Fatherless Behavior

It's every man for himself where I come from. That's just how I grew up.

i’m still entertained by the one guy thinking the baby had siblings as parents

Something I’ve noticed is that the movies nominated for Best Picture, except for the Formula One movie (which I’m not writing about, come the fuck on) have exactly two themes: absent fathers, and democratic backsliding. So instead of just citing the same three papers over and over again, I thought: why not do the annual Oscars roundup as two different blog posts around the two themes?

Last week’s (technically this same week but I was supposed to finish it over the weekend) post was about the second theme, democratic backsliding, and featured Best Picture nominees Bugonia, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, and Sinners, as well as Best International Film nominee It Was Just An Accident.

This week’s post is about the first theme: absent fathers. It will feature Best Picture nominees Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams.

The biggest internet story of the last few weeks was Punch, a Japanese monkey (if you want to comment that actually he’s an ape or whatever, I don’t care) who has been getting bullied and shunned by the other monkeys in his enclosure and has taken to carrying around a plush orangutan for comfort. Punch’s saga is a perfect metaphor for the ancient religion known as Gnosticism: a spinoff of Christianity of sorts mostly concerned with the Problem of Evil - that is, why bad things happen to good people, basically. To answer the oldest of religious problems, the gnostic gospels take an interesting path: they fact check the story of Genesis as partially true: there is an allmighty creator of the world responsible for humanity. It’s just that it isn’t God, but rather some knockoff called the Demiurge, and he’s evil. Or rather, God is only capable of perfect creations because the divine is perfect, but the Demiurge is only partially divine, so his creations are imperfect. However, God took pity on the creatures created by the Demiurge and gave them a spark of divinity by giving them transcendent souls, and God and the other angels all basically sit around rooting for humanity. The idea that the world is a flawed copy of a more transcendental reality but that nevertheless one must persist in seeking meaning and connection, a pursuit that has the stamp of approval of all powerful celestial beings, is tailor-made for that adorable monkey.

I think that the relationship between Punch the monkey and Gnosticism is also the relationship movies have with the real world: they’re a random thing that’s useful to explain a more complicated phenomenon. Culture and cultural products are downstream of other, broader societal forces. So, when a series of pieces of media (or art, though I think not all movies or music albums or whatever are art) tends to show some common trait, you should look upstream at what’s causing it. So, why is everyone so interested in bad fathers all of a sudden?

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

What do the listed Oscar nominees have in common? They’re all, in some shape or form, about the subject of fatherhood, specifically about bad or absent fathers. One is the most famous bad dad story that’s not in the Old Testament: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Two of the movies, Hamnet and Marty Supreme are about the relationship between being a parent and making something of your life, be it at the meaningless task of ping-pong or at beign the most important writer in human history. Two focus on what it means to have children in a world that gets worse by the second - the crossover with last week, The Secret Agent, and One Battle After Another, as well as the (less fascistic and more economic) transformations of Train Dreams. Both Sentimental Value and Sirat is about finding children who are lost, either metaphorically or literally (respectively).

Let’s do a brief summary of each, lighting round style (and big spoilers, especially for The Secret Agent which is told iceberg theory style):

• Frankenstein: come on.

• Hamnet: William Shakespeare meets his wife, who’s a witch, they have two daughters and a son, the son dies, and Shakespeare writes Hamlet while his wife resents him off camera for leaving the family behind.

• Marty Supreme: a ping pong player gets his married childhood best friend pregnant. He also bails on his mom and has an affair, all to pursue the ultimate goal: making enough money to buy a ticket to Japan so he can win a ping pong game that’s a publicity stunt for a fountain pen company.

• One Battle After Another (I did a full post about it): two left wing guerrillas have a daughter and then the mom gets caught by the head of ICE, who also coerced her into having an affair. Sixteen years later, the father and daughter are found out and chased by fascist paramilitary police and secret societies.

• Sentimental Value: a film director returns to Oslo when his ex wife dies to make a movie about his mother committing suicide starring his depressed daughter, who hates him, and his grandson from his other daughter, who also hates him.

• Sinners: a Black man and his twin open a music venue in the post-Reconstruction American South and try to protect his son from vampires, who want to convert him to join their eternal music group.

