at times connected in the films with expectations associated with hegemonic masculinity through the narrative device of the Other man. Within the workplace, father precarity results from conflicts between autonomy and submission to the authority of more senior men. A greater autonomy or seniority reduces this conflict while enhancing masculinity. Within the home, father precarity can be reduced by establishing a direct unmediated relationship with the child, a relationship that is chosen by the father and is not dependent on his position as part of a family. Masculinity is preserved for the biological father through dissociating of the father from the domestic setting. This chapter demonstrated how these films work to conceal the greater financial risk as well as the greater burden of care work the pure father relationship places upon the mother. The differential portrayal of mother’s and father’s workplaces is used to hide the financial risk to the mother of taking on the responsibility of care. Though discourses of choice create breadwinning as a choice for the White father, the dependence of the family on the father as main or sole provider is assumed. The interdependence of the status expectations of the mother and father will be explored more fully in the next chapters when I return to breadwinning and nurture by exploring how tasks are associated with these statuses within voluntaristic discourses of responsibility and blame. The new formation of pure fatherhood identified in Chapter 5 will be shown to require that the father not participate in child care; at the same time, the obligation for the father to provide financially for the family is undermined.

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Notes 1. In the epilogue of Liar Liar (1997), it is suggested that the parents may reconcile in the future, but the narrative resolution is not dependent on this. 2. Monitoring the strength of the father–child relationship is generally shown to be the mother’s responsibility and this is discussed in the later chapters.

References Appay, B 2010, ‘“Precarization” and flexibility in the labour process’, in C Thornley, S Jefferys, & B Appay (eds), Globalization and precarious forms of production and employment, Edward Elgars, Cheltenham, UK, pp. 23–40. Are we there yet? 2005, film, Revolution Studios—Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Beck, U & Willms, J 2004, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Beethoven 1992, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Bauman, Z 2003, Liquid love, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Beck, U 1992, Risk society, Sage, London. Buchbinder, D 2012, Studying men and masculinities, Routledge, New York. Butler, J 2009, ‘Performativity, precarity and sexual politics’, AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 321–336, . Cheaper by the dozen 2003, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Collier, R & Sheldon, S 2008, Fragmenting fatherhood, Hart Publishing, Oxford. Comeau, TD & Kemp, CL 2011, ‘Variants of masculinity within masculinist IT workplace regimes’, in JA McMullin (ed), Age, gender, and work, UBC Press, Vancouver, pp. 59–80. Connell, RW 2005, Masculinities 2nd edn, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Daddy day care 2003, film, Revolution Studios-Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Daddy’s home 2015, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Despicable me 2010, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Fluke 1995, film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Furry vengeance 2010, film, Summit Entertainment, Universal City, California. Gatrell, C 2007, ‘Whose child is it anyway?’, The Sociological Review, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 352–372, doi/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00709.x. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California.

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Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Harwood, S 1997, Family fictions, St. Martin’s Press, New York. Hook 1991, film, Amblin Entertainment—Tristar Pictures-Sony Pictures, Universal City, California. Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Jack Frost 1998, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Jingle all the way 1996, film, 1492 Pictures-Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Kramer vs. Kramer 1979, film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. Lehman, P 1998, ‘In an imperfect world, men with small penises are unforgiven’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 123–137, https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1097184X98001002001. Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. MacEachen, E, Polzer, J & Clarke, J 2008, ‘“You are free to set your own hours”’, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 66, no. 5, pp. 1019–1033, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.11.013. Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Näsström, S & Kalm, S 2014, ‘A democratic critique of precarity’, Global Discourse, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 556–573, https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995. 2014.992119. Night at the museum 2006, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. The game plan 2007, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The haunted mansion 2003, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Incredibles 2004, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. The longshots 2008 film, Cube Vision—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West Hollywood, California. The Santa clause 1994, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California.

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The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Traube, EG 1992, Dreaming identities, Westview Press, Boulder, USA. Waite, L 2009, ‘A place and space for a critical geography of precarity?’, Geography Compass, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 412–433, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17498198.2008.00184.x. We bought a zoo 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Wood, R 2003, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and beyond revised, Columbia University Press, New York.

CHAPTER 7

Responsibility

I have argued that the construction of the involved father that emerges in these films is neither that of the non-gendered ‘universal carer’ parent (Fraser 2013), nor the gendered father as a component within a traditional nuclear family. Instead, it reflects Dermott’s description of the modern model of fathering as ‘closer to the ethic of the pure relationship than an ethic of caring responsibility’ (Dermott 2008, p. 142). Though the films end with the promise of a better future based on pure relationship, this promises no happy-ever-after. A relationship that is based only in choice without incurring choice-foreclosing obligations is sustained only through the ongoing demonstration of choice. Nonetheless, there is benefit in constructing the father relationship as pure: a pure relationship reduces status conflict between responsibilities associated with the care of dependent children, and expectations of autonomy that are associated with the statuses of the late-modern ‘individual’. The possibility of pure fatherhood depends on freeing the father not only from traditional role associations but from responsibilities based in the need of a child for care (see Chapter 3). In this chapter, I return to an examination of voluntaristic discourses within the films with a focus on discourses of responsibility. For Barnes, the primary function of voluntaristic (or socially ‘agentic’) discourses is to ‘define powers and prohibitions, rights and responsibilities, entitlements and obligations’ of a status (Barnes 2000, p. 148). It is with regard to the intersecting rings © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_7

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of expectations surrounding statuses that society holds individuals accountable and social order becomes possible. These ideas were established in Chapter 4 and provide the basis from which I argue for an alternative to libertarian conceptualisations that locate ‘agency’ within the individual (see also McNulty Norton 2021). The previous two chapters have focused on the conflicts between intersecting statuses as these surround the father, who is also an ‘individual’, a ‘worker’ and a ‘man’. This chapter turns to the family. It examines how the films differentially distribute family tasks and childcare obligations to interdependent statuses. By exploring the distribution of responsibilities among family members, the following two chapters address the remaining research question: What assumptions and affordances do the films make in the constructions of the mother and child in order to accommodate the construction of the father–child relationship as ‘pure’? This chapter finds that the films construct the mother as ‘sufficient’ parent; and when the mother is not present, the child is portrayed as precociously independent. This chapter begins by setting out van de Poel’s (2011) taxonomy that differentiates between various types of responsibility. It returns to the topics of nurture and breadwinning, looking at the differential distribution of tasks and obligations within the family within discourses of responsibility (which may differ from the assignment of tasks through discourses of choice explored in Chapter 5). Discourses of responsibility reveal a differential construction of Black parenthood in the films Are We There Yet ? (2005) and The Longshots (2008), and these are explored in the section ‘The black family—deadbeat dads and insufficient mothers’.

The Taxonomy of Responsibility This chapter explores voluntaristic discourses of responsibility within which status-based responsibilities are assigned. These discourses include attributions of blame and obligation, assumptions of responsibility for task, and assignments of virtue (being a ‘responsible’ person). In order to negotiate these different types of ‘responsibility’, I draw on ethics professor Ibo van de Poel’s (2011) taxonomy of responsibility, developed to explore the assignment of responsibility within corporations. Here I apply his ideas to a domestic setting to determine how responsibilities are differentially distributed within the family. I would note here that van de Poel’s goal was that of locating and assigning responsibility within large corporations and, within these work-related settings, whether it is or is not

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the case that an individual is tasked with performing a particular function or has authority over a particular project may be more clearly marked than would be the case within a family context. Van de Poel expands on earlier classifications of Hart (cited in van de Poel 2011) and of Bovens (1998) to allow for a distinction between the person who carries out a task and the person who is responsible for ensuring the task is carried out or that a goal is achieved. I use van de Poel’s taxonomy because these distinctions allow for a more nuanced analysis of the interactions of family members. In particular, this model reflects distinctions between the responsibility to perform tasks and the responsibility to ensure child-related tasks are conceived and performed (regardless of who performs them) of the Pleck-Lamb (Pleck 2007) model. Van de Poel distinguishes nine types of responsibility. Three have to do with the discursive assignment of tasks and these are particularly helpful in distinguishing the differential assignment of care tasks within the family. They are responsibility-as-task (responsible for task performance); responsibility-as-obligation (the responsibility to ‘see to it that something is the case’, that an outcome is achieved); and responsibilityas-authority (you are tasked with the success of the overall project) (van de Poel 2015, p. 14). Another three of the nine are concerned with the assignment of fault: responsibility-as-blame; responsibility-as-liability; and responsibilityas-accountability (such as where a person may be asked to ‘account for’ an action). Discourses of responsibility operate interactively and discourses of blame and accountability are particularly useful in indicating where responsibility-as-obligation or as task are assigned. ‘Accountability’ can also be called ‘answerability’, and I will use that term here to prevent confusion with Barnes’ (2000) use of ‘accountability’. Related to these is responsibility-as-cause which differs from the previous three in that it does not carry the connotation of a negative outcome. A person may be responsible-as-cause for a positive outcome or a negative one. Responsibility-as-cause also differs from the others in that it is not clearly connected with voluntarism. A cause can be a natural phenomenon such as a storm, for instance. Even when a person causes an event, it does not necessarily imply social responsibility—as when the warmth of a body causes the temperature of a room to rise. Causal narratives are distinguished by Barnes from voluntaristic discourses as explained

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in Chapter 4. Nonetheless, in the assignment of blame, it is often necessary to first establish a causal connection (responsibility-as-cause) before attributing social responsibility. The final two uses of responsibility are: responsibility-as-capacity (the attribution of the various skills and knowledge required to make decisions); and responsibility-as-virtue (as when we say of someone ‘she is a responsible driver’) (van de Poel 2015). Responsibility-as-virtue is akin to ‘capacity’ in being seen as located within a person as an attribute, but requires not just capacity but a demonstration of some kind of ‘acting correctly’, often based on making the ‘right’ choices in the face of a variety of options. Since virtue is assigned to an individual rather than on the basis of other social statuses, I understand virtue as tied to the status of ‘individual’. The assignment of virtue requires a normative assessment of the right choice of action which depends on the judgement of the observer. Societal judgement of the normatively ‘right’ choice can be determined in part from instances where blame is assigned. These nine uses are related to and reliant on one another. Although the central interest here is the status-differentiated attributions of responsibility-as-obligation, task and authority, these are further revealed in an examination of discourses of blame, liability, and answerability which in turn rely on the attribution of capacity and at times also cause. In analysing the films to determine where responsibilities are assigned, I look at both tasks (who is shown to undertake the various tasks associated with the family and with parenting), and the assignment of obligation and fault in discourses of blame, liability or answerability (who or what is blamed for failure to act or to achieve a desired outcome).

The Responsible Mother When Dermott (2008, p. 142) claims that ‘caring responsibility’ is not a central aspect of modern conceptions of the father, she is using the phrase to refer to the ‘resource provisioning and daily care’ which, though necessary and sometimes legally required aspects of parenting, are not associated with the performance of intimate fatherhood. These tasks can, she said, ‘be done by someone else’ (p. 143). The someone else responsible for daily care in family films is usually the mother, though the responsibility of care can be shared with a feminised Other man (as in Daddy’s Home 2015) or, if the mother is deceased, be taken on by another woman (Ghost Dad 1990; Getting Even with Dad 1994; The

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Game Plan 2007; Real Steel 2011). Since the father relationship is not primarily one of ‘caring responsibility’, we would not expect failure to be couched in terms of failure to perform care tasks—and it is not in the films analysed. Not only are mothers created as predominantly responsible for the performance of childcare and child-supervision tasks (as shown by their performance of these tasks within the film), but they also carry responsibility-as-obligation for their children’s welfare (to ensure these tasks are carried out and outcomes achieved). Films indicate this obligation by showing harm resulting from lack of mother attention to these tasks and, in this section, I look at consequences and the obligations they imply. In many films, as previously noted, the mothers either do not work or her work offers the flexibility to allow her to be available to supervise the children. Responsibility (as task) for child nurture and welfare is visibly assigned to the mother in the on-screen performance of her carrying out care tasks. The children in the care of mothers are created by these discourses as age-appropriately vulnerable and in need of adult supervision and this is reinforced in discourses of responsibility and blame resulting from dereliction—or even from delegation—of caring and childsupervision tasks. In three films in which the mother is shown as absent from the home while working, she is shown to delegate care tasks to another (Beethoven 1992; Cheaper by the Dozen 2003; Are We There Yet? 2005), and the narratives show the mother’s absence to result in severe risks to the children. The consequences of the mother’s failure to directly care for the children are constructed as serious, even life-threatening, with the children in these films shown as placed in grave physical danger. In Beethoven, the youngest child almost drowns when in the care of a nanny; in Are We There Yet, the children end up travelling cross-country in the truck of a stranger when they run away from the assigned carer when the mother is on a work trip; in Cheaper by the Dozen, the youngest child runs away from home and is found alone on a train. These threats to the child require a response and in all three films, the mother gives up her work to meet the responsibility she is assigned to ensure the safety of the child. The mother’s decision to work in the three films cited above does not involve any ‘neglect’ of the child under the description offered by the Australian Institute of Family Studies advisory website on child neglect (Child Family Community Australia 2014)—as a failure of responsibility specifically to ‘provide adequate supervision, emotional nurturance, appropriate medical care, food, clothing, and shelter’ as these things are

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normatively understood. Though the mothers were not directly supervising their children, in all three films, care was delegated to another ‘responsible’ adult. These were: a middle-aged childcarer in Beethoven; a boyfriend in Are We There Yet; and the father in Cheaper by the Dozen. Though the mother (who has the responsibility-as-authority to do so) has delegated the responsibility (as-task) for caring for the children, this leads to lesser care for which the mother is shown to hold and accept responsibility-as-blame indicating a continued responsibility-asobligation. The mother expresses her accountability and blameworthiness both verbally: ‘They need their mother at home’ (Beethoven 1992; ‘It [delegating care] was a mistake, and it won’t happen again’ (Are We There Yet? 2005)—and by immediately changing her behaviour to redress her error (she quits her job, or in the case of Cheaper by the Dozen 2003, curtails her book tour). Though her delegation of responsibility-as-task while she works may be ‘accepted’ and outwardly approved within the film, she is still subject to her responsibility-as-obligation. This responsibility cannot be delegated—it is attributed to the status of mother, and in the end, forces her to resume responsibility-as-task for the daily care of the child. There is not a similar attribution of responsibility for child-supervision and care made to the status of father. To illustrate this, I think it is useful here to contrast the film set with father protagonist films of previous decades. The much-acclaimed drama Kramer vs Kramer, released in 1979, shows a father who must take on the parental care tasks when the mother leaves. A major turning point of the film shows the father’s development as a ‘responsible’ parent. He is shown attentively watching his son, Billy, in a playground while talking to a neighbour. When the child starts to climb the jungle gym while holding a toy aeroplane, the father immediately recognises the danger. The neighbour takes responsibilityas-task for removing the toy but is distracted and Billy falls and is hurt. Though the neighbour has taken responsibility-as-task, the father is shown in subsequent scenes to take responsibility-as-obligation. He worries about his performance of parenting, blames himself and does not accept the neighbour’s attempt to claim responsibility. In these scenes, Kramer echoes the responsibility discourses found in post-90s films only associated with the mother—that of responsibility-as-obligation that cannot be delegated to another by the delegation of task. Eighties film Three Men and a Baby (1987) also shows fathers accepting responsibility-as-obligation. In this film, three ‘bachelors’ share

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an apartment. One of them, Jack, discovers he is a father when the mother—unable to care for the baby while working—leaves the baby at the apartment. Jack tries to enlist his own mother in caring for the child, but she tells him that he has always run away from responsibility but ‘now you have to turn and face it’. He answers, ‘Mom, I’m a screw-up’ to which she responds ‘You were a screw-up. Now you’re a father’. Here fatherhood is associated with the attribution of an adult responsibility for the welfare of the dependent child. The other two bachelors sharing the home also take responsibility for baby Mary’s welfare, not only as task but as obligation. When they go out for the evening, the two bachelors leave Jack with the phone number of the theatre in case he needs them, and they later ring from the theatre to check that everything is well. Unable to reach Jack (who is showering), they race home. These earlier films indicate a ‘moral obligation’ to care for a dependent child (Ribbens McCarthy, Edwards and Gillies 2000, p. 791) that is associated with the status of being an adult. In both films, the obligation leads to the performance of caring tasks and this leads to a greater knowledgebased intimacy, reflecting discourses of the time that posited a rise in father performance of care tasks as both flowing from and contributing to knowledge-based intimacy with the child. As noted in Chapter 2, this notion was no longer prevalent in government policy documents in the United Kingdom and Australia by the mid-2000s. By the 2000s, family films were using various devices to obviate the need for the father to assume responsibility for care and supervision. Primary among the devices used is the construction of the mother as a responsibilised and sufficient parent—both responsible for the welfare of the children and able to provide this care. Unlike the mothers of ’80s films, mothers within this film set can either successfully juggle the responsibilities of motherhood with a working life or are free to choose not to work (see Chapter 5). Only in two films is this not the case: Are We There Yet? (2005) and The Longshots (2008). The Black mothers in these two films struggle to be ‘sufficient’. In both films, the mothers are portrayed as doing their best to be both breadwinner and nurturer; however, the biological fathers (both minor characters in the film) are constructed as irredeemable ‘deadbeat dads’ and the burdens of financial support as well as care are shown to fall to the mother. Unable to rely on the biological father to support her financially, the mother is unable to fulfil ‘her’ responsibilities towards the care of the child. In both films,

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another man (a boyfriend in Are We There Yet? and an uncle in The Longshots ) takes the protagonist role, becoming a stand-in father to the child. I will return to this differentiation in the construction of White and Black fatherhood when I discuss the obligation to provide financially below.

