Screen Machine

Feature: O Father Where Art Thou?

If the superhero genre is mainly concerned with how to tell the same basic story over and over again while finding endless superficial variations on its generic components, there is one thing that generally never varies: the moral authority of the paternal figure. Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Iron Man – their drive to do good in the world is always somehow premised on the saint-like qualities of their fathers (or sometimes uncles as is the case with Spider-man, whose Uncle Ben’s mantra “with great power comes great responsibility” echoes through each new installment of the franchise). Even a post-modern iteration of the superhero film like Kick Ass has its Big Daddy. One recent exception to this series is The Green Hornet, the critically maligned and somewhat under-rated addition to the superhero genre from Michel Gondry and starring Seth Rogen. What is the first order of business for the Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato when they first team up as crime-fighters? They visit the memorial statue of the Green Hornet’s recently deceased father – newspaper editor James Reid – and cut off its head.

Despite being in the minority when it comes to superhero films, The Green Hornet is indicative of a wider trend developing in popular film: an increasing obsession with the symbolic death of the paternal figure. In Tron: Legacy, a son is reunited with his long-estranged father only to be confronted with the reality of his father’s impotence; in The King’s Speech, the paternal figure is reduced to a neurotic with a speech impediment; in Inception, the heir to a huge energy empire hates his deceased father who failed in his paternal duties, having held nothing but contempt for his son’s perceived weakness. (Note the fall of the authoritarian father figure in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and Bahrain for some real-life counterparts.) But the father’s death is not the whole story of course, for just as surely as the Green Hornet and Kato cut off the head of the father’s statue at the beginning of the movie, at the end they are shown soldering the head back to the body. Herein lies the full narrative pattern arising in popular cinema: the death of the father, followed by his swift symbolic restoration.

In Tron: Legacy, it’s something like what Slavoj Zizek sees in The Wizard of Oz. Both films are in fact remarkably similar. In both films, the protagonist enters a fantasy realm, an event accompanied by a switch in film format that highlights the state-of-the-art technology – In The Wizard of Oz, it’s the move from black and white to colour; in Tron: Legacy, 2D to 3D. In both films, the protagonist is searching for a symbolic father and – once this goal is accomplished – are confronted with the reality of the father’s utter powerlessness. I.e. the “Wizard” is not a wizard at all, but rather an ordinary man who depends on smoke and mirrors to maintain his power. Tron: Legacy goes a step further by implying a level of theological import. The “father” is not just the biological father of the protagonist, Sam, but the creator of the film’s digital universe: The Holy Father himself. What a vision of God, then, when Sam discovers his father in self-imposed exile spending his days pottering around a spartan room taking the odd break to indulge in a bit of zen meditation! What Zizek finds remarkable about The Wizard of Oz is that despite the father being essentially found out, his symbolic power remains unaffected. The Wizard is still able to convince the Tinman, Lion and Scarecrow that he has given them a heart, courage and brains respectively. The illusion persists: “There is more truth in this appearance. Appearance has an effectivity – a truth – of its own.” The same holds true for Tron: Legacy. The film is full of warnings about the danger of political utopianism, but ends on the most utopian note of all: Even though we have already learned that it was the father’s shortsightedness and limited philosophical grasp that brought a whole new species of sentient being to life and then quickly brought about their genocide, Sam returns to the real world determined more than ever to pursue the legacy of his father (something about protecting some hot girl whose “perfect” DNA will usher in a new era of enlightenment), hence the film’s title.

If Sam’s faith in his father remains inexplicable in Tron: Legacy, The King’s Speech has this theme of restoring the father’s symbolic power at its very core. King George VI (played by Colin Firth) is trying to overcome a speech impediment and befriends an unorthodox speech therapist whose success in curing the King becomes increasingly important with the onset of World War II. The film would have undoubtedly been acceptable as an inoffensive tale of one man’s struggle to overcome a personal difficulty but the film insists upon its political dimension: It is not just important for the King that he overcomes his stutter; the film implies that this is also of immense importance for England herself. Here we have the old cliché – in a time of crisis, what is really important is for the people to have a strong leader on whom they can displace their political essence. The question to ask here is What gets lost in the restoration of the father? The film is not just about a man suppressing the incoherent utterances of his own voice. It is about a screenwriter, David Seidler, suppressing the incoherent utterances of history. Conspicuously absent from The King’s Speech is any of the events involving King George’s support for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in his signing of the 1938 Munich Agreement, a policy conceding the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Nor is there any mention of the King’s support for Lord Halifax (another Nazi appeaser) as a successor to Chamberlain in lieu of Winston Churchill.

The restoration of the father implies a certain amount of disavowal on behalf of the subject. This disavowal is the repressed narrative of Inception, a film that could perhaps claim greatness if it wasn’t so damn determined to domesticise its dramatic stakes. What is important in Inception? It’s that Leonardo DiCaprio gets back to being a father for his children. It’s that Cillian Murphy believe that his father was a good man. It’s that we as spectators experience catharsis by seeing these dreams fulfilled. But why is this the focus of Inception? Why is the focus not on the fact that our heroes are engaged in a ruthless act of corporate aggression by one multinational against another? Why is the focus on Cillian Murphy’s symbolic reconciliation with his father instead of his actual disempowerment? Why is the focus on Leonardo DiCaprio’s reunion with his children and not on the fact that he remains a cog in the relentless grind of global capitalism? This is perhaps the lesson to be learnt from the contemporary moment: We are very willing to trade power for catharsis, truth for pleasure. The real world analogy I can draw is how people were very excited at the images of protest from the recent Egyptian Revolution but quickly felt a desire for the comfort of the status quo. The Age even published an opinion piece by the chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi arguing that what Egypt really needs now is a “wise leader”.

So why do I like The Green Hornet? Perhaps it’s that the paternal figure is not really reinstated at the film’s conclusion. The film is infused with a determined irreverence that resists the conservative politics of the other films mentioned here. The image to close The Green Hornet is of the head restored to the father’s statue but welded on at a crooked angle. No longer a father figure but reduced to a fellow man. The lesson here is that we should not rebel against the “wise leader” in a purely reactionary manner (as is the case with your Dawkins-brand atheists) but rather we should happily take from the father that which is “wise” and reject that strange power which renders him a “leader”.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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