• The Secret Agent: a scientist falsely accused of corruption by a corrupt businessman trying to kill his research for money goes back to his hometown to pick up his son and take him abroad while being chased by two government militia members hired by the businessman.

• Train Dreams: a former railroad worker becomes unemployed after World War One, moves to a cabin in the woods to be a lumberjack, and then his wife dies or goes missing or just leaves him and the whole thing gets really surreal and weird.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface: Best Foreign Picture nominee Sirat is about a man and his son looking for his missing daughter in Morocco alongside his son; Best Foreign Picture nominee It Was Just An Accident features an extended plot point about the relationship between political prisoners and their torturer’s daughter and pregnant wife; Best Foreign Picture nominee The Voice of Hind Rajab is about a 5 year old Palestinian girl who gets shot and killed by the Israeli military while waiting for an ambulance; before her, her parents died (there’s pending legislation in the US Congress about this story); Best Actress nominee If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about a woman whose daughter has a difficult medical condition receiving zero support from her frequently absent husband; Best Animated Picture nominee Elio is about a little boy who loses his parents and goes off to live with his aunt - or with aliens; Best Animated Picture nominee Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is about a little girl in a vegetative state and her relationship with her parents, especially her father, and a Belgian nanny who takes care of her.

Saying these movies are about “absent dads” is a bit generic but they are all, somewhat surprisingly, about fatherhood: what is the role of dads in children’s lives, in society, and how can we balance the demands of fatherhood with the demands of living a life worth living or whatever it is Hamnet is about. Only one of the movies, Train Dreams, focuses on the father as provider; a handful, most notably One Battle After Another, as well as The Secret Agent, and Hamnet look at the father as a protector - in most of these cases, an unsuccessful one. The movies, which reach bizarre proportions in Hamnet, tend to take a more modern and progressive view of being a parent. The children in question are usually girls: Shakespeare, Bob Ferguson and his ICE pursuer Stephen J. Lockjaw, Gustav Borg, Mr Train Dream are all girl dads. The Oscars, in short, have two big things to say about dads: we don’t know what they’re there for, but we do know they’re not there. To quote that one super creepy song from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, “I’ve written “Dear Daddy, we miss you / And wish you were with us to love”.

This reflects the broader cultural conversation on parents: it is overwhelmingly about mothers, and when dads come up, it’s to say they’re doing too little or the wrong thing or whatever. It seems like, at some point in time, we’ve lost track of what it means to be a father, let alone a good one. These movies are, roughly, divided among three blocks: what is a father (One Battle After Another and The Secret Agent), what does being a father entail (Frankenstein, Train Dreams, Sentimental Value, Sirat), and why are men fathers (Hamnet and Marty Supreme).

You are the father!

The first question is obviously the most basic one, and also deceptively hard to answer. One Battle After Another is about what amounts to a custody battle between two prospective dads, one a fascist whose fatherhood is, unsurprisingly, determined by biology, and one a leftist whose relationship to his daughter is one of mutual care. While waiting for the results of her fascist dad’s paternity test, Willa, the child, says “I don’t care what that test says. I already have a father and it’s not you”. This reminds me of a true story: in 2004, a woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams provided proof that the late US Senator Strom Thurmond was her father, and while she offered to undergo a DNA test, no test was done. Thurmond was a staunch segregationist, and Washington-Williams was Black. She also used that parentage to apply for membership of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that glorifies the pro slavery side of the US Civil War and only allows the descendants of Confederate soldiers to join - they sat on her application for ten years until she died. DNA testing was used to try to confirms the claims that Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, fathered children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Hemmings was also his late wife’s Martha Jefferson’s biological sister.

The distinction between social and biological conceptions of fatherhood the topic of historian Nara Milanich’s 2019 book Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father. In the stricter branches of Judaism, membership is determined by matrilineal descent; the folk explanation is that, when the land of Judea was occupied by the Romans, there was no coherent way of keeping track of the religion of the father - not even married women were safe from the predation of Roman occupiers. The central image of her book is a mobile DNA testing van with the slogan “who’s your daddy” on the side: Milanich’s case is that this notion of fatherhood is actually very recent, stemming as far back as the discovery of DNA and the availability of commercial testing. During the nineteenth century, Latin American and continental European law defined fathers as the men who performed the role of caring, protecting, and providing for children, regardless of biological descent; according to some medieval laws, children could even choose who their father was if a widow remarried and paternity was not obvious. For example, a famous Italian case from the 1940s found simultaneously that a (White) woman who gave birth to a Black baby was legally responsible for adultery and that her (White) husband was the baby’s father anyways.

