American Obsession with Fathers & Sons

[Calladan]

So, as someone who lives in the UK but gets exposed to a lot of American fiction (in books, films and tv) I have to ask - what is the obsession with fathers and sons?

Star Wars, The Godfather, Death of a Salesman, Babylon 5, The West Wing. You can barely get through an episode of NCIS without someone whining about their father (and this spread into NCIS LA, where Deeks has Daddy issues and NCIS NO where Pride also has Daddy issues), and even Star Trek has various characters who have issues with their father.

This obsession took a truly disturbing turn when Elementary took the unbelievable turn of INVENTING a father for Sherlock Holmes just so he could have a trouble relationship with him. (As far as I know he doesn't have a father in any of the books).

So - what is it with fathers and sons in America? Why are so many American writers obsessed with it, and have been for so long?

[Benuty]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... addyIssues

[Calladan]

Except that doesn't entirely explain it, because Tom Paris, Stephen Franklin, Jethro Gibbs, Ben Sisko, Luke Skywalker, Tony McGee, Angel, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Dinozzo, Wesley Wyndham Price, Jed Bartlett and the rest can hardly be described as villains.

Good guys have problems with their fathers. Bad guys have problems with their fathers.

Write a list of twenty American male fictional characters - good or bad - and odds are at least five of them will have had problems with their father, one way or another.

I was just curious

[Benuty]

Except that doesn't entirely explain it, because Tom Paris, Stephen Franklin, Jethro Gibbs, Ben Sisko, Luke Skywalker, Tony McGee, Angel, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Dinozzo, Wesley Wyndham Price, Jed Bartlett and the rest can hardly be described as villains.

Good guys have problems with their fathers. Bad guys have problems with their fathers.

Write a list of twenty American male fictional characters - good or bad - and odds are at least five of them will have had problems with their father, one way or another.

I was just curious

Freudian excuse while a mostly villian trope can be used as a justification for drama amongst the heroes. I think it is mostly hollywood psychology (centered around extreme stereotypes) as to why daddy issues are so common.

Hollywood is literally perpetuating freudian psychiatry into the public at large, and as a result our culture changes around it.

[New haven america]

Because people have trouble coming up with decent character conflicts.

If you think the US is bad at this, you should check out Japan (Apparently in anime, if you don't grow up with a father, or have a father that's not really involved, you will become a shitty parent 90% of the time).

[The first Galactic Republic]

I believe the man who brought daddy issues to a highlight was Austrian.

[Forsher]

Cat Stevens is British. Your argument is invalid.

Anyway, interesting topic.

The main reason is because British literature is full of orphans (or parents aren't there at all for other reasons) and when parents exist to the British mind, it is when the characters themselves are parents (which is rarely true in the US, except when an actress falls pregnant and they decide to write it in). Naturally, the British mind then conspires to make terrible things happen* to the kids... (or, at least, these are the only ones the Powers That Be allow to screen here any more).

On the other hand, US Television shows have one over-riding message about being (a) a cop/detective/agent/whatever and (b) in relationships... it doesn't work. So, they can't have kids, they're not allowed to, but they still have to have families and, therefore, family drama** so the characters (in their thirties or forties) must be defined as children. The British mind seems to not care about this message so they lack this problem. As the ultimate proof, if there is a child they vanish and hardly ever appear (or less so than they should, Bones, at least when we still watched that, being a particularly blatant offender).

Also, consider the likes of NCIS, consider how the characters end up working for NCIS (we'll exclude Bishop for several reasons). Gibbs' is, unusually, a parent but he joins NCIS after his family is murdered. His issues with his father, as far as I remember, stem more from not having seen him in ages as a result of leaving his small-town world. DiNozzo's relationship with his mother's uknown? entirely forgettable? In any case, how he was raised basically left him with a PE degree which seems to translate into a fairly physical occupation. Also, when they decided to mature DiNozzo, the natural way of doing this was to have a relationship that did not (could not: see above) work and alter the relationship with the father (bad business deals).** McGee was a navy brat and hence ended up in NCIS. Ziva's dad was kinda evil.

