So Melissa at Shakesville was not impressed by the trailer for The End of Love, a new film about “a grieving father struggling to raise his two-year-old son alone.”
It’s not that this, too, isn’t a story worth telling. (I assume.) It’s just that it’s already been told. I have been implored so many times to offer my heartstrings for the tugging on behalf of the privileged guy who can barely get laid what with all the daddying he has to do. Or all the depression he has to overcome. Or whatever.
Meanwhile, try to get a film made about a disabled mother who is raising children on her own while not making enough money at something way more mundane than trying to become a movie star, and see how that goes. BO-RING!
Over at “Feminist Critics,” Ballgame is unimpressed by Melissa’s unimpressed-ness. He praises The End of Love for being a positive depiction of a single dad, and accuses Melissa of being a hypocrite having acted inconsistently because a post she wrote didn’t criticize sexist stereotypes in “Iron Man,” although that post was actually written by a different writer.1
Ballgame made a more interesting point in comments:
If the existing movie focuses on a relatively under-served segment of the market (such as single fathers), I don’t think it’s fair to say a different movie focusing on an even more under-served part of the market should have been made.
So here’s the conflict: Melissa thinks that we’ve seen lots of movies about how hard it is for single fathers, whereas Ballgame thinks it’s an underserved market.
Some relatively recent films where a lead or major character is a single father: Les Miserables, The Pursuit of Happyness, Finding Nemo,2 The Holiday, Definitely Maybe, Love Actually, Jersey Girl, Sleepless In Seattle, A Simple Twist of Fate, I Am Sam, The American President, Martian Child, We Bought A Zoo, Dan In Real Life, One Fine Day, Big Daddy, The Game Plan, The Pacifier, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Mall Cop, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Jack the Bear, and Four Single Fathers.
Is that a lot or not enough? Heck if I know. It does show that Melissa is right to say that The End Of Love isn’t breaking new ground with a single dad protagonist.
That said, I want to see single male dads on screen, and I don’t care if it’s already been done.3 There remains a cultural narrative that says that only moms can nurture, and therefore movies that push back against that narrative remain valuable.
On the other hand, what about single mothers? I want to see more of them on film, too. In the USA, there are over 5 single mother households for every single father household, yet I don’t think there are over five times as many single mom films as single dad films. And we need pushback in this area also – it feels like there are an endless supply of social conservatives ready to blame single moms for most of society’s problems.
In movies overall, women and girls are slighted. According to media scholar Stacey Smith:
Examining over 5,000 characters, a recent study of 122 G, PG, and PG-13 films theatrically released between 2006 and 2009 showed that less than 30% of all speaking characters are girls or women. Put differently, the ratio of males to females on the silver screen is 2.42 to 1. While on screen portrayals are skewed, the percentage of females working behind-the-scenes is even more abysmal. Across 1,565 behind-the-scenes employees from the same 122 films, only 7% of directors, 13% of writers and 20% of producers were female. This translates into a ratio of 4.88 males to every 1 female.
I think this is the heart of Melissa’s complaint: It remains a lot easier to get a movie financed and made if it’s about a man, especially a white man. There’s nothing wrong with Mark Webber, the white male writer, director and star of The End of Love, having decided to make a film starring himself. There is something wrong, however, in the fact that it’s a lot more likely that we’ll see such a film from Mark Webber than from Mary Webber.
As Melissa said, that doesn’t mean that The End of Love isn’t a terrific movie.4 It’s not about this one film; it’s about how women and girl characters, single mothers included, aren’t given equal treatment in films in general.
P.S. Full disclosure: Like Melissa and Ballgame, I haven’t actually seen The End of Love yet.
Hat tip to Fannie’s Room, who also criticizes Ballgame’s post.
- Even if Melissa had written both posts, Ballgame’s comparison would be more point-scoring “gotcha!” than intelligent criticism. Sometimes I feel like writing a careful analysis of a piece of media, and sometimes I just wanna say “the film was fun but the seats sucked.” That doesn’t makes me a hypocrite. [↩]
- In comments, Ballgame – who has never seen Finding Nemo – bizarrely dismissed it by saying “an animated movie like that wouldn’t merit too many points.” What the hell? [↩]
- [[George]] I’ve nothing to say [[Dot]] You have many things [[George]] Well, nothing that’s not been said [[Dot]] Said by you, though? –Stephen Sondheim lyrics from Sunday In The Park With George. [↩]
- The main character’s son is played by Mark Webber’s real-life adorable toddler, who was just reacting naturally to his dad. That sounds really neat to me, and a review I read claimed the very naturalistic parenting footage is the film’s best point. [↩]
This film is called Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire and it made $60m on a $10m budget and opened to critical acclaim and 6 Oscar nominations when it was released 3 years ago. Melissa’s argument is wrong.