Commercial DNA testing is a booming industry in the United States: the tv show Maury is, of course, still a hit with its tagline of “who’s your daddy”; Milanich links the rise of DNA testing with the Clintonian “BoBo” ethos combining sexual liberation with personal responsibility - nut inside whoever you want, but if it goes the usual way, you have to pony up. The website for 23andme warns user that they can both “discover relatives who were previously unknown to you,” and “learn that someone you thought you were related to is not your biological relative”. In this sense, France has banned private DNA testing on a constitutional level, in order to protect the social relationship between fathers and children. A 2005 paper by sociologist Michael Gilding focuses on the phenomenon of “rampant misattributed paternity”, the urban legend that a large number of babies are fathered by women’s affair partners - for which he explains there is extremely limited evidence, but which seems to be a very rare phenomenon, and is widespread because of a combination of media attention, misogyny, and the bizarre assumptions of evolutionary biologists.

The Secret Agent goes a step further with questioning what it means to be a father: every single person on screen is either a dad, a child, a mom, or both. Marcelo, the main character, is both a father trying to rescue his son from a dictatorial regime pursuing him and a son looking for his missing working-class mother. His son, Fernando, is raised by his grandfather, Don Alexandre, who is also his daugther Fatima’s example of what a man should be - a point she makes to Ghirotti, the corrupt businessman, whose idiot son follows him everywhere. The two hitmen Ghirotti hires are a stepfather and stepson duo; his friend, police chief Alcides, has two sons who work with him in the force, one good and one evil. Doña Sebastiana, Marcelo and Alexandre’s landlady, is a putative mother to all her tenants (which includes a mother, Claudia, and her daughter, as well as a young, I assume gay, man disowned by his father); she was also the mother figure of her dead niece Geisa. There’s two touching father moments, both involving Alexandre: the first is when he finds out how high his daughter’s opinion of him was. The second is at the end: Flavia, a researcher looking into Marcelo, meets adult Fernando, who tells her outright that he considers his grandfather, the man who raised him, his true father. We, as the audience, know how deeply Marcelo cared for his son, and how everything he did was for his protection. Fernando does not: he knows his father was just not there for him and then died.

The biological dimension of fatherhood doesn’t end with ejaculation, though. There is some evidence that fathers undergo physical changes after having children: fathers report lower testosterone after having children, which should have effects on behavior, particularly risky and unsafe acts. Additionally, there is some evidence that testosterone drops the most in more involved fathers - however, meta studies of the literature find smaller and more limited effects than individual studies, pointing to publication bias against papers that did not find a significant or large effect. However, the idea that there is a “biological style of parenting” is complete nonsense: anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s 2024 book Father Time examines not just the history of the idea of fatherhood, but also the biology and anthropology - even among animals, parenting styles are extremely varied between species, and among apes, within species and across time. Blaffer Hrdy uses the neurological and endocrinological differences of involved and univolved fathers (particularly, gay and straight ones) to examine whether nurturing behavior is a cause or a consequence of these physical changes; Hrdy finds it’s mostly the latter: the decline is testosterone is matched by the production of other hormones and peptides that incerease the chance of a connection being formed between the father and child, which makes it more likely that the child will live given the extremely resource-intensive infancy of human beings. In hunter-gatherer societies, for instance, men are both much more directly involved in physical violence and in much closer proximity to women and children, which incentivizes peaceful and cooperative behavior - if one caveman shares his food with others, the risk of starvation would decline, furthering the chances of everyone’s children living.

DNA testing is used, for example, to test whether immigrants are “truly” related in Europe and the United States, as well as by the the “misattributed paternity” fanatics and their flimsy DNA evidence. But neither the genetic nor affective conception of family is inherently progressive or regressive. The idea that fatherhood is a social construct was formalized into French law by Napoleon, who also stripped women of most of their rights, and his definition of fatherhood was extremely patriarchal and hierarchical. At the same time, DNA testing has been used by feminists in Latin America to certify that fathers owe a responsibility to their children. Argentina has, famously, used genetic testing to verify the origins of children (now adults) suspected to have been taken from left-wing political prisoners in the 1970s. This involved the development of genetic testing techniques that would not otherwise exist in order to verify, directly, the possibility that someone is a grandchild of a given woman.

