“My heart belongs to daddy,” Marilyn Monroe sang in 1960, in her last musical, Let’s Make Love. Almost nobody covers that song anymore, not just “because sexism” or “because kind of gross incest double entendres,” but also because “daddy” seems pretty lame, both as concept and reality, nowadays.
Fatherhood, especially urban, white fatherhood, has become a territory of (often literal) beard-scratching ambivalence. There’s this feeling that nobody really takes you seriously, that maybe you don’t want to be taken seriously, and that if you are taken seriously, it’s in a bad way. Check out this New York Times Op Talk blog post on “What It Means to Be a ‘Dad’,” in which appears this dour observation on the modern father figure: “Disconnected from the interests of everyone who isn’t like him, and unwilling to listen or to share power — out of touch in a bad way, not a cute one.”
Yep, cultural distaste for The Patriarchy is perhaps at an all-time high, and it’s no surprise this was reflected in the movie mainstream in a big way. Make no mistake: the put-upon, ineffectual, bumbling, clueless dad has always been part of pop culture. He was a particular staple of post W.W. II comedy: inchoate as an archetype in It’s a Wonderful Life, but more fully formed in fare ranging from The Seven Year Itch to Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation and more. But even in Jingle All the Way the bumbler eventually gets the toy. In a culture in which the LCD Soundsystem lyrics “with a face like a dad and a laughable stand” are almost a generational rallying cry, fatherhood is sapped of whatever inherent nobility cinema once attached to it.
Matthew McConaughey, well-intentioned as his character Cooper may be, is nonetheless kind of the ultimate Dad Who Can’t Hack It in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The one-time space cowboy clearly feels affection for his two children, specifically the precocious, feisty Murph, but it’s pretty clear he’s not interested in hanging out with them in any meaningful way. Son Tom isn’t so hurt by this, but Murph is a little needier. So when Cooper goes into space and checks out of his kids’ lives for literally decades, it should hardly surprise us that Murph grows up to be a mighty ticked-off Jessica Chastain. McConaughey’s character is hardly the only flawed or failed father figure here: let’s not forget Michael Caine’s Professor Brand, the scientific genius behind the exploratory missions to find a new Earth. At the risk of dropping some spoilers, Brand arguably sends his biological daughter to certain death and betrays his surrogate daughter, math prodigy/protégé Murph, only revealing the Massive Dad Fail in a deathbed confession.
In Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s Birdman, it would appear that Emma Stone’s straight-outta-rehab movie-star-daughter Sam is likely going to be just an easy target for the director’s disdain for all things Internetty, and she kind of is. But Birdman is pretty generous in spreading around the ineffectuality, and as a result her father, Riggan Thomson, the onetime superhero-portraying movie star now trying for artistic legitimacy on Broadway (played by Michael Keaton) comes in for a few crummy-dad kicks in the crotch. “You’re doing this because you’re scared to death that you don’t matter,” Sam shouts at Riggan in a flurry of rage, and while the movie may not sympathize with what Sam regards as signposts of relevance (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), her accusation has him dead to rights, as they say.
And look at the dads in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The real-time-shot chronicle of various moments in a kid’s life over a 12-year time period has come in for a little criticism on account of its arguably too-male perspective (on the other hand, whaddya want, it’s practically announced in the title). But just look at the specimens of manhood it offers: Ethan Hawke’s Mason Sr. is an appealing enough guy in that Ethan Hawke way, but he starts off pretty feckless and winds up square, once he’s come to face up to his responsibilities in the context of a new family. Then, Mason Jr.’s two stepdads seem “nice” at first, but are soon revealed as abusive alcoholics, and one feels both sorry for Patricia Arquette’s mom character and terrifyingly appalled at the lurch in which she’s been left, sociologically speaking. (The dating pool for single moms in Texas, it seems, is as dire as it is for young New York women as depicted in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture.)
Two dads also prove to be worse than one in Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s movie about an ambitious music student. “There are no two words more harmful in the English language than ‘good job,’” demonic music teacher Terence Fletcher (the electric J.K. Simmons) advises young Andrew (Miles Teller), during one of their rare exchanges in which Fletcher isn’t being an absolute hellbeast to the student drummer. As it happens, Andrew’s dad, Jim, played by Paul Reiser at his most determinedly schlub-menschy, is a teacher and failed writer who’s kind of the walking embodiment of the “good job” ethos. Between the “weak” biological dad and the pretty much insanely manipulative pedagogical surrogate, Andrew is led to the dubious conclusion that he has to forfeit his humanity in order to sidestep—at the very least!—artistic mediocrity.
Finally, there are the extremely clumsy big-brother/father/mentor/pal/God-knows-what moves that Steve Carell’s John du Pont puts on wrestling siblings Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. You’re reminded things have come to an especially dire pass whenever Carell is framed in a shot with an antique U.S. flag (and that’s pretty often): equating failed fathers with the lost promise of America itself is a pretty plain the-whole-system-is-out-of-order statement.
Who’s going to save us from this sorry state of affairs? If there's an Interstellar sequel it'd be great if Christopher Nolan could alter the time-space continuum to get Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn in the same room at once. Clearly the leadership the world needs.