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Today: J.D. Connor, who teaches Film and Media Studies at USC.

Issue No. 477

Taking It Lying Down
J.D. Connor

Taking It Lying Down

Dads of the Awards Season

by J.D. Connor

It’s awards season, the time of year when critics unearth big themes and render their verdicts on the culture at large, with diagnoses veering between compelling and hallucinatory. In the glare of competition and the intensity of an unrelenting screening schedule, no one is immune to the temptation to render judgement. Thus we learn that the movies of the moment, like the critics, are Taking Stands. Because the baseline genre of serious Hollywood cinema is some form of melodrama, the big themes often end up involving family issues. This year, mothers are ambivalent (or worse!), kids are threatened (or worse!)—but what of the dads? I’m here to tell you what the Awards-Season Dads are up to.

You can learn a lot about dads in films by the way they spend their time in the bathroom, and this year the Dads are not jerking it like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or Jacob Elordi in Saltburn, nor starving in Cubist turmoil like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. No. And while I can’t speak to them all, I can say that today’s Awards-Season Dads are often to be found both bathing and ruminating.

Here’s an Awards-Season Dad, Joel Edgerton, in Train Dreams. His wife is given to bouts of why-are-you-away-at-work-so-much. He’s a logger; there is a logging season; he can’t manage to find other work around town. She proposes going logging with him; he explains that it’s dangerous; it is.

Edgerton’s character is a tormented but decent guy, whose wise counselors either die or drift away. Bound to a woodland landscape undergoing profound changes, he never really gets his own role at the heart of them—a Forest Gump, as it were—even as he bathes in his drawers and looks at his hands to contemplate his situation.

Here is Shakespeare, another Awards-Season Dad, played by Paul Mescal in Hamnet. His wife comes to terms with his workaholism because he pounds the table and howls. He is also William Shakespeare, a genius, and is his own wise counselor (as the ghost of Hamlet’s father); he, too, bathes in his drawers. He also does a little anachronistic swimming in the river and then sinks down to contemplate and escape his situation.

Frankenstein is a little different, since Oscar Isaac, though he too is bathing to solve his problems, changes things up by putting some muslin on his face. When he leaps out we see his buttocks as he pads wetly about the lab. He gazes at himself in the mirror, imagining himself the subject of his own unholy experiments. (“Symmetry!” is his Archimedean “Eureka!”) So, no drawers. 

In Frankenstein it’s Saltburn tub veteran Jacob Elordi who wears the decorous loincloth and who plunges into the water below a tower. Not exactly bathing, not exactly ruminating, but adjacent to both. Like Edgerton, he spends a lot of time looking at his hands. Unlike all the other Awards-Season Kids, this one can’t die. He asks for an immortal companion; his ambivalent dad denies him, fearing monstrous “Procreation!” So, a drawers-thwarted Dad-in-potentia.

It’s not just that these dads are bathing, either, or bathing in their drawers, or pondering their hands: they are also, all of them, leaning back in invisible recliners. If they could be watching TV, they would be. If they could be watching themselves in the movies of their lives, they would be. These are hands, in other words, that cry out for a remote control. Thus and so, even our Costume Drama Dads look toward Leo DiCaprio’s bathrobe-wearing couchbound stoner in One Battle After Another, watching the movie of the life he isn’t leading but could be, maybe. Leo’s hands are made for holding a bong, or a corded phone, or a small beer. 

The Costume Drama Dads dream of the utopia of television. In Train Dreams this is literal. Edgerton discovers television and the space program at the same time and also at the same time very (very) tacitly comes to terms with the legacy of anti-Chinese violence that marks his initiation into manhood. In Hamnet the dream is figurative, when the play becomes the thing. 

Frankenstein’s television utopia is more complicated. It has glass plate photos directed by Christoph Waltz and held up by Elordi like a picture tube before his face. It also has bolts of lightning, the electricity that powers the life-giving apparatus, channeled down a smooth tiled tube. Waltz will slip to his death in it like a grown-up, syphilitic Augustus Gloop. This life-and-death-tube finds its echo in the inexplicable waterslide-style tube that Elordi uses to escape. All that is literal, or nearly so. Figuratively, a picture tube appears as a grand circular window in the tower and finds its entertaining echo in the smaller circular window in the captain’s quarters on the ship.

One of the oldest models of cinematic spectatorship is that of the male gaze, in which the camera positions us to identify with the imaginary wholeness and narrative power of a masculine hero. These dads do possess some narrative power, whether that belongs to the character (Hamnet, Frankenstein) or is just experienced as a field of force that surrounds him (Train Dreams, OBAA). But one doesn’t have to be a Jungian to see these diaped-up bathing moments as returns to a womb, as replays of a birth that remains baffling (Train Dreams) or partial (Frankenstein) or even one that has been usurped by the birth of one’s own child (Hamnet). Or, perhaps a chance to measure up to the revolutionary wholeness on the television, even if that means getting tossed out of a moving car by Benicio Del Toro (OBAA). 

Whether this paternal convergence is a diagnosis of contemporary masculinity or of an industry so bedeviled by streaming that it can’t even dream of cinema anymore and must settle for television is hard to say.

DARKENED SKIES

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