Creator’s Statement

In early 2023, I found out I was going to become a father. This news served to sharpen what had hitherto been incompletely formed, lingering questions that I had about paternal identity and roles. Having grown up without a father, I lacked the experiential frameworks through which many men negotiate their own transition to parenthood. My understanding of what a dad might be was therefore shaped primarily by, and mediated through, two sources: the conflicted accounts of peers who typically described often strained relationships with their fathers, and the representations of fatherhood that circulated in popular cinema and television of the 1980s and 1990s. For me, these images became templates—partial, distorted, and affectively charged—for imagining the paternal role. My videographic essay, “In Search of a Father,” surveys these representations, exploring how shifting media representations both register and shape cultural understandings of fatherhood.

The video essay is structured around the deceptively simple but telling question: what does a father look like? The phrasing matters. Unlike the questions “what is a father?” or “what makes a good father?”, which imply ethical or experiential dimensions, I foreground the visual. It reveals my initial sense of distance: I was not yet a father, rather an observer seeking models through images. In the video essay, I draw on a corpus of more than seventy films and television programmes, in large part due to their formative presence in my own childhood and adolescence, but also because they exemplify the archetypes and tropes of fatherhood that recur throughout the critical literature on paternal representation (see Bruzzi 2005; Feasey 2008; Hamad 2013a, 2013b; Reynolds 2019), and that continue to circulate across popular film and television. Comedies, children’s programmes, and mainstream blockbus3ers constitute the dominant forms in “In Search of a Father,” reflecting their role in shaping popular understandings of fatherhood in the Anglophone world. The project therefore analyses the ways in which screen cultures visualise the father, not as a fixed role, but as a repertoire of tropes and performances that circulate transnationally and intergenerationally. My approach examines select visual tropes across a large corpus in order to trace recurring patterns. The potential for detailed analysis of the formal and contextual concerns of a single work is therefore limited, so that, for instance, my engagement with the father in The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921) cannot fully account for the complexities of its use of exaggeration and irony in addressing issues of class and gender roles in a post-war context. Whilst not strictly, “distant viewing” (Arnold and Tilton 2023), my approach necessarily brackets questions around genre, and specific historical and geographical locatedness, to concentrate on analysis of patterns of representation, narrative, and character generated by visual forms.

“In Search of a Father” engages research in a range of disciplines on cultural constructions of masculinity and the family. As Laura King (2012: 26) observes, the historiography of family life has long marginalised discussion of the role of fathers in favour of an emphasis on motherhood and domesticity. While this focus reflects the historical reality that women carried (and carry) the greater share of domestic and caregiving labour, it has also meant that the symbolic and cultural roles of fathers have received less sustained attention. Film and television form part of this historical record, reproducing the marginalisation in representational terms: paternal figures appear in abundance, yet are often narratively or emotionally peripheral. Through interviews with activists, academics and practitioners, the video essay places recurring screen representations of fathers—as authoritarian figures, comic incompetents, or distant providers—in dialogue with contemporary debates about paternal involvement, gender equality, and the gap between public imagery and private practice. My gestures towards “positive” or “negative” models of fatherhood in the video essay reflect recurring evaluative frameworks through which screen texts themselves frame and assess paternal behaviours, and do not constitute attempts to establish moralistic views. In the video essay, Adrienne Burgess, CEO of the Fatherhood Institute, highlights the gap between public representations of fatherhood and private paternal practice. Film scholar Toby Reynolds reflects on Hollywood’s portrayals of fathers as beleaguered, anxious figures under pressure; and Kieran Anders, from the organisation Dads Matter, stresses that contemporary fathers are expected to be more engaged than ever, even as societal structures prevent and constrain their ability to parent. These perspectives are used to illustrate and/or juxtapose the examples from film and television with critical commentary, exposing the dissonance between reductive archetypes and lived realities.