Another Alex, did you actually see Precious? The single mom in question is kind of a monster. She lets her baby-daddy in periodically so that he can rape her underage daughter and ends up impregnating her (on two different occasions!), blames her daughter for it like Precious is a romantic rival or something instead of a child, berates her daughter for not signing up for welfare, admits to not breast-feeding only because she worried the ‘hygeine’ would be bothersome to her sex partners, doesn’t care when her daughter gets AIDS from her father, and throws her infant grandson on a couch.
Carrie made a lot of money too. So did Cinderella. All of the famous single mothers in our fiction are awesome. I guess Melissa is wrong.
Amp, that’s an extremely unfair take on Melissa’s essay. She did not say that films about single dads struggling to raise their children alone are boring or common. She specifically referred to movies that send “the message that it is Very Hard to be a straight, white, able-bodied single father. So hard. The hardest, man”, and where a gorgeous woman of course comes along to bone, er, save him. That’s definitely not the plot of, say, Finding Nemo (and, like you, I am astonished that ballgame would handwave it off; it’s the exact opposite of the ‘hilarity at dad incompetence’ genre).
That’s not to say Melissa’s essay is beyond criticism.
Technically, Finding Nemo is (or should be) about a single mother. When the largest, most dominant clownfish (the female) is killed, the next most dominant fish (a male) will become female upon assuming the top position. So technically, Nemo’s surviving parent should have become female shortly after the passing of the deceased parent (though I confess I’m not sure how long this takes).
Melissa says:
But that is why it’s the focus of a movie, right? Dog bites man and man bites dog are different headlines.
We know that “single fathering” with men as primary parent is far from the standard social role of men being emotionally unavailable. The fact that it is more rare is what helps to make it the “hook” of the movie.
Most films are looking for a balance of “something which seems unusual to the audience so holds their interest” and “something which is not so unusual or distressing that the audience doesn’t want to see it.”
Single dads fit that bill. So do, for example, “women who break outside the social mold or act in non-socially-mandated and not-too-disturbing ways.” Real or not. Like, say, Alien or the mom in Terminator or the Haywire actress or Demi in GI Jane or Maggie Gyllenhall in Sherribaby or whatever. (I would have expected that Precious would have failed the “not too disturbing” test at least to most of the public, but I was apparently wrong.)
We don’t see as many films about single moms. But that’s because they’re more normal: we don’t see as many films about dads who adhere to social norms, either. Neither do we see many non-art-house films about people living relatively ordinary lives, although that is what the vast majority of people do each day.
Melissa’s right that we fail to recognize reality all the time. And she’s right regarding the generally low %age of good roles for women in film. But I don’t think it makes sense to ignore how films are selected
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G&W, if the man-bites-dog rule applied generally, then the majority of cop movies and soldier movies would be about women, since most cops and soldiers are men. Arguably, most action films would star women. Etc. Yet this is not what we actually see happening.
I agree that the man-bites-dog issue is one reason for single dad movies, especially some of the comedies like “Big Daddy,” where the joke for the first half of the film is “ha ha, men taking care of babies, they’re so incompetent.”
But I also believe that there’s a general bias towards doing movies about men, and that’s another reason we see a disproportionate number of movies about men, including single dad movies.
Mythago: That’s a fair point.
Mokele: Wow, that would have made that movie even better!
While I appreciate the attention, Amp, I do think you end up distorting my views a bit when you strip away some nuance, as you do here. It isn’t as bad as the way that fannie mischaracterized my post, but I think clarifications are still warranted.
First, I was careful to note that I hadn’t seen The End of Love, so my “praise” of it is strictly provisional.
Secondly, I didn’t accuse Melissa of being “a hypocrite” per se. For one thing, I try very hard not to attack a person but to criticize what they say or do. What I did say was that I was saddened at her reaction, which I do think was “mean-spirited.” As I noted elsewhere, I wouldn’t have had any objection if Melissa had criticized the movie based on its artistic demerits (poor acting, bad writing, whatever). I was criticizing the basis of her reaction to the movie (which she also hadn’t seen), which was that she was put off by a movie about single dads because it gives “privileged” men too many “cookies.”
My point about her non-reaction to certain important gender dynamics in stories like Iron Man* is that it embodies the profound flaw of gynocentric analysis which exaggerates male privilege and is blind to female privilege. There are, indeed, a zillion stories in our culture about male heroes. The gynocentric reaction is to classify this as an unalloyed male privilege/female disprivilege: “men” are centered, women are secondary.