The Independent Child In those films where fathers have sole charge of the child due to the mother’s death or absence, the films do not construct the father as responsible for nurture and protection. Instead the films construct the children as self-sufficient and able to manage danger or they use comedic devices to downplay the severity of the danger. This is in contrast to films with a mother present where children are shown to be vulnerable and in need of age-appropriate supervision. In a number of films, the lack of care provided by the father when the children are in his sole charge could be considered ‘neglect’ under the description offered above. The fathers frequently do not provide adequate supervision and, in a number of films, this puts the child in extreme danger. Yet the fathers are not ‘blamed’ for this lack of care in narratives that show dire consequences ensuing. Instead, the children in these films show themselves to be precociously independent. They are able to care for themselves within the home, to handle danger, and to travel around strange cities or the countryside without supervision. In Getting Even with Dad (1994), the child Timmy not only protects himself from dangerous criminals, but manages to keep his father out of jail by misleading the police. Although the boy is only eleven, he is left alone in his father’s apartment overnight and wanders a city which is strange to him for long hours. Timmy not only cares for himself but is shown caring for his father when he buys his father a new toothbrush. At the moment of the father choice, the son is sitting on a long-distance bus, having given his father an ultimatum—if the father insists on keeping his stolen goods, Timmy will leave. Yet the film does not provide clues as to where he is going. The mother is dead. He has previously lived with an aunt but we are told in the film’s opening scenes that she is newly married and away on her honeymoon, and in any case the new husband does not want the child. The child is created as self-sufficient when he is seen to ‘choose’ to leave his father though he is without any clear destination or designated carer. The danger to the child is often brought about through the father’s action or inaction. In The Game Plan (2007), the father takes his young

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daughter to a nightclub then forgets her when he leaves; in Getting Even with Dad (1994), the child is chased by criminal associates of the father and must find a way to escape them; in Night at the Museum (2006), the child is chased by criminals as a result of the father’s actions; in Real Steel (2011), the son is left on the side of a slippery muddy cliff in a rainstorm at night when the father refuses to assist him. Later he is brought into contact with vengeful criminals. Yet the films do not assign blame to the father by showing harm to the child. Neither do they imply obligation to care for the child by showing the fathers changing their behaviour to better protect the child. Instead, the child is shown as able to negotiate the danger. In two films, danger to children is caused by the father though the mother is present and the children are not precocious. In both Hook (1991) and Jingle All the Way (1996), the father, having caused the children to fall into danger literally ‘flies to the rescue’ to demonstrate his heroism—but these films have an unreal, almost comic-book quality that renders the danger non-threatening. In Hook, the children are threatened by pirates in Neverland. In Jingle all the Way, the child is captured by a man dressed up as a comic-book villain. The comic-book style construction of the scene serves to reassure the audience that there are no ‘real-world’ consequences and that there is no need to worry that a real child will be hurt. This mitigates against any impetus to assign fault. Two films that diverge somewhat from this trend in the construction of father responsibility for care are Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and Daddy’s Home (2015). In Cheaper by the Dozen, the father is given his dream job as a football coach of a college team at the same time as the mother (who was previously the primary carer in the home) is away on a book tour. When the children suffer consequences from the mother’s absence, the mother cancels her book tour and returns home, signifying her responsibility-as-obligation for their care. The mother’s return restores order and happiness to the family; however, in this film, the father also quits his demanding job. While the discourse does not construct him as having an equal responsibility-as-obligation or task, he is shown as assuming responsibility-as-authority for the overall success of the ‘project’ of raising the children. When he tenders his resignation, he explains: ‘If I screw up raising my kids, nothing I achieve will matter much’. In Daddy’s Home, the parenting model of the stepfather and mother is established early in the film as two co-earning co-carers—the only instance of this relationship within the film set. When the biological father ousts

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the stepfather from the family home, he is told by the mother that he must take over the domestic care tasks previously undertaken by the stepfather. She asks, ‘You want to be a real parent now?’ and then gives him a list of child-related activities for the week. Nonetheless, when he decides he can’t ‘take the shit’ involved in child care and also leaves, the tasks revert to the mother, indicating the responsibility-as-obligation remains with the mother even within the co-parenting family of mother and stepfather established in the opening scenes. The films I analyse here do not support optimistic universal-caregiver narratives of new involved fatherhood (see Chapter 2) that presume a cycle of involvement in parental care tasks growing organically from, as well as leading to, greater knowledge of the child. Though the films do show one-to-one time spent in the child’s company leading to greater intimacy, they do not show this time to be spent in caring tasks or as leading to greater engagement within the domestic sphere. Rather than the father spending more time within domestic space, the films of the late 2000s show intimacy developing as a result of the greater time that children spend within the father’s workspace (and from the fathers learning to ‘disclose’ as will be discussed in Chapter 9). Intimacy grows from the greater knowledge of the father by the child rather than the child by the father and these films show the child involving themselves in their father’s work and emphasise a resultant career benefit for the father (see Chapter 9). The children’s involvement in their father’s work might initially be disruptive, but results in the ‘rescue’ of the father—either signified by a career gain (The Incredibles 2004; The Shaggy Dog 2006; RV 2006; The Game Plan 2007; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Despicable Me 2010; Real Steel 2011) or a reorientation of career goals towards a greater self-actualisation for the father (Night at the Museum 2006; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). This development signals a departure from earlier films (Ghost Dad 1990; Hook 1991; Fluke 1995; Jingle All the Way 1996; Liar Liar 1997; Jack Frost 1998) where the father acknowledges he needs to learn more about the children’s lives and interests.

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Breadwinning, Responsibility and the Hollywood Father Here I return to the subject of breadwinning, considering now not discourses of choice but of responsibility. While the mother is discursively constructed as responsible (as task and obligation) for nurture and supervision of the children—thereby ‘freeing’ the father from responsibility based on the dependency of children for care—the films show an ambivalence with regard to the ‘breadwinning’ role associated with traditional models of fathering. In general, the films provide clues that the father takes the dominant role in providing financially for his children, and in a number of films in which the mother is alive and the nuclear family live together, the father appears to be the sole provider for the family unit (Hook 1991; Beethoven 1992; Dr Dolittle 1998; The Incredibles 2004; RV 2006; Evan Almighty 2007). Where the parents are separated, the division of financial responsibility is rarely disclosed—although an analysis of the likely relative incomes and the living standards displayed would lead to an assumption that the father is providing some financial support. This rendering of the father as provider implies fathers have a responsibilityas-task to provide financially for the family. However, the films challenge the assignment of responsibility-as-obligation. Many films make a point of rejecting the construction of fatherhood in terms of family breadwinner by challenging the centrality or diminishing the importance of that role. Both mothers and children urge the father to jeopardise his job in order to spend more time with them or disallow claims by the father that he has to work. This may be used to affirm the importance of relationship, as in RV (2006), when the mother says, ‘You mean more to me than just a paycheck’. In some films (Jungle 2 Jungle 1997; The Game Plan 2007; Old Dogs 2009), the father discovers only at the beginning of the film that he is a father, and in these films the mother must be assumed to have solely provided for the child up to this point. There is no implied blame or consequence for the father’s lack of awareness of the children’s birth, though in all three, the father was married to the mother when the children were conceived. There is also no blame attributed to the mother for not informing the father: in two of the films, the mother is informing him now because she believes the children have reached an age when they should ‘get to know’ their fathers. In one, this occurs when the boy is 12, in the other the children are 7-year-old twins (one boy, one girl). In

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the third film, the father does not discover his parenthood until after the mother is deceased and the 8-year-old daughter goes in search of him. In another five films (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; Getting Even with Dad 1994; Jack Frost 1998; Night at the Museum 2006; Real Steel 2011), it can be assumed from narrative details that the father has, at least until this point, contributed less to the family income than the mother (for example in Getting Even with Dad, the father was in jail). Though the father is not ‘blamed’ for failure to provide through plot devices that show consequences to the welfare of the child, there is generally in these films an implied critique of the non-providing father as being an ‘irresponsible’ person. The irresponsibility is not connected directly to his failure to provide, but is shown in other ways. In Real Steel, he is shown to cheat someone of money he owes them; in Getting Even with Dad, he is a thief; in Night at the Museum, he cannot hold down a job. The non-provider father is also cast as unrealistic in his career goals. In four of the films, he is focused on achieving a career goal which he may never achieve. In Jack Frost, the father is a musician who has been hoping for a big break for fifteen years; in Getting Even with Dad, an ex-con and baker who has committed a burglary in order to have his own bakery business; in Night at the Museum, he is a would-be inventor whose ‘schemes’ are not successful; and in Real Steel, he is a former boxer and now wants to be the owner of a successful robot-boxer but is too rash and impulsive to be successful. Despite the exceptions noted, the father in family films can generally be assumed by his working status relative to the mother to provide financially for their children either as sole or co-provider. However, when a father does not do so, the failure to provide is not generally cast as father failure in discourses of blame that would imply an obligation connected to the status of father but are connected with lack of individual responsibilityas-virtue.

The Black Family---Deadbeat Dads and Insufficient Mothers Exceptions to the lack of responsibility-as-obligation of the non-providing father are two films featuring African-American families. In Are We There Yet? (2005), the biological father has a new family now and neglects the children from his previous marriage, breaking promises to see them. We

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are not told whether he pays maintenance, but the mother is shown struggling to hold down a job while trying to be the sole carer for her two children. This is shown as exacerbated when the father cancels an arranged visit at the last minute when the mother is required to be away on a workrelated trip. The mother’s job is threatened because she has no one to care for her children. The mother’s new boyfriend, Nick, volunteers to fill in for the father so the mother can go out of town to work. As sociologist Aasha Abdill (2018) remarks ‘the absence of a black father is somehow seen as worse than the absence of a white father’. This she connects to poor child outcomes within the Black community based on structural inequalities—structural inequalities that, she points out, affect the father as well as the child. Are We There Yet? (2005) reinforces this notion of greater consequences of father absence for Black families by its depiction of the mother as insufficient on her own to financially support the child while providing secure care. Abdill (2018) found advice to Black men in childcare centres and kindergartens in Brooklyn to support a deficit model of Black fatherhood by portraying the ‘responsible’ and involved Black father as atypical. Advice urging Black fathers to ‘step up’ is couched not in terms of conformity to norms but in nonconformity to typical Black fatherhood. Fathers are urged not to be deadbeat dads ‘like the rest of those fathers out there’ (Abdill 2018, conclusion). The concern with deadbeat dads found in films of the ’80s such as E.T. (1982) and The Karate Kid (1984) (see Chapter 2) continued into the 2000s for Black fathers in this discourse of the missing Black father. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama, addressing a largely Black congregation in Chicago, said that too many fathers had ‘abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men’. He went on: ‘You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all Black children live in single-parent households’ (Obama 2008). The venue for this speech indicates the association of deficit fatherhood with the Black community—something that drew comment and criticism at the time. In this film set, it may be seen as reinforcing the greater virtue of the White father—since he is always redeemable and redeemed by the movie’s end, even in films Getting Even with Dad (1994) and Real Steel (2011) where the fathers are portrayed as ‘deadbeat dads’. The redemption of these white deadbeat dads does not involve them becoming either good breadwinners or caregivers (see Chapter 8).

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The boyfriend protagonist in Are We There Yet? (2005) reinforces the representation of a deficit Black fatherhood when he says to the children: ‘the same thing happened to me when I was your age. They [fathers] make you laugh. They tell you they love you. And then one day they just never come back’. This inclusive use of ‘they’ creates fathers—or at least Black biological fathers—as unreliable. Though a failure of the father to provide is implied by the mother’s need to work (a need that is not shown in films featuring separated White parents), the biological father’s central failure is constructed as his failing to want to spend time with the children. This is established in a scene where the boyfriend (the film’s protagonist) speaks to the children about their father. Speaking of the biological father, he says: ‘He’s the failure, not you. He’s the one who’s gonna miss out’. The Longshots (2008), also featuring a Black family, is based on the biography of Jasmine Plummer who at eleven became the first girl to play football in the youth league in the Pop Warner tournament at the Super Bowl. In this movie, the protagonist is the biological father’s brother Curtis. He is jobless and they live in Minden, Illinois, a town with high unemployment due to the closure of the town’s factory. Jasmine’s biological father is portrayed as an irredeemably irresponsible father who has not seen Jasmine for 5 years, and her mother as having to work long hours as a waitress in a diner. This leaves Jasmine alone a lot and the mother offers to pay Curtis to spend time with Jasmine while she is at work. Curtis says of Jasmine’s absent biological father: ‘I’ve known Roy my whole life. All he’d do was run from his problems … All the mistakes I’ve seen him make, the biggest one was leaving you’. This construction of irredeemable Black fatherhood is found in only two of the films captured in this study. As Hamad (2014) argues, Black father protagonists in many of these films are shown to have ‘transcended’ race through education and financial success (see Chapter 2). These transcendent Black families are generally portrayed as integrated into what are otherwise White communities and so can be seen to reinforce White middle-class hegemony (Hamad 2014). There is little indication in the films that this transcendence requires overcoming structural barriers. In both Are We There Yet? (2005) and The Longshots (2008), there is implied obligation accruing to the father in the portrayal of the mother as struggling to secure the welfare of the child as she juggles work and nurture. Nonetheless, even in these two films, the failure of the biological father is constructed as a failure to ‘choose’ the child rather than a

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failure to provide for the child. As in the films featuring White deadbeat dads, the choice is shown as available and the possibility of father redemption through the choice of the child remains open. Black fathers are ‘irredeemable’ not because they do not provide, but because the films associate lack of provision with an irredeemable lack of virtue in narratives that do not end with the biological father making the ‘right choice’. I will argue in the next chapter, this failure to demonstrate the choice of the child is the central failure of the father, and this failure is constructed primarily as a failure of responsibility-as-virtue.

References Abdill, AM 2018, Fathering from the margins, Columbia University Press, New York. Are we there yet? 2005, film, Revolution Studios- Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. Beethoven 1992, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Bovens, M 1998, The quest for responsibility, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Cheaper by the dozen 2003, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Child Family Communities Australia (CFCA) 2014, ‘Understanding child neglect’ no. 20, April, . Daddy’s home 2015, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Despicable me 2010, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. E.T. the extra-terrestrial 1982, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Fluke 1995, film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Fraser, N 2013, Fortunes of feminism, Verso Books, London. Furry vengeance 2010, film, Summit Entertainment, Universal City, California. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Hamad, H 2014, Postfeminism and paternity in contemporary US film, Routledge, Ney York. Hook 1991, film, Amblin Entertainment—Tristar Pictures-Sony Pictures, Universal City, California. Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California.

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Jack Frost 1998, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Jingle all the way 1996, film, 1492 Pictures-Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Kramer vs. Kramer 1979, film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. McNulty Norton, D 2021 ‘The responsibilised “agent” and other statuses’, Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520986037. Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Night at the museum 2006, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Obama, B 2008, ‘Obama’s Father’s Day remarks’, The New York Times, 15 June 2008, . Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Pleck, JH 2007, ‘Why could father involvement benefit children?’, Applied Development Science, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 196–202, https://doi.org/10.1080/108 88690701762068. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, https://doi.org/10. 1177/S003803850000047X. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. The game plan 2007, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Incredibles 2004, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. The karate kid 1984, film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. The longshots 2008, film, Cube Vision—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West Hollywood, California. The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Three men and a baby 1987, film, Interscope Communications—Touchstone— NBC, Burbank, California.

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van de Poel, I 2011, ‘The relation between forward-looking and backwardlooking responsibility’, in N Vincent, I van de Poel, & J van den Hoven (eds), Moral responsibility, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 37–52, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_3. van de Poel, I 2015, ‘Moral responsibility’, in I van de Poel, L Royakkers, & SD Zwart (eds), Moral responsibility and the problem of many hands, Routledge, New York, pp. 12–49.

CHAPTER 8

Locating Blame

In Chapter 7, I argue that the failure of the father is not rendered as a failure based in responsibility for breadwinning and I find no evidence that there has been a shift to a construction of father failure as a failure of nurture. Nonetheless, there is an implication of blame or answerability that attaches to the ‘failing’ father in films of father redemption since failure is failure to fulfil some expectation. In order to locate the source of the expectation implied by the father’s ‘failure’, this section investigates discourses that attribute blame within the films for what they reveal about the nature of father obligation. Exploring discourses of responsibility-asblame through the different ‘routes’ to obligation, I find that the central failure of the fathers in these films is a failure to choose the child and that this is not constructed as a failure of ‘father’ task or responsibility, but a failure of ‘individual’ virtue. Such a finding is congruent with a late-modern context in which ‘individual agency’ is constructed in terms of choice and answerability for choice. In the section Obligation based on virtue, I consider the conflict between the requirement for the individual to choose virtuously and that of the father to choose ‘freely’, and its resolution in a pure relationship that is chosen for its own rewards. In the section Responsibility for securing the father–child relationship, I turn the focus from the father to the other family members. Consideration is given to how discourses within the film attribute responsibility for the creation and maintenance of the intimate father–child relationship © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_8

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(and connected to that for the redemption of the father) to the mother and child. Contrasting later films with Harwood’s (1997) analysis of ’80s films, this section explores the shift away from the attribution of responsibility (and blame) to the mother for securing the father and considers whether this responsibility has shifted from the mother to the child.