Scholarship on fatherhood spans several disciplines, from Sociology and History to Film and Media Studies. Sociological accounts have traced how expectations of paternal identity have shifted over time. Michael Lamb’s work in the late 1980s and 1990s identified successive epochs of American fatherhood, each dominated by a distinct paradigm: first the moral teacher, then the breadwinner, later the sex-role model, and most recently the nurturing father (Lamb 1987, 1995). Although this research is now several decades old, it remains influential because it crystallises a framework that has been repeatedly cited and reworked in subsequent studies. Simon J. Williams (2008: 492), for instance, draws on Lamb’s typology to show how these shifting paradigms continue to shape contemporary sociological understandings of paternal practice.

Stella Bruzzi (2005) shows how postwar Hollywood repeatedly dramatises the internal conflict between the roles of authoritative, distant patriarch and the emotionally present caregiver, as exemplified by figures such as George Bailey (James Stewart) in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and George Banks (Steve Martin) in Father of the Bride (1991). Through the medium of the video essay, these archetypes are brought into sharper focus: the form makes it possible to highlight not only which paternal figures recur, but how they are framed and narrated. In “In Search of a Father,” fathers are revealed as positioned at the margins of domestic spaces, performing comedic incompetence in the home, and are redeemed through climactic moments of sacrifice or confession. Such recurring devices reveal how the cultural negotiation of paternal identity is staged cinematically, often in ways that resolve narratives without acknowledging the systemic constraints that shape family life.

Systemic factors that prevent fathers from fully engaging in familial life “such as the presence or absence of workplace barriers and policies, parental leave policies, daycare systems and more” are identified by sociologists Thomas Johansson and Jesper Andreasson (2017: 3). They argue that fatherhood is increasingly tied to intimacy and domestic care, yet institutional structures remain resistant to this transformation. In the UK, statutory paternity provision continues to be minimal (CIPD 2022). Eligible fathers or partners are entitled to just one or two consecutive weeks of paid paternity leave, at a statutory rate of £184.03 per week or 90% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower. This leaves many fathers unable to inhabit the roles that contemporary culture increasingly valorises, those of the emotionally present, caregiving, and domestically engaged father celebrated in policy rhetoric and popular media alike. This disjunction matters for representation: while screen fathers are often celebrated for triumphing over adversity through individual determination, the structural conditions of race, class, and gender that delimit real fathering practices are largely absent from popular narratives. Cultural discourses surrounding Black fathers, for instance, have frequently perpetuated the stereotype of absence or irresponsibility (Coles and Green 2010), a reductive framing that obscures both the realities of paternal care and the structural barriers faced by Black families. The personal motivators for my video essay did not facilitate interrogation of this representational history in depth, and indeed further work will be required to expose how neoliberal screen cultures privilege stories of individual resilience over systemic critique. Some early work in this area includes Brid Featherstone (2009) on how neoliberal discourses have reshaped understandings of fatherhood around ideals of individual responsibility and managerial care, and Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker’s (2014) study of recession-era Hollywood cinema, which provides a useful point of comparison for how film frames gendered inequalities within neoliberal ideology.

The central argument of “In Search of a Father” is that media representations of fatherhood participate in a feedback loop with societal expectations: they crystallise cultural anxieties and desires around the paternal role, while simultaneously shaping how fatherhood is understood and enacted. My own personal position, once as a viewer without a father, now as a father confronting these images anew, gives the project its double perspective. The initial detachment implied by asking “what does a father look like?” becomes complicated by lived experience, revealing fatherhood not as a static category but as a shifting practice continually negotiated across cultural, institutional, and personal registers. By foregrounding the tropes through which fathers are represented, and placing them alongside scholarly and activist critique, the project contributes to debates on masculinity and care, offering a videographic method for interrogating how fatherhood is both seen and unseen on screen.

References (creator’s statement and video essay)

Arnold, Taylor, and Lauren Tilton. 2023. Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images. MIT Press.

Bruzzi, Stella. 2005. Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood. Bloomsbury Publishing.

–––. 2013. Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scène in Hollywood. Edinburgh University Press.

Burgess, Adrienne. 1997. Fatherhood Reclaimed: The Making of the Modern Father. Vermillion.

Caesar, Terry. 2008. “#1 Dad: Fatherhood, Reception, and Television in Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Studies in American Humor, no. 18, 59–73. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42573550.