There is some merit to that, but the picture is considerably more complicated. On the one hand, such stories tell men that (being men), they can be heroes. OTOH, those stories also tell men that they have to be extraordinary to be deemed worthy of respect and love. All too often, that means being extraordinarily gifted at violence, able to achieve violent domination of others despite impossible odds, and impervious to blows that would kill actual human beings many times over.
This carries over into actual lived culture, where men and women often glorify male social dominance, risk-taking, and extreme male ‘alpha-ism,’ and tend to view men as responsible for their own victimization.
Now, obviously my point here would have been stronger if I had linked to her actual words instead of a piece that someone else had posted on her website. I believe I have seen her saying positive things about Iron Man, but it may have been in a discussion about Robert Downey Jr. or about the sequel, or wev. At any rate, I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone can share a link to Melissa criticizing a male superhero story because it perpetuates the gender stereotype that males have to be totally dominant and alpha to be considered attractive.
As far as the ‘other side of the coin’ goes, I don’t agree that the parallel for egalitarians to consider is ‘stories about single moms.’ I don’t think our culture is nearly as averse to women being in a child care role as it is to men being in a child care role. Women’s role in child care is largely taken for granted — even excessively so, as many feminists correctly point out — and for the most part they have the female privilege of being presumptively trusted when they are seen interacting with children. There are clearly societal issues regarding single motherhood, but it wasn’t the ‘singleness’ of the father in The End of Love that deserved provisional points for egalitarianism in my view, it was the ‘male as primary child caretaker’ angle. (I note that I’m crossposting with g&w, and I agree with many of his points.)
The ‘other side of the coin’ in my view would be the presence of women as heroes, superheroes, high achievers, and employees. My impression is that we’ve made considerable progress on that score, though I’m open and sympathetic to arguments that there’s room for a lot more. I certainly wouldn’t disparage a new movie that I hadn’t seen because I viewed it as giving women “cookies” for being superheroes or workers (or single mothers, for that matter).
Finally, I have to admit to a certain amount of eye-rolling to the reactions to my Finding Nemo comment. Maybe you thought I was disparaging animation/graphic artists and felt some professional sensitivity on that score, but that wasn’t my point. (Hey, I thought Maus was a great work of literature!) When I said, “I haven’t seen Finding Nemo, but my gut reaction would be that an animated movie like that wouldn’t merit too many points,” I was just guessing that it fell more into the category of ‘Hollywood cartoon emphasizing zany antics’ than ‘intelligent, nuanced portrayal of men as nurturers of children’ … judging from the reactions, maybe my guess is wrong, and I’ll be happy to defer to your opinion on that score.
* Corrected in my post as best I can, thanks.
I think the source of what bugged ballgame about McEwan’s post is that it constantly talks “privileged man” and “privileged man” that.
I think the main reason for the single dad rom-com is you can get kids in the movies and appeal to parents, without making your female lead a slut.
I agree there’s a general bias towards men. But I’m pretty sure most of it’s from films like the Bournes, Avengers, Transformers, etc, the structure of most rom-coms and relationship dramas forces a pretty even gender split.
Precious is the single mother I was talking about in Precious.
I’m not sure if they’re incredibly progressive just because they have a single dad. As Mythago alluded to the single dad rom-coms you listed are all based around the happy ending of the kids getting a mother and the reconstruction of the nuclear family.
ballgame: yeah, your guess is wholly wrong, particularly given that Pixar movies in general have a large crossover audience not simply from children and parents-escorting-them to adults. Mild spoilers: Nemo’s dad isn’t redeemed by the love, sexual or otherwise, of a Good Woman (the female lead, Dory, is a friend only); he isn’t a hilarious incompetent dad, just an overprotective one.
Two other quick points, Amp: The movie is The End of Love, not The End of a Love, FWIW. Also:
Agreed.
mythago: Point taken.
Danny: Yeah, there was that! ;)
I think it is important- and has not yet been noted- that Melissa didn’t ask for more films about mothers. She asked specifically why, when a movie centers on the relationship of a single parent and a child, that single parent is almost always a man.
It is true that we have damaging cultural narratives about women being the nurturing ones, exclusivly. But these cultural narratives are almost always about two parents. If a father and mother exist, then the women is expected to be the primary caretaker, and the man is expected to be the primary bread earner- to the detriment of both.
But single women raising children? The cultural narratives are overwhelmingly negative. They are sluts. They are welfare queens. When they work a lot, they are neglecting their children. When they cut back on work to take care of their kids, it’s their fault when their carreer suffers. They are the reason their children have- statistically- not as many chances in life. No man wants a women who is already raising another man’s children.
The ideal nurturing woman of our cultural narrative is not a single woman.
