CONTRA BAND: Bad Dads

Parents juggle many responsibilities, but they hold a singular purpose -- keep their child alive.

 A spate of pandemic movie releases feature a new paternal archetype -- the Male Nihilist.

 Recent films such as Don't Breathe 2, Wrath of Man, Annette, The Card Counter, and Cry Macho are rife with crappy dads. These guys seem conflicted in their motivations:  one to destroy(vengeance) and one to preserve (the child).  The trend began, for me, with Wrath of Man, depicting brutal consequence (his son is murdered) by a marathon of  subsequent homicide. Statham kills with machine like precision, and on the scale of a subway train worth of victims. Its hard to reconcile the parallel (or cheap psychological excuse) of mass casualties with actual parental pain and despair.   Yet there is an emotional heft to these doomed father figures; whether its Wrath's physical cruelty  or the final brutal act of Annette, they test a viewer's compassion to understand pain inflicted in a perversion of parental love.    Modern politics, though not overtly,  color the polarized father/ child characters who will ultimately grow closer together.  These films share the concept of The Father character doubling as one side of America (the old guard/Republican) and The Child as the other (the new Millennials/Woke Democrats.)  An older generation refuses to eschew their ways while the newer generation  exists to effectively cancel the older one.   There are things to tear up at in Don't Breathe 2. 

Who is Baby Annette? An index of Henry McHenry's desperation to wipe clean his sordid past. The same motive is crucial in DB 2 and Schrader's The Card Counter; to erase the murderous sins of the Dad and rise like a Phoenix (the actual name of the daughter in DB 2).  William Tell (Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter) ties himself to young Cirk (Tye Sheridan) as a mentor/ protector.   Tell's culpability lay in engagement in torture at Abu Ghraib; serving a beast.  Finally abandoning his armed forces past to become a disengaged poker player, he is reinvigorated as another beast, an avenging angel, along with the wronged Tye. The  point driven home in Annette:  a wooden doll-child doubling as a construction of parents' projected wants onto the world. 

Wrath of Dad

These films showcase the old guard (old men) making a case for their legacy within the confines of a troubled society; we idle in stasis as we watch screens and wait for our devastated existence to fix itself.  The (re)animation of these old men is perfectly suited within the action film genre. The weight and force of corporeality is the good that bludgeons bad.  Politics are Kill or be Killed. I feel these are the movies we need in this moment.  In this era of lockdowns, edicts and disallowed casual contact -- brute force interrupts and reconnects us to  primal instincts.  Its a post pandemic , post PC catharsis.  In Annette, more figurative catharsis is reached because Driver's dad character (Henry McHenry)  is the bad guy , but he drives the bad out of himself as his love literally animates the wooden progeny (a marionette whose strings he pulls)  into a real, independent  baby girl.  Annette, more self conscious about the father as artist and vice versa -  has a Dad as an artist who lost his way.  His impulses to create resulted in comedy stardom, but his act is a joke because he phones it in, cringe-worthy schtick and exhalations.  Repurposing his creative impulses he brings about a new mammoth success -- an earth shattering love affair where one must obliterate the other to keep creating.

destructive artists

 All these men share an unflagging impulse to protect their child no matter the cost (of life), some of them (Don't Breathe 2's old man and Henry McHenry) may even use the impulse to protect their child as a reason to enact violent revenge fantasies.  Part of the attraction of these films is a pulp brutality existing alongside a quieter melancholic tale of the loving,  misunderstood Father.      

The trend diverges into a group of less literal Fathers; men manifesting themselves as Father-Like figures; inserting a weight and rationale onto vengeful, unleashed behavior.  Schrader's The Card Counter features a Dad and Kid dynamic where a protagonist inserts himself as a Father Figure, avenging a child's injustice.  DB 2 does the same. In Eastwood's Cry Macho the octogenarian 'fathers' a pre teen out of a deranged yet narratively deemed necessary way for the two males to literally and figurally save one another.  Card Counter's Issac doles out revenge while the film eyes him and his motives with a more dispassionate angst.  DB 2 employs more genre movie archetypes and narrative movement. The Old Blind Man is a brutal kidnapper turned Father Figure. He is animated by  internal rage; it both devolves AND evolves into psychopathic protective love.  These two films, more than any other I've mentioned, employ poetic license to veer truly off the rails. The incoherent tenor of Schrader's art film echoes the incoherent gutter screams of the C level revenge action flick DB 2.  Two dudes with a God Complex; one Calvinist and one more openly batshit crazy. Two of a kind.

