Author: Dr Jason Bainbridge

Affiliation: University of Tasmania

Email address: [email protected]

Title of abstract: Blaming Daddy: The portrayal of the evil father in popular culture

Body of abstract: The father remains an ambiguous figure in popular culture. In most media, it is the absence of the father that forces the protagonist to become the . But what occurs when the father is not only present, but also a figure of evil? This paper looks at the representation of the evil father in three popular media texts – Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, Norman Osborn in Spiderman and in . In each text, evil is manifested in the creation of a secondary persona, the alter egos of Darth Vader, the Green Goblin and respectively. This offers the child (or surrogate child) of the father the potential to become as evil as the father by adopting his alter ego. But ultimately it also permits the father to be redeemed, to have the atrocities he has committed to be blamed on this alter ego and therefore insulates and absolves the father from blame. In this way, popular cultural representations of the evil father provide an interesting way of mapping how we perceive the evil that fathers do (they are, quite literally, “not themselves”) and how we apportion blame.

The father remains an ambiguous figure in popular culture, often physically absent but ever-present in the minds of the characters. For a great variety of stories, from Oedipus Rex to Harry Potter to Equus to Dexter to any of the Pixar movies, it is the absence of the father that initiates the narrative and, in many cases, forces the protagonist to assume the role of the hero. As narrative theorist Robert Con Davis notes: “the question of the father in fiction… is essentially one of father absence” (Davis 1981:3). Jan Cook concurs stating that “a fictional father is… not simply what stories are about but the motive for telling them in the first place” (cited Radstone 1988:154) with Roland Barthes going so far as to suggest that: “Every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the absent, hidden or hypostatised father” (Barthes 1975:10).

Indeed, the absence of the father seems to be almost a precondition for narrative development; think of the case when a father is present and it is the mother who is absent in any number of fairy-tales and their Disney adaptations. Here, it is the presence of the father that permits evil to enter the narrative, in the guise of the stepmother, with the father steadily becoming more and more absent as he is displaced from the narrative by the stepmother figure. What then are we to make of those texts where the father is not only present, but a figure of evil himself? In this paper I want to consider three representations of the evil father across three popular media texts – Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, Norman Osborn in Spider-man and Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks. These examples were chosen as: each text has itself been multimediated as films/books/comics, comics/films and television/film/audios respectively; in each example fatherhood is important to the text and to their relationship with their children - Luke Skywalker, Harry Osborn and respectively; they are all truly evil, a mass-murdering intergalactic dictator, a homicidal and a vessel for a serial-killing rapist respectively; in each text, this evil is manifested in the creation of a secondary persona, the alter egos of Darth Vader, the Green Goblin and BOB. I want to consider each of these texts as a way of mapping how we perceive the evil that fathers do (they are, quite literally, “not themselves”), how we apportion blame, and, to a lesser extent how they relate to the somewhat problematic theories of fatherhood proposed by Freud and Jung. Of course, there is an argument that each of these present fathers ultimately remains absent because the father himself (eg. Anakin Skywalker) is replaced by the abstract/symbolic figure of the alter ego (Darth Vader) for much of the text. Certainly this is true of Anakin in the original Star Wars film trilogy (commencing with Episode IV: A New Hope); it is not until the very end of Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back that both the protagonist (Luke) and the audience is made aware that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father, Anakin. Even then, the plot of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi hangs on the question of whether Luke’s surrogate father – the Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi – is correct in saying that Anakin is absent (“He is Darth Vader… more machine than man”) or whether, as Luke believes, there is “still good in him” and therefore the presence of the father, Anakin, is still possible. Confronted in the climax of the film by another surrogate father, the Emperor Palpatine, Luke is given the chance to assume the role of Darth, quite literally given the opportunity to become the father, as Palpatine’s apprentice. But he rejects this offer and is ultimately proven right when Anakin saves him at the cost of his own life. Near death the mask of Darth Vader is finally removed to reveal the scarred, tired face of Anakin Skywalker beneath; in death the father is made present.

Crucial to all of this is the notion of the alter ego, the black, armoured garb of the of the Sith, Darth Vader – which literally means, “dark father”. As in Return of the Jedi the alter ego allows the child (or, as we shall see below, surrogate child) of the father the potential to become the evil father simply by adopting the alter ego. But perhaps more importantly it also permits the father to be redeemed, to have the atrocities he has committed to be blamed on this alter ego and therefore insulate and absolve the father from blame. This is made clear at the end of Return of the Jedi where it is the armour of Darth Vader which burns on Luke’s make-shift pyre (the alter ego), but it is the spirit of Anakin (the true father) who smiles and glows as he becomes one with his fellow Jedi, Obi-Wan and Yoda, in the light of the Force; Vader has been punished and destroyed, Anakin is redeemed and absolved.