Routes to Obligation As discussed in earlier chapters, many of the films connect lack of relationship to failure to choose the child when faced with the demands of the corporate workplace for the unencumbered individual. This failure is often portrayed as tied to the father’s ambition (Hook 1991; Beethoven 1992; Fluke 1995; The Santa Clause 1994; Liar Liar 1997; Jack Frost 1998; The Haunted Mansion 2003; Cheaper by the Dozen 2003; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011) or result from the father’s reluctant acceptance of workplace demands (Ghost Dad 1990; RV 2006). The modern corporate workplace is thereby created as at least partly responsible-as-cause for the failure of the father. Nonetheless, ultimately, responsibility-as-blame in these films is shown to reside with the father for choosing the workplace or his own career ambitions over the child. In Imagine That (2009), the father says ‘I messed up’ because he chose career goals instead of the child. In Furry Vengeance (2010), the father goes further ‘I got my priorities completely out of order … I was just trying to further my career’. In Liar Liar (1997), another career-focused father says: ‘I’m a dolt … I love you more than anything else in the world’. In other films, this admission takes the form of apology as in Jingle All the Way (1996), ‘You two mean more to me than anything. I’m sorry I haven’t shown that lately’. The fathers in these films acknowledge both the blame and their obligation to construct themselves as autonomous reflexive ‘agents’ exercising their choice of the child. Responsibility-as-blame implies that these fathers have the capacity to resist the constraints and demands of the workplace as well as the obligation to do so. This is not to deny that these constraints exist—or even that meeting these work demands is not also an obligation of the father (as ‘worker’). In these discourses, failure is cast as a problem of individual men rather than a result of structural arrangements of paid and domestic labour that are profoundly gendered. It is up to the father, these discourses imply, to find an individual solution. In general, the resolution

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offered in the films is for the father to seek greater workplace autonomy so he is not answerable to a higher authority within the workplace. In films in which the father already has autonomy at work, the solution lies in a reorientation of his priorities that is demonstrated by ‘choosing’ the child. Van de Poel (2015) discusses three ‘routes’ to obligation and so potentially to blame. The first is through responsibilities that are assigned based on status (what van der Poel terms ‘role’); the second is obligations based on promises or commitments; and the third, obligations based on ‘virtue’. The third route—the virtue route—attributes responsibility to any ‘virtuous agent’ when a normatively desirable outcome is achievable by an individual, and this relies on a generalised requirement for individuals to exercise good judgement in their choices (van de Poel 2015, p. 31). I consider these three in turn in the following sections by exploring filmic discourses in which the father is blamed or held to account.

Obligations Based on Being a Breadwinner Only two films, Ghost Dad (1990) and RV (2006), directly acknowledge the structural requirements for the father to provide for his family and the conflict this creates for a father who is also presenting himself as freely choosing. I have already spoken in Chapter 5 of the political subtext of Ghost Dad (1990) that aligns the unreasonable work expectations and poor social security net with American Republicanism. I noted there that, nonetheless, choosing to build closeness with the children is constructed as the ‘right’ choice despite the dire financial consequences of this for the family. RV (2006) starring Robin Williams is a family comedy that shows a father trying to balance his family’s demand that he spend time with them on holiday with his boss’s demand that he attend an important meeting. Bob tricks his family into believing he has cancelled their planned holiday in Hawaii in favour of taking a road trip so that he can ‘spend more time’ with them. He tells his wife: ‘I’m running out of time with my kids’ but uses the road trip to disguise his need to attend a meeting across the country. Comedic sequences showing the city-family coping with life on the road are interspersed with shots of Bob secretly working on his computer in camping-ground bathrooms while coping with a lack of internet availability. When the family discover his deceit, he makes a speech in defence of the father-provider:

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‘Life is hard. Not the-TiVo-is-not-working-in-my-room hard—Making-a living-because-you-are-responsible-for-the-people-you-love hard’. In this speech, he explicitly claims his responsibility for earning the family income and asks the family to acknowledge the constraints this puts on him. In doing so, RV challenges the attribution of blame and invites the audience to view the father’s situation as ‘no-win’. His male colleagues assure him he has no choice but to do what the boss says while agreeing that this will end in his divorce. In one scene, we see the father bullied by his boss. The father, Bob, sits on a chair in the middle of a large bare room while his boss stands over him. Camera angles switch between close-up shots of the boss framed upwards from Bob’s lower position so that they enhance the size of the boss and create him as looming over the father—and wider shots looking down from above and behind the boss that diminish the size of Bob. The boss is jabbing his finger to emphasise his insistence that Bob will cancel his Hawaiian vacation if he wants to keep his job. When the family discover his deceit, Bob speaks of the family’s collusion (and therefore their responsibility) in creating this demand that he make his boss happy and keep his job. He points out their investment in his role as provider: that the daughter wants to go to Stanford; that the son is going on a camping trip to Alaska; that his wife wanted the expensive fixer-upper they own. These demands fuel the father’s need to keep his job, but his deceit is shown as based in a reluctance to be seen as a ‘failure’ in front of his family—and here it is unclear whether the film associates the ability to provide and ‘succeed’ in the workplace with successful masculinity or successful fatherhood. Having raised the issue of the father’s responsibility as provider, and the conflicts this creates for family life, RV veers away from engagement with this issue. The family do not acknowledge their own need for him to protect his job or accept that the father ‘has to’ work. When he calls on his family for help: ‘I have to get to that meeting or I lose my job, and we lose a lifestyle’, they refuse. Rather than acknowledging the family’s need for the father to keep his job, the film goes on to construct him as cowardly and less masculine for his submission to the demands of his boss. Though acknowledging the institutional constraints involved, the film constructs an individual solution when Bob chooses to lose his job. However, I want to distinguish this film from those that can be seen to locate the problem as primarily an individual problem—one in which the cause can be found within the flawed character or poor choices of the father (such as the

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‘irresponsibility’ of the father in Mrs Doubtfire [1993] or the ambition of the father in Liar Liar [1997] and Imagine That [2009]). In RV (as in Ghost Dad 1990), responsibility-as-cause is clearly assigned to the workplace. In shifting from the workplace as ‘responsibility-as-cause’ to the requirement that Bob accepts responsibility for his choice and correct his behaviour, RV reflects the demand within an individualised society to attribute ‘blame and responsibility’ to individuals as ‘active shapers of their own lives’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 24) regardless of causal responsibility. This ‘culturally binding mode of attribution’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 24) rests on the attribution of autonomy to the status of ‘individual’ as ‘empowered agent’. Bob’s children teach Bob that, rather than submitting to the demands of higher-status men, his role as the suitably masculine man and as reflexive ‘individual’ requires that he demonstrate a greater personal autonomy. Bob’s decision to rebel against the large national company he works for comes when his daughter tells him that she ‘gets it’, that she understands that ‘sometimes if you want to succeed, you have to just do what they tell you’. His young son then stands up to the overbearing boss in a physical confrontation. These events inspire Bob to reassert his ‘masculinity’ and individual autonomy by sabotaging the deal he was supposed to secure (at the cost of his job), and the happy and united family drives away in the recreational vehicle.

Obligations Based on Commitments Given In this section, the second route by which obligations are conferred is considered, that of promises and commitments (van de Poel 2015). It is in response to obligations the father has assumed (by making promises) that mothers frequently attempt to hold the father to account, as in the film Jack Frost (1998): ‘How many times have I told you. If you’re not going to be there, don’t say you’re going to be there’; or in Jingle All the Way (1996) after the father misses his son’s karate class: ‘Don’t explain it to me. It wasn’t my karate class you missed’; or in Liar Liar (1997) when the father is late to collect his son from his home, and the mother asks sarcastically: ‘Did you have any trouble finding the place?’ There is also at times an implication that a commitment was made in the decision to become a father. In Imagine That (2009), when the father cannot find time for his daughter (though he’d promised to care for her for the week) the mother asks, ‘Evan, why did you tell me you even wanted to

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have children?’ The implied obligation here is not just connected with the promise made but harks back to an earlier commitment made by the father in choosing to become a father. Yet spending time with the child, when this is framed as an obligation based on a promise or commitment, is shown to be insufficient and even counter-productive to the redemption of the father since it has little power to compel the father. This can be seen in the lack of father responsiveness to the mothers’ prompts to spend time with the child to prevent the child from feeling hurt by broken promises or from lack of father attention (Ghost Dad 1990; Hook 1991; The Santa Clause 1994; Jingle all the Way 1996; Liar Liar 1997; Jack Frost 1998; The Haunted Mansion 2003; Evan Almighty 2007; Imagine That 2009). Redemption is not rendered as the ability to honour commitments in these films. Indeed, Jungle 2 Jungle (1997) demonstrates that spending time with the child when done as an obligation based on a commitment or a concern that the child not be hurt by broken promises does not redeem the father. The film makes this explicit when the father inadvertently expresses his reason for having the son stay with him (for a short visit) in terms of ‘obligation’ based on a promise he gave. The father, Michael, is persuaded by the mother (they are divorced) to take the son home with him to New York for a visit after casually making a promise to do so. When the father reveals his reason for allowing the visit in response to his son’s question: ‘Why did you bring me here [to New York]?’, the child runs away. There follows a scene where the father chases the distraught child down the busy streets of New York trying to retract what he said.

Obligation Based on Virtue In exploring responsibility-as-virtue, I want to return in this section to the argument of Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2000, 2016). Adult status, they find, confers a normative or ‘moral’ obligation to act responsibly. Adults are ‘morally accountable’ (2000, p. 789) and this confers a responsibilityas-obligation with regard to dependent children. As already noted in Chapter 2, Ribbens McCarthy, Edwards and Gillies found in their study of fathers and stepfathers that men frame their obligations in terms of financial provision and ‘eschewing individual pleasures’ while women focus ‘on accepting an inescapable responsibility for children and creating a stable family environment for them’ (p. 800). They conclude that moral obligation is not gendered, though the nature of the obligation is gendered

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and based on current social constructions of motherhood and fatherhood (2000, p. 791). It is noteworthy that in their description, father obligations are framed as choice—of choosing to eschew individual pleasures—and mother obligations are framed as acceptance of responsibility. This differential construction of the obligations of fathers and mothers aligns with that found within the films. I also find an accordance with their claim that, though the obligations are gendered, there is nonetheless also an obligation of adult individuals to ‘choose’ the child, regardless of gender. In this section, I explore how this adult obligation is formed (that is, the ‘route’ to obligation) and what it implies regarding the nature of the father–child relationship. The obligation I find in disengaged father films is the obligation to choose the relationship and the further requirement that this choice is based on ‘wanting’ the relationship. The obligation is not to nurture but to choose and I argue here that it is connected not to expectations associated with the ‘father’ based on child dependency but to expectations associated with the ‘individual’ based on the general expectation of ‘individuals’ within a society to act virtuously (as this is normatively understood). Responsibility-as-virtue requires an individual to both accept accountability for their choices and to display ‘good’ judgement in making a choice (van de Poel 2015). Fathers at the beginning of these films are primarily constructed as failing to make the ‘right’ choice but they are redeemed and their virtue is restored when they are shown to ‘choose’ the child. This creates the father as a responsible ‘individual’ by fulfilling the obligation of a competent member of society to make the right choice when faced with competing choices. It is this choice—or rather making the normatively ‘right’ choice—that redeems the father as virtuous and it is through this route to obligation that the father as an individual can be seen to have an obligation. Responsibility-as-virtue requires the exercise of judgement, in particular the exercise of judgement when faced with ‘a plurality of normative demands’ (Williams cited in van de Poel 2015, p. 30). The virtuous father is a father who puts his children’s desire for intimacy before his own ambitions or workplace obligations. This is acknowledged when in Liar Liar (1997), the father accepts blame (and acknowledges lack of virtue) when, unable to tell a lie, he surprises himself by announcing, ‘I am a bad father’—or in The Shaggy Dog (2006) when the father accepts blame for his previous inattention to his children: ‘I’m a terrible man’. These fathers are claiming an intrinsic fault—a lack of virtue, in contrast

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to discourses where mothers acknowledge regret for their actions as in Beethoven (1992): ‘It [delegating care] was a mistake, and it won’t happen again’. While it is the choice that constructs the father as virtuous, it is the wanting to spend time together that dignifies the father’s choice as free. In Liar Liar (1997), the crisis point occurs when the father discovers to his own surprise that he ‘really wants to’ see his son, Max. In Getting Even with Dad (1994), the father’s potential love interest, Theresa, urges Ray to decide what he ‘really wants’. When Ray leaves Timmy on the bus and is walking away, it is this consideration of what he really wants that has him turning back. In Hook (1991), it is when Peter Pan realises that all he’s ever really ‘wanted’ was to be a father. Though the father may need to spend sufficient time with the child to learn to ‘want’ to be with them, father intimacy is not displayed through the performance of nurture or in the quantity of time spent with family, but in a choice that is based on the pure desire for the child’s company— the ‘want’. Dermott discusses the relationship of time spent with a child and the construction of the intimate father and finds that many accounts of modern fatherhood ‘misrecognise[s] the relevance of time in negotiating intimate relationships’ (Dermott 2008, p. 141). This misrecognition relates to the association of time spent with children and the development of intimacy. Dermott challenges the assumption that the development of intimacy requires a great amount of time spent together. Quality is more important than quantity in the development of intimate relationship—and the quality of relationship, she claims, is signified not by time spent with the other but by ‘Wanting to spend time with someone’ (Dermott 2008, p. 142, emphasis in original). The father becomes a good father when he becomes the ‘virtuous father’, one who makes the ‘right’ choice—not because of obligation conferred by his status as a father, nor because of commitments he has made, but by establishing an intimate relationship with the child that causes him to ‘want to’ spend time with the child. Once the father learns to want to spend time with the child, the father will make the ‘right’ choice out of his own desire to be with the child. A good father then is constructed in these films as one who chooses to spend time with his child for the sake of his own emotional satisfaction rather than one who performs responsible fatherhood. This intimacy based on ‘wanting’ to spend time with the child carries no implication that the father has a responsibility to carry out nurturing

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or breadwinning tasks. Indeed, it operates in opposition to any implication of responsible care since ‘responsibility’ (with its implication of the ‘dependency’ of children) would diminish the purity of the choice. I argue that this ‘wanting’ valorises the relationship: the relationship is legitimised and made ‘special’ by being constructed as pure where this is understood as untainted by obligations based in dependency, on commitments made, or on expectations connected to the father-as-status. This allows for the construction of the father as an ‘autonomous’ individual. This construction aligns with the traditional rendition of White American masculinity, the American cowboy, as well as the more recent ideals of the neoliberal individual and worker.

Responsibility-as-Virtue and the Cowboy Father While the virtuous choice for the father is expressed as a choice of the child, the choice the father makes in many films is not only in favour of father–child relationship, but against the corporate workplace rendered as materialistic and morally deficient. Having acquired virtue, the father is shown to be unable to continue to collude with corrupt or immoral work practices. While many films package the two into one (Hook 1991; Jingle All the Way 1996; Jungle 2 Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011), thus obscuring the turn against a morally compromised corporate America in the turn towards the family, in other films, this choice ‘against’ is foregrounded, with the resolution dependent not on a realisation of the father’s love for his children, but on his explicit rejection of corporate values (Dr Dolittle 1998; RV 2006; Furry Vengeance 2010; Real Steel 2011). In these films, the father ultimately rejects the corporate world, not because it interferes with family time, but because it opposes the American (masculine) values of autonomy, independence and a rejection of materialism. These fathers, redeemed, reprise the attributions of the American cowboy identified by Eric Hobsbawm (2013): self-reliance, autonomy, a rejection of materialism, and the defence of the frontier against the coming of the big corporations. In RV (2006), as the family traverses the country in their hired recreational vehicle, the at-first-reluctant city children find value in nonmaterialistic pursuits in the American hinterland, and the family is shown to grow closer. At camping grounds along the way, they meet an idealised

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‘close’ family that spends their life on the road. At first mocked as hillbillies, they are seen in the end to be ‘honest, good people’ untainted by materialism, and their ‘innocent’ home-schooled children are portrayed as educationally advanced compared with Bob’s city children. The distinction between the families is echoed by the contrast between the large national corporation Bob works for and the small local company it wishes to acquire. In the end, Bob advises the small company not to accept the takeover despite the immediate monetary rewards it will bring because it will mean they will lose their autonomy. Dr Dolittle (1998) also frames the father’s choice in terms of the defence of small independent business and individual autonomy against large corporations and materialism. In Dr Dolittle, though the father’s transformation brings him closer to his youngest daughter, the main plot points of the film are those that support the end goal of the father’s rejection of the HMO (Health Maintenance Organisation)’s offer to buy out the independent medical clinic he and his partners own. This choice between individualism and corporate values is established in the beginning of the film when his wife cautions him: ‘You sell—they own you’. Though the mother argues in favour of independence, the father is tempted by the offer which will bring his family greater wealth. The father’s position within the family in this film is never really in jeopardy. There is some attempt to establish the large company as family-unfriendly: the meeting to discuss terms is scheduled for a Saturday and the reluctant partner says: ‘See it’s happening already. You’re being forced to neglect your family’, but this is said lightly and is not supported by other plot developments. A false assertion that ‘the more money you have, the more time you get to spend with your family’ is established as a stalking horse by the father, but again the film does not follow through, and the falsity is never established. Instead, the father finds other reasons to reject the HMO’s offer when he is convinced by a dog (he can talk to animals) and his youngest daughter that he should be true to who he is. He decides to retain the clinic as an independent business because it provides him with the autonomy he needs to retain his unique identity. As Hobsbawm (2013, ch. 22) points out, cowboy ideals also have a dark side: the defence of the White Anglo-Saxon American against the immigrant of ‘lower races’. This element of the cowboy ideology is evident in movies Furry Vengeance (2010) and Real Steel (2011). In Furry Vengeance, the father works for a property development company that invests in turning undeveloped land into housing estates. The small

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town White inhabitants with their traditional American values and flannel shirts are being bamboozled by the slick lies of property developers, represented in the film by Indian character Mr. Gupta and an unpleasant Chinese-American character named Mr. Lyman (who tell lies). Gupta and Lyman want to kill all the animals in the development because ‘less animals, less hassle’. Both these ‘foreign’ characters are notably smaller than the local inhabitants. In the end, they are defeated by the American wilderness itself when the animals battle against them. American cowboy ideals are also set in opposition to ‘foreign’ corporate interests in Real Steel (2011). Real Steel is set in the near future and is premised on the development of robot boxing as a sport. Biological father Charlie was a boxer and his career was destroyed by this development. Now the ‘winners’ in the world of boxing are the leading robot designer, a Japanese man, and his business partner, a Russian woman. Both are portrayed as arrogant and cold and display extreme wealth and a futuristic dress sense in contrast to Charlie’s blue-collar outfit of jeans and t-shirt. In the final confrontation, Charlie and his son Max go up against these two ‘foreigners’. The judges rule the Japanese designer’s robot as the technical winner—but the American crowd give the popular vote to Charlie and Max’s robot ‘Atom’. The crowd designates Atom as the ‘people’s champion’, an expression of particular resonance in a time of rising populism. In all four films (Dr Dolittle 1998; RV 2006; Furry Vengeance 2010; Real Steel 2011), the American wilderness serves as a setting for these modern-day cowboy heroes who, beholden to no one, represent the ‘ideal of individualist freedom’ pushing back against the big corporations which were always the cowboy’s enemy (Hobsbawm 2013, ch. 22). Like cowboys in 1930s to 1950s films, these fathers demonstrate responsibility-as-virtue by their affirmation of the traditional American values of individualism. The fathers in ’80s films (The Karate Kid 1984; E.T. 1982; Star Wars 1977) provided outsider father-substitutes for White children who had been abandoned by their own fathers (Traube 1992). In contrast, the cowboy fathers in Furry Vengeance and Real Steel use negative constructions of outsiders to redeem and reaffirm a gendered and racialised hierarchy of American personhood.

