Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film

Framing Fatherhood

Hannah Hamad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135088903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book interrogates representations of fatherhood across the spectrum of popular U.S. film of the early twenty-first century. It situates them in relation to postfeminist discourse, identifying and discussing dominant paradigms and tropes that emerge from the tendency of popular cinema to configure ideal masculinity in paternal terms. It analyses postfeminist fatherhood across a range of genres including historical epics, war films, westerns, bromantic comedies, male melodramas, action films, family comedies, and others. It also explores recurring themes and intersections such as the rejuvenation of aging masculinities through fatherhood, the paternalized recuperation of immature adult masculinities, the relationship between fatherhood in film and 9/11 culture, post-racial discourse in representations of fatherhood, and historically located formations of fatherhood. It is the first book length study to explore the relationship between fatherhood and postfeminism in popular cinema.

1 Fatherhood, Postfeminism and Contemporary Popular Film

Fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of masculinity across the spectrum of mainstream U.S. cinema, a move that has taken place in tandem with the cultural normalization of postfeminist discourse. Popular cinema is abundant with paternally signified characters, as ideal masculinity in postfeminism has increasingly tended toward fatherhood. Some argue that the legibility of postfeminist masculinity in popular culture is obfuscated by its plurality and that this signals a shift away from the possibility of a universal normative ideal and from the notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity.’¹ For example, Margaret Ervin argues that formations of postfeminist masculinity, such as the ‘metrosexual,’ enable the furtherance of “plural male identities.” ² Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon similarly view the “postfeminist man” as a “hybrid” configuration of a multiplicity of current cultural formations of masculinity, likewise at odds with the notion of a hegemonic ideal.³ Paternity is a universalizing discourse of masculinity (notwithstanding the variety of modes through which it is articulated), with a high degree of cultural purchase that enables hegemonic commonality across a plurality of postfeminist masculinities. Therein lies its powerful appeal, as it negotiates a range of masculine identities through a culturally apposite discursive anchor germane to the mores of contemporary culture. Hence, as illustrated throughout this book, postfeminist fatherhood is the new hegemonic masculinity. ⁴ The case study example explicated hereafter is highly symptomatic of the cultural logic and gender politics of the contemporary fatherhood film and indicative of the pervasiveness of paternity as the dominant paradigm of movie masculinity, manifesting as it does in the unlikely context of a documentary about penguins.

Following its release, March of the Penguins (2005), which thematically centralizes postfeminist fatherhood in its depiction of the Antarctic emperor penguin community, became a surprise sleeper hit. Notwithstanding that “documentaries were more visible and central in this decade than perhaps in any other era in American film history,”⁵ it nonetheless differed from its feature documentary contemporaries in declining to deal directly with a hotbutton issue like a school shooting, corporate crime or climate change, as did Bowling for Columbine (2002), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Nor was it sold on the name of a filmmaker like Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, or Werner Herzog. Instead it was trailed, with the help of star power via Morgan Freeman’s voice-over narration, promising a story of parenthood in “the harshest place on earth.” It took $77.5 million at the U.S. box office and a further $50 million elsewhere across the world,⁶ making it the second most lucrative feature documentary ever released in theaters, placing it inside the top thirty highest grossing films of that year. It outperformed dozens of ostensibly higher profile films with more obviously discernible appeal and won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. For a contemporary nature documentary, such success was unprecedented. Its success is less unlikely than might be assumed, given the thematic centrality of protective and involved fatherhood underlying the chief aspect of its premise. This is that penguin fathers, in the extreme environment of the Antarctic winter, must nurture eggs, attend the birth of their babies, and parent them solo, until the mothers return from a faraway hunting expedition. This situates the film as part of a ubiquitous trend in contemporary popular cinema that conceptualizes fatherhood as ideal masculinity, in accord with this representational imperative of postfeminist culture. The tendency to draw male protagonists as fathers gives rise to the negotiation of hegemonic masculinity through a cultural identity formation I call postfeminist fatherhood. Postfeminist fatherhood manifests in many guises, and its identifying characteristics vary according to narrative, genre, and numerous other factors. However, dominant iterations tend toward a model of fatherhood that is (or becomes) emotionally articulate, domestically competent, skilled in managing the quotidian practicalities of parenthood and adept at negotiating a balance and/or discursive confluence of private sphere fatherhood and public sphere paternalism. Furthermore, hegemonic formations of postfeminist fatherhood configure this model at little cost to the legibility of fathers’ more traditionally masculine traits. Fatherhood is thence dually articulated through a mutually constitutive binary of strong–sensitive, patriarchal–postfeminist masculinity, with a correspondingly circuitous relationship to feminism. Thus, what underpins the variously overlapping and seemingly competing configurations of postfeminist fatherhood in popular cinema is that they all, in some way, account for the reconceived gender norms in parenting that arose from the politically charged movement for the social and economic enfranchisement of women in the 1960s and 1970s (second wave feminism).