                                                                                                                                                                         Its the close of 2021 and the world still feels constipated.  Our pace of life lies halfway between soul crushing and k-hole.  Pandemic stasis clutches on, that last finger of a hand flung off a sliding subway pole, moving nowhere except another potentially hazardous metallic surface.  Chained and unfree for 18 months, a liberation is felt in the shared setting of a movie theater; a public square we'd been locked out of.  The movies discussed allow us, collectively, to feel ENERGIZED and purposeful. Even if it isn't true.   Maybe it's the thrilling rewards of the action drama, especially in this age of inaction and powerlessness.  Maybe it's the meth -  amphetamine (in the plot of DB 2.)   Here, in our new movies, are toxic masculine heroes aplenty, but reclaimed with a renewed moral compass to save us from modern toxicity; from our screens and our frozen pointing fingers. 

death drives, ending lives.

 Smiley Face Killers (2020) has bogeymen.  They have lived inside your thoughts and expectations since you were small.  They lingered; biding time in the corners, outside the light. They will hide in a closet, shadow you on your bike; force you to recall your view in the world as a child-- open to suggestion; independent of thought, yet dependent on others to help protect you.

We wear false faces.  The symmetry of a young jock's visage veils the disruption his bipolar disorder wreaks. Smiley Face Killers points to this mental state and this pandemic time:  We mask and we separate, failing to distinguish ourselves from another.  The scenario  proliferates the confusion of people who lack a simpatico between interior and exterior, indicating psychic crisis.  The voice inside us is suggestive, yet strong, saying now is the time to drown yourself and die.

As the dissonance between one's FACE/MASK and one's interior widens, the crisis grows.  Encompassing a social breakdown, the  Alpha dudes are pulled inward, into their doubts, their psychological weaknesses and into their solitude, away from others.  The new Alphas (this rebel fiend army hunting us just out of sight) are also leaders, but of a dark murderous cult.  The war simultaneously is waging inside a contained single person as well.  It is indicative of a virus.  It is manifested as psychological fracture and mental deterioration.  The movie comments on how what nudged at us in our childhood bedrooms--  (is he under my bed waiting to kill me?  Does a monster live in my closet?  Will I soon be brutally murdered?) grows inside us all the while.  Our dis-ease is progressive and chronic, having caused pathology to our organs as they developed.

As in Cosmatos' Mandy (2017) -- the mask of the face promotes the illusion of containment. The borders of the face of Mandy leak when she is permeated and consumed by a cult leader.  Both films involve the constructed identity of a darkly murderous counter-culture cult as its conduit. But the horror is the reveal of the lack of distinction and autonomy that one human actually has from another.  The lie is that we control our thoughts, our bodies, ourselves.  Our wants can infect and even attract others to overtake us.

Smiley Face Killers is mythical in its fears while specific in its placement and time.  The men of these 1990s placid Cali suburbs are alpha dogs slightly denatured; sensitive men and counter culture grunge movements of the 90s coloring the psychological status of preps and bros.  It is the birth of (portable computer/phone) screens. Timeless terrors are grounded in contemporary social isolation (technical as well as medical.)  Like Mandy, it is a film about a specific year.  Mandy's pointed recall of 1983 is a parallel to Smiley Face Killers' magnification of psychic ills in the 1990s, though its deliberate 2020 release is grounding it in a modern plague.

 Our dis-ease is multiplied and vague. It is pandemic. This disease is both the soil and the dirt along the grave; it breeds mental illness and suspicion and weakens our organs to keep us from noticing we are the target of many.. in turn, our destruction serves the earth and nourishes the few who live in the outlines, once scared children themselves, now vanquishing the monster inside us all, victorious at last.

In the logic of Smiley Face Killers the face is called Galiel.  He must be killed. It is the name of the mask that pretends to be a face.