Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks was married at the start of the movie would probably have a different emotional resonance.
I haven't read the linked article yet, but Here's take seems completely correct.
All takes here are always correct.
Well I was missing because SOMEBODY shot me in the head.
Also, the trope is much older than Hollywood. Hansel and Gretel etc. In which the mother is removed in order to expose the children to malign forces. (Including but not limited to their own stupidity.)
Or, what heebie said. But she said "interesting storylines" instead of "horrific death and injury".
heebie's take is the right one in most cases, but in 8th Grade the point of it is really to emphasize the heroism of the single dad.
The exquisite fireside scene between Elsie Fisher and Josh Hamilton at the end of Eighth Grade -- I decided that scene was actually bad, that it was pandering -- even though I was weeping with everyone else in the theatre at the time.
I think the Slate and Heebie explanations are mutually compatible. (Heebie's doesn't on its own explain why it's so often daughters, not sons.)
A third possibility: it's easier writing for male screenwriters, either childless or leaving the emotional parenting to their partner, because they can draw on their own cluelessness in writing the dad. I went through the 12 screen works mentioned in the article and all but 3 were written and created by men (exceptions: TATBILB, Clueless, 10 Things).
What's that thing you kids say? Pwned?
Or it's precisely because single fathers a so rare in the real world. The single mothers watching the film can fantasize about meeting the eligible single man with proven parenting skills.
It is weird, though, how differently single moms and single dads are portrayed. Single moms are portrayed as harried tornados, alternating between extreme competence and humorless exhaustion. Single dads are hapless bumblers who joke around a lot.
Both are portrayed as needing saving. And that's the way we became the Brady Bunch.
Also I'm not sure about the article drawing a distinction between "divorced" and "abandoned". Are there a lot of fictional single fathers who are definitely still married to absent wives?
This post reminds me of the first post I read on The Last Psychiatrist: "If you liked The Descendants, you are a terrible person". That movie had George Clooney as the single father, although the mother wasn't dead but in a coma, or something (I never actually saw the movie).
I'm also a terrible person. But I don't think that's the reason.
I think you remove the mom because moms are the adult in the room, and storylines can get a lot more interesting if ol' wet noodle mom isn't clucking about what a self-evidently bad idea the scheme is.
This isn't really borne out in Veronica Mars, though, given that Keith Mars spends most of his time clucking about what a self-evidently bad idea the scheme is.
This post reminds me of the first post I read on The Last Psychiatrist: "If you liked The Descendants, you are a terrible person". That movie had George Clooney as the single father . . .
Speaking of The Descendants (and single parenting) this was an odd story (emphasis mine).
"All I could think about was, what if I found a man who was nice and kind, an ideal father, someone who would make her feel better?" Asako says.
She'd heard about relative rental agencies that could send an actor to play a guest at a wedding or go on a date - they are well established in Japan. So she contacted one to ask if they could also provide a fake dad. After auditioning five hopefuls, she settled on a man called Mr Takashi.
"I found him the easiest to talk to," Asako says. "He's very kind and sweet, so I just followed my instincts."
Takashi runs a rental agency with about 20 staff and more than 1,000 freelancers - men and women of different ages and backgrounds who can cater for almost any situation, taking on fake names, personalities and roles. They often have to lie, but they are very strict about not breaking the law.
As an actor himself, he's played boyfriends, businessmen, friends and fathers, and been a bridegroom at five fake weddings.
He prepares for his roles, he confesses, by watching Hollywood movies like Little Miss Sunshine, the Oscar-winning film about a dysfunctional family bonding on a road trip, and The Descendants, in which George Clooney plays an indifferent parent who suddenly has to embrace fatherhood after a family tragedy.
15: I think "abandoned" can be stretched to include "divorced with the mother not participating in parenting", which is pretty uncommon.
(I'm reminded I just learned on FB someone I knew in my previous city, who had two kids since I moved away, apparently had his wife disappear abruptly a few months ago, arranging a divorce by email but not otherwise communicating. The kids are with him.)
White Bird in a Blizzard turns this trope inside out. AFAICR, which isn't very.