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Responsibility for Securing the Father–Child Relationship Before concluding the focus on discourses of responsibility, I wish to consider to what extent the turn towards a pure relationship is shown to confer responsibility on the mother and the child to establish or support the father–child relationship and to redeem the virtue of the father. As previously noted in Chapter 6, the father relationship and the obligations that surround it have in the past been conferred on the father based on his relationship with the mother, leading to an implied responsibility for the mother to secure and keep a husband as part of the mother’s overall obligation to ensure the child’s welfare. This assignment of responsibility for securing the father can be seen in top-earning films made in the ’80s and earlier decades (Harwood 1997). Harwood (1997) finds that fathers in ’80s films were most notable for their absence. Rather than attempting redemption of these absent biological fathers, plots in the ’80s centred on the need for mothers to attract alternative fathers, as in E.T. the extraterrestrial (1982) the top-grossing film of the eighties (Box Office Mojo) or Look Who’s Talking (1989). In E.T , the father is entirely absent as he has left the family in order to pursue a new relationship in Mexico. The mother is constructed as ‘to blame’ for the father absence (Harwood 1997, p. 158) and for the consequent sorrow and alienation of son Elliot. Elliot forms a special relationship with an alien who has been stranded on Earth. When the film ends (with Elliot having to say goodbye to father-substitute E.T.), there is an implied possibility of a new father for the family based on the potential for a romantic relationship between the mother and government agent ‘Keys’. By this means, not only is the mother constructed as responsible (as-blame) for the absence of the biological father but is made responsible for securing a new father for the family. In the highly successful 1989 film Look Who’s Talking, baby Mikey (voiced by Bruce Willis) sets about finding himself a perfect father (his biological father is married to another woman and has two children with her). To secure the father he wants, Mikey encourages a relationship between the man and his biological mother. In voiceover, Mikey declares he wants ‘James to be the Daddy’ so he must act to get ‘you two together’; he can secure the desired father only if the mother secures James’ affection. In another box office success of the late eighties, Three Men and a Baby (1987), alternate family forms are celebrated when three male friends

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who share an apartment are left to care for the biological baby of one of them in the mother’s absence. When the mother returns at the end of the movie, it is decided that she will also move in and they will all live as an extended family together. However, in the sequel Three Men and a little Lady (1990), the mother wants ‘a more normal environment’ for the child who is now five. The mother decides to marry to secure a nuclear family for little Mary and must secure the love of the ‘senior’ patriarch within the extended family (not the biological father) to secure the happy-ever-after ending. When he shows himself reluctant to commit, she agrees to marry a different man to provide the nuclear family she believes the child needs. This trope that implies that the mother has a responsibility to secure the father is not found in the films explored here. The change in nineties films to the centrality and singularity of the biological father relationship has removed the mother’s obligation to ‘extract [family] commitment from men’ (Kimmel 2010, p. 78). Nonetheless, in a number of the films, the mother’s tasks (whether cohabiting or separated) include urging the biological father to spend more time with his child. In this section, I examine discourses of obligation around the mother to determine shifts in mother obligation. In particular, whether there is a shift from the mother created as responsible for securing the father for the family to that of the mother having responsibility-as-obligation for ensuring the formation of father–child intimacy. I find that though she is shown to have responsibility-as-task, this does not lead to responsibility-as-obligation. In a number of films, the mother exhorts the father to spend time with the child for the sake of the father–child relationship (The Shaggy Dog 2006; Imagine That 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011) or for the sake of the child’s emotional welfare (Liar Liar 1997; Jungle 2 Jungle 1997). In other films, the mother urges the father to spend more time with the children for the father’s own happiness—because he is ‘missing’ the pleasures of fatherhood, as in Hook (1991) where the mother is speaking to the father of the few years where children want their parents’ company: ‘It’s a few years and it’s over. And you are not being careful. And you are missing it’. In Jack Frost (1998), the mother speaks also of the father missing out: ‘One of these days, Charlie’s gonna score his first goal and you won’t see it. Just like you never saw him with the measles. Or the time he jammed the Fig Newtons into the slide projector. You know, those things only happen once—then they’re gone’. Other films show the mother endeavouring to support the father–child relationship by

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requiring the father to take sole charge of the children for a short period (Jungle 2 Jungl e 1997; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009). Urging fathers to spend time with their children and facilitating this by creating and enabling time together is thereby constructed as a task that the mother performs and may be considered to imply a responsibility-astask. Nonetheless (with one exception discussed below), post-’90s family films do not discursively construct the mother as blameworthy when the father fails to spend time with the child or when there is a lack of father– child intimacy. The absence of blame discourses would imply that she does not carry the responsibility to ensure the relationship as outcome (that is, she has no responsibility-as-obligation). This may be because she is unable to achieve the outcome and cannot therefore be responsible for it: even if she ‘properly fulfils her supervisory duties’ this will not result ‘under normal circumstances’ in the desired outcome (van de Poel 2015, p. 35). She is unable to fulfil what van de Poel calls ‘the causality condition’: she cannot cause the outcome to come about. Although this can be seen as related to the shift in the socio-legal assignment of ‘fatherhood’ (away from relationship with the mother and towards a biological attribution of legal relationship) other factors might also be in play here. Aronson and Kimmel (2001, p. 44) discuss the decline of the Hollywood trope of the redemption of the male through the transformative power of a good woman’s love, ascribing this to a post-feminist inability to sustain belief in the ‘innocent and pure’ woman. Having gone out into the world, women lack the transformative power of innocence required to ‘tame’ the man and extract commitment (Aronson and Kimmel 2001). Citing Wexman, Harwood (1997, p. 61) emphasises the past ubiquity of the Final Romance trope in providing closure in Hollywood films—a closure that guarantees the happy-ever-after and offers social stability through the nuclear family unit. The promise of the ‘Final Romance’ (Harwood 1997, p. 61) is premised on a certain discourse of heterosexual relationship: one where the man accepts or is brought to accept responsibility, very often by the love of a good woman. Wendy Hollway (1984) calls this discourse of monogamy and family life (that positions men as objects of a woman’s desire for family life) the ‘have/hold’ discourse. To attain the man, a woman must be desirable (be a desirable object of the man’s choice) while to keep the woman, a man must commit. For a man to say ‘I love you’ within what Hollway has called the heterosexual ‘have/hold’ discourse is for him to make a

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commitment: and through that route accept responsibility towards the family. It is in this commitment that the ‘wild man’ is tamed. Father family films, since they feature the father as problem—a problem that threatens the stability of the family—undermine the guarantee of stability promised by the Final Romance. These films are not romances ending with the proposal and with screenshots of the wedding and of future progeny as the credits roll. These films begin five or ten years later, when the progeny are an actuality and the happy-ever-after is under threat. In the families of late-modernity, the family is not fixed, but is open to constant renegotiation and reflexive review, undermining the traditional guarantee offered by the formation of a nuclear family unit (Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). The assurance of security, the ‘stable generational future’ promised in the happy-ever-after Hollywood romance ending has not eventuated. When these father films begin, the mother has already demonstrated that she is incapable of ‘securing’ the father’s commitment. Though she is no longer ‘blamed’ for this, she is not able to fill that role. Aronson and Kimmel (2001) view the rise of father films in the nineties as resulting from the substitution of children for women within this trope of male redemption—so that children take on the responsibility for taming men, and they see this as indicating a backlash against women for abandoning their responsibility to tame men. Certainly, these family films have much in common with the traditional romance genre, including the requirement for the father to choose and to declare his choice with a new implication of a happy-ever-after (albeit one that is not tied to the nuclear family). These family films also mimic the traditional romance as regards the grounds of choice—the choice is in response to the growth of love/intimacy in a dyadic relationship. However, the happy-ever-after rests not on submission to the ‘have-hold’ discourse with its promise of responsibility and forever, but results from a desire for the relationship which must be sustained by delivering ‘enough satisfactions’ (Giddens 1992, p. 58) to both parties and ‘presumes equality’, at least in terms of emotional ‘give and take’ (Giddens 1992, p. 62). Yet by adopting the structure of a romance with its established trope of male choice, the films position the child as the object of choice—both available (always seeking the father’s love) and needing to demonstrate their desirability and so attract the father (where desirability is based on their ability to

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deliver satisfactions ). By this means, the child becomes responsible (astask) for securing the relationship. Since the redemption of the father rests on the child’s success at carrying out this task, there is a causal connection between the task and the redemption of the father with the positive benefits this brings to the father in terms of both virtue and self-actualisation. The child is thereby created as able to secure the outcome that the mother is not and this would imply an obligation on the child (by the virtue route). Nonetheless, I found no discourses of blame that assigned this obligation to the child. This could be due to the child’s status as ‘child’ which may not carry the same expectations to act responsibly. The Peter Pan ‘sequel’ film Hook (1991) makes explicit this movement from the woman to the child as male redeemer. Peter Banning (played by Robin Williams) is a grown up Peter Pan. The backstory reveals to us that baby Peter originally fled to Neverland to avoid ‘growing up’ when he heard his mother describe the future planned for him (education, marriage, a responsible job). He stayed an immortal child until he fell in love with Moira (the granddaughter of the original Wendy character in the play) and it was for love of her that he submitted to growing up and becoming a man and so left Neverland. In Neverland, all adult males are pirates and Peter became a pirate when he grew up, albeit a modern-day version: a corporate raider. He works all the time and misses important events in his children’s lives. The movie begins with him forced to return to Neverland to rescue his son and daughter who have been kidnapped by Captain Hook. In Neverland, there is a revelatory scene when he realises that it was not the love of Moira but his desire to be a father that had motivated him to grow up: ‘I know why I grew up—I wanted to be a father’. Being a father is his ‘happy thought’ that allows him to fly, and he chooses to grow up and leave Neverland again. In choosing for his son’s sake to grow up again (he also has a younger daughter but she seems incidental—the focus is on the father–son relationship), he can return to the world, no longer the workaholic pirate, but a fun-loving playmate father. He is no longer acting from the obligations of his status as father or the commitment made within a heterosexual have/hold discourse, but out of the desire to spend time with the child. In a number of films, children act to ensure they spend time with the father in order to demonstrate the more intrinsic rewards of relationship and so attract the father’s choice, and both boys and girls are shown to be active in this. In Getting Even with Dad (1994), the biological father has committed a robbery. Son, Timmy, hides the stolen rare coins and

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blackmails his father: Timmy will return the coins if the father spends time with Timmy, going to sports games and museums and pretending ‘you like having me around’. In The Game Plan (2007), the daughter lies to her guardian and carer aunt (who thinks she is at ballet camp) and visits her father, telling him that her (deceased) mother has deposited her at his apartment. Forced to spend time with their children, all the fathers come to want to spend time with them. Other films show children trying to connect with the father by sharing his interests and enabling his career success (Imagine That 2009; Real Steel 2011). The narrative of the child who acts to secure time with the father rests on the trope of the innocent wisdom of the child who knows (or at least hopes) that time together will allow intimacy to develop and perhaps that this will help the father. In some films, the development of intimacy (and the resultant virtuous choice made by the father) is required in order to save the father: from going back to jail in Getting Even with Dad (1994); from a downward spiral leading to destitution in Real Steel (2011); from overweening ambition that has caused the father to act immorally (Hook 1991; The Shaggy Dog 2006; Liar Liar 1997; Furry Vengeance 2010; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011). Again, no blame attaches to the child for any failure to secure intimacy or to secure time with the father. The films generally construct the actions of the child, not as responsibilityas-obligation to save or redeem the father, but in terms of their own quest for intimacy with their father—in service to their own desire for a relationship with the father, a desire that is constructed as a given for all children. I noted above that the films post-1990 do not assign responsibility-asobligation (blame) to the mother; however, there was one exception. In Daddy’s Home (2015), the most recent of the films analysed, we can see in the epilogue an implication of responsibility cast on the mother for the absence of the biological father. This story is of a stepfather, Brad, and a biological father engaged in a competition to be the ‘daddy’. It ends with the stepfather as co-parent in the home and the biological father, Dusty, retaining his masculinity and autonomy while living in a separate house down the street. In the epilogue, however, Dusty has remarried and now has a stepchild of his own. Though he was unwilling to sacrifice his masculinity to become a hands-on dad to his own children, we are shown that a year or two later, he has remarried, traded his motorbike for a family car, and is now competing with the biological father of his

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new stepdaughter to win his stepdaughter’s acceptance as a ‘dad’. The film associates his new willingness to be a hands-on dad in the home— to ‘take the shit’ as the film casts domestic ‘dadhood’—to result from the superiority of his new wife, Karen. Karen is rendered as an ‘upgrade’ on the mother, Sara. Sara is shown to be intimidated by Karen who ‘looks so young’ and is more accomplished (Karen is both a doctor and a ‘celebrated novelist’). We then see the arrival of Karen’s ex-partner (the father of her child) on a motorbike that is much larger than Dusty’s old motorbike. He is so large and muscled that Brad says ‘he’s got legs for arms’. As the credits roll, we see Dusty faced with the position that was previously Brad’s— of being the softer ‘less masculine’ stepfather in competition with the more masculine biological father. Though this reprises the trope of the successful woman able to tame the wild man and secure his care of the children, success is not dependent here on the trope of the innocence or virtue of the ‘good woman’. Instead it is rendered in terms of higher education and greater career success (combined as previously with physical attractiveness). This may reflect current trends in assortative mating (De Hauw et al. 2017). Equally it may reflect a ‘devaluing’ of mothers on the marriage market along with a higher value placed on masculinity rendered as autonomy and physical hardness. Daddy’s Home (2015) is the only film of the set that carries an implication that the mother may be responsible for securing the father for the child, and this occurs only in the epilogue.

Conclusion Intimate relationship, considered as a ‘pure relationship’, grounds the development of love not on obligation that is based in dependency but on reciprocity and a willingness to be mutually vulnerable (Giddens 1992). I have shown how the films use discourses of responsibility (and failure of responsibility) to affirm the father’s autonomy and to construct the relationship with the child as ‘chosen’ and free from any obligation based in the child’s dependency. Though the father bears the general adult responsibility associated with the status of ‘individual’ to make normatively virtuous choices, he is constructed as free from particular ‘parental’ responsibilities or obligations associated with a child’s need for care. The father’s choice of the child created as free from obligation and based on ‘wanting’ to spend time with the child elevates the value of the relationship by creating it as ‘authentic’.

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The mechanisms identified in the previous chapter that free the father from responsibility are: the creation of the child when in the ‘care’ of the father as self-sufficient, and the construction of the mother as both responsible for and sufficient to guarantee the child’s welfare. While the pure father construction places new demands on the mother (to be sufficient) and the child (to deliver satisfactions sufficient to inspire the father to ‘want’ to spend time with them), the films do not discursively attribute responsibility-as-obligation or blame to the mother (since the mother is unable to secure the relationship). I also found no voluntaristic discourses attributing blame to the child for failure to secure the father–child relationship. This lack of blame can be ascribed to the status of the child as ‘child’ and so not accountable as a responsibilised individual. Nonetheless, the films associate poor father outcomes with the child’s failure to accomplish the task of redemption. In an adult ‘individual’, this would create the condition of responsibility-as-obligation. The formation of the pure father–child relationship and the redemption of the father rests on the father learning to ‘want’ to spend time with the child. This want is based in the satisfactions available from relationship with the child. A number of films of the late 2000s and early 2010s (Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; We Bought a Zoo 2011; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011; Real Steel 2011) have begun to problematise the father as a poor communicator. The lack of communicative competence interferes with the development of disclosing intimacy. In the next chapter, I explore this shift. I also further examine the role of the agentic (voiced) child and the innocent wise child (who speaks truth) in the redemption of the father.

References Aronson, A & Kimmel, M 2001, ‘The saviors and the saved: masculine redemption in contemporary films’, in P Lehman (ed.), Masculinity, Routledge, New York, pp. 43–50. Beck, U 1992, Risk society, Sage, London. Beck, U & Beck-Gernsheim, E 1995, The normal chaos of love, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Beck, U & Beck-Gernsheim, E 2002, Individualization, Sage, London. Beethoven 1992, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Box Office Mojo, . Cheaper by the dozen 2003, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California.