With the addition of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars films, the trajectory of the films is altered so that it is Anakin who becomes the protagonist. Here, we see Anakin himself commit atrocities, but they are framed as acts of desperation made out of a love of family – a love for his mother, tortured at the hands of the Tusken raiders and a love for his wife, Padme, who seems destined to die in childbirth. Here Anakin is the protagonist of a tragedy. He does not become a father until the end of the film and the secret birth of Padme’s twins, Luke and Leia. In this way, he is always constructed as the absent father, absent from the birth and kept absent by his assumption of the masked alter ego of Darth Vader after the horrific injuries he receives in battle with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Mustafar.

As the birth of the twins is kept secret from him, Anakin is necessarily absent from conception but as Paul Rosefeldt notes in his work on the absent father in modern drama, while “the mother displays the physical presence of motherhood… fatherhood needs to be authenticated” (Rosefeldt 1995:5). This is something also commented upon by Freud when he says: “maternity is proved by evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an influence and a presence” (Freud 1964:114). While a little obtuse, this points towards a relationship perhaps better explicated by Peter Wilson when he says that “the ‘invention’ of the father is of necessity founded not on the biological facts of paternity but on the relation of a male to a female and on her offspring” – the term father therefore denotes “a cultural relationship” (Wilson 1983:65) as much as it does a biological one.

This idea of the father being a cultural, rather than natural, construct is an important one. First, it suggests that Anakin Skywalker, Norman Osborn and Leland Palmer are as much constructions as The Green Goblin, BOB and Darth Vader alter egos. Indeed, as we have already seen in Return of the Jedi, this is a recurring theme of these texts: what is the “real” father? Is it the father who adopts the alter ego or is it the alter ego who adopts the father? Second, the existence of fatherhood as a cultural construction also permits fathers to exist as father figures for a much wider group of people than just their biological offspring. This becomes particularly apparent in the of Norman Osborn.

Osborn appears in the Spider-Man comic books produced by Marvel Entertainment and, despite being killed in the first film, is a recurrent presence throughout the Spider-Man film trilogy (almost the equivalent of a “dark Obi-Wan” from Star Wars). He is a corrupt businessman and scientist who fashions for himself the criminal alter- ego of the Green Goblin. More problematically, he is the father of the protagonist (Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s) best friend, Harry Osborn and a surrogate father figure for Peter himself. As the Green Goblin he becomes Spider-Man’s greatest enemy.

Both the storytelling in the comic books and the films is strongly informed by melodrama. Some elements of melodrama (most particularly the triangle for ’s affections formed by Lana Lang and Lois Lane) have always been part of comic book writing, but here melodrama was usually reserved for the supporting characters. In Marvel comics, the protagonists, the individual superheroes, are themselves made melodramatici.

Following Peter Brook’s formulations in The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), melodrama involves different combinations of at least five constitutive elements: moral polarization, overwrought emotion, pathos, non-classical narrative mechanics and sensationalism (see Singer 37) – all elements that clearly map onto Spider-Man. Furthermore, in melodrama there are usually six different roles: the protagonist, their helpers, the , his henchmen, the judge/father figure, and an authority figure (such as a doctor). In the Green Goblin, we find a confusion of these melodramatic roles where the villain (the Green Goblin) is also the judge/father figure (Norman Osborn). This means Osborn can simultaneously act as a surrogate father for Peter while the Goblin identity itself acts as a possible identity for Harry; Osborn-as-father therefore simultaneously becomes a point of identification and something to be defined against. Once again it permits the alter ego to be blamed for the crime and defeated (the Green Goblin ultimately dies in combat with Spider-man) but Osborn himself has the potential to be redeemedii.

The third of our fathers, Leland Palmer/BOB, appears in the television series Twin Peaks. TP’s narrative revolves around the murder of promiscuous prom-queen, Laura Palmer. Suspecting that this is the work of a serial killer, FBI Special Agent is called in to assist the local authorities with the investigation into Laura’s murder revealing not only her double-life, but the double-life of the town as well. Several episodes into the second season Laura Palmer’s murderer is revealed to be her father Leland, a lawyer and pillar of the community who seems to have been possessed by a malevolent entity known only as BOB. One of the key mythological elements in the series, BOB is a denizen of the Black Lodge. One of his creators, , describes him as “an abstraction with a human form” (qtd Rodley 178); in the text he is simply referred to by FBI agent Albert Rosenfeld as “the evil that men do.”