Why fathers rather than mothers? Desire to match parental and child genders? Easier ability to have fathers not be biological? Legacy of a more male-dominated era (i.e. as children the dominant force in where they lived and how they lived was their father, their mother being a housewife of limited means)? I do not know. Daddy Issues sounds cooler???

On the other hand, if US television that I don't watch (i.e. anything non-scripted and anything scripted but sans police/agents/terrorists), look a bit different then just believe the Brits Love Orphans theory.

As to Sherlock Holmes, I will mention the third brother hypothesis.

*Broadchurch. Dead kid. Happy Valley. Dead kid. Abducted grandkid. Abducted other person's kid. The Missing. Lost kid. Probably dead. Father's a bit nuts. Thirteen. Kid goes missing for thirteen years. I guess Doctor Foster kinda counts but I'm not sure why we watched that. Okay it's probably more I've forgotten most of the other ones but you get the idea.

**This may or may not be a line from Inception, which is the brainchild of a Brit, so, naturally, the main character's a father separated from semi-orphaned parents by an arrest warrant.

[Giovenith]

Pretty simple: The struggle for identity.

It's not so much father and son specifically at play as it is simply parent and child. All children are, to some degree, reflections of their parents, and so are tasked with figuring out how much of their parents's own nature do they want to embrace and how much do they want to deny. Some people have amazing parents, and the drive to emulate them can inspire both pride and frustration, either from a security in being a piece of a grand legacy or the anxiety of being unable to match that legacy. Some have not so great parents, and thus the struggle of the child to prove that their parents's nature does not define their own, and of the parent in dealing with that child's rejection. Sometimes it's a bit of both, with child struggling to emulate the good and rise above the bad, and sometimes the parent having different ideas as to just what aspects of themselves are good and bad.

The reason this story is primarily told through fathers and sons though, I believe, is because for a long time women were not generally considered much as individuals. Women's lives and roles were rarely touched upon through any angle other than their relationships with men they knew, whom they were basically expected to base their entire lives around. Whereas men had to go through the journey of fashioning their own identities, women's identities were predestined for them, as support systems for whatever their husbands or fathers decided to do. A man could be a baker, a pilot, an engineer... A woman could be a baker's wife, a pilot's wife, an engineer's wife, etc. Women's identities were expected to be nothing more than reflections of their men's identities, and so the process by which they try to forge their own identity by considering their mother was just assumed to be nonexistent. All women are automatically wives, so they don't need to have a struggle to determine if they want to be like their mothers, because they just will be, right?

As gender equality grows, this has changed though. We've made great strides in realizing that a woman's personhood is not simply determined by what her men do, that there are things about herself she must figure out on her own terms. Disney's "Brave" and "Frozen" are great examples of women forging identity with respect to other women. Not just that though, but the relationships with which we use to tell stories of identity are becoming more diverse as well, with father/daughter, mother/son, brother/sister, etc. all becoming more common. The father/son dynamic is still around, but it's becoming less common than it was as we realize that humans are much more complex than we used to give them credit and can gain insight into their identities from a variety of sources outside of just direct descendence.

[Anollasia]

I believe the man who brought daddy issues to a highlight was Austrian.

Oh. I see what you did there.

[Calladan]

On the other hand, US Television shows have one over-riding message about being (a) a cop/detective/agent/whatever and (b) in relationships... it doesn't work. So, they can't have kids, they're not allowed to, but they still have to have families and, therefore, family drama** so the characters (in their thirties or forties) must be defined as children. The British mind seems to not care about this message so they lack this problem. As the ultimate proof, if there is a child they vanish and hardly ever appear (or less so than they should, Bones, at least when we still watched that, being a particularly blatant offender).