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De Hauw, Y, Grow, A & Van Bavel, J 2017, ‘The reversed gender gap in education and assortative mating in Europe’, European Journal of Population, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 445–474, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-016-9407-z. Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Daddy’s home 2015, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. E.T. the extra-terrestrial 1982, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Fluke 1995, film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Furry vengeance 2010, film, Summit Entertainment, Universal City, California. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Harwood, S 1997, Family fictions, St. Martin’s Press, New York. Hobsbawm, E 2013, Fractured times, Hachette, UK. Hollway, W 1984, ‘Gender difference and the production of subjectivity’, in J Henriques, W Hollway, C Urwin, C Venn, & V Walkerdine (eds), Changing the subject, Methuen, pp. 227–264, http://www.brown.uk.com/brownlibr ary/WEN2.htm. Hook 1991, film, Amblin Entertainment—Tristar Pictures-Sony Pictures, Universal City, California. Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Jack Frost 1998, film, Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Jingle all the way 1996, film, 1492 Pictures-Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Kimmel, M 2010, Misframing men, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, USA. Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Look who’s talking 1989, film, Tristar Pictures—Sony Pictures, Culver City, California. Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, https://doi.org/10. 1177/s003803850000047x.

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Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2016, Making families: moral tales of parenting and step-parenting, Routledge, Oxon, UK. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. Star wars: episode IV 1977, film, Lucasfilm - Twentieth Century Fox, San Francisco, California. The game plan 2007, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The haunted mansion 2003, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The karate kid 1984 film, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Culver City, California. The Santa clause 1994, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Three men and a baby 1987, film, Interscope Communications—Touchstone— NBC, Burbank, California. Three men and a little lady 1990, film, Touchstone Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Traube, EG 1992, Dreaming identities, Westview Press, Boulder, USA. van de Poel, I 2015, ‘Moral responsibility’, in I van de Poel, L Royakkers, & SD Zwart (eds), Moral responsibility and the problem of many hands, Routledge, New York, pp. 12–49. We bought a zoo 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California.

CHAPTER 9

Voice

In this chapter, consideration is given to having a ‘voice’ in the construction of family. Voice here is understood to indicate participation in the process of constructing and conveying judgements and expectations and so affecting the behaviour of others and the operations of social institutions. Though agency as responsibility can be explored within voluntaristic discourses that express blame or assign tasks, ‘having a voice’ is revealed in the privileges and restrictions that circumscribe not only what may be spoken but who may be heard. Status-associated expectations regarding the ‘right’ to a voice in decision-making are shown in the voicing of preference but also in the extent to which this counts for something. Attention has already been given in Chapter 4 to restrictions around what may be spoken by a competent ‘agent’ in an individualised society (in which competence requires a display of autonomy enacted within voluntaristic scripts of individual responsibility). This restriction with respect to the father (as noted within the earlier chapters) is displayed in the requirement for the father to take personal responsibility for his ‘choices’ rather than to assign the work–family conflict to structural factors. Although this is an issue of agency as voice since it imposes constraints on what can be said, it will not be further explored in this chapter. Instead this chapter turns to an exploration of the manner in which voice is used within the family to construct family relationships. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_9

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The intimate pure relationship is achieved in the films when the father learns to ‘want’ to spend time with the child where this depends on the ‘satisfactions’ the relationship delivers. In an individualised society in which people are ‘persuaded to make meaning of their life as if it were the outcomes of individual choices made in furtherance of self-interest and self-actualisation’ (Baker 2008, p. 54), the desire for a relationship with the child is tied to the possibility that the relationship will further the self-interests and self-actualisation of the father. These benefits are linked in the films to the fathers’ ability to hear the child’s wisdom. Children, in their ‘innocence’, are constructed in the films as able to provide this wisdom by operating as the ‘locus of truth’ (Harwood 1997, p. 128). Attention is also given in this chapter to the ‘voiced child’. The greater focus on communication in films from the mid-2000s corresponds with a growing understanding of children as ‘agentic’—and this agency, as Oswell (2012) argues, is generally framed as a sanctioning of the child’s right to have a voice in decisions that affect them—to have a right to express an opinion and to be heard. The right to speak and be heard is understood here (based on Barnes 2000 model of status) as a privilege associated with the contemporary status of the ‘child’. This chapter investigates the sanctioning of the child’s voice in the films by exploring how children’s voices are used to restrict or effect access to the father. The shift to the agentic child is considered in relation to a shift within the films from the innocent child to the innocent animal as ‘locus of truth’.

The Pure Father---Learning to Listen and to Communicate Emotion In films of the 2000s and 2010s explored in this chapter, though the father is shown as virtuous or to become virtuous in wanting to spend time with his children, he is rendered as lacking the communicative competence that allows intimacy to develop. This is posed as a failure of skill—a failure to have the softer skills in communication and relationshipbuilding that would allow the father to connect with the children. This failure of skill is at times attributed to the father’s own upbringing, as in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), or linked to conventional expectations associated with ‘masculinity’ that impose constraints on disclosing vulnerability by voicing emotion (The Game Plan 2007; Imagine That 2009; Real Steel 2011).

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This failure of skill reflects Giddens’ (1992, p. 125) concern that men are at a disadvantage within an individualised society in which relationships are based on intimacy due to the traditional ‘reliance of men upon women for doing the work of creating intimacy’. A pure relationship based on intimacy relies on each person being ‘prepared to reveal concerns and needs to the other and to be vulnerable to that other’ (Giddens 1992, p. 62), something Giddens considers as more problematic for men. The films of the late 2000s and early 2010s can be seen to hinge on this concern that a masculine lack of emotional literacy is inimical to the development of a successful father–child relationship, and that central to this is the father’s inability to communicate: to show vulnerability and to listen to the child. By the late 2000s, with the release of The Shaggy Dog (2006) Imagine That (2009), Real Steel (2011) and Mr Poppers Penguins (2011), a failure to show vulnerability and to hear the child had become the central transgression of the failing father, and conversely, developing the ability to hear the child and communicate emotion had become the path to father redemption. In The Shaggy Dog, the father, when transformed into a dog, becomes the silent confidante of his children; in a pivotal scene in Mr Popper’s Penguins, the mother equates being a father with listening to the child: ‘Maybe she doesn’t want advice … maybe she just wants you to be her Dad and listen’; in Imagine That, the daughter follows her father into his work world in order to have him ‘hear’ her. In RV (2006), The Game Plan (2007), Real Steel (2011), Imagine That (2009) and Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), the fathers must also develop ‘emotional skilfulness’ understood following Warren et al. (2005) as ‘the ability to identify and communicate emotions’ (p. 219). In this section, I will explore in some detail how the films create hearing the child and communicating emotions (particularly emotional vulnerability) as central to good fathering. The 2011 release Real Steel tells the story of an ex-boxer who is offered the opportunity to claim custody of his eleven-year-old son after the death of the boy’s mother. Real Steel (2011) references the ‘70s boxing hit Rocky (1976) to such an extent that reviewer Todd McCarthy (2011) dubbed it ‘Rocky the Robot ’. This cross-genre film combines elements of the underdog sports film with family drama and science fiction. Produced by DreamWorks for Disney, who developed a merchandising stream based on action figures of the robots, the film disappointed expectations when it earned a PG + 13 rating. Unlike most family father films, Real Steel is not a comedy, and though family-friendly with regard to sex, language

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and drugs, there is significant violence within the film. While most of the violence involves robots boxing against each other, there is one scene where the son is pinned to the ground by an adult male and must watch while his father is beaten. Set in the near future, it tells the story of a could-have-been champion boxer who has been left behind by the turn to robot boxing and now makes a tenuous living on the carnival circuit pitting his robot against other robots for prize money. The scenes of oversized humanoid robots battering each other are held together by the story of the redemption of the father Charlie Kenton (played by Hugh Jackman) brought about by Max, the eleven-year-old son he has never met. When the film begins, the boy’s mother has just died, with the result that Max’s custody is open for contention. Max’s aunt on the mother’s side wishes to raise him, and Charlie sees this as a chance to extort money from her. He strikes a deal with the aunt’s wealthy husband in which he receives $100,000 for signing over custody of Max. The wealthy husband does not, however, want Max to interfere with his summer holiday plans and part of the arrangement is that Charlie ‘insist’ on keeping Max for the summer. Charlie is portrayed as uncaring and impatient with the boy, frequently putting him in physical jeopardy through a lack of ordinary protective care and because of the danger of his own lifestyle. Charlie is, as one character phrases it, ‘a bad bet’ who owes money to dangerous people and continually wastes the chances he is offered by his brash and boastful choices. When the film opens, his life has reached the bottom of a downward spiral, and the money he receives from Max’s uncle offers the possibility of another chance—one he immediately wastes. An alternative father figure is proffered when the boy is saved from falling off a cliff by being caught on the out-flung arm of a robot halfburied in the mud of a junkyard. The robot, named Atom, provides a parallel to the father Charlie. Like Charlie, the robot is unable to express his feelings since he has no voice, and like Charlie the robot has been junked when superseded by later models. Max has faith in the robot and decides to dig it out and repair it. This provides an analogy for (as well as the means by which) Max redeems the father. At first, Charlie thinks the outdated robot is a waste of time. Later, when Atom begins to win against larger and newer robots, Charlie takes an interest and the father and son begin to earn money from pitting Atom against larger robots in competitions.

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Real Steel is one of the ‘cowboy’ films discussed in the previous chapter. A loner, Charlie roams the American countryside in his truck, going from one minor-league fight to the next. Though set twenty years in the future, visually the film is set in the past, in the America of the fifties—the America of small-town carnivals, rural gas stations and brownstone gyms. The values too seem set in a past where blue-collar men cannot express themselves verbally but are resilient and ‘can take a hit’. Charlie is portrayed as fifties masculinity unreconstructed. He is taciturn, a braggart and a fighter who counts on his charm to repeatedly win the assistance of the lead woman character, Bailey. If Charlie is a model of fifties masculinity, Bailey is his feminine counterpart, standing by her man. The daughter of Charlie’s beloved and now deceased coach, Bailey is sometimes sister, sometimes mother, sometimes best friend and sometimes lover to Charlie. Her life is also steeped in nostalgia as she hangs on to the past, trying to keep her father’s dream, the old gym, going. Worn out by Charlie’s downwardly spiralling lifestyle, Bailey does make some attempt to sever the connection but ultimately is there whenever and in whatever capacity Charlie needs her. It is Bailey who takes on the traditionally female role of explaining the father (Langellier and Peterson 2011) to Max, telling him stories of Charlie’s glory days as a boxer before the sport was taken over by robots. Travelling across the country with his father and the robot, Atom, Max is shown to develop a relationship with the robot, who performs intimacy more successfully than the father. Although mute, Atom engages with the child because of a shadow function that allows him to faithfully mimic the movements of the person he is ‘shadowing’. When Max runs, Atom runs, when Max dances, Atom dances with him, and when Max looks into the robots ‘eyes’, the robot looks back. A close-up frames a shared look as a ‘Look’ as described by Sartre (1956)—one that recognises the subjectivity of the Other and is recognised in return. This shadowing is interpreted by Max as intimacy and the synchronisation of action between the two also conveys this to the audience, reflecting as it does the coordination of interaction signalling affinity that commonly occurs in social interaction (Macrae et al. 2008). The child understands the subjectivity of the robot as a shared secret, saying to Atom: ‘Your secret’s safe with me’. This moment is repeated with the biological father at the end of the film when, in a shot that mimics the earlier one, the father ‘Looks’ at Max and tries but is unable to articulate his feelings for the child. He repeats ‘I … I …’ but cannot finish the sentence and say ‘I love you’. The boy

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interrupts his fumbling attempts, using the same phrase he used to the robot: ‘Your secret’s safe with me’. Which begs the question of why the father’s feelings are secret: why his vulnerability, the vulnerability inherent in an intimate relationship, cannot be expressed in words, but affirms that the father’s lack of communicative competence is no longer a barrier to the relationship. The boy has recognised the father’s love and does not need to hear it spoken. While the film excuses the father from developing ‘feminine’ communication skills, allowing the father and son to establish intimacy without them, it places great importance on the father learning to ‘hear’ the child. After Charlie has turned over custody and Max has taken up residence with his aunt, Charlie comes to the house. When Charlie says he is sorry, Max challenges him: ‘That’s why you came? To say you’re sorry?’ the boy asks. His tone indicates that ‘sorry’ is not good enough. Charlie answers ‘No … I came to tell you that I heard you’ (the character places stress on the word ‘heard’). This is marked as the magical phrase that heals the past and allows Charlie to be rehabilitated as a father. Charlie has not come to claim or to contest custody of his son. He is still not supporting his son financially—indeed he is in no position to do so. Nor does he engage in any activity that could be seen as nurturing. He assures the aunt that he is not there to claim Max and asks her permission to take Max for one night only so they can go to the fight. But he has ‘heard’ the child and revealed vulnerability before the child and that is good enough. The admission of vulnerability is also found in The Incredibles (2004) where the father breaks down at the end of the film and reveals his vulnerability to the mother. In the final conflict with the evil villain of the film, the father refuses the help of his family. The mother challenges him when he insists that she and the children (all superheroes) wait in the car. He admits ‘I’m not strong enough … I cannot lose you again’. Having revealed emotional vulnerability, the father unites with the family and together they are able to defeat the enemy. In RV (2006), Bob reveals his vulnerability when he tells his family that he concealed the risk to his job because how they think about him is ‘the most important thing in the world’ to him and he didn’t want them to think he had failed. This unites the family behind the father. In Liar Liar (1997), the father cries as he tells Max he doesn’t think he will be able to cope if Max moves away. Box office hit Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011) further explores the theme of fatherhood as a requirement to listen and hear the child, and reveal his

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own emotional vulnerability. The film is based very loosely on a children’s book of the same name first printed in 1938 (Atwater and Atwater). Although the book also featured a father (a dreamer who brought his family to the brink of financial ruin because his desire for adventure resulted in him adopting a family of penguins), the film shares little with the book other than the penguins and their antics. The film version is a family comedy: interactions with the penguins supply the comedic elements. The father, Popper, is a high-powered, high-earning divorced man whose ex-wife is primary carer for their two children, though she works also for a non-profit organisation (it is unclear in what capacity or whether she is paid or unpaid, part-time or full-time). Popper and his children, a boy aged about 10 and a girl approximately 14, ‘have the most magical alternate weekends together’ as he satirically puts it. Popper’s work focus is not shown as the ‘cause’ of father disengagement. Rather, we see his focus on work as resulting from his inability to accept or reveal his emotional vulnerability. He is portrayed as isolated and lonely though highly successful at work. Popper (he is called Popper throughout the film, even by his children) is the son of an adventurer and his problems are portrayed as resulting from the absence of his own father, an absence that haunts Popper and impacts his own family relationships. Popper’s vulnerability is established in a series of vignettes in the opening scenes showing Popper as a child of varying ages, waiting in his bedroom for his father to call him on a ham radio. Popper senior was guilty of letting his son down: he was always chasing adventure in remote parts of the world and breaking promises to return or to call. Popper grows up to be a highly successful property buyer for a New York development firm, who plays on people’s desire for adventure and travel to convince owners to sell their properties. Popper’s life is disrupted when he receives the bequest of a penguin, a final ‘souvenir’ from his deceased adventuring father. Due to a mix-up when Popper tries to return it, the penguin is soon joined by five others. Popper’s vulnerability and loneliness continue to be disclosed to the audience along with his emotional dependence on his wife and children, even as he hides them from his family. When, early in the film, his daughter does not wish to visit him on the scheduled weekend because of his failure to respond appropriately to emotional communication (when she tries to speak with him about a boy she likes), he is shown returning to his apartment alone carrying bags of gifts. Passing the doorman, he

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explains his children’s absence by saying ‘they don’t like me right now’. Alone in his apartment, Popper is a figure of pathos as he places the bags of toys on the dining table, then straightens the alignment of the chair in his perfectly ordered apartment. The loneliness is highlighted by the cold sterility of his apartment, the blue tones of the furnishings shadowed in this scene to shades of grey—a stark contrast to the warm reds and golds of the family home he has just come from where children’s drawings inhabit the fridge door and sunshine pours in through lace curtains. His lack of human contact is reinforced in the next scene when he wakes on Monday morning saying ‘Monday. Thank God’. Popper’s sadness is revealed also to the audience when his father dies, but he dismisses the attempts of his ex-wife and his father’s lawyer to offer sympathy or comfort, insisting he is ‘fine’. Though the film depicts Popper as aware of his own loneliness, he is unable to communicate his emotions and his constant response to any attempts by others to have him express his own emotional state is ‘I’m fine’. This is shown to block emotional intimacy with others, particularly with his ex-wife and daughter. The ex-wife draws away in rejection when he refuses to disclose vulnerability, and he struggles to overcome his lack of emotional skilfulness in order to build a better relationship with his daughter. Communication with his son is, in comparison, unproblematic: possibly by reason of age or gender, their interaction is uncomplicated by a need to be heard or to listen as they engage in physical play and bond over balls. Initially we see the son greet his father by showing him his latest soccer ‘power shot’, which Popper catches in the groin. As Popper doubles up, the son grabs his own genitals and groans in empathy. In another scene, when Popper’s daughter enters the living room, the two males huddle together to watch her. The father asks the son to interpret the daughter: ‘What are we looking at?’ The son talks of her in terms of explosives: ‘95 pounds of C4 explosives on a hair trigger’ and advises the father not to cut the wrong wire. As the story progresses, the son continues to help the father in his communications with his daughter, filling him in on important information such as the name of her best friend. The mother also takes on this role, whispering prompts to the father as he talks to the daughter. However, Popper continues to blunder, unable to engage in emotional communication, offering instead flippant or hard-headed advice until the mother says: ‘Maybe she doesn’t want advice. Maybe she wants you to be her dad and listen’.