The only Descendants we're able to watch around here is the one where the main character's mother is the evil fairy Maleficent. It's probably had ten screenings in the last couple weeks. Dad not mentioned, though in certain ways Maleficent is more like classic single dad than classic single mom.
Cinderella
1. Wicked step-mother is a good trope because (a) she has to displace the heiress with her own children; (b) the dad is clueless or complicit; (c) deaths in childbirth made the situation a lot more common before the 20th century.
2. As the man said, unhappy families are better for storytelling.
3. Missing dad has been pretty vanilla to our culture: absent from active parenting, even if not from active marriage.
I've mentioned before that my dad's father was a widower with 3 kids under 6. For what has to have been a tough 5 years, and then he got out of it by dying himself.
Isn't there also a problem in Hollywood of being more likely to cast Dad-aged men than Mom-aged women as main characters?
My personal ex recto theory is that it's an inheritance from fairy tales, which often feature a lost mom or wicked stepmother. Now it seems like an overwrought plot device, but given maternal mortality statistics there had to have been a time in which kids heard those stories and thought whatever the ye olde equivalent of "that's so real, man, it speaks to me" would have been. My stepmother's a total bitch and it would be awesome if there was a candy house in the forest.
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a surprisingly good movie.
I think in Eighth Grade (which I just so happen to have watched on NYE) a mother character just wouldn't have worked because "concerned but clueless" would have played differently. E.g., encouraging Kayla to "put [herself] out there" and go to the cool kids party would have read more as bullying from a mom, instead of misguidedly optimistic. I don't think the firepit speech would work from a mother. There's something about the distance of really not understanding 13yo girls at all that gives the father credibility in that scene. A mother would come across as 100% patronizing.
The single mother character in The Grinch gets the equivalent of the firepit speech and it totally works. (Of course, Cindy Lou Who is also, like, eight. And none of you all who don't have elementary-age kids on break saw that movie, which really wasn't very good (but wasn't the horrible abomination you might expect).)
Pointing out that single fathers are rarer in reality than in films seems to be missing the point. Murders are also rare in reality and alien invaders that need to be battled by power-armoured Emily Blunt are almost unheard of.
Whereas invaders battled by Tom Cruise are pretty much annual. The patriarchy is everywhere.
32: Someone should make a movie about the struggles of a single father who is stuck solo-parenting because his wife is off in powered body armor fighting alien invaders.
I haven't read the article or heebie's post, or any of the comments except comment 2. Yet I feel confident that Here's take is completely wrong, and NickS should be ashamed of himself.
34 is not far from the plot of Incredibles 2.
I've mentioned before that my dad's father was a widower with 3 kids under 6. For what has to have been a tough 5 years, and then he got out of it by dying himself.
My dad was a widower with 3 kids under 10. He got out of it by marrying my mother. He got out of that by dying.
The article focuses on stories with teen protagonists with single parents, but you also get the inverted phenomenon, where single fathers are a lot more likely to be protagonists than single mothers. I'm not sure how this affects the "adult in the room" argument, but it seems relevant to it.
More precisely (and exposing the amount of bad television I watch), it seems pretty standard to give a single male TV protagonist a kid whom he deals well with, purely as a characterization note. (Castle, Eureka, Deep Space 9, and Better off Ted all come to mind.) But single mother protagonists either are on shows that are actually about the parent-child relationship (Gilmore Girls) or are portrayed as being not-so-great parents (Orphan Black). The female counterpart to the single father thing seems to be to make them good with somebody else's kid (like Olivia's relationship with her niece on Fringe).
NickS should be ashamed of himself.
Having now read the linked post, I don't think there's much disagreement going on between Heebie and the author. She is ultimately less interested in the question of why people write stories using the "missing mom trope" and more interested in what sort of a mirror the trope holds up to relationships in which both parents are present (emphasis mine).