My hideous progeny

The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv” in A Universal History of Infamy (1954)

Frankenstein is an adaptation of a classic novel, and a classic story of fatherhood: Victor Frankenstein, quite famously, is described as the monster’s father. When the monster is born, Victor recoils in horror; the central part of the narrative is the horror, both of Victor against his creation, and of the monster for being rejected. In an astoundingly Freudian turn, the monster is intelligent and sensitive but hideous to the eye, and he is repeatedly rejected - causing him to turn to violence. The monster compares himself to Adam (of “and Eve” fame) and Satan in Paradise Lost, the only creation of a cruel and absent minded God. Ellen Moers writes “Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care”. Moers’ interpretation is around motherhood: Mary Shelley started the novel a few months after giving birth to her second child. Her firstborn died two months or so before her second pregnancy. Harriet Shelley, Percy’s lawfully wedded wife, committed suicide shortly after becoming pregnant, allegedly, from someone other than her husband. The folk origin story for Frankenstein is that came from a nigthmare Mary Shelley had during a gathering with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was extramaritally pregnant by Byron. During their stay, Mary and Percy read Rousseau’s Emilie, a book about the problems of education and the need for compassionate and encouraging parenting, as well as Paradise Lost and Plutarch - two books the monster reads in the book. Percy Shelley contributed modestly to the text of the book, and his most noteworthy suggestion was the addition of the comparisons by the monster to Satan in Paradise Lost - declaring that “evil henceforth became my good”. Mary Shelley was an unwed mother whose own mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had already died, and her father, the otherwise progressive William Godwin, ostracized Mary for her pregnancy. Shelley’s sister, Fanny Inlay, committed suicide after Godwin disowned her when he found out he was not her biological father. Victor Frankenstein, despite his progressive and humanitarian beliefs, proves himself to be a cruel and neglectful father - perhaps, in some way, like William Godwin himself. Frankenstein wants the glory of creating life without the affective responsibilities it entails.

But what are these responsibilities? Traditionally, fatherhood wasn’t considered particularly notable: dads were the ones who taught children religious discipline and their trade, and that’s about it. This doesn’t mean fathers were unimportant: in Ancient Athens, for instance, a baby was not legally a person until his father inducted them into the family via a ceremony called the amphidromia, celebrated around a week after a baby’s birth. In Sparta, legend says children would be abandoned by their fathers in Mount Taygetus if they had physical flaws; in ancient Rome, newborns would be placed on the ground, and if fathers did not pick them up and select them into the family, they would be considered fair game for anyone who wanted them. According to Saint Augustine, children inherit sin from their fathers, who transmits it via the act of sex itself. In agricultural times, there wasn’t much distinction between the time spent at work and at home, and between time spent working or parenting. After mass industrialization, however, it became more common for fathers to work outside the home, which meant their responsibilities shifted from being the head of a family farm to being the provider and the paterfamilias, a primary breadwinner whose economic contribution allowed him to dominate the family. The creation of a mass consumer society, and particularly of the automobile, heightened the importance of “providing” as a central duty of fathers. Historian Augustine Sedgwick, in his 2025 book Fatherhood points out that “Fathers have often likened themselves to gods, begetting, bestowing, smiting, and saving at will (…) But for mortals, such expectations can only end in failure”. Not being able to determine biological parentage, ancient laws gave fathers the power of life and death; industrial society also did, excluding women (usually legally) from the labor market. In fact, Sedgwick’s book has a surprising lesson: any time society has been transformed by cultural, economic, or technological factors, fatherhood was itself transformed in order to preserve the place of prominence of the father. In an interview with GQ, he said “Men had to go into cities and factories and no longer be men in the ways that their fathers and grandfathers had been. There was a lot of anxiety about what it meant to be a man.” This is exactly what the movie Train Dreams is about, in a way: an industrial worker loses his job and goes off to the rugged wilderness to reclaim his male pride. This destroys his family, quite literally, and he goes insane as a result. In this sense, modern fathers don’t have a fixed role: since the rise of feminism and of the service economy, men do not have an unimpregnable position in society - they don’t get to dictate the terms of the family anymore, anywhere. This makes us ask an interesting question: what does it mean to be a good father? What is the role of a father?