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Popper takes up the mother’s suggestion and tries ‘listening to’ one of the penguins. He immediately receives an emotional reward as the penguin snuggles into him. This is constructed as the turning point in Popper’s journey. Popper begins to bond with the penguins in response to their affectionate behaviour—which manifests as their desire to always be close to him and their mimicry of his actions. He talks to them and plays with them. He also starts to invest his time in their care, engaging in nurturing behaviour: bringing snow into his apartment, shopping for fresh fish at the markets, toilet training them and researching their needs. He becomes less lonely in response to the ‘unconditional love’ we are told is given by this species of penguin. His growing ability to show warmth and to listen results in a closer relationship with his children. Though Popper is also developing a capacity to nurture, the display of care-taking is limited to the penguins. He is not shown engaging in nurturing behaviour with his children, even at the end of the film. He is instead portrayed as the ‘weekend Dad’, taking the children to the park and watching films with them on the couch. He is not shown in any physical acts of caring such as providing food (though presumably he does feed them) or helping them with homework. He is also not positioned as the prime alternative carer: when the mother is going to Ghana for three weeks, she plans to leave the children with her mother as a matter of course. Only when she sees the children’s newfound happiness in spending time at the father’s apartment does she suggest he might take them ‘for a few nights’ while she is away (this never eventuates). She also suggests they spend the night with him when she comes to collect them one evening and finds them curled up happily in front of the TV with Popper and the penguins. She makes the suggestion to Popper: ‘They’re liking it here. Want to keep them overnight?’ Popper’s response (‘Really? Cool’) indicates this is an offer rather than a request from the mother: that is to say, he is not helping her by supplying care while she goes out; rather his behaviour has resulted in the happiness of his children and so he is being offered more time with them. This offer is subject to ratification by the children who are then asked their preference. (They affirm their desire to stay.) As the father learns to listen and to feel and express emotion, his place within the family and his access to the children become more secure. The arrangement of the father as the alternate-weekend Dad whose time with the children is subject to gate-keeping by the mother or children is not contested in the film. Though the mother can be seen here to gate-keep, this is framed positively as conditional upon the

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desires of the children and in their interest, and as rewarding rather than restricting access—endowing Popper with more time and supporting him in earning his children’s approval. Popper also begins to reveal his emotions to the mother, telling her about his childhood sadness, and this results in a growing intimacy also between them, one which is leading to reconciliation by removing blocks to intimacy. This trajectory is interrupted by the father’s withdrawal when one of the penguin’s eggs does not hatch. Constructed as both feeling responsible for this (the zookeeper tells Popper he is not giving the penguins what they need), and driven by the emotional pain of loss for the unborn penguin, Popper retreats to his previous flippancy and emotional inaccessibility and returns to the corporate world. He gives the penguins to the zoo and disappoints his wife, not for the action but for his failure to display emotion. She says she wants him to ‘feel something’. He denies his previous attachment to the penguins and his emotional self, saying it ‘wasn’t me’, that it was a dream ‘where people live with penguins and their kids love them and all the eggs hatch’. The withdrawal sets the stage for the familiar tropes of epiphany and ‘choice’ that result in the father’s redemption and family reconciliation.

The Voiced Child This section explores how the child’s voice is used to effect and restrict access to the father. I find that children are shown as not able to gain access to the father through the voiced expression of their needs: that is, through ‘agentic’ voice, conceptualised as a privilege to speak and be heard attached to the current local status of the ‘child’. Instead they gain access to the father when the father learns to want to be with them and this is effected primarily through the device of the innocent child’s voice that conveys wisdom. The shift to a conceptualisation of children as agentically ‘voiced’ conflicts with the understanding of the child as innocent and the idolisation of the child’s voice (Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2000; Jenks 2005) as the ‘symbolic voice of authenticity’ (James 2007, p. 261). This idolisation of the innocent voice, James argues, results in a silencing of the child’s agentic voice. This conflict is problematic for contemporary films in their rendition of a pure relationship that conceptually depends on an ‘agentically’ voiced child, while still retaining the power of the innocent child’s voice to grant authenticity to the redemption of the father.

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Though generally the films show access as both available and supported/desired by the mother and the children as seen above in the film Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), the mother also has the authority to restrict or deny father access to the child. The denial or restriction of access to the children by the mother appears in a number of films when the father’s actions are seen to threaten the child’s emotional welfare (Mrs Doubtfire 1993; Getting Even with Dad 1994; The Santa Clause 1994; Liar Liar 1997; Night at the Museum 2006; Imagine That 2009). In some films, the children also are seen to deny father access. In Mr Popper’s Penguins, the daughter uses her voice to restrict access to herself and her brother early in the film as noted above. She is given authority in the film to speak for her younger brother, though in the first instance the boy is not shown to share her reluctance to spend the weekend with his father. Her refusal to go to the father’s home results in the cancellation of the visit for both of them, which the movie makes no attempt to explain. Though the daughter is shown as having the ability to express her wishes, her unaided voice is not sufficient to be heard. The daughter’s wishes are communicated to Popper by the mother who then suggests that he talk with the daughter. When this goes badly, the daughter says: ‘This is why I don’t want to go’—but she addresses this comment to her mother as she leaves the room rather than speaking directly to the father. Though the daughter expresses her opinion, her voice is only effective here because she acts within the parental authority of the mother. Later in the film when Popper has ‘disappointed’ the children by sending the penguins to the zoo, she speaks for herself and her brother when she says that they don’t want to go with Popper to his ‘stupid press conference’. This time her mother is not present and, being a child, she is unable to choose not to go with her father. Although she expresses the sentiment, she does not appear to expect her words to have any influence: even as she speaks, the two children are shown getting into the car to accompany their father. Only in Getting Even with Dad (1994) is the child able to act independently to deny the father—but even in this film, there is an implied authority from the (deceased) mother. We are told that she has earlier denied the father access to the family saying that if he didn’t love them enough to stay out of jail, he didn’t love them enough. This is the choice that the son again offers the father, requiring him to choose between a life of crime and the relationship. Conversely, the child’s access to the father is not readily available, and the films do not construct children as able to secure this through the

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voiced expression of their needs or desires. Even for children with resident fathers, time with the father is often not available. It is generally the mother who petitions the father on the child’s behalf. Such petitions do not generally result in an outcome beyond the father’s promise which is subsequently unfulfilled. A number of films show the child directly asking the father for his time (Ghost Dad 1990; Liar Liar 1997; Imagine That 2009; Real Steel 2011) or reminding him that he has promised to be present for an event (Hook 1991; Jungle 2 Jungle 1997), but the requests are in every case denied or the promises broken. As noted in the previous chapter, the father must first learn to want to spend time with the child and then choose the child’s company for the genuine ‘want’ of it. A notable absence within the films is the expression of any desire by the children for the reconciliation of separated parents. While ‘90s films with child protagonists such as All I Want for Christmas (1991) and The Parent Trap (1998) show children of separated parents expressing a desire for the parents to reunite (and conspiring to bring this about), the children of separated parents in father protagonist family films are generally not shown to have any desire for this to occur. An exception is Are We There Yet? (2005) in which the children go in search of the father and discover he has re-partnered and has a new family. Unlike the films with child protagonists above, the children’s expressed desire in Are We There Yet? for parental reconciliation is not met. In three other films, the mother has remarried and reconciliation is not possible. In the remaining films where reconciliation is possible (Jungle 2 Jungle 1997; Liar Liar 1997; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009; Mr Popper’s Penguins 2011), the children do not express the desire for this within the film and are not shown to have an emotional stake in this outcome. In father family films, where the children exercise voice in family construction, either positively or negatively, it is in support of the project of redemption of the father and for relationship with the father, and not for family reconciliation. The inability of the mother and the children to gain the participation of the father through the exercise of agentic voice leads to the trope in which access to the father is elicited through the exercise of the mother or child’s ingenuity and the child’s innocent voice. The ingenuity is exercised when the father is tricked or forced into spending time with the child (Getting Even with Dad 1994; Jungle 2 Jungle 1997; Are We There Yet 2005; The Game Plan 2007; Imagine That 2009; Old Dogs 2009),

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and/or the father is enticed by the promise of material gain (The Longshots 2008; Imagine That 2009; Despicable Me 2010; Real Steel 2011). The time spent together results in a growth of intimacy but it also provides the benefit of access to the children’s unique insight to truth, the ‘innocent wisdom’ that is associated with childhood. This innocent wisdom can provide the father with the revelatory moment that leads to change as in Jungle 2 Jungle (1997) when the son tells his father that he (the father) is an adolescent. This comes during a conversation where they argue over whether the son is ‘a man’. The father says: ‘You’re an adolescent … You don’t have a wife. You don’t have a family to support. You are free to do whatever you want’. To which the son responds (based on this definition): ‘You’re an adolescent’. Sarah Harwood (1997, p. 143) uses the phrase ‘insight to truth’ to describe the wisdom attributed to children through the discourse of childhood innocence (see Chapter 3). A number of films employ the trope of the child’s ‘insight into truth’ to secure the father’s time and attention and also to demonstrate the value of the child. In Real Steel (2011), Max is able to rehabilitate his father’s fortunes—earning his father, Charlie, the money and recognition that he needs—because his belief in the robot, Atom, is a ‘true’ belief, its truth grounded by the innocent child’s unique ‘insight to truth’. Although Max is originally critical of his father’s high-risk behaviour—calling his approach to robot fighting ‘cocky and half-assed’ and asking, ‘Do you even think about the stuff you do before you do it?’, Max displays the same behaviour when he enters Atom in fights that the robot appears destined to lose. The difference between the two lies in Max’s belief in his robot, a belief that is rendered as carrying the insight to truth that accompanies childhood innocence. Unlike his father’s risks which are shown to always result in loss, Max’s risks pay off. A similar device is used in 2009 film Imagine That in which the child has magical foreknowledge of the changes in stock market prices that she is able to share with her financial adviser father to aid his career. In The Santa Clause (1994) too, the father ‘forgets’ that he became Santa for a night, but the child’s insight to truth remains and, in the end, it is the child’s belief that convinces the father. In Liar Liar (1997), the son makes a wish that for 24 hours his father cannot tell a lie. This gifts the father with his own insight into truth. The child’s insight into truth also serves to mark children as the ‘locus of truth’ which, Harwood (1997) argues, endows them with moral authority. Harwood (1997, p. 128) maintains that the chief function of

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children within Hollywood films is as indicators of the moral centre within the ‘claims of competing adults across psychic and social terrains’. The competing psychic and social terrains mapped by Real Steel (2011) are marked out by the series of dichotomies the film establishes, between the aunt and the father and between the father and the owners of the champion robot: male/female; blue-collar/moneyed; White American/outsider; nostalgic/futuristic. In this film, the child’s insight is used not only to rehabilitate the father but to redeem a version of White American masculinity. The final contest in which the robot Atom is pitched against the multinational corporation’s champion is raised to a moral victory by association with the ‘innocent child’. It is a victory for the traditional, for the working-class battler, and a defeat for the forces aligned against American fifties masculinity. At the close of the movie, Max is hoisted onto the shoulders of (robot) Atom and (father) Charlie, his masculinity assured by his triumph as he meets the eyes of the Russian woman he has defeated while the crowd roars its approval for the victory of the White male underdog. Max’s father, Charlie, is not redeemed or credibly redeemable as a responsible parent, but he is redeemed as a model of masculinity. Charlie is the ‘hard-bodied hero’ returned; the one who was ousted in the eighties by the turn to the nurturing father (see Chapter 2). His return is sanctioned and sanctified by the son, whose ‘voice’ affirms the need, not for the nurturing father, but for the father who will ‘get off the mat and fight’ for his masculinity. With his masculinity redeemed, father Charlie takes on the one role that others cannot: that of the essential father who is able to usher his son to manhood. The film does this by reprising the notion of male gender role identity (identified in Chapter 3 in connection with father ‘essentialism’) in its representation of the tale of Iron John. Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) is an exegesis of the folk tale of the same name, generally considered a tale of a boy’s initiation into manhood. Stella Bruzzi (2005) suggests that the popularity of Robert Bly’s book within the men’s movement of the nineties stems from its reconciliation of primal masculinity with sensitivity—something that populist feminist approaches had framed as antithetical. Bly’s book advocates a need for the unreconstructed male who can nonetheless show sensitivity. It focuses on the father–son (rather than father–child) relationship as the central fathering dyad. Bly’s mythic reconstruction of the ‘Iron John’ folktale calls for the wild man to usher the boy into manhood. In the tale, the boy must first rescue the wild man by stealing the key to his cage. The boy’s father, the king, has forbidden

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anyone to open the cage, and the key to the cage is kept under his mother’s pillow. When the boy’s ball goes into the cage (In Bly’s version, a golden ball), the boy agrees to steal the key and release the wild man in exchange for its return. When the boy succeeds in releasing the wild man, he is carried into the woods on his shoulders—symbolically ushered into his rightful place as a man, a place he has earned by his triumph over ‘the maternal and the weak paternal’ (Bruzzi 2005, p. 141). Bly (1990, p. 1) considers fifties men to suffer, despite their ‘charm and bluff’ from a lack of intimate space, and to only feel alive when they have an enemy. He describes them as passive: a passive man may ‘skip over parenting’ letting women do the tasks, both the boring tasks and the feeling tasks, and may also ask his children ‘to do the loving for him’ (p. 64). He contrasts these with the ‘soft men’ who first began to appear in the seventies, in part to fulfil the requirements for a different kind of masculinity demanded by ‘energetic women’ (1990, p. 3). Soft men, according to Bly, lack energy and are unhappy (1990, p. 1). Bly advocated putting men in touch with their wild man, who has a ‘respect for riskiness’ (Bly 1990, p. 230) but is capable of intimacy. In Real Steel (2011), when the child is invited to voice what he wants in a father, he calls for the wild man. In the confrontation scene when Charlie hands Max into his aunt’s custody, Charlie yells ‘What do you want from me?’ Max’s answer is ‘I want you to fight for me. That’s all I ever wanted’. In the context of the scene (in which Charlie is handing over custody), and in the wider narrative which began with Charlie selling his custody rights, the narrative might imply to the viewer an expectation that the father would ‘fight for’ custody of Max. Instead, the film goes in a different direction and when Charlie visits Max at the aunt’s home to tell Max he has been ‘heard’, he asks the aunt to allow Max to come with him to the robot, Atom’s, championship match. Charlie then ‘fights for Max’ in a more literal sense, by pitting himself against the champions within the robot boxing world. At the same time, Charlie is fighting for a particular rendition of masculinity. This is created by the metaphorical connection that has been established between the father and the robot, Atom. Atom is already established as a model of good fatherhood by virtue of his relationship of intimacy with Max, and the robot’s strength within the ring is that he can always ‘get off the mat’ no matter how strong or large his opponent, or how many times he is knocked down. It is this ability that allows him

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to defeat more modern and more powerful robots. During the championship match, Atom uses this ability to wear down the opponent robot. Symbolically, the match shows father Charlie—and by extension a rendition of White American masculinity—‘getting off the mat’. This rendition of masculinity is tied to the body—the White male muscular body of the father. When Atom’s voice-operated control system is damaged, Charlie must employ the shadowbox function which entails Charlie shadowboxing an imaginary opponent outside the ring while in the ring the robot mimics his actions. There is a close-up of Max’s face when he watches his father ‘fighting’ and it widens to include Bailey’s face as she and Max exchange proud looks, both of them shedding tears of joy as they watch Charlie resurrected as the fighter. The importance of the essential father role is affirmed as the film reprises the essentialism of the ‘80s and early ‘90s that connects the father to developmental outcomes in the form of male gender role identity. The essentialism is authenticated here by the voices of both the agentic and the innocent child. Max has expressed his desire for the father to fight, and has been heard, and his insight into truth has made his father’s success possible while affirming the righteousness of the victory. The right of the child to have a voice sits uneasily with the discourse of the innocent child since the innocence rests on a lack of knowledge of the world—yet here the two have been married successfully. With the agentic voice of Max given the authority and authenticity of the innocent child’s ability to ‘speak the truth’ (Harwood 1995), Max declares for the essentialist father, but a father who, having retrieved his wild man, is able to feel, to be sensitive. The child’s voice of authority is used to speak for an essentialism that harks back to that of the ‘80s. At the same time, the use of the agentic voice that is ‘heard’ establishes the relationship as an intimate one. The move towards intimacy as the core value of fathering, heralded by Ghost Dad in 1990 and running through the films of the following decades, finds its ultimate expression here, where fatherhood has been stripped of its other roles. Intimacy stands alone—but it is an intimacy based on an essential connection that can only be found with the biological father. Real Steel, even more than the 1993 film Getting Even with Dad (see Chapter 6) separates the essentialist father from parenting tasks of nurture and provision and portrays these tasks as not valued by the child. It is the aunt who provides Max with a home, who offers him care and shows protection—yet during the course of the movie he never once looks at or speaks to her, denying her the subjectivity he bestows on the robot. Nor

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does he speak to or look at the aunt’s husband—the financial provider. Charlie offers neither care nor provision, and far from being protective, risk-taking Charlie constantly puts his son in danger. It is the child Max who protects the father when Charlie is being beaten for not paying a debt. Max also protects his father from his downward slide by his adoption of Atom, whose victories provide them with money and also provide father Charlie with success in his work world. In the scene where Charlie refuses Max’s request for them to stay together, Charlie tells Max that it is his own fault if he is disappointed because ‘You forgot who I was’. This takes on another significance in light of the film’s ending. Charlie is not the nurturer, the provider or the protector. These are not the roles the film designates as belonging to the father. His role is to be the wild man, the one his son rescues and who in turn, in raising his son onto his shoulders, initiates him into manhood. As the ‘locus of truth’, children serve the function within family films of indicating the moral centre of ‘competing claims for “true” parenthood’ (Harwood 1997, p. 128), and in Real Steel, though he might be cared for by the aunt and uncle, Charlie indexes the father’s claim. A similar discounting of the carer in favour of the claims of the biological father is made in The Game Plan (2007). In this film, the father has only recently discovered he has an eight-year-old daughter, Peyton, the daughter of his ex-wife. She has been living with her aunt since the mother died, though in the earlier part of the film this is not revealed to the audience and the aunt is thought to be the mother. When the film begins, we are shown Peyton’s footballer father, Joe Kingman (played by Dwayne Johnson), mocking a team-mate’s desire to spend New Year’s Eve with his family. Joe takes his wallet in order to ‘confiscate his mancard’ before joking to the other players that ‘his wife has already [taken] it’. When his daughter arrives unexpectedly (her aunt thinks she is at ballet camp, but the child has made her own way instead to the father), Joe initially portrays the incompetent father who places his daughter in danger. At the end of the month, the aunt discovers that the child is not at ballet camp and comes to find Peyton who is now in hospital recovering from an anaphylactic reaction after eating peanuts. The aunt sees this as proof that Joe is not able to care for his daughter. The daughter also chooses to return to her aunt, believing that this will be best for her father’s career. However, with Peyton gone, Joe plays poorly and gets hurt. The daughter seeks him out in the dressing room and tells him ‘my dad’s not a quitter’. At the same time, realising he needs her, Peyton tells

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Joe she loves him and wants to ‘come home’. The father looks to the aunt (as authority) who agrees to give up Peyton because ‘she needs her father’. The unique intimate relationship with the recently met biological father is affirmed as more important than the lesser relationship Peyton has with the aunt though she has been portrayed as a close and loving carer. Again, the child’s voice affirms that what the child requires of the father is a fighter, not a quitter. As in Real Steel, the character of the aunt is that of sufficient parent who secures the child’s welfare and enables the father– child relationship to be constructed as ‘pure’—that is, to be based only in ‘choice’. However, the creation of the father–child relationship as pure still poses problems for the assignment of innocence to the children, and I explore this in the next section.

