The Father Remains an Ambiguous Figure in Popular Culture
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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 hero. 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 Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks. In each text, evil is manifested in the creation of a secondary persona, the alter egos of Darth Vader, the Green Goblin and BOB 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 Laura Palmer respectively; they are all truly evil, a mass-murdering intergalactic dictator, a homicidal supervillain 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 dark lord 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 character 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.