In my own family, my husband and daughter are close, and I consider my husband an equal partner in parenting. Still, I'm usually the one to talk with our daughter about her social and emotional life. I ask a lot of questions, which starts a lot of conversations. If I take a cue from these on-screen pairs, does my very presence in our household prevent them from being as close as they could be? Do I unintentionally usurp the emotional caregiving of our children? Until now, I haven't actually used this term when considering my role as a mom. In turn, I haven't thought of my husband as fulfilling this role less. When I read this op-ed to dads about why daughters shield their fathers from their experiences with sexual assault (sent to me by my distressed husband), I wondered: What can we as parents do to change this de facto dynamic?
Victoria Goodman, an individual and family therapist in Mount Kisco, New York, explained, "We assign roles because that's how we get through our busy days. Can we do it differently and less predictably? Yes." In fact, she said, "Dads should be talking about their emotional world." There's room in almost every family for fathers and daughters to have these intimate conversations, even with a mom at home. Goodman encourages it. "Even if it doesn't come naturally, it will resonate with a teenager that her dad is interested in her emotional life."
Anyway, what with smart phones, there's no margin left in cannibalizing lost children, regardless of the number of greedy stepmoms out there.
Tangentially related, Jane Campion and Karyn Kusama both made pretty good feminist horror films I thought.
I thought that both The Deescendants and the next film by Alexander Payne Nebrasaka, which is another film about a father and child (there a son) were quite good. Nebraska is slow bleak realism, not kind to its setting.
41.last: See also Springsteen, Bruce.
Honestly, I blame Willa Cather. Or the bleak, windswept nature of the plains.
Are we ever again going to be blessed with a movie focused on Emily Blunt doing pushups?
Hey I never realized that Mrs Doubtfire and the Home Alone movies had the same director. I have not seen Mrs Doubtfire despite being fond of Robin Williams' performances-- have people here liked it? Some relevance to a thread interested in absent parents in pop culture.
I think that if you have a chance to let your kids be raised by Pierce Brosnan, you shouldn't interfere.
I also think Sally Field would have been much happier with him.
Nebrasaka
Maybe a good title for a Great Plains - Japan cross-cultural film?
How come Oklahoma gets the peppy musicals, Kansas gets the prog rock, the Dakotas get trucks, and Nebraska gets only bleak shit named after it?
50: They named Abe Lincoln after the capital city of Nebraska.
Nebraska gets only bleak shit named after it
Shit? That album went platinum and was ranked one of the best albums of the 80s by Rolling Stone.
Bleak, but well done shit. My apologies.
24 is our house too. I wasn't even aware that there was an alternative.
We just saw the new Mary Poppins movie. It wasn't a disgrace, but it starts out weak and they worked really hard to echo the original in story arc and nostalgia.
alien invaders that need to be battled by power-armoured Emily Blunt are almost unheard of
Maybe in your fantasies, pal, not in mine.
55: You should see Aquaman instead. Basically the same in terms of an absent mother and a woman who had magical abilities
And I gather Aquaman has more Julie Andrews in it.
I didn't notice and assumed you were joking until I looked it up.
Still fond of The Long Kiss Goodbye, which threads the needle by having the affectionate mother thrown back into her pre-amnesia spy life. Daughter also gets to buckle swashes.
59: But I did look it up because I trust you.
60: I liked that movie. The scene with the deer is still in my head.
I also liked the Gina Davis pirate movie whose name I can't remember.
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O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done
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Doing the town and doing it right in the evening It's pretty pleasing
Every time I sing this song, I think of Henry Kissinger.
In other great moments from the same long-running series (Kissinger Perplexed by Pop Culture), we have him meeting Sean Combs at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball and walking around afterward asking "But why duss he call himself: Fluffy?"
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Respect for Mattis' signoff.
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|| OT: thanks to ttaM for recommending the Mick Herron "Slow Horses" books. I read the first one on the train yesterday and rather enjoyed it - rang very true.
Only quibble is that he is a bit too fond of a certain trope which goes like this: "And then something ambiguously described but bad-sounding happened to John! Now we will leave you in suspense and have three pages about Alice. Back to John: aha! It turns out it wasn't what you thought but something else." The worst example is of someone who is hit in the head with an axe by a murderous lunatic and then, three pages later, has a bit of a headache because he was actually hit not very hard with the blunt side. But there are like eight or nine examples in a not very long book and it gets a bit wearing.