Once again this alter ego is important, for while TP is quite an ambitious incest narrative in offering a rapacious white middle class father (a figure all but unseen in most incest literature) it also explores the “impossibility” of trying to come to terms with that fact through the figure of BOB. Diane Stevenson draws attention to the class distinction here, for while the families in TP society are largely middle class, BOB is from “the lower class” (74). Thus the threat to the middle class family potentially comes from outside “normality in terms of the middle class” (Stevenson 74).

Extradiegetically BOB actually makes visible this idea of domestic violence, quite literally giving a face to the change that comes over someone engaged in this act, the “dual personality” so many accounts refer to – and an idea we have seen before in the violence of Vader and the Goblin. Like these alter egos, BOB is a way of externalising internal tensions but with BOB presented as the face of violence, the implication is that Leland the man is innocent and that it is BOB who is the perpetrator. BOB therefore operates in a similar way to Vader and the Goblin, serving to insulate and absolve the evil father (Leland) from blame.

Diane Stevenson ponders the question of whether it was Leland or BOB who killed Laura Palmer. Using the work of Tzveton Todorov she argues that TP places the viewer in the world of the fantastic throughout and this presentation highlights the fact that “we still lack a settled language that would enable us to talk about these things [child abuse and family violence] realistically” (72). She argues that: BOB is the double of Leland, the Mr. Hyde to Leland’s Dr. Jekyll, and he is double in another sense, doubly a figure of the underworld: a low-life drifter from the criminal underworld and a demon from the spectral underworld. That BOB the criminal drifter resides in Leland tells us that Leland harbors the criminal inside him, that the incestuous and murderous are to be understood as part of his psychological make up; that BOB the demon possesses Leland tells us that anyone could be so possessed, that the incestuous and the murderous do not arise from inside but are constructed from outside. (75)

However, BOB is a deliberately ambiguous figure and whether he works as myth (a manifestation of evil) or metaphor (for mental illness), to define him any further would be to unnecessarily limit the polysemy of TP. Indeed, the ambiguous nature of BOB is what makes him – and the relationship between him and Leland – so interesting because it highlights the ambiguity in dealing with perpetrators of domestic violence. Samuel Kimball, for example, suggests that the murders Leland commits: Bring[] the audience face to face with the incestuous and infanticidal paternal violence which, even when the killer confesses, the men of TP will not be able to acknowledge but will instead cover up beneath a rhetoric blinded by the very light it evokes, for Leland’s signature in BOB’s remains unreadable to them. (21)

Unlike other narratives concerned with incest and murder there is no legal recourse in TP. This in itself can be read as a commentary on the incest narratives in the crime or detective fiction genre where legal recourse provides little comfort to the victimiii. In TP, Leland Palmer is never charged with the murder of his daughter and the court scene where he comes before a judge is unusual, both in its setting (a bar) and in the way the proceedings are conducted. Before commencement, the judge offers his condolences to Leland on his “heartbreaking loss” and comments that he “knows Leland to be a fine and decent man” and that it is “dreadful to see him under these circumstances” (Episode 11). In the bail hearing, Sheriff Truman further outlines Leland’s fine character, describing him as a well-liked and well-respected member of the community. This disjunction between the fine upstanding pillar of community and the home abuser is one often seen in incest narratives and a division that also plays out across our other ‘father’ texts. Here, once again through an alter ego, TP is able to split these identities into two, (Leland and BOB) rather than presenting them as facets of the same individual.

This allows for the lawmen to forgive Leland. In the end he is not prosecuted by the law but rather absolved by Dale Cooper as he encourages Leland to “go into the light” (Episode 17). In an increasingly strange series of scenes BOB admits to the murders of Laura and Maddie. He says that Leland was a “good vehicle”, that he was “a babe in the woods” with “a large hole where his conscience used to be” and goads the lawmen to watch what happens when he leaves Leland (). BOB then bashes Leland’s head into the wall and he begins to die. As he dies Leland realises that he killed Laura. This further confuses the situation because he now starts to take responsibility for the crimes. He also talks about being possessed by BOB and how much he loved Laura. Dale urges him to “seek the path, look to the light” and Leland tells him that he can see Laura and that she’s beautiful. He dies forgiven by Cooper. Later Sheriff Truman, Dale, Albert Rosenfield and Major Briggs briefly discuss what occurred. Cooper asks if it is easier to believe in BOB or “to believe that a father raped and murdered his daughter?”