On the other hand, cultural narratives about single fathers are positive. There are no welfare kings. They are to be commended for accepting responsibility. They are doing the best they can. Women want a man with children.
There are hardly any negative views of single fathers.
That is the issue. If Melissa had writen a complaint about a film that was about a family consisting of a working mom, a stay at home dad and a couple of kids, and demanded more movies about stay at home moms, then the complaint might be valid. But she didn’t. And ignoring the importance of the “single” part in the “too many movies about single fathers, not enough about single mothers” is dishonest.
“a recent study of 122 G, PG, and PG-13 films theatrically released between 2006 and 2009 showed…only 7% of directors”
93% of directors are male. need we say more?
I don’t think it’s true that dads are the default single parent. I like Ampersand’s list, but he had to round it out with lots of obscure and disposable trash on it, works of art like Jersey Girl, The American President, The Game Plan, Mall Cop, etc. (The Pacifier actually features a single mother, BTW).
But lots of our cultural touchstones feature single mother’s, do you want a partial list? ET, Toy Story, The Phantom Menace, Where the Wild Things Are, Anna Karenina, Erin Brockovich, Forrest Gump, Terminator 2, The Karate Kid, Jerry McGuire, Mamma Mia… I’m not sure I could outnumber Ampersand’s list 5 to 1, but in terms of impact I’ve already puts his list to shame. What have dad’s got on that level: Les Mis, Finding Nemo, The Sound of Music?
Another Alex,
Good points. I thought about ET and Terminator 2. I had not thought about The Phantom menace, but that raises the issue whether Empire Strikes Back is just another stereotypical tale of the evil absent single father.
:P
-Jut
lauren:
I’m not sure this premise holds up to scrutiny. Just off the top of my head, I think of Murphy Brown, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Good Wife: all contain favorable depictions of single motherhood, and all are/were very popular TV series.
Crossposted with Another Alex.
@Amp, re: Marlin’s gender change: yeah, neat in isolation. Factor in that Nemo would have fertilized Marlin’s eggs to preserve the colony (the whole point of the mechanism, after all). And also, clownfish are murder accomplices who live among anemones, lure other fish into the deadly tendrils by nonchalantly swimming around (“these purple things? some kind of grass. I dunno. Hey, come here and check out this iridescent scale I got going on.”), and then feast on the remains that fall to the deadly stings.
So Nemo is the heartwarming story of a young boy who flees from the biological and cultural imperative to mate with his former father, now mother-analogue, and is relentlessly pursued across the oceans by a parental figure so repressed when it comes to the reality of clownfish biology that “he” totally denies the change and insists on living as his former gender. The young runaway is eventually found, returned to the incestuous statutory rape scenario clearly dictated by the biological constraints, and apparently rewarded for his (at least) tacit cooperation by joining with other young fish in social gatherings, which he will use to acclimatize the other fish to the necessity of dying so that Nemo and his parent-raping ghoul molester family may thrive.
Good job on the research there, Pixar.
But you were okay with the vegetarian sharks?
…thank you, let me in-line that edit…
“After a traumatic exposure to the soul-destroying, despairing nihilism of a band of self-pitying, suicidal sharks, the young runaway is eventually found, returned to the incestuous statutory rape scenario…”
lauren:
I’ll add a few to Another Alex and ballgame’s list:
The Partridge Family, Gilmore girls, Miranda in Sex in the city, Judging Amy, Chocolat, North Country, Mermaids, All about my mother (Todo sobre mi madre), Where the Heart is, Hope floats, Enough and I am sure there are more.
This is not a rhetorical question, since I don’t remember or know all of the movies with single mothers that people have listed: How many of them were not white and, specifically, how many of the were Black? I can think of the remake of The Karate Kid as a movie with a positive portrayal of a single Black mother–though she ends up needing a man to rein in her son; to teach him, essentially, how to be a man–but I can’t think of many others–which may have as much to do with the fact that I don’t watch many movies as with how many or how few there are.
I also think there is an element to the single-father movies that has not yet been mentioned. Almost two decades ago, if not more, David Blankenhorn wrote a book called Fatherless America, in which he argued that many, if not most of the social problems the United States is confronting today have to do with the social and cultural collapse of fatherhood as an institution. Specifically, though, he argued that fatherhood is the epitome of manhood, that fatherhood as a social role is necessary in order to socialize men, make us more caring, more mature, less wild, self-involved, narcissistic, etc. Fatherhood, in other words, in Blankenhorn’s formulation–though this is also a little bit reductive–is the cure for everything that is wild, damaging, gratuitously violent, irresponsible, over-sexualized, self-centered etc. about traditional masculinity. Fatherhood is what is necessary to domesticate men, in the best possible sense of that term.
