On this Father`s Day, it may be only a coincidence that the movie screens are full of dads. Kevin Costner`s Eliot Ness coos over his kids in ”The Untouchables,” and John Lithgow (”Harry and the Hendersons”) and Martin Sheen (”The Believers”) fight to protect their families from supernatural forces; Jack Nicholson`s demonic Daryl Van Horne, a supernatural force himself, is lured into fatherhood by the three ”Witches of Eastwick.” Even Benji, the floppy-eared canine children`s film star, acts as a protective papa to a brood of cougar cubs in his new film, ”Benji the Hunted.”
Fatherhood has been one of the dominant themes of American moviemaking since the late `70s, when a small melodrama called ”Kramer vs. Kramer” came out of nowhere to clean up at the box office and sweep the 1979 Academy Awards. Such films as ”Table for Five” and ”Six Weeks” rushed in to fill the American public`s sudden craving for sensitive, caring, new wave dads, bravely raising their families in spite of the absence or indifference of a mother.
But these most recent papas seem fundamentally different from their late
`70s predecessors. ”Kramer vs. Kramer,” along with its many imitators, was a reaction against the feminist attitudes that had become
institutionalized in those years: If Mom was going to leave home all day to go to her own job, or even, as Mrs. Kramer did, leave home entirely to ”find herself,” here was the proof that women weren`t really necessary–that fathers made the best mothers after all. Any dramatic change in a society, such as the one feminism produced in the `70s, is followed by an equally dramatic conservative reaction–and in our time, it has most often been movies and television that have played the role of social reactionary, seeking to recuperate and restore traditional values.
The ”sensitive” dads of the `70s arose in answer to specific cultural pressures. When those pressures eased up, those dads disappeared: as
”feminized” fathers, they themselves represented a too-significant departure from tradition to be satisfying for very long. Soon enough, parodies such as ”Mr. Mom” finished the cycle.
The image of the ideal dad, as it has been pressed upon American society, requires something more distant, more authoritative, more powerful, uninvolved in the daily, domestic life of the household but always prepared to step in to set things right. As a real person, this all-knowing, all-wise father may well have never existed. He is, in our time, supremely a creation of popular culture, of the movies and of television. More specifically, he seems a creation of the situation comedies of the 1950s. More specifically still, he is Robert Young in ”Father Knows Best.”
For the generation that now dominates filmmaking, Young is the primal papa–the image it grew up with, the image, thanks to a television childhood, that seems more real that reality. Now that the television generation is in charge, both as filmmakers and film consumers, it isn`t surprising that Young has come back, a mythic figure clambering up from the electronic id.
It`s Brian De Palma`s ”The Untouchables” that presents the most purely Youngian of the current screen fathers: Kevin Costner`s Eliot Ness is perfectly secure in his paternalistic values, impeccably loving, protective and powerful. The scenes depicting Ness with his family are straight from sitcomland, a display of hollow symbols–doting Dad, devoted Mom, beaming baby –emptied of all genuine warmth or life-giving tension. Ness is so sure of his benign fatherly role that he wants to extend his moral authority beyond his family to encompass the entire city–and in doing so, rid the city of its evil father, Al Capone.
In his interviews, director De Palma has repeatedly insisted that ”The Untouchables” is a ”John Ford picture”–meaning, apparently, that Costner`s uncomplicated heroism, his loyalty to home and family and law and order, is in the image of the hero played by John Wayne in Ford`s westerns. But Costner`s Ness, a man of no doubts or hesitations, has little to do with the tortured, self-conscious figure played by Wayne in Ford`s ”Rio Grande,” ”The Searchers” or ”The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Wayne`s relationships with his family and society were consistently marked by misunderstanding, rejection and outright hostility. The violence he used to protect civilization made him unfit to live within it.
But for De Palma, Ness` willingness to kill is what defines him as a leader and a father: it`s something must learn from the crusty, traditional cop played by Sean Connery, and once this ancient wisdom has been handed down –again, as from father to son–Ness comes into his full glory. There is no shading in De Palma`s Ness, as there was in Ford`s Wayne (or, at least, what shading existed in David Mamet`s screenplay has been suppressed by De Palma`s one-note direction). His capacity for violence does not compromise his goodness, but actually reinforces it. He is the father as final power and final judge, providing protection and exacting punishment–Robert Young with a gun.