Sedgwick says his own son told him a good father was “funny and good at hugging”. Fairly good answer. Parenting, including fatherhood, is extremely important because childhood is extremely important - early education, for instance, helps set out children for primary school and thus for high school and university. In this sense, we can look at what fathers are doing: they spend around 16 hours a week on childcare and housework, compared to 6 in the 1960s and 16 in the late ‘90s, but also to 30 that mothers spend (down from 50 a week, or seven hours a day, in the sixties). Fathers spend less time on basic care and on education, and more time playing with their kids. This isn’t really their fault, in a way: 63% of fathers wish they spent more time with their kids, a figure that is 1.5 times higher than for mothers. Fathers also are more likely than mothers to agree that work gets in the way of being in their children’s lives. However, this isn’t really the whole story: the allocation of housework plays an enormous role in family decisions, but is only partially explained by men having higher earnings - gender norms, particularly around what kind of housework and childcare men ought to do, play a gigantic role (for instance, expectations of what men and women are supposed to do play a role during grocery shopping).

The fact that being a provider isn’t the main role of fathers anymore doesn’t really mean that their labor market outcomes don’t matter anymore: fathers losing their jobs reduces the lifetime annual income of children by 9%, a correlation that strengthens for sons relative to daughters (but at the same time, fathers being sole or main earners increases future gender wage gaps for children). This has a number of causes, but the main one is pretty simple: parents are usually able to pass down their profession to their children, for instance via “dinner table human capital” (basically, inside knowledge the family has). Children of army members are between 58% and 110% more likely to enlist in the military, which is especially high for father-son or mother-daughter duos. The ability of children to rise up the income ladder is very closely correlated to the mobility of their fathers in the case of sons, and as the economy becomes more gender-equal, this also matters for women. While the same-gender parent-child duos are important, it’s also worth noting that either parent tends to have an impact on either child on other measures, but the second study does seem to point at something particularly important: the employability of the parent in question determines what kind of human capital they are able to pass down. This seems to particularly hurt sons when considering that the job market has weakened significantly for men: the shift from a blue collar earnings premium to a blue collar earnings penalty has resulted in women becoming more competitive at the lower rungs of the income scale, particularly given new technologies.

This is reflected in, for instance, the fact that boys who grow up in low income areas are significantly less likely to work than girls who grow up in those areas (though distressed communities are bad for both, if worse for boys), suggesting the importance of role models and of economic advantages inherited from parents. The importance of community conditions is important even in prosperous communities: many of them have biases that affect future economic performance. In this sense, a second issue to consider is that fathers serve as role models for their children, regardless of gender. For instance, one of the major drivers of the negative impact of teen motherhood appears to be that teenagers are not particularly capable of raising children: controlling for underlying characteristics in background (which is not indicative of a causal link), the children of teen mothers and older mothers have no statistically significant differences in life outcomes; the impact of the qualities of fathers is especially important. In the same vein, the presence of a father, and of one without a criminal background, lowers the chance of a child committing a crime as a teenager, which is both true for sons and daughters and is only partially explained by parental involvement and economic disadvantages. Instead, having a father is important even as a role model for children, which explains why the effect is particularly large on sons. Another piece of evidence is that male students tend to fare better when their teachers are male, which means that gender diversity quotas actually improve student outcomes via, in part, role model effects. However, female students also benefit from the presence of male teachers, a fact that might be explained by selection, since male teachers entering a stereotypically female field should be unusually dedicated to their work.

But what is a good father? Well, let’s look at the movies. Basically all of them are about protecting, which, in a world that is safer than ever (with some exceptions), is not all that relevant. Victor Frankenstein is, as a father, like Gustav Borg from Sentimental Value, not a present dad: Frankenstein famously expels his “son”, and Gustav Borg fucks off to Sweden while his wife raises his two daughters. The main difference is that Borg understands his two adult daughters; they read his screenplay and realize the movie isn’t about his mother, but rather, about his daughter Nora, who has struggled with depression most of her life. The fact that Gustav understands his daughter is a sign that the relationship can be repaired; in contrast, Frankenstein does not understand the creature. Sedgwick describes this as “a fatherhood of listening”: paying attention to your children and accompanying them. A recent The Baffler piece about Pixar’s Elio, an Oscar nominated animated movie, points out that Disney’s anti-liberal turn isn’t necessarily about not portrarying certain things (most notably gayness, which they describe as “300 million dollars worth of therapy”) but rather by how they treat the parent-child relationship (completely hierarchical) and the lives of children (completely sanitized): “This could be a premise that allows Pixar to move back onto more exciting territory, to think about the autonomy of children and their desires, but that might smack of radicalism. After all, in an era of hyperconservatism and brutish domination, to be “family friendly” is to commit to disciplining children over understanding them.”