Destroy fatherhood, according to Blankenhorn, and you end up with the man Michael Douglas played in Falling Down–and I think the way Blankenhorn places the character’s fatherhood at the center of that movie is right on.
So I think that what you see in single-father movies is in part an expression of Blankenhorn’s anxiety about fatherhood. By showing men being single fathers, by showing how having to take on the entire responsibility of parenting matures those men, turns them into “real” men, the films prove the necessity of fatherhood both to the men and to their children; and the fact that a woman comes along, as Mythago puts it, to “bone, er save him” merely reinforces the manhood he has earned. My point is that there is a deeply conservative subtext to these movies, or at least to almost all of them that I’ve seen over the years, even going back to Kramer vs. Kramer, and that it’s less about who is the default single parent than it is about shoring up the ostensibly necessary connection between fatherhood and manhood.
It’s not a general rule. In my own opinion, it really becomes relevant when you’re looking at something which is not inherently movie worthy.
The daily at-work life of a anti-drug agent on the Mexican border may be worthwhile movie fodder. The daily life of a normal single parent who works as a paralegal isn’t usually in that category.
Of course there is; I’ve agreed with you on that many times.
Don’t forget The Descendants, about a man who becomes a single dad when his wife is fatally injured in a boating accident. That movie was all about how hard it is to be a handsome multi-millionaire white man who’s inherited a huge private estate in Hawai’i. It was one of the most irritating movies I’ve ever seen.
Oh my gosh, what is this I don’t even.
[headdesk]
Richard, I find your argument pretty dubious … at least, the part where you imply that movies about single fathers are inherently “conservative.” You could construct analogous arguments asserting that movies about single mothers have a “deeply conservative” subtext. (“Motherhood is the penultimate goal for women. By showing a women persevering in being moms despite tragic events depriving her of a helpmeet or beastly men failing to uphold their traditional responsibilities, movies about single motherhood demonstrate how this vital role is women’s truest and highest purpose.”)
Ballgame: I didn’t say that movies about single fathers are inherently conservative; I said that I’ve detected that conservative agenda in almost all the movies I’ve seen, which are inevitably about how becoming a single father is what finally teaches these men to “man up.” In almost all the movies like this that I know of, the man who becomes a single father was, before that, not present as a parent, always working, irresponsible, or whatever and, to the degree that these movies show these men learning to be men by learning to be fathers, they are deeply conservative; they are deeply invested in traditional ideas about manhood and masculinity, no matter how different the single father’s role might be from the traditional father’s role within the household. Do I think it is possible to make a movie about a single father that does not have this kind of agenda running through it? Yes. Finding Nemo might come close or even be one of them; it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, though, that I’m not sure.
The narrative of single motherhood that I have seen in the movies, on the other hand, is not about how being a single mother teaches women suddenly to be engaged as mothers; it is not about how it teaches women, finally, to grow up and be the women they were supposed to be. Indeed, I can’t think of a movie with a single mother where it is about how being a mother teaches her how to be a woman. I am not saying that movies about single mothers cannot also have conservative subtexts; but I don’t think it is the same kind of conservative subtext, and those distinctions, in my opinion, matter.
(By the way, I think you’ve misused the word “penultimate,” but if you didn’t, I am curious to know what you mean.)
A list of movies depicting single mothers raising children? Let’s not forget “Aliens”.
Grace
Huh?
How interesting is your life? My life sure would not make a lot of money from a movie unless there was a damn good script writer. OTOH my friend the DEA agent has a very interesting life and you could more easily make money off of a movie about him.
I don’t think it’s actually easier to make a good movie about a DEA agent than about a single mother, if you ignore the financing. Most movies about DEA agents, or more generally about cops, FBI agents, etc – law enforcement in general – are extremely mediocre movies, after all, so it’s clearly not that easy to make a great cop movie.
I suspect, however, that it’s easier to get a movie about people with guns financed, because to finance a movie, you don’t just need a vision for a movie – you need a vision for a movie that can be easily explained to the many minds who are in charge of financing movies.
Any subject, including the daily travails of being an ordinary parent (or for that matter, the adventures of a tough cop), can be a great movie given the right execution. But it’s a lot harder to elevator pitch “The Family Stone” or “The Kids Are Alright” than it is to pitch “yet another tough law enforcement dude with a gun,” or for that matter, “Look Who’s Talking 5.”