CIPD. 2022. Employer Focus on Working Parents: Parental Leave and Pay and Childcare Policies. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/employer-focus-on-working-parents-report_tcm18-111075.pdf.

Coles, Roberta L., and Charles Green, eds. 2010. The Myth of the Missing Black Father. Columbia University Press.

Feasey, Rebecca. 2008. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh University Press.

Featherstone, Brid. 2009. Contemporary Fathering: Theory, Policy and Practice. Policy Press.

Hall, Richard. 2019. The Emotional Lives and Legacies of Fathers and Sons in Britain, 1945–1974. Gonville and Caius College, doctoral thesis. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.40615.

Hamad, Hannah. 2013a. ‘Hollywood Fatherhood: Paternal Postfeminism in Contemporary Popular Cinema.’ In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Nadine Muller and Joel Gwynne, pp. 99–115. Palgrave Macmillan.

–––. 2013b. Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary U.S. Film: Framing Fatherhood. Routledge.

Johansson, Thomas, and Jesper Andreasson. 2017. Fatherhood in Transition: Masculinity, Identity and Everyday Life. Springer.

King, Laura. 2012. “Hidden Fathers? The Significance of Fatherhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain.” Contemporary British History, 26, no. 1, 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2012.656385.

Lamb, Michael E. 1987. The Father’s Role: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Routledge.

LaRossa, Ralph. 1997. The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History. University of Chicago Press.

Lucas, Siân E., Nughmana Mirza, and Joanne Westwood. 2021. “‘Any d*** can make a baby, but it takes a real man to be a dad’: Group Work for Fathers.” Qualitative Social Work, 20, no. 3, 718–737. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325020909431.

Negra, Diane, and Yvonne Tasker. 2013. “Neoliberal Frames and Genres of Inequality: Recession-Era Chick Flicks and Male-Centred Corporate Melodrama.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16, no. 3, 344–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549413481880.

Reynolds, Toby. 2021. The American Father Onscreen: A Post-Jungian Perspective. Routledge.

Williams, Stephen. 2008. “What is Fatherhood? Searching for the Reflexive Father.” Sociology, 42, no. 3, 487–502. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038508088837.

Filmography

Abbott, Paul, George Faber, Charles Pattinson, and David Threlfall (Executive Producers). 2004–2013. Shameless [TV series]. Channel 4. UK.

Anderson, Paul Thomas. 2007. There Will Be Blood. Paramount Vantage. USA.

Anderson, Wes. 2001. The Royal Tenenbaums. American Empirical Pictures; Touchstone Pictures. USA.

–––. 2023. Asteroid City. Focus Features. USA.

Armstrong, Jesse, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Frank Rich (Executive Producers). 2018–2023. Succession [TV series]. HBO Entertainment. USA.

Aronofsky, Darren. 2022. The Whale. A24. USA.

Aykroyd, Dan. 1991. Nothing But Trouble. Applied Action; Warner Bros. USA.

Bay, Michael. 2001. Pearl Harbor. Buena Vista Pictures. USA.

Benigni, Roberto. 1997. Life is Beautiful. Miramax. Italy.

Benton, Robert. 1979. Kramer vs. Kramer. Columbia Pictures. USA.

Brumm, Joe. 2020. Bluey: Season 2, Episode 26, Sleepytime. Ludo Studio. Australia.

Capra, Frank. 1946. It’s a Wonderful Life. RKO Radio Pictures. USA.

Carroll, Carlo. 1995. Fluke. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. USA.

Chaplin, Charlie. 1921. The Kid. First National. USA.

Chase, David, Brad Grey, Robin Green, and Mitchell Burgess (Executive Producers). 1999–2007. The Sopranos [TV series]. HBO Entertainment. USA.

Coffin, Pierre, and Chris Renaud. 2010. Despicable Me. Universal Pictures. USA.

Columbus, Chris. 1993. Mrs. Doubtfire. 20th Century Fox. USA.

De Palma, Brian. 1987. The Untouchables. Paramount Pictures. USA.

De Sica, Vittorio. 1948. The Bicycle Thieves. Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche. Italy.