You’re a dog and I’m your man

I’ll be your father figure,
I drink that brown liquor,
I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger

Taylor Swift, “Father Figure”

In Totem and Taboo¹, Sigmund Freud proposed the concept of a “primal father”, the leader of a horde of cavemen who claimed exclusive ownership of all women in the tribe regardless of family status. This created profound envy among the lesser men, who conspired to kill the primal father and redistribute ownership of the women. For Freud, this wasn’t really a description of early humanity, but rather a sort of collective myth we subconsciously use to justify the basic norms of our civilization: the prohibition of incest and the exclusivity of monogamy, yes, but also the patriarchy. To quote an article Sedgwick penned for the New York Times: “The trouble with a father’s godlike paternal mandate is protection and provision cannot be fully guaranteed - they run out. Nobody is actually a god. Perhaps to elevate themselves above women, whose power to create and sustain life is vividly clear, men have defined the role of the father in terms that can never be entirely fulfilled.”

In their review of Marty Supreme for The Point, Zito Madu quotes an interview director Josh Safdie gave about the film’s ending, where Marty races back from his triumph in Japan to meet his newborn child and cries after seeing him. The ending provoked enormous discourse: some people interpreted as Marty realizing his life of hustling and ping pong was over. Me, and the director, took the exact opposite approach: “Next thing you know, I went to City Hall, we got married, have a kid and have another kid. And that feeling when I met my first daughter, it was a cosmic feeling. … Having a kid is like—[Marty’s] one dream had to end so the other one could begin. It’s seeing [Marty] actually go from boy to man.”. To Nadu, this weakens the point of the movie, and I somewhat agree - however, it’s entirely possible that Marty being, in hindsight, a humongous asshole to escape the “small life” of family only to realize it’s exactly what he wanted is precisely the point of the movie. The movie most similar to Marty Supreme in its themes is Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, a portrayal of William and Agnes Shakespeare’s surprisingly modern family life. Up until the moment the titular character dies, the film focuses on the “small life” of Agnes as a mother and witch; once he goes, the focus shifts to William’s endeavors (including a very embarassing scene where he recites the most famous monologue of the play in question); the ending seems to suggest him being a neglectful husband and an absent father is justified by his tremendous accomplishments in art. Argentine writer Tamara Tenembaum’s review drills down on this point: unlike the source material, Zhao’s Hamnet is a very modern piece, where Agnes reacts to the death of her child in a modern way, and expects to have a modern husband. But William Shakespeare wasn’t a millennial. He was born in the sixteenth century. By trying to have it both ways between the past and the present, Zhao weakens a movie about a very alien time with very alien relationships between fathers, mothers, wives, and children. If William Shakespeare was a man of his time, there would be no catharsis from seeing Hamlet; if he was a man of our time, his behavior after his son died would be incomprehensible.

The interesting thing is that Josh Safdie has his pulse on modern men, and Chloe Zhao does not. Around 60% of Gen Z men say they definitely want to have children, compared with roughly 55% of Gen Z women. A different poll (which I have a few quabbles with²) found that young women find having a family less important than young men on both the left and the right. This reflects a broader trend of diverging priorities among men and women: particularly, that women seem to derive a lot more meaning from their work than from family life, while the opposite is true for men - however, in the first poll cited, the majority of men still hold that the most important thing for a father is to be a “provider”, which goes along with other evidence finding that young men have surprisingly traditional views about marriage and family (it is, though, worth noting that some of the other surveys mentioned find the big jump happened among milennials and Gen X men). This model of the family is completely unsustainable: not only is a modern standard of living incompatible with a single provider, and advances in home appliances have made stay-at-home wives and mothers completely pointless, but also, and more importantly, it’s just not what a good half of the people interested in a heterosexual marriage want.

