Dads Rock: The end of the world and the family
In Christopher’s Nolan’s film Tenet (2020)the protagonist, handily enough called Protagonist (John David Washington), is a US government agent that somehow gets involved in a plot to reverse entropy. This would allow the world to move backwards to a point where climate change does not happen. The stupidity of this plot device is as breathtaking as the film is spectacular. Slow motion reverse fight scenes, backwards explosions, bungee jumping up a building. The trappings of an action film buried in a confounding series of events that lead to a meaningless conclusion. The macguffin of entropy in the narrative of Tenet hides the real ideological and narrative thrust of the film. This is a film about fatherhood, the family, and the end of the world.
The nuclear family: a husband and wife with 2.5 children is a development of the Capitalist method of production. The idea that men work and women do unpaid child labour at home, that this unit is the basis of “family” life, can only come from a system where the very connections of all of us to each other have been obfuscated and alienated. Pre-Capitalist societies did not have such a strange and isolated view of the way humans reproduce, grow, learn, and are cared for. There is strong evidence to suggest that for the majority of human history people lived in communal groups where labour, love, and care were shared equally. It is only when, a few thousand years ago, people begin to settle and produce surplus goods, that divisions emerge. These divisions are at first along gender lines, and then they become stratified into classes. The emergence of Capitalism a few hundred years ago further alienated and atomized people into “individuals”. This helped to maintain a system that destroyed communal links as it exploited human labour. The family emerges out of this, as an artificial construction that mirrors the blasting, alienation of Capitalism. It is this that creates the disasters we face, however for the court artists of the ruling class the tail wags the dog.
In Tenet the Protagonist chooses to protect a rich woman (Elizabeth Debecki) and her son (the son we never really see but from a distance), from her monstrous husband, played in wonderful scene chewing style by Kenneth Brannagh. The bad dad of Brannagh’s character is behind the plot to reverse entropy, thus making his son cease to exist. The anxiety in the film is not generated by the high stakes science fiction reversal of time, nor by the truly horrifying reality of climate change. It is the anxiety of the abusive husband, and the bad dad. It is as if the rich family falling apart prefigure the end of the world. The Protagonist functions as the good father: emotionless, tough, violent to others, but willing to sacrifice all for the woman and her child; for the family that could be. Save the family, save the climate is the message. The spectacle of the film is a smoke screen over a fairly boring reactionary idea. That the end of the bourgeois family means the end of the world.
This obsession with the family, masculinity, and fatherhood extends to Nolan’s other films ( see the Batman franchise, Interstellar, and Inception)and many mainstream Blockbusters of the past year.
In Army of the Dead (2021) the end of the end of the world is a zombie apocalypse and there are two dads vying for supremacy. Which dad wins will determine the fate of humanity and the planet, but most importantly the family. The bad dad in this situation is a tough US marine, Scott Ward played by Dave Batista. He must reconcile with his estranged daughter (step daughter? It is never clear) played by Ella Purnel through an absurd plot involving a bank heist in zombie over ran Las Vegas.
The good dad is a Zombie dad, nay a Zombie King, portrayed by Richard Cetrone. The Zombie King is shown protecting his “family” of Zombie Queen, Zombie baby, and Zombie subjects. This anachronistic fantasy of the regal family is subverted on the surface. However in contrast with the dysfunction of the relations between the non zombie family members it seems to suggest that we should be aspiring to the Zombie royal relationship. The Zombie family has everything in place, in order, until the thieves come and kill the Zombie Queen. The world has not ended as long as we have family. Even when we are dead, as long as the family goes on, we can exist.
Director, Zak Snyder’s pornographic fetishism of extreme violence is the spectacle that covers up the true nature of his film making. Many critics see the as the reactionary element of his films as the clear celebration of militarism and violence. Under-appreciated is his liberal fantasy of the good father. Again this father has to be tough, he cannot be caring or loving, he has to be taught how to express these “female” traits through hyper violence.
