The American Father Onscreen

A Post-Jungian Perspective

Toby Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429576423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The American father is constantly depicted by contemporary Hollywood as being under pressure and forever struggling, but why? By utilising an analytical psychological approach, this fascinating book reveals the depths, complexities and nuances of the depictions of the American father and his struggles with contemporary contextual challenges and offers a fresh and intellectually exciting set of perspectives and interpretations of this key masculine figure and his effect on cinematic masculinities.

Using a post-Jungian methodology and close textual analysis, the book seeks to explore the presence and impact of the American filmic father, and the effect his Shadow has on himself, his children and US society. It does this by examining the concept of 'father hunger', a term popularised by the mytho-poetic men's movement that holds fathers to be an essential link to the masculine continuum and masculinity in general. Analysing the role that Hollywood plays in depicting fathers and their relationships with their children and American society, The American Father Onscreen concludes that Hollywood presents the American paternal as crucial to the construction of US society and, consequently, American cultural myths, such as the American Dream.

Providing an alternative perspective into the fascinating, complex, and under-researched figure of the American father, this book will be of great interest to academics and students of film, gender studies, American studies, and post-Jungian psychology.

Chapter 1

The American father and his contexts

DOI: 10.4324/9780429199684-2

At the risk of stating the obvious, the father has been a constant presence within cinema, yet curiously overlooked, with Stella Bruzzi highlighting this somewhat odd omission in her seminal discussion of the paternal Bringing up Daddy in which she identified that the cinematic father had been previously treated ‘ “a bit like air” – omnipresent but rarely talked about’ (2005, xi). From the brutal Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp) in D.W. Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms (1919, USA) to the struggling Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) in American Beauty (Mendes, 1999, USA), the American father, in particular, has been a vital, yet under-discussed, onscreen presence. By exposing him and his presence within American society, along with his accompanying cultural myths, most importantly his place within the American Dream, we can provide important context to this figure and its impact on filmic discourses. This chapter, due to reasons of brevity and necessity, paints a broad picture in terms of reviewing the father. In particular, there is a vast, complex and ever-increasing body of work on film gender alone, with Kord and Krimmer accurately summarising this situation: ‘Reading the vast literature on the subject is like walking into a hall of funhouse mirrors’ (2011, p. 37). Given this situation, the chapter is structured around the father being contextualised within film studies, gender studies, and cultural studies, before we move on to analysing the paternal’s presence from a post-Jungian perspective within cultural myths such as the American Dream in the next chapter.

Masculinity and cinema

In terms of both film and cultural studies, what started to emerge from gender discourses around masculinity and men in cinema in the early 1990s was the key idea of pluralised masculinities that were to be located within cultural texts such as film. Since Mulvey’s seminal work on gendering the male gaze and female subjectivity in her landmark 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the assumptions around masculinity was that of a monolithic cultural construct that was premised on the goal of patriarchal dominance of woman. Employing Freudian and Lacanian theories to support her critique of patriarchy within cinema, Mulvey sketched what Dix calls ‘a pessimistic, even morbid account of the female spectator’s place as it is constructed by mainstream narrative’ (2008, p. 234). Whilst invaluable in drawing critical attention to masculinity, and the undeniable power of the gaze, it was uncomfortably close to gender essentialism for many critics (Stacey, 1994; Peberdy, 2011), promoting, again in Dix’s words ‘a depressingly binary system’ (ibid), with masculinity, and indeed femininity, still being identified as singular. Stacey echoes this, commenting how:

Psychoanalytic theories of identification used within film criticism have led to very narrow conceptualisations of cinematic identification, which have ignored the broader meanings of spectator/star relations and indeed have led to some overly pessimistic conclusions about the pleasures of cinema.

(Singh, 2009, p. 125)

Bruzzi concurs:

For all its brilliance, Visual Pleasure has not only opened doors, but closed them, too … the overwhelming attraction of Mulvey’s schema has, in turn, closed down alternative ways of interpreting gender operations in mainstream, principally Hollywood films.

(2013, p. 7)

Continuing in a similar vein in the early 1980s, Steve Neale’s 1983 essay ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’ applied psychoanalytical theories and continued the work that Mulvey started, with specific reference to men, rather than just women, being cast as an onscreen spectacle. It differed, however, with the influence of Ellis’s work in Visible Fictions (1982), around the plurality of representations of men and masculinities. Whilst a useful and timely contribution to the debate, the psychoanalytical model it used was still subject to the restrictions inherent in a reductionist psychological paradigm. The emerging debates around masculinity were increasingly predicated on the growing realisation that there was now a plurality of cinematic masculinities that was on offer. This recognition of diverse male and female spectators, along with their corresponding diverse cultural, social and political perspectives, culminated in Cohen and Hark’s seminal collection of critical writings: Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Identifying the traditional view of onscreen manliness as an ‘unperturbed monolithic masculinity produced by a de-contextualised psychoanalysis’ (1993, p. 3), they provided a persuasive deconstruction of masculinity as cultural performances, performances that were subject to a spectrum of influences and discourses. Screening the Male was followed by Kirkham and Thumim’s complementary collections of essays on masculinities, You Tarzan and Me Jane, (1993), both of which also addressed masculinities from a number of viewpoints (including psychoanalytical), although mainly from a cultural studies perspective. These two early collections provided inspiration for a rapidly increasing number of perspectives on masculinity and film, and as such, provided the basis for theories around masculinity being a wholly plural construct, firmly foregrounding these theories within debates on cinematic masculinities.