The biggest error people make in this discussion is misattributing blame to “luxury beliefs” of the feminist leisure class: college educated women are still marrying at high rates, and it is non-college educated women who have seen their marriage rates fall through the floor. The correct narrative is that the decline in fertility rates is driven by a decrease in and delay of marriage rates and in fewer children born in marriages, but not to a large spike in childless, unmarried educated women.

Thus, the question of why men are more conservative than women is the same question as why women don’t want to give up their jobs to change diapers: the relative wages of women have increased enormously because of specialization in services and women’s advantages in education and social skills, while men’s relative economic fortunes have declined. These women are also benefiting from the care economy boom, and their lack of partners relates both to the lower earnings potential of non-college men but also their conservatism around home life. Fundamentally, women see much bigger disruptions to their (to them, meaninfgul) careers than men: as mentioned above, women do more care work than men, and even in homes with equal income distributions, men are less likely to spend their time off work doing stuff at home. Women tend to report lower life satisfaction after having children mediated by the increase in domestic labor, which pairs nicely with research finding that more involved fathers result in better mental health outcomes for mothers - plus, countries where fathers do more childcare have higher fertility rates, at least in Europe. Women are far more likely to be called for emergencies and have their calendars shaped around the school year and the school schedule while men aren’t. Married couples tend to prioritize men’s careers regardless of earnings, and face higher divorce rates when men lose their breadwinner positions.

Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin has two recent papers around the topic, and both reach the same conclusion: the economic advancement of women without corresponding social norms for men to step up at home (which don’t even need to be progressive) results in lower rates of marriage and fertility, since women don’t face any strong external obligations to marry for material wellbeing anymore - very few countries still can be described by Amy March’s “I’m not a poet, I’m a woman. And as a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. And even if I had my own money, which I don’t, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. if we had children they would belong to him, not me. they would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me” monologue in the 2019 film Little Women. The idea that being too conservative to be “dad material” shouldn’t be particularly controversial: just ask MAGA men in DC, a city that voted for Kamala Harris at a 96% rate, how their dating life is going. While men’s desire for children is obviously laudable and meaningful, the idea that society needs to bend itself around that isn’t going to happen.

I’ve gone over the “why” of this divide in meaning multiple times by now, which I found by complete accident in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s work: the shift from a traditional modernity focused on production (by men, of things, and by women, of children) to one focused on consumption and self-expression coincided with a cultural shift to seeing your career as an aspect of personal expression and liberation, at the same time as career opportunities for women improved and worsened for men. Put another way, women who want to be “tradwives” do get the opportunity, but women who don’t get to be consumers (of vacations to Japan, skincare, Netflix, whatever) or even workers, through the “girlboss” archetype. Men haven’t really been told to want to be “trad husbands”, and consumption is, as most people would guess, not truly emotional satisfactory. I feel like the most ironic part of the equation is what the drivers of this misalignment are: the expectation that women ought to want power over the home. Shirley Jackson’s account of her husband is that he was reasonably nice and provided for them, but he was just completely emotionally checked out - Jackson “reminds readers that she is the absolute gravitational center of her family’s world”. She might as well be describing Agnes Shakespeare, a fact that goes completely unacknowledged by the decision to focus the film’s last third on Sad Dad. Shakespeare also wrote Henry IV, which has the famous line “heavy hangs the head that wears the crown”; women simply do not want sole authority over the home - they want a democracy, not dictatorship, over their children. The problem of trying to keep the traditional modern of the family on life support is the problem of polytheism: you can’t have multiple supreme deities at the same time. You can’t follow the commandments of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed at the same time. To quote the singer Mitski, “You’re an angel, I’m a dog / Or you’re a dog and I’m your man / You believe me like a god / I destroy you like I am”.

Conclusion

A recent article on n+1 magazine by A.S. Hamrah touches upon the topics that the most notable movies of the year are about; I highly recommend it. At the same time, a spate of articles on the Atlantic and New Yorker describe the relevance of current events of notable recent movies: the conspiracy theories in Eddington and Bugonia, authoritarianism (did that one already), violence, et cetera, as well as the all-encompassing loneliness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ouevre. The most descriptive film about modern dating and relationships isn’t even Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster - it’s Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, about a socially maladjusted business owner and his miserable experiences around women.

