From Logan to Stranger Things to Guardians of the Galaxy; The depiction of fatherhood is changing.

Orignally Posted: Nov 12, 2017

The depiction of fathers in movies has typically been the bumbling, enept, familiar babysitter. He’s there holding the baby at arms length when “uh-oh”, it’s diaper change time and you know that this glorified cum container doesn’t know what to do when that happens. We have redundant words like “Mr. Mom” to describe a word that already exist, a dad, to point out how odd it would be for a man to take responsibility for his own kids.

But this is seemingly shifting into a narrative about fatherhood that is less about instilling the sexist roles of what a “real” man does, for what the more realistic relationship that each of us have with our fathers. Many times the term “daddy Issues” have been used to explain away a girl’s behavior towards men. She doesn’t trust men? Daddy Issues. She enjoy sex “too much”? Daddy Issues. She is fiercely independent? Daddy Issues. She is helplessly obedient to men? Daddy Issues. But each and everyone of us, has daddy issues. Everyone is coming to terms with the human being that donated half his chromosomes and the impact this person has had on our lives. None of that is more clear than in the genre mediq of 2017.

The first movie in which I noticed this shift in the presentation of masculinity and fatherhood was James Mangold’s Logan. A film in the X-men canon but as stylistically and tonally distant from those film as one could get. The movie centers around a young girl who has escaped a mutant testing facility and is trying to reach a safe haven in Canada and contracts Logan (aka the Wolverine) to get her there. It is during this trip that Logan discovers that the young girl, who is named Laura (or X-23 for all you nerds) is actually his clone. By this point in the X-men movie series Logan is a shell of what he used to be, the adamantium in his body eating away at him from the inside like a giant skeletal cancer. Each time he ejects his claws, he has to pull them the rest of the way out in what I can only describe as the bloodiest Viagra commercial I’ve ever seen. He is old. He is exhausted. He has to wear glasses from the rack at the pharmacy. He has seen insurmountable horror and suffered incalculable loss. He is no longer the rage screaming, veiny, jacked, pointy haired, cigar smoking scamp of the first movies, now he is a disgruntled Uber driver, taking care of his eldery paternal father-figure Professor X. Logan is battling something that he cannot put his claws through, he is battling age. The paternal relationship between Professor X and Logan is strenuous, Logan refuses to allow himself to be fathered while simultaneously taking on the role of son. His desires are always at odds with his actions. Fighting hurts him more, but he still does it. Pushing the Professor away only furthers his sorrow. The entire movie the antagonistic question is asked, what happens when a person who is used to solving their problems with violence, has to solve his problems with empathy instead? Professor X is battling a form of mutant alzheimer’s and it has cataclysmic repercussions for everyone around him, and the only person capable of withstanding the damage done by his power is Logan. This dynamic is a perfect setup for posing the key problem, how do you punch your way through loss? Logan does everything he can to push away his feelings, his pain, his hurt, by drinking and through graphic (you wanted an R-rated Wolverine movie well fuck me you got it!) and violent actions but it solves nothing, people still die, Professor X is still suffering and Laura is still there looking at him. Wolverine is hands down the most popular X-men character, and when you see him skewer a man’s head like a shish kabob on the 4th of July you cheer for him but you are also aware that this is killing him. His lifetime of killing is literally killing him. He watches Laura enact the same brutal violence as he did and he is terrified, because he knows what that has costs him. No longer are the depictions of the Terminator blowing people up to protect a young John Conner amoral and universal, Logan understands that by exposing Laura to violence like that he is setting her up for a lifetime of loss. Since Laura is Logan’s clone, she is the only person in the entire world who could possibly understand him and he is unfamiliar with this. His initial reaction is to just keep her at arm’s length, until she responds to his behavior with violence towards him and he begins to understand that she needs him. She needs someone to teach her how to live with who she is, even when the person that she is, is a tiny, adorable, unstoppable, rageful, killing machine. A man is supposed to be tough, he is supposed to be strong, he is supposed to leave all that mushy feelings stuff to the woman, which means that he loses out on developing a deep, emotional relationship to his children. It means he is constantly keeping a part of himself apart from growing and changing and being stronger on the inside as well as the outside. In Logan that stereotypical depiction of masculinity and violence in challenged. What is the true cost of living your life like that when you have a child to take care of?