"Bad Blood" by Mark Carreyrou is also excellent but frustrating, because the thing that keeps happening is: "At this point John, a very experienced and intelligent person, was having serious doubts about Theranos, and for good reason. Then he had a meeting with Elizabeth Holmes and decided that everything was fine." And since neither Holmes nor any of the Johns will talk to Carreyrou or anyone else, we can't tell what happened in those meetings, but that's kind of the core of the story.
Finally started "Westworld" and it's excellent. Managing to restrain myself most of the time from pointing out all the bits of Monument Valley that I've ridden round.
I reread this comment and conclude that I'm turning into bob.
!>
69.last: Except I care about what you have to say, so clearly not.
Pretty sure Seamas O'Reilly's father has it over all the other single fathers.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/17/dad-raised-11-kids-alone-how-will-i-cope-with-one
Also if you haven't read the thread from his pinned tweet, it really is hilarious.
https://twitter.com/shockproofbeats
I'm curious if you still think the same about Westworld by the end of the first season, and especially the second.
70: aww. Happy new year, Thorn. And indeed to the rest of you.
I'm waiting for the Rambo sequel where Rambo goes to Moscow to apologize for interfering with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
I already wished people happy holidays a couple of weeks ago. I think that should count for a happy new year wish, unless you're one of those emotionally needy people.
I say "Happy New Year" instead of "Happy Holidays" to make it clear that I accept the calendrical reforms of Pope Gregory XIII, not like those heretics in the Eastern Orthodox Churches who won't consider it 2019 for another week and a bit.
That reminds me. I need to run down the street to the Greek Orthodox church and tell them I'm from the future.
It's easier to find parking now, before the students return.
Though the anniversary of the October Revolution is probably the best time.
Oh, I looked up a bit more info about that distant cousin, the mathematics teacher who turned Turk. Turns out he trained as an officer in the British Royal Artillery, but at the age of 19 killed a friend in what was either a duel or a practice bout gone wrong and left the country around 1755. Twenty years later he's being written about by English visitors as "Ingiliz Pasha, a Scotch Renegado, a worthy clever fellow and well connected"; he was also a General of Bombardiers, engaged in casting cannon and experimenting with balloon flight: he organised the first manned balloon flight in the Ottoman Empire in 1786 (the first manned flight in the world was 1783) as part of an experiment in using them for artillery observation.
A bit later still he ran into some familiar faces when British troops landed to fight the French in Rhodes in 1801, and he was sent as liaison. One of the Highland officers, seeing Ingiliz Pasha walking past in full ceremonial gear and accompanied by his family and retinue, muttered in Gaelic "That's one son of a bitch with a high opinion of himself", to which Ingiliz Pasha replied angrily, and also in Gaelic, "And what bitch has claimed you as her pup?"
I'm convinced that ajay has some ancestors who've popped up in the Flashman novels and I just missed it at the time.
Ingiliz Pasha was a bit early for Flashy, but there was another one in 1874 who had a pretty Flashmanish life: fought the Maoris, dug for diamonds in Kimberley, anti-slavery patrols off the East African coast, and commanded Arab troops against the Russians in Bulgaria. He also got kicked out of the Navy for being late back on board, despite attempting to rejoin his ship by swimming after it very fast.
87.1 I know it's a bit too early for Flashman, but he would be perfect and surely there must be others a few decades later.
Getting back to the OP, one explanation I've heard for the abundance of single-parent families in movies and especially TV is that it saves a salary. Never underestimate the cheapness of Hollywood.
Ingliz Pasha is a wonderful story.
Ume and I have been watching The Good Place, and it has one strange effect: I can't remember any of the gags or details after an episode is over. It's like a very pleasant narcotic. While it's on, I laugh in the right places and really enjoy some of the gags, but once it's over, all I remember are the characters, who remain alarmingly vivid. I know they are caricatures, but they have got completely under my skin. I cannot tell you how strongly I identify with the moron from Florida. Something of that unquenchable ignorant cheerfulness is obviously a vitamin that my psyche needs.