Del Toro, Guillermo, and Mark Gustafson. 2022. Pinocchio. Netflix. USA.

Donner, Richard. 1987. Lethal Weapon. Silver Pictures; Warner Bros. USA.

Dragotti, Stan. 1983. Mr. Mom. Twentieth Century Fox. USA.

Favreau, Jon. 2003. Elf. New Line Cinema. USA.

Ford, John. 1959. Pilgrimage. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. USA.

Gilligan, Vince, Mark Johnson, and Michelle McLaren (Executive Producers). 2008–2013. Breaking Bad [TV series]. AMC. USA.

Granik, Debra. 2018. Leave No Trace. Bleecker Street. USA.

Groening, Matt. 1989–present. The Simpsons. 20th Television. USA.

Gunn, James. 2014. Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel Studios. USA.

Hebron, Shelley. 1994. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Season 4, Episode 24. NBC. USA.

Hillcoat, John. 2009. The Road. Dimension Films. USA.

Howard, Ron. 1991. Backdraft. Universal Pictures. USA.

Jenkins, Tamara. 2018. Private Life. Netflix. USA.

Leisen, Mitchell. 1946. To Each His Own. Paramount Pictures. USA.

Lester, Mark L. 1985. Commando. Twentieth Century Fox. USA.

Luske, Hamilton, and Ben Sharpsteen. 1940. Pinocchio. RKO Radio Pictures. USA.

Marquand, Richard. 1983. Return of the Jedi. Lucasfilm. USA.

Mendes, Sam. 1999. American Beauty. DreamWorks Pictures. USA.

–––. 2002. Road to Perdition. DreamWorks Pictures. USA.

–––. 2008. Revolutionary Road. DreamWorks Pictures. USA.

McTiernan, John. 1988. Die Hard. Twentieth Century Fox. USA.

Miller, Troy. 1998. Jack Frost. Warner Bros. USA.

Muccino, Gabriele. 2006. The Pursuit of Happyness. Columbia Pictures. USA.

Mulligan, Robert. 1963. To Kill a Mockingbird. Universal Pictures. USA.

Nimoy, Leonard. 1987. Three Men and a Baby. Touchstone Pictures. USA.

Östlund, Ruben. 2014. Force Majeure. TriArt Film. Sweden.

Oxley, Peter. 2007. Tales from the Jungle. BBC. UK.

Pagnol, Yves. 1990. La gloire de mon père. Gaumont. France.

Ramis, Harold. 1983. National Lampoon’s Vacation. Warner Bros. USA.

Reitman, Ivan. 1994. Junior. Universal Pictures. USA.

Roach, Jay. 2000. Meet the Parents. Universal Pictures. USA.

Robinson, Phil Alden. 1989. Field of Dreams. Universal Pictures; Carolco Pictures. USA.

Ross, Matt. 2016. Captain Fantastic. Bleecker Street. USA.

Sheridan, Jim. 1993. In the Name of the Father. Universal Pictures. UK/Ireland.

Shyamalan, M. Night. 2002. Signs. Touchstone Pictures. USA.

Spielberg, Steven. 1975. Jaws. Universal Pictures. USA.

–––. 1989. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Paramount Pictures. USA.

–––. 1991. Hook. Amblin Entertainment. USA.

–––. 2002. Minority Report. 20th Century Fox. USA.

–––. 2005. War of the Worlds. Paramount Pictures; DreamWorks Pictures. USA.

Stanton, Andrew, and Lee Unkrich. 2003. Finding Nemo. Walt Disney Pictures. USA.

Stevenson, Robert. 1964. Mary Poppins. Walt Disney Pictures. USA.

Sullivan, Tim. 1985. Jack and Sarah. Polygram Filmed Entertainment; Granada Film. UK.

Truffaut, François. 1959. The 400 Blows. Les Films du Carrosse. France.

Weir, Peter. 1989. Dead Poets Society. Touchstone Pictures. USA.

Weitz, Paul, and Chris Weitz. 2002. About a Boy. Universal Pictures. UK.

Wenders, Wim. 2002. Paris, Texas. Anchor Bay Entertainment. UK.