The next movie I saw that reexamined the role of father to child was James Gun’s Guardian of the Galaxy 2. In this movie Peter Quill, while on the run from a group of gold space Aryans, finds his birth father and desperately tries to build a relationship with him until it’s discovered that his father has other plans for him. In the first movie it is revealed that Peter’s mother was not delusional when she said that a man from space impregnated her thus granting Peter with unusual cosmic powers. When he finally meets up with his father Ego (the actual name a grown man came up with) he all but abandons the family he formed during the first movie so as to play glow ball with Kurt Russell in his giant single father condo. The theme of fathers being a disappointment to you is heavy in this film. Ego is not who he is presenting himself as and is actually a giant, selfish planet prick while Yondu, Peter’s childhood kidnapper is actually revealed to be his protector (while also exploiting a child, but I guess that’s better than being eaten by your dad a la Cronus style). The presentation of fathers has been much kinder than that of mothers. From the movie Psycho to Throw Mama From the Train, mothers have been depicted as the source of all pain in a child’s life. Mother’s are with the child much more than fathers typically are and if the mother has any sort of psychological illness (which is much less likely to be diagnosed) the child is usually the one who is the most exposed to it. But fathers get away easy. Their failings as men, as fathers, as husbands is much more permissible. It’s funny to say dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back, we watch men on daytime TV brag about how many children they have and how little they are in those children’s lives. A man’s failings are his own, a mother’s failings are her children’s burdens to bear. This concept is heavily critiqued in the movie, with Peter understanding his failure as a man is a direct line to the presence and absence of the men in his life.

In Guardian’s Peter struggled to accept that this fantasy person he wished would save him his whole life is a terrible person and the mishmash group of technicolored weirdos he cruises the galaxy with are actually his real family. There is a saying that goes “blood is thicker than water” but the second part is often left off is “but the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” This is a moist way of say that the blood we spill for our friends is more substantial that the waters that birthed us. Peter has to let go of the man he thought was perfect and accept that there is no perfect father out there. There are only complicated men, that we can learn to accept and love regardless or we have to let them go.

In Stranger Things season 2 our favorite greasy police officer Hopper is hiding Eleven away is what is the worst cabin to be hiding an adolescent girl in that a grown man could think of. But here we are. The Duffer Brothers get many things wrong in Stranger Things, especially when it comes to issues of race and gender, their weakest area of understanding, but the development of Hopper as father is fairly interesting. Hopper is initially presented as a selfish gross slob (I would argue that he is still two out of three of these things by the end of season 2) but is revealed as being a man who watched his only daughter die of cancer before the dissolving of his marriage. In the series, Will Byers disappears into another dimension while a girl escapes from a secret government facility and is the key to finding Will and getting him out of the terrifying nightmare world he is trapped in. Hopper, the chief of police in the small fictional town is drawn deeper and deeper into the mysterious truth of what happened to Will Byers. Also Winona Ryder’s is in it and she’s BONKERS. In the plagiaristic style of the Duffer Brothers, Hopper is an amalgamation of many leading male figures of the 80’s he is one part Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis and and Danny Glover, he is too cool to care, a lawman who does things his own way, and he’s getting too old for this shit. But in the second season Eleven, the facility breakee, is now living with Hopper in this shanty playhouse out in the woods. [No matter how I write it just sounds so fucking weird.] But Hopper is loving it, he is making her breakfast, watching movies, reading bedtime stories, lying to her, just like an actually parent does. Hopper has made Eleven the stand in for the daughter that he has lost and by the end of the series is trying to make Will’s mother a stand-in for the wife he lost as well. Hopper is an endless emotional void, he pretends not to care but invests himself so much in other people’s lives. He knows intimate details of the people in his town, he is babied by his secretary, he risks his life for the Byers family and shelters Eleven from the entire US government, it is a lot to ask for a man who is supposedly “closed off”. This man cares and desires to be vulnerable but has separated himself from that option. In many depictions of men in media the idea of settling down and raising a family is tantamount to jail time. It’s the last option that any self-respecting bachelor wants but Hopper is baby hungry. He craves domesticity and to be the role of father, it is nothing compared to punching intergalactic demons in the dick. Gone are the 90’s comedic depiction of a man avoiding the responsibilities of children, into showing a man who loses not an ounce of his badassery while also desiring his “daughter” to go to prom.

According to a study conducted in 2015, fathers reported spending triple the amount of time with their kids than men in the 1960s (only seven hours a week, compared to a woman’s 15m which is pathetic but hey). Men also reported wanting to spend more time with their kids and more and more millennial men are choosing to stay at home and raise their kids. The depiction of fathers will continue to change as society changes, which is great. As an aspiring procreator myself, I look forward to swapping diaper rash solutions and baby yoga locations with the local dads. By seeing more varied and nuanced depictions of fatherhood in media hopefully this will give men more freedom to be the kind of men and fathers that they want to be.