Regarding “penultimate,” Richard, I didn’t misuse the word (which clearly should have been “ultimate”), it was my hypothetical low-information traditionalist who misused the word, as such people are wont *double checks “wont”* to do. ;)
More seriously, your assertions here seem to embody the weakness of many arguments I’ve seen which emerge from an insular gynocentric rhetorical environment:
First, your saying that single father movies aren’t inherently conservative, just that “almost all the movies I’ve seen” of that type are, strikes me as pretty much a distinction without a difference in our present discussion.
Here your argument comes pretty close to being ‘un-falsifiable’ — that is, impossible to be shown to be either right or wrong (and therefore, pretty much devoid of merit). It’s built on a series of tenuous assertions and is internally contradictory.
Your ‘pre-single-father’ man is “always working” or “irresponsible.” But the ‘working father’ is the embodiment of certain conceptions of traditional fatherhood, so for such a man to step back from work to forge a closer bond with his offspring can hardly be called a “deeply conservative” development. Alternately, if you’re going to claim that the ‘true conservative’ conception of manhood involves a father bonding with his offspring, and that it is only our overworked modern materialistic capitalist society that has imbued the notion of money & work above all among men, one can hardly call that kind of conservatism’s critique of materialist society bad or even inegalitarian!
This is also true when looking at ‘pre-single-fathers’ who are “irresponsible.” Now, I’m pretty much a socialist gender-egalitarian libertarian. But I also recognize that most people find their greatest happiness when they forge deep emotional bonds with other people (or, at the very least, most people find the absence of such bonds to be a source of persistent unhappiness). You know, love. So a man who forges an emotional bond with his offspring where before he had no such bond in his life can hardly be seen as some kind of sinister propaganda pitch for a reactionary agenda.
When you later claim that movies about single fathers “are deeply invested in traditional ideas … no matter how different the single father’s role might be from the traditional father’s role within the household” you pretty much clinch my argument for me. It doesn’t matter to you whether the pre-single-father is working too much or not working enough, and it doesn’t matter to you how untraditional his household is when becomes a single father. Any movie about a single father is, in your view, somehow pitching an undesirable ‘conservative agenda.’
Ballgame:
Note the difference between your formulations and mine. You wrote:
And:
I wrote:
And:
In your formulation, the men forge emotional bonds where there were none before, specifically with their children, and you suggest that there is no way this could be seen as being part of a conservative gender ideology. (“Sinister propaganda pitch for a reactionary agenda” is your formulation, not mine, but I accept that my use of the word agenda might have triggered it; I hope we can both agree that all works of art are ideologically informed, even as they are overdetermined, meaning that they are susceptible to many different readings.) Anyway, as far as your formulation goes, who could disagree. Certainly not me. Because you’re right, for a man to take on child care, with all that implies, as the men do in movies where they are single fathers goes against some of the core values of traditional manhood.
My formulation, however, is not about the emotional bonds that these men forge with their children; it’s about the ways in which being a single father, in these movies, becomes the way these men earn their manhood; it’s about the way these movies suggest that the best, and maybe even the only way you turn a boy-man into a mature, responsible man–and the emotionally distant workaholic is really the only flip side of the irresponsible boy-man–is through fatherhood. (Mrs. Doubtfire–and I know it’s old, but I just watched it so it’s the example most easily available to me right now–may not be about single fatherhood, but it is an example of what I am talking about.) Connecting manhood and fatherhood in this way is conservative because it still means that manhood is something men have to earn, not something that men embody simply by being.
For me, it is possible for both our readings of these movies to coexist without contradiction.
More, a deeply traditional, gender-conservative (if I can coin a really awkward neologism) single father, despite the fact that his fatherhood is not modeled on the one he would most probably have preferred, will very likely raise his children, sons and daughters, to be as deeply conservative as he is–I have known families like this. My point being that single fatherhood does not in and of itself bespeak or promulgate progressive values, egalitarian values. In the same way, when a movie about a single father is invested in an ultimately conservative ideology of manhood, the fact of the single father, the fact of his success as a father, etc. and so on does not erase the ideological conservatism. Similarly, this fact does not erase all that may be progressive in the movie. We are after all talking about works of art, not propaganda.
My response to Ballgame, and Ballgame’s response to me, moved to an open thread.
No, that’s not exactly what I said, Richard. The gist of what I wrote was that a such a movie wasn’t inevitably a part of some inegalitarian project. There certainly isn’t any reason to suppose that The End of Love is part of that project, given the only evidence we have at hand (the trailer), and I frankly think the odds that almost all of the single father movies that you just happened to have actually seen genuinely embody such a view to be slim to none.
I’m avoiding the word “conservative” here because in this context it seems to misleadingly imply a great deal more than it actually means. And frankly, this seems important, given what you say in your last paragraph. I can’t tell how much I agree and how much I disagree because I honestly don’t know what, exactly, you mean by “gender conservative.”