This leads to some incredibly funny scenes in Army of the Dead where the intention to portray conflicted masculinity and the inability of men to take “women’s roles” comes up against the absurd apocalyptic setting.
In one scene Batista’s marine takes a moment out of mowing down zombies with a machine gun to have a heart to heart with his daughter. “ I am not angry at you for killing my mother”, she says, “I am just mad you weren’t there for me afterwards”. This line is delivered with no sense of irony.( We have seen in an earlier, truly disgusting, slow motion dream sequence Ward killing a zombie woman with a knife while his daughter screams). They then go on to discuss Ward’s plans to open a food cart once he has the money from the zombie slaughter and heist.Surely this is the middle class, liberal fantasy writ large!
Mother’s must be dead, or in peril, in these spectacles. The world must be ending as the mother has died. The father cannot be a mother, that would subvert the role of the family. He cannot be caring but can only be redeemed for his absence. It is not his fault, these films tell us, the family is falling apart, the world is ending and these bad dads are doing their best.
There is another dead mother and a bad father in The Suicide Squad (2021). Bloodsport (Idris Elba) is an elite assassin who refuses to be recruited by a secretive (maybe CIA) US government agency using convicted supervillains to do their dirty work. He is visited by his daughter who exposes that her mother is dead and that he is a bad dad but that she needs his help. She has been caught shoplifting and if he joins the Suicide Squad he will redeem himself. He angrily retorts that he taught her not to get caught and that he is a bad dad. The head of the shady department head, played by Viola Davis, threatens to somehow have his daughter killed in prison ( I am not sure why narratively her being sent to prison first is worse). This allows our bad dad to go on a journey of self discovery and find a surrogate super daughter in Rat Catcher Two,Daniela Melenchor. The plot is dull, racist towards Central and South Americans, and involves predictable action sequences, weapon fetishization, and above average CGI. The main ideological core of the film is however the family. Rat Catcher Two had a good father although he was a “bad” man because he stole, and also because he denied her a mother or family unit. Her loss and Bloodsports inability to be a father, due to the absence of a mother, are the main underpinnings of the fantasy narrative. The end of the world spectacle is about the absence of stable families. The world is ending because we are not fulfilling our roles. The world is saved by a bad dad realizing his place as protector of a daughter, as someone who is violent but for a reason: for his family. It is worth noting a deep connection between American militarism, imperialism, and the family in all of these films. This is not a unique trait in American blockbusters from any time period but I feel the focus on the dad at the end of the world is unique to our time.
The final bad dad, or bad dads, come from the most recent Amazon sci-fi spectacle: The Tomorrow War. The plot is a strange mix of all of the films above, and stolen concepts from the classic science fiction Forever War by Joe Hadelman, that create a lifeless, braindead, reactionary piece of propaganda. I am not going to outline the plot save to note that all of the elements of family disintegration and the end of the world are present.
We have a cataclysmic event and a sense of a father (Chris Pratt as ex Green Beret, Dan Forester) who doesn’t know his place in the world. Forester must rediscover his inherent violent “masculine” features in order to save his family in the future, thus saving the world.
In The Tomorrow War subtext almost becomes text. Forester’s daughter is, in the future, the only one who can save humanity, but she cannot do this until her father agrees to not divorce her mother in the past. This comes perilously close to revealing the true meaning of the film. The world is saved when Forester reasserts his role as a father in the family unit and brings his own estranged father, who left him as a child, back into the family.
The spectacle of these films: the sound and fury that signifies nothing, disguises the true nature of their ideological function. It is an interesting phenomena that these popular, large budget science fiction movies are all centered around essentially the same narrative: the bad dad, the disintegration of the family, and the end of the world. It says something about the waning sense that the family can be a place of stability or provide what we need. As Capitalism as a system creates more displacement, war, climate refugees, and disease the artistic scribes that rely on the maintenance of this system produce vapid spectacles of stale ideology. They may be a comfort to some, but the bad dad becoming the good dad will not save the world. Only fundamental changes to our economic system of production, that prefigure a change to our family life and the way men view themselves and the world, can bring us closer to something like salvation.
