The father

The chapter describes and analyses the role that the Father plays within cinema and links this to cultural notions of the ‘American Dream’. It does this by initially examining the polysemous aspects of the father from a symbolic perspective using a post-Jungian methodology within the introduction, as well as highlighting the drawbacks of using a symbolic perspective (there is a danger of falling into rigid, codified analyses, which can stifle interpretation and debate within discourses on the father).

The chapter then moves onto the actual analysis, dividing the chapter into four separate sections, each dealing with a different aspect of the father. Beginning with the redeemed Father, the chapter goes on to analyse three films (American Beauty, Hard Eight, Road to Perdition) and examines how the father is mediated within these texts in terms of the paternal’s capacity for redemption and embracing numinosity, whether by sacrifice (Road to Perdition), spiritual awareness (American Beauty) or guilt-driven drive for redemption (Hard Eight). There are in-depth discussions around the role that the father’s surroundings and society have on him and his actions, as well as how the father figure is represented within normative society as well as subcultures.

The second section deals with the Unredeemed Father, the father who commits sins against society, as well as his children, with the films There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, and Revolutionary Road. Each film shows a different aspect of how the paternal can transgress societal norms and become a destructive force, affecting both their offspring and the wider world in a negative way. There Will be Blood shows what havoc a dark father can wreak on his children and drive away any hope of redemption, Magnolia examines the devastating effects of fatherly incest on daughters, and Revolutionary Road shows that a father can be oppressed by a society that demands certain codes of behaviour from the paternal, with older father figures manipulating father-hungry sons.

With the third section, the absent father is examined through the films Fight Club, Winter’s Bone and Frozen River, each film also demonstrating the dark, or Shadow, side of the American Dream, and how it is not necessarily open to all members of American society. With Fight Club, the unnamed Narrator is befriended and then manipulated by his Shadow Alter-Ego into a nihilistic and dangerous rebellion against late capitalist American society, with the absent father being explicitly blamed for anarchistic tendencies and the pain of abandoned sons. Winter’s Bone and Frozen River are similar, in that the absent father is depicted as the cause of monetary and economic hardship, with the women in the films being forced to take on the traditional masculine role of the father as breadwinner and source of stability.

Lastly, the final section is concerned with the surrogate father, and examines the paternal via the films Boogie Nights and A Bronx Tale, with the positive and negative aspects of the surrogate father under analysis. Boogie Nights looks at the negative senex figure of Jack Horner and how he comes to dominate, exploit and capitalise the surrogate son-figure of Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler in the LA porn industry of 1970s and 1980s America, a dark and inverted version of the American Dream. A Bronx Tale is a more ethnically specific narrative of Italian-Americans and how the surrogate father figure can be both a positive and negative role model for a son, embodying the ambiguity and contradictions of this symbolic presence.

The conclusion draws together the various arguments previously discussed and summarises how and why both father hunger and the father figure is so important within American cinema, as well as exploring the link between the Child and the Father, which leads into the next chapter.