In addition to, and supporting the overall sense of, the debate widening, Kirkham and Thumim identified the following areas as being of primary concern with regard to depictions of masculinity, namely: the body, action, the external world and the internal world. These were, they argued, the main sites where male strengths, weaknesses, anxieties, pleasures, and pain reside:

It is these sites that various traits of masculinity are signalled; these may be qualities either asserted or assumed in the construction and development of masculine characters, or they may be signifiers of themes quite consciously concerned with an interrogation of masculinity.

(ibid, p. 11)

For example, Tasker’s dissection of the first two Die Hard films in the long running franchise (McTiernan and Harlin, 1988–2013), in her in-depth study of male action films Spectacular Bodies (1993), makes a point around the transposition of male anxiety and the body:

Anxieties to do with difference and sexuality increasingly seem to be worked out over the body of the hero. The male body (usually replete with muscles) is an arena where by contemporary anxieties are played out on screen.

(ibid, p. 236)

This broad demarcation of where masculinities are enacted and played out within cultural products was a major step forward in establishing studies of masculinities and gender within film studies. Another noteworthy development within the literature was the emergence and adoption of the performative theories of gender theorists, such as Judith Butler (1990, 2004), RW Connell (1987, 1995, 2005) and, within film studies, (Pomerance, 2001; Pomerance and Gateward, 2005) amongst many others. Many of these essays and works argued persuasively that masculinity (also gender as a whole) is a performance, a masquerade, ‘dramaturgical’ in that it is, in effect, an exhibition for audiences and spectators that both reinforces and subverts cultural norms and discourses. Butler, quoted in Peberdy, stated that gender performances are ‘ideological, created and fuelled by public and social discourse in order to normalise what is conceived to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’’ (2011, p. 27). As such, filmic performances and onscreen representations therefore echo cultural and gender performances. This theory will be discussed further and in greater detail later on.

So far in this section, plurality still remains the over-arching concept when considering a cultural studies approach to masculinity and gender; the past idea of an essentialist single masculinity is expressly exposed as simplistic and restrictive when considering the polysemous cinematic depictions of masculinity. Simultaneously, there were a number of other aspects of filmic masculinities that were being explored. Masculine aspects of national cinema were starting to be analysed with French males and Gallic masculinity under scrutiny (Powrie, 1997), alongside later examples such as Russia (Goscilo and Hashamova, 2010) and Italy (Rigoletto, 2014; O’Rawe, 2014; Bini, 2015). Inspired by the development of the four main areas defined by Kirkham and Thumim, writers such as Holmlund (2001), Lehman (2001, 2007) and Fouz-Hernandez (2013) focused attention upon cinematic representations of the male body. There were also in-depth dissections and analyses of masculine representations within cultural, historical and social discourses (Cohan, 1997; Davies and Smith, 1998; Yates, 2007; Combe and Boyle, 2013), alongside overviews and analyses of males and masculinity within film and actorly performance (Bingham, 1994; Peberdy, 2011) and more generalised summaries and explorations of men and film (Baker, 2006, 2016; Benshoff and Griffin, 2003; Chopra-Gant, 2005; Gronstad, 2008; Burrill, 2014). Discussions of men within genre films (Grant, 2010) were joined by more specific inquiries, with horror (Greven, 2013, 2017) and war (Morag, 2009) being some of the genres under scrutiny. In terms of families and anxieties around the masculine, Harwood (1997) and Tincknell (1997) identified changing and responsive cinematic representations of the family under pressure; fathers being seen as still playing a key role within this social structure, albeit as figures also under a number of pressures. Filmic representations of the crisis in masculinity also came under questioning with Walsh (2010) and Fradley (2013) providing dissenting perspectives and trenchant critiques of this phenomenon. This recognition of the crisis that masculinity was facing in the late 1980s and early 1990s is echoed and explored further by, amongst others, Kord and Krimmer. They state:

Upon entering the realm of cultural representation, a social diagnosis-the crisis in masculinity-metamorphoses into a crisis of fatherhood. In this new guise, it is propelled to prominence by a plethora of scholarly works, social movements, and cultural narratives, Hollywood cinema being amongst the most conspicuous among them.

(2011, p. 37)

With these metamorphoses of crises in masculinity transforming into crises of fatherhood in mind, we are able to now turn to the main focus of this section of the chapter, that is to say, the mapping of the cultural discourses that deal directly with representations of fathers and fatherhood within film.

Fathers in film

Film studies had a noticeable lack of emphasis on representations of the paternal figure until just before the millennium. This absence of discussion was reflected in the literature around the father and film. Susan Jeffords cogently analysed the depictions of father figures within Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) in Screening the Male (1993), arguing that fatherhood within the ‘new masculinity’ is depicted as being a construct that ‘transcends racial and class difference, but that the vehicle for that transformation is fathering, the link for ...