”The Untouchables” is an unabashed celebration of paternal power and paternal authority. William Dear`s ”Harry and the Hendersons” and John Schlesinger`s ”The Believers,” though they`re much less effective as films, display more measured, more complex attitudes, hesitating somewhere between the stern paterfamilias and the ”sensitive” male of ”Kramer vs. Kramer.”
Produced by Steven Spielberg`s Amblin Entertainment, ”Harry and the Hendersons” reflects Spielberg`s habitual family themes so closely that it seems, in effect, a Spielberg movie–a remake of ”E.T.” told from the point of view of the father, a figure mysteriously missing from Spielberg`s 1982 film.
In ”E.T.,” a troubled, emotionally divided family was rescued by a visitor from the beyond: an extraterrestrial man-child who functioned both as a playmate to the film`s fatherless, almost friendless 10-year-old boy and as an embodiment of an ancient, traditional wisdom–a wise parent. Backing away from the image of the stern father, Spielberg presented an effective fantasy compromise. E.T. was gentle enough to inspire affection while being authoritative enough to inspire respect.
In ”Harry and the Hendersons,” there is another troubled family and another visitor from beyond–this time, a hulking, shaggy Bigfoot who moves in with the Henderson family, led by hulking, shaggy John Lithgow. The beast`s size and strength at first inspire fear; in his capacity for violence and destruction, he seems the embodiment of evil adulthood, his physical superiority posed as a threat to the rest of the family.
But the monster inspires a respect from the Henderson children that Lithgow, a terminally ineffectual new wave father, has never been able to command. Lithgow`s refusal to assume his proper authority, the film suggests, is a result of his relationship with his father (M. Emmet Walsh), a fierce authoritarian who owns the local gun shop and ridicules his son`s artistic ambitions.
The monster, of course, turns out to be anything but. As the Hendersons get to know him, he`s revealed as a meek, kind-hearted creature who weeps at the slightest provocation. Presenting Harry–as the monster is quickly nicknamed–as a whimsical child trapped in the body of an adult, the film offers Lithgow a fantasy solution for his dilemma. Here is a figure who is both father and child, both authoritative and affectionate. Following Harry`s example, Lithgow has, by the end of the film, regained his family`s respect. Discovering a new courage and forcefulness, he fights to rescue Harry from a murderous hunter, while still hanging on to his sweet, sentimental nature. Father, at last, manifestly knows best.
George Miller`s ”The Witches of Eastwick” is the most sly and sophisticated film in this recent brood, and although the issue of fatherhood enters the film only late–as a sort of final punchline–its ironic perceptions give the theme a nice, neat twist.
The film, loosely based on John Updike`s novel, presents a power struggle between the forces of masculinity and femininity, couched in vaguely supernatural terms. The ”witches” are three involuntarily single women–a widow (Cher), a divorcee (Susan Sarandon) and a victim of desertion (Michelle Pfeiffer)–who dream up a fantasy lover for themselves. When Daryl Van Horne
(Jack Nicholson) appears, he seems at first a grandly romantic figure:
exotic, mysterious, fabulously wealthy, infinitely seductive.
But as the movie progresses, Daryl escapes the women`s fantasies and acquires his own reality–and with it, his own desires and expectations. A lover at first, he becomes more and more of a husband, demanding loyalty and domesticity. ”I want what every man wants,” he raves in one of the film`s funniest sequences, ”Respect and affection and someone to iron my shirts!”
The women, not surprisingly, now want to get rid of him, and there`s only one sure way–to demote him even further, from husband to father. Once he`s given the women children, he disappears–both literally, as he`s banished from the movie in a storm of special effects, and, in the film`s metaphorical subtext, from the emotional life of the family.
Here, at last, is the ideal father for the popular culture of the 1980s
–so distant, so superior, so purely symbolic that he no longer exists as a human being. But he does reserve one method of communicating with his kids. When their mothers aren`t looking, he appears to them on a TV screen. Robert Young has been done one better.