Much like the Demiurge and God (or Japanese zoos and the Demiurge), the movies are a pale reflection of the real world. What are they reflecting back at us? I think three general anxieties: one about men, one about society, and one about the world.

The one about society I’ve already spoken about: the world feels more precarious and dangerous than it has in a long time. Democracy feels profoundly threatened and people feel disconnected from the economy and from institutions. Political extremism is on the rise. And the most visible face of this extremism are young men, both in the broader right and the “manosphere”. The viral internet figures of today are Nick Fuentes, a 20-something neonazi, and Clavicular, another 20 something meth addict who hits himself in the face with a hammer but in a cool incel way and not a scary guy on the subway way. People focus on their shocking racism and antisemitism, but not on their equally shocking sexism: in a mirror of a series of viral 2018 moments, even conservative women are repulsed by their shocking statements, such as “Women are made to be fucked … Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns … There are no female philosophers. There are no female inventors. There are no female generals or billionaires. They are mothers, whores, nuns. End of list. That’s what you can be” from Fuentes.

The idea of a “crisis of men” is, at this point, a cliche, rooted in a general sense of aimlessness, lack of romantic success (which seems to affect just about anyone these days), and perceived lack of workplace opportunities. This is the second anxiety we have: about the future of men. The stories cited above focus on men who are somehow lost or inadequate or “useless”, or who can’t decide on their fate. There was a recent article about “media bias” resulting in stories of hypercompetent women and incompetent men; what the (conservative) author failed to notice is that archetypes are downstream, not upstream, of the collective unconscious. To quote Sam Adler-Bell’s (excellent) story on the misogyny of the New Right: “A lot of these people on the right have never had a positive or negative interaction with a Jew,” she went on, “but they’ve all had negative interactions with female caretakers who told them to brush their teeth,” or with desirable women who rejected them, or “HR harpies” who interrogated them about their tweets. “ Susan Sontag wrote that, in essence, fascism was a form of sadomasochism, the political “adoration of force” that motivates it being applied to human sexuality. Hence, our concern about democratic breakdown and its most visible face becomes a concern about the lives of those people: their loneliness, alienation, lack of success, and frustration.

For the third anxiety, a brief detour. I just finished reading philosopher Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk, a book about the history of the Apocalypse in human thinking, and the most interesting thing about it is how our understanding of the end of the world is shaped by contemporary challenges: various scientific discoveries were translated into fantasies of apocalyptic breakdown from climate, earthquakes, or comets. The book he most discusses is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which came right around the time of two major humblers of the human race: Georges Cuvier’s discovery of past mass extinction events, and Pierre de Maupertuis and Georges Buffon’s theory of the evolution of species, which focused on “superior” creatures displacing “inferior” ones. This pointed to something seemingly inevitable: that humans could be replaced by creatures we create. In Frankenstein, the monster isn’t considered a corpse or a deformed human - he’s considered a different species, and Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to create him a bride comes from a reluctance to populate Earth with a “race of demons” who will kill and replace humans. In this sense, the elevation of an otherwise mediocre adaptation of the ultimate novel about the anxieties of creation points to our third major anxiety: artificial intelligence. The fathers in the movies nominated don’t feel completely at ease with what they’ve brought forth and what the sacrifices will be; neither do we.

Post script: unlike last week’s post, I don’t really have a personal anecdote to share, mostly because I don’t feel comfortable talking about that kind of thing and also because my dad does read my blog. But I have to say that I think he’s been a great dad and has supported and encouraged me my whole life. I developed a passion for movies thanks to him, as it was our go-to outing for most of my teenage years. Recently, he told me he was a bit disappointed I chose not to pursue a career in physics because he came up with a story where I became a nuclear physicist at a big government facility down in Bariloche. He told me this ten years after I finished high school because it was obvious to both of us it didn’t matter anymore and he didn’t want me to feel pressured before.

1. Bizarrely, the book has a lot to say about Jeffrey Epstein and was (?) a major influence on Peter Thiel. What the fuck is going on with that guy. Unrelatedly it seems that some scholars do think Freud’s account of the primal horde was accurate.

2. Basically, every option is divided between four or five equivalent terms, which makes comparisons really messy. It should just be “being financially secure and independent”, “having a family”, “owning a home with no debt”, “helping others”, and “fame and influence”. The actual options triple the number of things to rank.