The Agentic Child---The Loss of Innocence and Unconditional Love In the Hollywood trope of an earlier era, the love of a good woman transformed bad men into good men—a love that was deemed both authentic and unconditional (blind) by virtue of the woman’s innocence. Aronson and Kimmel (2001) identified a shift in this trope in the wake of feminism when the moral authority granted to the good/innocent woman shifted to children (see Chapter 3). As Harwood maintains, innocence carries a moral authority, or ‘moral authenticity’ and in father films, children are the voice of this authority, marking the ‘locus of truth’ (Harwood 1997, p. 128). In this section, I explore how the turn towards a pure father–child relationship affects the child’s ability to act as the locus of truth. In Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), Popper’s agentic children do not offer unconditional love: their love and even their company are conditional upon Popper’s performance, specifically his ability to create intimacy, an ability he lacks because of his fear of emotional vulnerability. It is the unconditional love of the penguins that heals the wounded Popper and transforms him into a good man. The ‘locus of truth’ has moved to the penguins: they are gifted with the moral authority and privileged wisdom associated with innocence. This ‘wisdom’, which is associated with a capacity for unconditional love, is revealed in the letter from his deceased father that Popper discovers during the low point of the film, inciting his moment of realisation. It advises him to model himself on the

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penguin, the wisest of creatures since ‘once it loves you, it never leaves your side’. These words (and the apology from his father that comes with them) complete the process of healing the wounds of Popper’s childhood and allow him to open himself emotionally. In the following scene, he advises his daughter: ‘You’ve got to put your heart out there. And it might get broken, but that’s how you know you have one’. Having acquired wisdom from the penguins, the father shares it with the child. Taking his own advice, Popper asks his wife for another chance and regains his children’s approval by rescuing the penguins from the zoo. This change from the trope of the innocent child to the innocent animal as moral barometer and source of unconditional love mirrors the shift identified by Aronson and Kimmel (2001). It may then indicate a shift in the normative understanding of children as inherently less dependent and more ‘agentic’—or it may result from the filmic reconstruction of children as independent ‘agents’ that allows for the relationship to be contingent. As independent agents (individuals) within a confluent relationship, children can no longer serve as holders of innocent wisdom or sources of unconditional love. This allows the father–child relationship to be constructed as a pure dyadic relationship that is free from the obligations that accompany dependency. Animals as the source of wisdom and of moral redemption—as the ‘locus of truth’—can be found in seven of the disengaged father films. Furry Vengeance (2010) features a father who is redeemed through the wisdom of animal characters that the father learns to ‘protect’ rather than through the voice of his critical son. In Dr Dolittle (1998), it is the dog who tells the father to be who he is: ‘I’m a dog and I act like a dog … We are who we are’. Later the father accepts his own unique abilities and repairs his relationship with the daughter, sharing the wisdom from the dog: ‘No matter what happens, you be who you are. And you love who you are. Because I love you’. The Shaggy Dog (2006), Evan Almighty (2007), Furry Vengeance (2010) and We Bought a Zoo (2011) all feature children who voice criticism, and they too place animal characters in the redemptive role, endowing them with the wisdom of innocence but also with a need for protection and care that is not displayed by the children. Though the father is shown providing nurture in Dr Dolittle (1998) and Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011), it is only with respect to the animals. In general, the films render the father as hero rather than carer of the animals, and redemption comes about through the act of protecting the animals in all seven of these films. The ‘choice’ the father makes in these

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films is the choice in favour of the dependent animals, whose interests are constructed in the plots as in conflict with his ambitions. The father who is not a hero to his family becomes a hero by saving the animal characters. This restores him in the eyes of his children and re-establishes his virtue through his choice of the dependent animals’ welfare over his own interests. Having ‘chosen’ the animals, the father’s own moral centre, his virtue, is re-established.

Conclusion Giddens and others (Cordova and Scott 2001; Warren et al. 2005) connect intimacy with a willingness to be vulnerable, with Giddens claiming that intimacy only develops ‘to the degree to which each partner is prepared to reveal concerns and needs to the other and to be vulnerable to that other’ (Giddens 1992, p. 59). Fatherhood in recent films is valued as intimate relationship—as ‘pure’ relationship for the satisfactions it brings. The redemption trajectory is then tied to unblocking whatever hinders intimacy and these films take up Giddens’ concern that men are disadvantaged in creating intimacy through disclosure. Giddens (1992, p. 62) frames this as: ‘The masked emotional dependence of men [that] has inhibited their willingness, and their capacity, to be made thus vulnerable’. Men’s concealment of emotional dependence is, Giddens (1992, p. 59) claims, supported by the romantic ideal of the strong silent male whose emotions are hidden beneath a mask of emotional coldness. As was found in previous films (with the exception of Ghost Dad 1990), the films end not only with greater intimacy but with greater ‘selfactualisation’ where this is related to career success (see Chapter 7). In Real Steel, the father is professionally vindicated; in Mr Popper’s Penguins, the father becomes the proprietor of the restaurant instead of acquiring it for his company. Even when fathers sacrifice their careers for family, this sacrifice is rewarded with greater career success as well as greater autonomy in the workplace. The ‘new’ new man acquires emotional skills while hanging on to his masculine credentials. The films might show him ready to sacrifice success, to sacrifice the goals of men—‘status among other men, conferred by material rewards’ as Giddens puts it (1992, p. 57)—but as in previous films (see Chapter 7), fathers are not required to follow through on these sacrifices. Their newfound wholeness combined with their former strengths and supported by their ability to hear the wisdom of innocence (of the child or animals) results in an

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unbeatable combination. In the end, they emerge not only ‘whole’, but victorious over their competition. Rather than children’s voices participating in the process of constructing family, they are effective only in their ability to assist the father to achieve a self-actualisation which is individualised. The voice of the child is used to add value to the child (and so attract the father’s choice) and to affirm the rightness of the father’s pursuit of self-actualisation.

References All I want for Christmas 1991, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Are we there yet? 2005, film, Revolution Studios—Sony Pictures, Santa Monica, California. Aronson, A & Kimmel, M 2001, ‘The saviors and the saved: masculine redemption in contemporary films’, in P Lehman (ed.), Masculinity, Routledge, New York, pp. 43–50. Atwater, F & Atwater, R (1938), Mr Popper’s penguins, Little Brown & Company, New York. Baker, J 2008, ‘The ideology of choice: overstating progress and hiding injustice in the lives of young women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 53–64, . Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. Bly, R 1990, Iron John: a book about men, Addison-Wesley, Boston. Bruzzi, S 2005, Bringing up Daddy, British Film Institute, London. Cordova, JV & Scott, RL 2001, ‘Intimacy: a behavioral interpretation’, The Behavior Analyst, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 75–86, MEDLINE Complete EBSCOhost. Despicable me 2010, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Dr Dolittle 1998, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Evan almighty 2007, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Furry vengeance 2010, film, Summit Entertainment, Universal City, California. Getting even with Dad 1994, film, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Beverly Hills, California. Ghost Dad 1990, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Harwood, S 1995, ‘Family fictions in E. T.’, Changing English: Studies in Culture & Education, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 149–170, . Harwood, S 1997, Family fictions, St. Martin’s Press, New York. Hook 1991, film, Amblin Entertainment—Tristar Pictures-Sony Pictures, Universal City, California.

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Imagine that 2009, film, Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California. James, A 2007, ‘Giving voice to children’s voices: practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials’, American Anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 261–272, . Jenks, C 2005, Childhood, Routledge, New York. Jungle 2 jungle 1997, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Langellier, K & Peterson, EE 2011, Storytelling in daily life, Temple University Press, ProQuest Ebook Central (Academic Subscription Collection). Liar liar 1997, film, Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Macrae, D, Duffy, O, Miles, L & Lawrence, J 2008, ‘A case of hand waving’, Cognition, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 152–156, . McCarthy, T 2011, ‘Real Steel’, The Hollywood Reporter, viewed 29 September 2018, . Mr Popper’s penguins 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Mrs Doubtfire 1993, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Night at the museum 2006, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California. Old dogs 2009, film, Walt Disney Pictures, Burbank, California. Oswell, D 2012, The agency of children, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Real steel 2011, film, Dreamworks—Walt-Disney Studios, Universal City, California. Ribbens McCarthy, J, Edwards, R & Gillies, V 2000, ‘Moral tales of the child and the adult’, Sociology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 785–803, . Rocky 1976, film, Chartoff-Winkler—United Artists, Beverly Hills, California. RV 2006, film, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, California. Sartre, J-P 1956, Being and nothingness, Simon and Schuster, New York. The game plan 2007, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. The Incredibles 2004, film, Pixar Animation Studios—Buena Vista Pictures, Emeryville, California. The longshots 2008 film, Cube Vision—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West Hollywood, California. The parent trap 1998, film, Cinema Vehicle Services—Buena Vista Pictures, North Hollywood, California. The Santa clause 1994, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California.

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The shaggy dog 2006, film, Walt Disney Pictures—Buena Vista Pictures, Burbank, California. Warren, LZ, Cordova, JV & Gee, CB 2005, ‘Emotional skillfulness in marriage’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 218–235, . We bought a zoo 2011, film, Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles, California.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

The central problematic of this project was a conceptual one: how to frame an exploration of the cultural construction of the contemporary ‘father’ within an individualised society in which ‘role stereotypes fail to function’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 49). The rational ‘agent’ of late-modernity, conceived as freed from status-based institutional and social constraints, is created as responsible for their own ‘chosen’ biography. When agency and choice are conceptualised in terms of autonomy from or resistance to social ‘constraints’, a social requirement to account for one’s biography in discourses of individual choice places strain not only on the individual but on the researcher. Where there is a social requirement to account for personal circumstances as choice, personal narrative accounts that employ discourses of choice become both prevalent and suspect. Critical research into social differentiations can not be based on the notion of equally empowered individuals making unique life-choices, despite, or indeed because of, the prevalence of discourses that reveal the cultural dominance of libertarian constructions of the ‘empowered’ individual. In this book, I have mobilised Barnes’ (2000) fundamentally social model of agency to offer a new framework for exploring the unequal burdening of individuals based on status. The usefulness of Barnes’ model is the conceptualisation of ‘agency’ in terms of the social function of agentic discourses. Barnes frames agency, not in terms of autonomous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_10

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or resistant choice, but in terms of the function of agentic discourses in creating social order: as the means by which social members convey expectations to individuals and create them as accountable. The critical discourse analysis method I employ here considers everyday discourses that assume ‘free will’ to be the means by which social members differentially distribute responsibilities and rights. This opens the way for investigating shifts in social roles or ‘statuses’ through analysis of the voluntaristic discourses by which they are surrounded. By exploring these discourses, it becomes possible to reveal the unequal burdens imposed, not only by the differential assignment of expectations to statuses, but by conflict between incompatible expectations at the intersection of statuses (see also McNulty Norton 2021). This includes the ‘status’ of the responsibilised ‘individual’ member of a society. This model enables the investigation of the unequal burdens imposed by the expectation to, as a responsible contemporary individual, construct oneself as autonomous choice-maker. Mobilising Barnes’ model of agency, I have explored the ‘voluntaristic discourses’ used within this set of Hollywood family films as they convey expectations and construct contemporary American fatherhood. I build on Barnes’ model to argue that shifts in the construction of statuses (changes in the expectations surrounding a status) can be conceived as occurring in response to the tensions that arise when statuses with incompatible expectations intersect—that is, at the intersection of expectations associated with different statuses borne by one individual. By exploring the discourses that attribute agency and risk, I was able to map both the expectations surrounding the father and the conflicts between them. Shifts in the responsibilities and privileges surrounding a status involve a redistribution of responsibilities and this has consequences for interdependent statuses. These were explored through attention to the voluntaristic discourses surrounding the mother and child within the films.

The Father The central aims of this project were: to explore shifts in the construction of the Hollywood father in family films from the 1990s to 2015, and to reveal the central tensions of contemporary fathering as the films portray them. To achieve these aims, I formulated the following research questions:

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What unmet expectations are associated with father failure in Hollywood family films? What conflicts and tensions are indicated by father failure within the films? I found the unmet expectations of failing fathers in early ’90s films to be framed as a failure to perform what I term ‘essentialised’ father tasks: that is, tasks that cannot be accomplished by another. These tasks in themselves are neither central to the child’s welfare nor demanding in terms of time spent with children. Their accomplishment depends not on the actions being done but on the father doing them. Typical tasks essentialised to the father are reading bedtime stories or attending sports games. Since they are able to be performed outside normal working hours, they do not account for the narrative conflict established in the films that requires the father to choose between work and family. By the end of the ’90s, these essentialised tasks have fallen away and fathers in later films directly choose relationship with the child (Chapter 5). I have argued that the change from a relationally fixed father who chooses to perform tasks to a father who chooses relationship is a profound one and it is here that I locate the emergence of the ‘pure father’ within the films. Along with this shift, I found a change from essentialised tasks to the essentialised relationship. The new essentialism constructs the father relationship as ‘authentic’: a relationship that is sustained by the individual desire for the relationship. The relationship is based on choice and is shown as only available with the biological father. This secures the father–child bond to the biological father in the face of changes in family forms. It also secures the choice of ‘opting in’ to the contingent father, since the relationship is always available. In addressing the lack of obvious time conflict between work and family—and in response to my second research question—I explored the risks associated with choices in the films. I identified the central conflict of fathers in the set of family films to be between the expectations of the father and those of the neoliberal ‘individual’. The use of choice discourses within the films creates the work of the father as a ‘choice’, which renders the father as accountable for his absence from the family when working. The father has no recourse to excuses that cite workrelated absences as an obligation without risk to his status as ‘individual’. As Barnes notes (2000, p. 116), we may make allowances for individual failure to meet expectations, but even in the process of making allowances,

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there is an element of status degradation. The father who fails to demonstrate full autonomy is shown in the films to risk degradation to his status as ‘individual’ but also to his masculinity status. The films use the device of the Other man to portray the father who spends time in domestic space and performs jobs around the home as less ‘masculine’, even when jobs performed in domestic space are those traditionally associated with the father (such as cleaning out the gutters). The trope of the Other man in father family films is used to reinforce the superior masculinity of the biological father—a superiority that is connected to autonomy (Chapter 6). I found that penis size, type of workplace and occupation of domestic space are employed in the films to create the ‘Other’ man as less masculine and so to highlight the masculinity of the biological father. A separate area of conflict was found between the father’s statuses as ‘worker’ and as ‘individual’. The expectations of the worker within a hierarchically constructed work environment conflict in the films with the expectation of the individual to be autonomous. A key finding of this project was that the precarity of the father at home and at work that pervades these films is not grounded in tensions between the father and the worker but exists separately within each of these statuses as they each entail conflicts with the expectations of autonomy of the contemporary ‘individual’ and of masculinity. The films find resolution for these conflicts through greater autonomy. Giddens’ (1992) notion of pure relationship is defined by its lack of dependency (see Chapter 3) and valorised for the ‘authenticity’ of a relationship based only in ‘wanting’ to be with the other for the satisfaction it brings. As Dermott (2008, p. 142) cogently remarks, the quality of an intimate relationship is signified by ‘wanting to spend time with someone’ [emphasis in original]. The desire for the relationship is framed as a ‘given’ for the child while the father’s desire for the relationship is forged through the development of an intimacy based in mutual disclosure and sustained for the rewards it affords. Within the films, these rewards are framed in terms of the father’s career goals and self-actualisation. Pure fatherhood is contingent and dyadic, and there is a presumption of equality in the lack of mutual dependency. It must be demonstrated through the choice—and the choice does not fix the relationship in time. Instead, the choice, being always open, must be ever demonstrated, and this underlies the pervasive precarity of the father in the films.