The unexpected box-office legs of March of the Penguins were aided when championing its depiction of family values became a cause célèbre for U.S. conservatives, who found it affirmed their favored familial norms.⁷ This is notwithstanding the role reversal that structures its postfeminist premise, at odds with right-wing sanctification of mothers’ private sphere roles as nurturers and fathers’ public sphere roles as providers. Thus, fathers shelter eggs, sustaining them with their body heat, while mothers hunt to feed their families. The nurturing role of fathers is overdetermined in a segment highlighting their ability to simulate lactation. However, construal of this as feminizing or an appropriation of motherhood is offset through emphasis that this is a one-off occurrence to sustain the chick until the mother’s return and that it occurs from the throat rather than the breast. Narration also highlights the bond established between father and child as “the father and his chick sing to one another.” The subsequent severing of this bond when fathers leave the breeding ground on their own hunting mission is treated with marked pathos, as this parting of ways is depicted as emotionally painful for both father and child. Following their departure, mothers assume nurturing duties, which both parents take up on rotation thereafter, so chicks are constantly parented and food continually gathered. But while penguin fatherhood is idealized and their separation from their chicks treated with solemn reverence, this is not true of the curtailed sequence depicting motherhood. In one segment, when her chick dies, a mother attempts to steal the chick of another. Grieving mothers are thus pathologized as deranged baby snatchers, in contrast to the stoic and steadfast fathers. This echoes a historically gendered double standard aligning female mourning with hysteria, and male melancholia with gravitas,⁸ and which underpins the articulation of postfeminist fatherhood in melancholic terms across contemporary popular cinema more broadly.

March of the Penguins thus “idealizes and anthropomorphizes its penguins” ⁹ and can hence be read as a depiction of postfeminist fatherhood. This is compounded by some cognate contemporaneous phenomena of popular cinema: the emergence of similarly penguin-themed parables of postfeminist fatherhood, Happy Feet (2006), Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011), and Happy Feet Two (2011), and the comparable narrative of anthropomorphized protectorate lone fatherhood, Finding Nemo (2003), the second highest grossing film of 2003. Mr. Popper’s Penguins literalizes what March of the Penguins analogizes in that it requires the enactment of idealized parenthood by deficient father Tom Popper (Jim Carrey), who becomes “proxy parent” to a group of penguins when they “imprint” on him, necessitating his provision of their parental care. Through his surrogate parenting of the penguins, Popper recuperates his derogated fatherhood, heretofore characterized by his workaholic absence, enabling him to reconstitute his broken family with newly acquired credentials of postfeminist paternity. Happy Feet is a companion to March of the Penguins through its depiction of Antarctic emperor penguins and its postfeminist characterization of penguin dad Memphis (Hugh Jackman), whose fatherhood of Mumble (Elijah Wood) is appositely drawn to this template. However, it is with Mumble’s paternalization in Happy Feet Two that postfeminist fatherhood rises to thematic prominence. The later film narrates ameliorative protectorate fatherhood, as Mumble and his son Erik, working through tensions that arise between them when Mumble fails to prevent Erik from suffering social ridicule, are separated from Erik’s mother. She has been trapped by an iceberg in a marginalization of motherhood typical of the postfeminist fatherhood film. Mumble must now free her, ensure the safety of Erik and his friends, and recuperate his fatherhood in the eyes of his son, which takes place when he risks his life to free a trapped elephant seal father, reuniting him with his own sons, whereupon Erik’s view of his father is transformed. This is confirmed later when Erik operatically conveys his filial reverence as he sings: “My hero, my father.”