Yeon, Sang-ho. 2016. Train to Busan. Next Entertainment World. South Korea.

Zemeckis, Robert. 1985. Back to the Future. Amblin Entertainment; Universal Pictures. USA.

Biography

Simon Stanton-Sharma is a lecturer at the University of Salford, specialising in film and television production, creative pedagogies and decolonising praxes. With over twenty-five years of experience as a filmmaker and television director, he has worked primarily at the BBC. Notably, he launched new BBC Africa services in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal, and, for seven years, directed Newsnight on BBC 2. Most recently, he has worked on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project “Decolonising English Literary Studies in and Beyond the Classroom” and has published in the journals Media Practice and Education and Visual Studies.

Review by Katie Barnett, University of Chester

This video essay, “In Search of a Father,” explores the complex and complicated relationships between the representation of fatherhood in popular culture—predominantly cinema—and the realities of lived fatherhood in the twenty-first century. Simon Stanton-Sharma approaches the subject through a gently personal lens at the beginning of the film, reflecting on his own impending fatherhood and how expectations and experiences of on-screen fatherhood come to bear on this. This gives weight to the unfolding exploration of depictions of dads, as does the inclusion of sociological and medical perspectives on fathering.

Many of the films discussed in “In Search of a Father” are well-worn touchpoints on the fathers-on-screen map. Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), Three Men and a Baby (Leonard Nimoy, 1987), and Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993) are all—for good reason—perennial examples of shifting attitudes towards fatherhood in Hollywood cinema. However, the audio-visual form here allows for the useful elucidation of ideas around, for example, the eroticisation of the father figure in films such as Three Men and a Baby, as illustrated in the discussion of Ted Danson’s shower scene. By drawing on more recent televisual examples such as Succession (HBO, 2018–2023), Bluey (ABC Kids, 2018–) and Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), Stanton-Sharma goes beyond these more familiar examples to demonstrate the pervasive and sustained cultural preoccupation with fathers. Indeed, the wide variety of clips in the film is testament to the formidable task of shifting perceptions of fatherhood when so many tropes are long-established.

Where the video essay is particularly powerful is in the inclusion of interviews with Adrienne Burgess and Kieran Anders, the latter of whom raises interesting issues surrounding paternal mental health, limited paternal leave and the importance of positive images of fatherhood. This, in turn, leads to important considerations in the film about the systemic issues facing men attempting to construct their fatherhood in a social, cultural and political landscape that is not always set up to accommodate varied visions of what “good” fatherhood might be.

Review by Hannah Hamad, Cardiff University

It is my pleasure to write in support of the publication of this work. I would like to recommend publication in the strongest possible terms.

I am better placed with my expertise to comment on the content than the form of this video essay. That being the case, I find the content, coverage, and use of videographic form, and the way that these things have come together in the execution of the essay, to be really quite wonderful.

The expostulations on the relationship between text and context are excellent. Cited sources have been paraphrased skilfully and engagingly. And a really impressive range of film and television works, and scholarly sources on fatherhood, film, and culture have been engaged with. The arguments of the cited authors have been synthesised and reformulated in a way that behoves the form of the videographic essay, and in a way that complements the author/filmmaker’s own arguments and lines of enquiry, as well as showcasing their skill and creativity as a critical and academic video essayist.

The choice, use, and assemblage of excerpted material in the form of clips from the range of films and television series within the author’s corpus of texts is particularly noteworthy. The way in which this material has been used is incredibly persuasive and beautifully illustrative. Everything has been selected with great attention to detail and relevance, and the relationship between audio and visuals in this regard is exactly as it should be.

The balance of breadth and depth is spot on. And the voice-over narration blends engaging accessibility and pithy paraphrasing with academic gravitas and critical heft perfectly.

The sheer level of skill and professionalism with which this video essay has been conceived, assembled and executed is second to no other that I have yet seen (albeit my experience of reviewing video essays is still relatively limited).

An auto-ethnographic approach is not one that I would have expected to sit well with me in relation to the subject matter, but in this case it works brilliantly as a jumping off point, and really helps to guide and orient the viewer through the material to follow.

License

CC BY 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.