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The Mother and Child A secondary aim was to explore the ramifications of the shifts in ‘fatherhood’ for expectations of the interdependent statuses of the mother and child in the films. These aims are captured in the final two research questions: How do these films reduce or resolve conflicts in constructing the redeemed or ‘good’ father? What assumptions and affordances do the films make in the constructions of the mother and child in order to accommodate Hollywood (re)constructions of the father? Discourses of responsibility are used in the films to create the father as free from obligations based in the dependence of the child. These discourses assign obligation for child welfare to the mother who is shown to be ‘sufficient’: that is, to be able to secure the needs of the child for protection and nurture. In two of the seven distinct films featuring Black fathers, mothers were shown to be unable to secure the child’s welfare when the biological fathers failed to provide financially. The mothers in these two films only were shown as needing to work to provide for the child which meant they were not available to the child as carer. Many of the White mothers in the films worked, but it was not shown as necessary or to impact the mother’s obligation to care for the child. If the child’s welfare was threatened, the mothers were able to stop working. This inability of the Black mother to balance work and childcare implies an obligation for Black fathers to provide. Black fathers who failed to provide for their children were constructed as irredeemable (they did not choose the child) and, as a consequence, replaceable. In contrast, White fathers were not shown to have a similar obligation: in films where White fathers failed to provide, another person was available to do so. Father redemption was not consequent on financial care of the child, either for the White or Black father—both could be redeemed in the act of choosing the child. However, the two films featuring ‘deadbeat’ Black fathers (those who failed to provide) did not make this choice while filmic narratives with deadbeat White fathers ended with fathers redeemed through the choice of relationship with the child. Though breadwinning was not constructed as an ‘obligation’ for White fathers, contradiction was found in the assumptions that underpin the

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mothers’ ‘sufficiency’. Pure relationship for the father is enabled by the construction of the mother as the responsible and sufficient parent where the sufficiency rests on assumptions that she is free from financial concerns. Within these Hollywood films, the divergent formulations of mothers and fathers as individuals-within-a-family are supported by divergent constructions of mothers and fathers as neoliberal workers. Mothers are shown as beneficiaries of the ‘flexible’ workplace that allows her to juggle family and care work with ease, while fathers are shown as victims: required to demonstrate the ‘flexibility’ of an unencumbered individual and burdened with the inescapable demands of a highly competitive and precarious work environment (Chapter 6). Another device used to construct the father as free from obligation based in the dependency of the child was the construction of the child as precociously self-sufficient when in the sole company of the father (Chapter 7). Fathers might fail to supervise or protect the child or even actively put them in danger, but this has no consequences in terms of the welfare of the child. This contrasted with the risks associated with any lack of vigilance by the mothers. I found that despite the lack of obligation to secure the child’s welfare, there remains an obligation for the father as ‘individual’ to choose the relationship. This obligation is based on the expectations of individuals to be virtuous. Potential conflict between the requirement to choose freely (of the pure relationship) and the obligation of the virtuous individual to choose the child is resolved in the films when the father learns to ‘want to’ spend time with the child (Chapter 7) and consequently chooses the child for his own sake. The children in a number of disengaged father films actively seek to elicit the father choice through a demonstration of worth—a worth that is not intrinsic to the child but connected to the possibility of enhancing the father’s self-development (Chapter 8). The trope of the wise child who serves as the ‘locus of truth’ allows the father to achieve self-actualisation (generally connected to the father’s career). Children’s voices are used in the films to affirm the fathers’ prioritisation of ‘development of the self’ (Chapter 9). While the child is not constructed as responsible for the father’s redemption in discourses of blame, there is an implication of responsibility since the child is shown to take action to bring this about. Mothers are not shown as responsible (they cannot effect the transformation).

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Final Thoughts I have argued that, in addition to the differential assignment of responsibilities based on status, individuals are unequally burdened in the everyday work of balancing the intersecting expectations of their multiple statuses. Consequently, they unequally incur the penalties that are distributed for failing to meet status-associated expectations. The pure father construct that enables the father to competently balance the statuses of father with ‘individual’ leads to a change in the expectations surrounding the mother such that she is cast in the films as sufficient parent. This increases the difficulties for the mother in balancing the statuses of ‘mother’ and ‘worker’ or ‘mother’ and ‘individual’. These consequences to the mother are backgrounded or hidden within the films. While pure fatherhood reduces the risk to the father of status degradation, the risk to the mother in sustaining her multiple statuses increases. Similarly, Black fathers face tensions in fulfilling expectations of autonomy associated with the status of the contemporary ‘individual’ due to expectations of breadwinning that continue to surround the status of Black fatherhood (but not White fatherhood). The pure relationship described in this book is not the realisation of an ideal of democratic and non-gendered partnership between adults who negotiate the fair distribution of the burdens of family life. Instead, it portrays a re-gendering of the family. Instead of a gendering based on traditional role-based expectations, these films offer a picture of the family where relationship itself is gendered. Where ’80s film fathers learned to be involved and build intimacy through engagement in childcare (see Chapter 2), films post-1990 recreate the traditional family roles of breadwinner and carer along with different routes to intimacy for fathers and mothers. While mother–child intimacy continues to be grounded on knowledge of the child gained by spending time in child-related tasks and activities, father–child intimacy depends on the father choosing the relationship based on its satisfaction where these are linked to the father’s self or career development. In a late-modern context, where the ‘individual’ is expected to display autonomy, the status conflict between the parent responsible for a dependent child and the ‘individual’ is thus resolved by creating the father as ‘individual’ and the mother as bound in obligations that tie her to the home.1

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Bruzzi (2005) in her exploration of the father in Hollywood films since the ’40s finds that, regardless of the rendition of fatherhood, Hollywood films support the father. She claims that ‘Hollywood is supportive of fathers in a way that it is not supportive of mothers’ (p. xviii). The renditions of a beleaguered and precarious fatherhood and the authorisation of redemption through self-actualisation in these family films support Bruzzi’s claim. One concern as I finish this project is the construction of the mother that underpins the pure father. Though Fagan et al. (2014) have claimed a growing convergence of parenting activities in contemporary America and Europe—indicating, they say, a convergence in the cultural construct of motherhood and fatherhood—these films do not display signs of such a convergence. Instead they portray a version of fatherhood where even those domestic tasks associated with traditional fathering, and indeed the presence of the father within the family home itself, are deemed ‘unmasculine’. Rather than growing convergence, mothers are cast both as devoted natural carers and as the ‘functional’ parent solely responsible for childcare and protection. These obligations both tie her to the home and create barriers to her standing as contemporary ‘individual’. At the same time, the mother–child relationship is created as in some way ‘less than’ the pure intimacy available only with the biological father (should he choose it) since mother relationship lacks the authenticity of a relationship sustained for its own sake. Nonetheless, the father’s position in these films is not enviable. In a construction of pure fatherhood, father belonging within the family is precariously tied to a demonstration of choice that is always contingent. While relationship with the child is always available, security within the family or authority based in securing the child’s welfare is not. The pure fatherhood within these films is a fragile celluloid construct. The films’ careful avoidance of scenes of the father within domestic space discloses how reliant this construction is on the devices the films employ to create the father as free from responsibility for the dependent child. Nonetheless, the underlying conflict between the domestic father and the ‘individual’—as well as the resolution that assumes the mother is financially cared for while burdening her with parental responsibilities—is of significance to the sociological understanding of the changing nature of the contemporary family.

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Note 1. Bueskens (2018) exploration of the conflict between ‘mother’ and ‘individual’ is of interest here. She argues that the autonomy of women as ‘individuals’ outside the home is created by the constraint of mothers (their lack of the status of ‘individual’) within the home.

References Barnes, B 2000, Understanding agency, Sage, London. Beck, U & Beck-Gernsheim, E 2002, Individualization, Sage, London. Bruzzi, S 2005, Bringing up Daddy, British Film Institute, London. Bueskens, P 2018, Modern motherhood and women’s dual identities, Routledge, viewed 20 August 2018, . Dermott, E 2008, Intimate fatherhood, Routledge, New York. Fagan, J, Day, R, Lamb, ME & Cabrera, NJ 2014, ‘Should researchers conceptualize differently the dimensions of parenting for fathers and mothers?’, Journal of Family Theory and Review, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 390–405, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/jftr.12044. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. McNulty Norton, D 2021 ‘The responsibilised “agent” and other statuses’, Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520986037.

Appendix

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6

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Mrs Doubtfire

Getting Even with Dad

The Santa Clause (sequels: 2002, 2006) Fluke

1993

1994

1994

1997 1998

1996 1997

Mother deceased/previously divorced Divorced/mother remarried

Divorcing

Married Married

Mother deceased

Marital status of biological parents

Father deceased (afterlife film) Jingle All the Way Married Jungle 2 Jungle Divorced (father unaware of child’’s birth) Liar Liar Divorced Dr Dolittle Married (sequels: 2003, 2006)

Hook Beethoven

1991 1992

1995

Ghost Dad

1990

The film set

Biological Biological

Biological Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological Biological

Biological

Protagonist father

White American African American

White American White American

White American

White American

White American

White American

White English White American

African American

Race/ethnicity of family

High High

High High

High

Average

High—then father low Low

High Average

Average

Income

16 Boy 11 5 9 Girl 5 13 Boy 11 6 13 Boy 12 6 11

Boy 5 Girl 14 Girl 9

Boy 7 Boy 13

Boy 8

Boy 6

Girl Girl Boy Girl Girl Girl Girl Boy

Urban Urban

Suburban Urban

Suburban

Suburban

Urban

Urban

Urban Suburban

Suburban

Child gender and Location estimate of age

192 APPENDIX

2006 2006 2007

2006

Night at the Museum (sequels: 2009, 2014) RV The Shaggy Dog Evan Almighty

Are We There Yet? Divorced/father (sequel: 2007) repartnered

2005

2004

2003

Daddy Day Care (sequel: 2007) The Haunted Mansion The Incredibles

2003

Married Married Married

Divorced/mother remarried

Married

Married

Married

Cheaper by the Dozen

2003

Married/father dies during film (afterlife film) Married

Jack Frost

Marital status of biological parents

1998

The film set

(continued)

Biological Biological Biological

Mother’s friend/stepfather in sequel Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Protagonist father

White American White American White American

High High High

Low (father)

Average

African American

White American

Average

High

High

High

Low

Income

White American

African American

African American

White American

White American

Race/ethnicity of family Small town

Girl Girl Boy Boy

14 Boy 11 16 Boy 12 15 Boy 11 7

Boy 10

Girl 14 Boy 7 Boy baby Girl 11 Boy 9

Girl 10 Boy 8

Suburban Suburban Suburban

Urban

Suburban

Suburban

Urban

12 (7 boys and Suburban 5 girls) from young adult to 4 Boy 4 Suburban

Boy 8

Child gender and Location estimate of age

APPENDIX

193

The Longshots

Imagine That Old Dogs

Despicable Me (sequel: 2013) Furry Vengeance

2008

2009 2009

2010

We bought a Zoo

Daddy’s Home

2011

2015

Uncle (father’s brother) Biological Biological

Biological

Protagonist father

Divorced/mother remarried

Mother deceased/never married Mother deceased

Divorced

Married

Biological and stepfather

Biological

Biological

Biological

Biological

Divorced Divorced/father unaware of children’s birth Children are orphans Adoptive

Mother deceased/previously divorced/father unaware of child’s birth Divorced

Marital status of biological parents

White American

White American

White American

White American

White American

White American

White American White American

African American

Mixed

Race/ethnicity of family

Average

Average

Low

High

High

High

High High

Low

High

Income

Note Children’s ages and family income are estimated based on visual cues (size/style of home)

2011

Mr Popper’s Penguins Real Steel

2011

2010

The Game Plan

2007

The film set

(continued)

Boy 8 Girl 7

Boy 14 Girl 7

Boy 11

Girl 15 Boy 8

Girl 11 Girl 7 Girl 3 Boy 13

Girl 7 Boy 7 Girl 7

Girl 11

Girl 6

Small town/rural Suburban

Small town/rural

Small town/rural Urban

Suburban

Small town Urban Urban

Urban

Child gender and Location estimate of age

194 APPENDIX

Index

A African-American families, 29 agency, 6 accountability, 60, 62, 63, 65 causal agency, 60 competence, 61 individual ‘agency’, 90 libertarian conceptualisations of agency, 49, 60 moral dimension, 50, 59 powers of choice, 61 social agency, 60 source of an action, 62 agentic children, 50, 62, 158 agentic discourses, 182. See also voluntaristic discourse authentic relationship, 174, 183, 188. See also pure relationship authority, 188 autonomous, 66. See also pure relationship autonomy, 117, 137, 139, 143, 144, 151, 152

B Barnes, B., 60 biological father, 183 essentialism, 172 Black father, 5, 107 absence, 129 deadbeat dads, 123 irredeemable, 107, 130 Black mother, 123 insufficient, 107 breadwinning, 40, 79, 82, 91, 93, 185 as choice of work, 80. See also choice obligations, 137 responsibility for, 127 C child agentic voice, 166, 168, 172 as object of choice, 149 demonstration of worth, 186 precociously independent, 124 safety, 124 child’s welfare, 185

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. McNulty Norton, Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6

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196

INDEX

children’s film genre, 23 choice affirming the father’s choice, 79 choice of relationship, 97 choice of the child, 143 choice of work, 76, 77, 82, 93 the ‘right’ choice, 78, 79 choice discourses, 75 co-dependency, 47. See also Giddens female role, 48. See also dependency communicative competence, 50 conflict work-family, 78 contingent choice, 98. See also pure relationship contingent relationship. See pure relationship corporate values, 144 cowboy ideals, 145 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 66 cycle studies originary film, 70

D deadbeat dads, 17 degradation of status, 64 democratic family, 51, 82 dependency, 93 female role, 22 free from dependency, 88 deracinate, 29 Dermott, E., 42 development of self, 48 direct relationship. See unmediated relationship disappointed father, 24 discourses of responsibility, 117 disengaged father, 24–26, 78 domestic space, 184 dyadic relationship, 99, 102, 184

E endpoint of films Gergen, K., 68 essentialised tasks, 75, 86, 87, 183 essentialising the biological father, 76 essentialising the father, 83 essentialism, 39, 41, 183 essentialist father, 172

F failing father, 75 failure to be present, 17 failure to choose the child, 136 family film genre, 22 father ‘hero’ father, 112 vulnerability, 159 father autonomy, 112 father-essential tasks, 85 father involvement, 37, 45 father protagonist, 16 father’s irreplaceability, 86. See also essentialising the biological father film cycle, 69 financial security of mother, 107 flexibility, 102 flexible workplace, 186 freely chosen relationship, 88. See also pure relationship free will, 60. See also agency

G gate-keeping, 165 gendering of relationship, 187 gendering of the workplace, 104 Giddens, 47. See also pure relationship good father, 1

INDEX

H happy-ever-after, 149. See also restoration of the nuclear family heteronormativity, 28 Hispanic/Latino, 29 Hollywood’s dominance, 19

I individual as a status, 64, 76 individualisation, 46, 48, 63 impact of, 64 individual solution, 136 innocence, 52, 152 moral authority, 174 redemptive power of innocence, 52 innocent animal, 158, 175 locus of truth, 175 innocent wisdom, 169, 174 insight into truth. See locus of truth interdependent statuses, 64, 118 intersecting statuses, 64 intimacy. See intimate relationship father–child intimacy, 187 mother–child intimacy, 187 intimate relationship, 42

K knowledge-based intimacy, 123

L learning to listen, 158 legal basis for fatherhood, 100 listening, 159, 165 locus of truth, 158, 169, 172, 174 love, 81, 88

M making a difference. See agency

197

masculine status, 110 masculinity, 20, 184 get off the mat, 172 pretenders to masculinity, 110 mother, 85 necessary, 85 sufficient parent, 186 mother–child relationship, 188

N naturalisation, 82, 84 negative constructions of outsiders, 145 nuclear family, 102 nurture, 38, 80 discursive shift, 43

O opting in, 183 originary film, 78 Other man, 109, 184 domestic setting, 110 masculinity, 110 penis, 110 overprotective father, 25, 78

P paternal involvement. See father involvement precarity precarity at home, 98 precarity at work, 98, 102 precocious child, 186 promises, 137, 139 providing. See breadwinning pure father, 93 possibility of, 47, 117 pure fatherhood, 184 pure relationship, 4, 49, 117, 187 parent, 49

198

INDEX

R redeemed father, 98, 103, 112 re-gendering of the family, 187 rejection of materialism, 143 relationally fixed father, 183 responsibilities, distribution of, 182 responsibilities, redistribution of, 182 responsible contemporary individual, 182 restoration of the nuclear family, 100 Ribbens McCarthy, J., Edwards, R. and Gillies, V., 50, 59, 140 right choice, 131, 142 rings of expectations, 61, 63 risk, 65 routes to intimacy, 187 Routes to obligation, 136 S safety of the child, 121 securing the father deliver satisfactions, 150 responsibility of the child, 149 responsibility of the mother, 146 state and status, 60 status defined, 5 status degradation, 111 susceptible, 61 T taxonomy of responsibility, 118 time, 37, 41 quality time, 45, 83 time availability, 41, 111 types of responsibility. See taxonomy of responsibility

U unconditional love, 46, 165, 174, 175 unencumbered individual, 104 unequal burdens, 182 unique relationship, 174 universal-caregiver narrative, 126 unmediated relationship, 99, 101, 113

V van de Poel, I., 118 virtue, 135, 137, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150, 152 voiced child, 158, 166 voluntaristic discourse defined, 5

W wanting to spend time, 142, 152 welfare of the child, 86, 87 White father, 5 wild man, 170, 172, 173 work–life choice, 97 workplace, 102 bullying, 77, 79 entrepreneurial masculinist workplace, 104, 105 flexibility, 108, 109 moral values, 104 mother, 106 non-entrepreneurial workplace, 109 responsible-as-cause, 136 workplace flexibility, 106 workplace autonomy, 109, 112