Moving from paternalized penguins to the anthropomorphized aquatic paternity in Finding Nemo, this film stages a child-in-jeopardy scenario enabling the narrative enactment of protectorate fatherhood when widowed single father Marlin, a clownfish, traverses the Great Barrier Reef to find and rescue his lost son Nemo. Finding Nemo insists on Marlin’s heteronormativity by standards of human behavior and thus on his postfeminist fatherhood, contrary to noteworthy documented realities of clownfish behavior. When his wife dies, Marlin raises Nemo alone. However, as Judith Halberstam highlights, citing findings from evolutionary biology, it is known to be the case among clownfish that “if the female partner should perish . . ., the male fish will transsex and become female. She will then mate with one of her offspring to recreate a kinship circuit.”¹⁰ Thus Marlin’s widowed single fatherhood is another anthropomorphization of this cultural ideal of masculinity. Furthermore, in characterizing Marlin in terms of personal tragedy, spousal bereavement, and lone male parenting, Finding Nemo is symptomatic of key ways in which postfeminist fatherhood is negotiated in contemporary popular cinema: via the efficacy of melancholy as the emotional mode of address par excellence for its articulation, and for the viability of marginalized motherhood through affective appeals to victim status. Postfeminist fatherhood thus accords with the imperatives of the melodramatic mode. It does so with troubling implications from a feminist viewpoint with regard to the representability (or lack thereof) of motherhood and to its discursive hegemony. This is enabled by postfeminist culture, which negotiates this conceptualization of fatherhood as appealing, thanks in part to the apparent accommodation of feminist discourse and the normalization of an ostensibly feminist ideal of masculinity.

Finding Nemo and March of the Penguins thus present as anthropomorphic narratives of postfeminist fatherhood, cementing its articulation as ideal masculinity elsewhere across the spectrum of contemporary popular cinema. In 2003 Finding Nemo shared screens with family comedies of postfeminist fatherhood Daddy Day Care, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Haunted Mansion, paternalized historical dramas The Last Samurai, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Missing, and more films thematizing fatherhood, including Elf, Mystic River, Bad Santa, Love Actually, Matchstick Men, Cold Creek Manor and It Runs in the Family. In 2005, March of the Penguins shared screens with War of the Worlds and Hostage, both of which stage scenarios requiring the enactment of protective fatherhood in the extreme circumstances of alien invasion and hostage crisis. That year also saw the release of paternally oriented comedies Are We There Yet? The Pacifier, Cheaper by the Dozen 2, Yours, Mine and Ours, Son of the Mask, Sky High, Dreamer and Bad News Bears, and films which matter-of-factly feature single-father families, such as Zathura, Because of Winn-Dixie and Racing Stripes, or which kill the mother/stepmother quickly to create widowed single fathers like those of White Noise and Hide and Seek. More films from 2005 to further thematize fatherhood include Cinderella Man, Coach Carter, Kingdom of Heaven, The Legend of Zorro, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, The Weather Man, Transamerica and An Unfinished Life. Finding Nemo and March of the Penguins are therefore not isolated examples of paternally oriented popular cinema. Nor are 2003 and 2005 atypically anomalous for their spikes in father-themed output. Rather, they are symptomatic of the paternal turn that gave rise to the normalization of postfeminist fatherhood in popular cinema. Thus, there is political ground at stake in the mediation of postfeminist fatherhood, as it takes feminism “into account,”¹¹ while sidestepping the feminist issues inherent to articulating masculinity in these terms. Delimiting my study to the contemporary era, commensurate with the time frame germane to the cultural hegemony of postfeminism, and the related intensification of depictions of fatherhood in film, this book explores the gender politics of postfeminist fatherhood across a range of its dominant paradigms and recurrent formations.

Postfeminist Fatherhood as 'High Concept'

A key contention of this book is that the twenty-first-century prevalence of popular cinematic fatherhood is historically locatable in relation to contemporaneous discourses of postfeminist masculinity. This enables contemporary manifestations of fatherhood as ideal masculinity to be differentiated from those of film before second wave feminism. It further requires consideration of the specificities of the contexts that produced and helped to shape them. At various points I therefore extend my discussions of postfeminist fatherhood beyond the bounds of the film text and into wider cultural spheres in which they and discourses surrounding them are mediated. I thus incorporate analysis of promotional posters, trailers and TV spots, critics’ reviews and discursively congruent wider cultural conversations about fatherhood and masculinity taking place elsewhere in the media. I thereby invoke Justin Wyatt’s notion of “high concept,” by which the premise and principal selling points of films are reduced to emblematic visual descriptors and taglines.¹² This informs my consideration of how producers capitalize on the cultural currency of postfeminist fath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Fatherhood, Postfeminism and Contemporary Popular Film
• 2 Paternalizing the Past with Postfeminist Family Values
• 3 Post-9/11 Fatherhood and the Cultural Logic of Paternal Protectionism
• 4 Film Stardom and the Paternalization of Aging Masculinity
• 5 Postfeminist Fatherhood and Immature Adult Masculinity
• 6 Postfeminist Fatherhood and Postracial Discourse
• 7 Concluding Remarks, Future Directions and Postfeminist Fatherhood beyond the Mainstream
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index