Under scrutiny then, the blame for Laura’s death moves from the perpetrator (Leland) onto a supernatural power (BOB), thus removing Leland’s culpability and allowing him to be forgiven because the lawmen believe he was “inhabited” or “possessed”. However, this explanation of the crimes abrogates the responsibility of the father – both diegetically and extradiegetically. Lynch refers to Leland as “a victim… Everybody that has done bad things is not all bad” (qtd Rodley 180). , the actor who portrayed Leland, similarly says “Leland is a true innocent, in a sense, because he was totally possessed by this evil spirit, BOB” (qtd Gross 1990) while Hughes suggests a more cynical reason for BOB: the possessing spirit BOB… neatly sidesteps the righteous indignation of television standards and practices by taking possession of Laura’s abusive father as he rapes and murders her. God forbid that anyone should bring a respectable middle-class father’s rape and murder of his own daughter into American homes, without some kind of supernatural possession to explain it away! (Hughes 133)

BOB therefore problematises TP as incest narrative. While BOB makes domestic violence visible he also raises the possibility of disavowal. Therefore we could claim that while TP is adventurous and daring in its tackling of the subject of incest and domestic violence, in the end it is ultimately conservative in its treatment, transferring responsibility from the father to the supernatural figure of BOB.

Leland, like Anakin and Norman before him, is part of a tradition of disavowal in popular culture, where evil becomes a separate persona, that abrogates the protagonist’s responsibility. Like the classic Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde , the dual personality takes on a completely different physical form, often enabled by mental illness and thus insulates and absolves the perpetrator from blame for his crimes.

If we accept BOB as a personification of domestic violence/incest then the fact that Leland Palmer is both a lawyer and father to Laura means that BOB’s possession violates modernity in two ways, attacking Leland both as representative of the legal system (lawyer) and totemic representative of the law (father). In either role Leland represents authority and BOB’s possession overturns this authority. BOB is therefore emblematic of the contradictions in modernity, the “thing in the dark” or premodern impulse modernity claims to have controlled. Once again he shares the same qualities as Vader and the Goblin; they too overcome symbols of modernity, a legal officer (Jedi Knight) and businessman respectively and like them BOB is also emblematic of the human dark side, the non-rational, feelings, urges and desires that modernity does not and cannot deal with (as modernity only believes in rationality and progress), the feelings, urges and desires that manifest themselves in acts of violence and incest. If, as Freud and Atkinson continually assert, modernity is a paternal project, then the alter ego of the father is also the alter ego of modernity – the most basic premodern urges given form in the Sith, the Goblin and the bad spirit.

For Jung (1964) the father is “a mental spiritual principal that is ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ the material world… a sort of divine perfection… beyond the reach of mortals still tied to the physical world” (Greenfield, 204)… “a father who is bodiless… who stands for Law, for the Idea, for the Symbolic” (Yaeger 8). And so, in conclusion, it is notable that all three of these narratives evince a desire to return their bad fathers to this Jungian state; through death, they all become literally bodiless, leaving the physical trappings of Vader, the Goblin and BOB (along with the blame for their crimes) to become truly Jungian-like and redeemed. Ultimately it seems that only in absence, death, the good father can be truly made present agai Notes: i Melodramatic in the sense that soap operas are melodramatic, that is, notoriously serialized and interweaving the stories of characters and events. For more on the relationship between melodrama and popular media see Cawelti (1976) who argues that all popular genres are gradations of melodrama. ii Though this is not unproblematic. In the film, the reappearance of Norman Osborn in the sequels as a ghostly figure encouraging his son to take on the Goblin persona clearly does little to suggest a spirit at peace, in the same way that Anakin and Leland (see below) appear to be at peace. Similarly, in both comics and films, Harry finally redeems his father not as Harry Osborn but by assuming the mantle of the goblin (and in both formats it costs him his life). iii There are also a number of other incest narratives that consider the shortcomings of the law, for example Lance Peter’s popular fiction novel Gross Misconduct (1993), also made into a film in the year of its release, which explores the outcome when the wrong man is persecuted because the law is blind to the father as perpetrator.

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