To me, it means “man works at paying job, woman does the feminine child-rearing nurturing stuff.” Right? If so, then a single dad could be as Republican as the day is long, but his kids are going to grow up with at least a little bit of a sense of, “maybe child-rearing isn’t something that only women can do.”
Similarly, I’m also puzzled at your frequent reference to men “manning up” to become fathers. All parents who love their children will make sacrifices for them. How do you know a movie is viewing this as “manning up” when a single father is doing it, as opposed to one that’s just showing a single dad doing what a good single dad has to do?
None of this is to say that a movie about a single dad is invariably progressive, just as a movie about a working woman or female superhero isn’t invariably progressive. But a progressive isn’t going to sneer at the very idea of a movie about a working woman by saying ‘it’s already been done’ and ‘gives women too many cookies.’
Moreover, there’s an important angle here that is outside of traditional ideas of the ‘gender conservatism’ vs. ‘feminism’ debate: namely, the perception that men are potential predators. Here, there is, in fact, some overlap between the two supposedly oppositional views. To some extent, there are elements in both camps that buy into the ‘men are beasts’ bigotry (although the source of that beastliness hotly debated). And showing regular men caring for children does carry an important egalitarian message that helps undercut that bigotry, helping boys and men see male interaction with children as something which is perfectly normal and accepted. We often hear feminists talk about the importance of role models for women aspiring to non-traditional occupations; we should be just as aware of the importance of these non-traditional role models for men as well.
In re-reading your comment, Richard, I do detect areas of agreement between us which my previous comment might imply wasn’t there. So that’s good (that we agree, not so good that I implied that we didn’t). It seems to me our disagreement really comes down to this:
It seems like this is an interpretation that you’re imposing on single father movies, and not something that would actually exist in all of the single father movies you’ve seen.
I think that’s completely the wrong way around. Cop films are expensive (cars, costumes, shooting permits, firearms, etc). Films about single motherhood are inexpensive, harrowing films about single motherhood are even better – they’re really only a step up from porn in terms of production budget (what do you need, cheap clothing, smashed up furniture and a dilapidated building?).
There are dozens and dozens of these at places like SXSW and Sundance every year. The reason they’re not at your local multiplex is that people have tough lives and go to the cinema to get away from stuff like that. Hell, Sundance is on now, do you want some examples? These are honestly all 100% genuine.
Two Mothers. Naomi Watts plays a single mother in a film about two women who have ‘wrong and doomed’ sexual affairs with each other’s teenage sons.
Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes. Magic realist film in which a suburban American high school girl, fixated with her mother’s death during her birth, develops an unusual bond with a single mother (Jessica Biel) who moves in next door.
The Way Way Back. Comedy featuring Toni Collette as a single mother who takes her teenage son on a road trip. No, sorry, a bittersweet comedy with a dysfunctional family trip.
Big Sur. Kerouac adaptation featuring Kate Bosworth as a single mother, the first 10 minutes are without dialogue, and then we get to watch a descent into alcoholism and emotional delusion.
Another Alex, good point. I guess I was thinking more about mainstream film or relatively “big” indies. Also, as you can tell, i know almost nothing about the film industry. :-p
Ballgame:
Fair enough on the distinction between calling someone a hypocrite (criticizing the person) versus just criticizing something they said.
Of course, in this case, you were criticizing something that Melissa didn’t actually say:
It’s up to you to provide evidence to back up your claims, and if you can’t do it – as you plainly can’t in this case – then you should withdraw the claim. “I believe I’ve read her saying something I object to, but I don’t know for sure if that’s true and I can’t find a link, therefore I’m going to criticize her for saying it” is a spectacularly unfair and dishonest approach.
Regarding your disagreement with Richard, I think there’s an obvious and significant difference between saying “the single-dad films I’ve seen have had a certain conservative theme,” and saying “single-dad films are inherently conservative.” The former doesn’t assume that single-dad films MUST be conservative, the latter does.
A movie like Big Daddy (for example) definitely has the theme of a adult child-man being “stepped up” into socially-approved adult-responsibility manhood through being a father. That’s a theme which is found in many single dad films (and more generally, in “manchild grows up through nurturing relationship with child and/or getting boned” films, such as the excellent “About A Boy”), and it’s a regressive theme because it endorses very narrow ideas about manhood and adulthood.
That doesn’t deny that those same films may also have positive, progressive themes. Films can have more than one theme at a time.
Les Mis is an interesting contrast to that, because although it says that the main character grew into a whole person because he learned to be a father and love his daughter, it doesn’t connect that to ideals of ‘being a man” or of taking on adult responsibilities – Jean Valjean was conventionally “masculine”, and took on loads of adult responsibilities, long before he adopted Cosette. While I’m not endorsing everything in Les Mis, or saying it’s the only good approach, I think it does show that it is possible for a film to avoid the regressive themes Richard is talking about, while still taking on some of the positive themes you’re talking about.
No, Amp. If you want to claim it was an unconvincing argument, well, I could respect that, but it wasn’t “spectacularly unfair” and it sure as hell wasn’t “dishonest.” ETA: Your summary of my supposed argument is misleading: I was more pointing out what I haven’t seen her say to say about stories like Iron Man, and opening up the issue to the readers who may have seen something I’ve missed. Anyway, I wrote a long response which I decided not to post because this is all secondary to my main point, which stands unrebutted.
OK, so here’s the critical question that I’m tossing back at both you and Richard: how, exactly, do you distinguish between:
1. A movie that shows a self-absorbed adult male human maturing and becoming less self-involved due to having a loving relationship with his child (let’s call this movie, Father Feminist), and …
2. The movie Paleo Dad, a movie that shows an “adult child-man being ‘stepped up’ into socially-approved adult-responsibility manhood through being a father”?
I mean, short of a closing voiceover at the end — “… and that’s how I became *orchestral flourish* … a MAN!” — how could you tell the difference? Related: how can you tell Paleo Dad is endorsing “very narrow ideas about manhood and adulthood”? Does the movie palpably sneer at the main character’s man-friends who remain childless at the end, or something? If that’s true, then maybe you have a point … but I’m extremely skeptical that that’s been true of all of the ‘single-father’ movies that Richard has seen, and there’s certainly no evidence for such a subplot in the trailer for The End of Love.
Seriously, this is what hangs me up about all of Richard’s responses here. I can’t detect a description of anything tangible in his references to all of the supposedly regressive single father films he’s seen that would explain how, exactly, they were regressive Paleo Dads instead of Father Feminists.
OK, in re-reading your last comment, Amp, this seems germane:
But here I would just disagree with your premise. I don’t think it’s inherently regressive to show a self-absorbed person (male or female) becoming more mature as a consequence of bonding with their child.
I have edited this comment for clarity:
Ballgame: Two things strike me about your responses to me:
1. You keep asking for me, in varying and sundry waysm to draw you a bright line between Paleo Dad and Father Feminist movies, when I have said that I’m not arguing for such a bright line. Rather, I am pointing out one conservative theme–conservative because it is invested in the idea that men need to earn manhood–that has seemed to me common to the single father movies I have seen, not to every movie that has a single father character in it.
2. You do not seem to acknowledge that there is a cultural narrative which posits mature, responsible fatherhood as a central component, if not the ultimate expression of manhood. If you don’t acknowledge the presence of this narrative, then our disagreement is about a good deal more than movies. Your description of Father Feminist movies, for example,
does not acknowledge that the emotional maturation you describe takes place in the context of a culture–and a culture that is represented in the movie, whatever movie we are talking about–that is still pretty heavily invested in traditional manhood values, and that this maturation is therefore inevitably going to be a response to those values, whether it conforms to them or not.
Amp has pointed out, and he’s right, that the single-father movies I am talking about–Big Daddy is one of them; Three Men and a Baby was another–are part of a larger sub-genre, if I can call it that, of movies in which a man-child is forced to grow up and become a mature, responsible man through any number of interventions: suddenly becoming a father (single or not), getting divorced, getting married, having sex, etc. In these movies as well, it is probably possible to depict the male protagonist’s character development in the same way that you have described Father Feminist’s, without referring to manhood as a value system at all, and if that’s the way you would describe them–think movies like Mrs. Doubtfire, Kramer vs. Kramer, any of The Hangover movies, even The 40-Year-Old Virgin–then, as I said above, I think our disagreement is about something much deeper than the interpretation of individual movies.
I know you will say that I still haven’t answered your question, and I suppose I haven’t, but there are two reasons for that: First, I don’t have time to go back over a movie in the kind of detail it would take for me to give you the thorough kind of answer you’re asking for; second, and more importantly, I think this larger disagreement I am talking about, if it exists, would make that answer an exercise in futility, because if you don’t at least see the cultural narrative of manhood at work in these movies, it won’t matter what I say I see.
This is not to say that I don’t take the point of your question. I think the question of fatherhood and how it is represented in culture, popular and otherwise, is a very thick knot that needs to be untangled. Your question is part of that process.
On a slightly separate note, I think you should pick up Fatherless America, the book by David Blankenhorn that I mentioned earlier, if you haven’t already read it. It’s been a very long time since I read, but I think you would find it worthwhile.