But it's not just US tv shows. The entire canon of US fiction (books, films, plays etc) appears to have this obsession as well, stretching way back to before TV was around.

Pretty simple: The struggle for identity.

It's not so much father and son specifically at play as it is simply parent and child. All children are, to some degree, reflections of their parents, and so are tasked with figuring out how much of their parents's own nature do they want to embrace and how much do they want to deny. Some people have amazing parents, and the drive to emulate them can inspire both pride and frustration, either from a security in being a piece of a grand legacy or the anxiety of being unable to match that legacy. Some have not so great parents, and thus the struggle of the child to prove that their parents's nature does not define their own, and of the parent in dealing with that child's rejection. Sometimes it's a bit of both, with child struggling to emulate the good and rise above the bad, and sometimes the parent having different ideas as to just what aspects of themselves are good and bad.

The reason this story is primarily told through fathers and sons though, I believe, is because for a long time women were not generally considered much as individuals. Women's lives and roles were rarely touched upon through any angle other than their relationships with men they knew, whom they were basically expected to base their entire lives around. Whereas men had to go through the journey of fashioning their own identities, women's identities were predestined for them, as support systems for whatever their husbands or fathers decided to do. A man could be a baker, a pilot, an engineer... A woman could be a baker's wife, a pilot's wife, an engineer's wife, etc. Women's identities were expected to be nothing more than reflections of their men's identities, and so the process by which they try to forge their own identity by considering their mother was just assumed to be nonexistent. All women are automatically wives, so they don't need to have a struggle to determine if they want to be like their mothers, because they just will be, right?

As gender equality grows, this has changed though. We've made great strides in realizing that a woman's personhood is not simply determined by what her men do, that there are things about herself she must figure out on her own terms. Disney's "Brave" and "Frozen" are great examples of women forging identity with respect to other women. Not just that though, but the relationships with which we use to tell stories of identity are becoming more diverse as well, with father/daughter, mother/son, brother/sister, etc. all becoming more common. The father/son dynamic is still around, but it's becoming less common than it was as we realize that humans are much more complex than we used to give them credit and can gain insight into their identities from a variety of sources outside of just direct descendence.

This does make more sense - there are more shows recently about mother/daughter relations (and father/daughter or mother/son relations) but I suppose up until recently it was the father that was the (for want of a better phrase) primary "adult figure" that a child had to live up to, and daughters were probably not expected to grow up to be the "man of the house" in the way that boys were.

But still - I do wonder why America embraced this trope so readily and why other nations (the UK for example) seems happy enough to have left it alone. I am not saying there aren't stories of father/son conflict in UK fiction, but if the sheer number that fill the US canon is..... overwhelming.

[USS Monitor]

Because people have trouble coming up with decent character conflicts.

If you think the US is bad at this, you should check out Japan (Apparently in anime, if you don't grow up with a father, or have a father that's not really involved, you will become a shitty parent 90% of the time).

Now that you mention it, a lot of anime characters do have really weird daddy issues.

On the other hand, US Television shows have one over-riding message about being (a) a cop/detective/agent/whatever and (b) in relationships... it doesn't work. So, they can't have kids, they're not allowed to, but they still have to have families and, therefore, family drama** so the characters (in their thirties or forties) must be defined as children. The British mind seems to not care about this message so they lack this problem. As the ultimate proof, if there is a child they vanish and hardly ever appear (or less so than they should, Bones, at least when we still watched that, being a particularly blatant offender).

But it's not just US tv shows. The entire canon of US fiction (books, films, plays etc) appears to have this obsession as well, stretching way back to before TV was around.

Can you give some examples from before Hollywood? Cos it's a very common trope in Hollywood, and it's often used as a shortcut to create drama without doing proper character development, but it's not something that has stood out to me as being a staple of American literature. Not to say it doesn't exist, but I haven't noticed it being a recurring theme in American literature more than in other literary traditions.

[Giovenith]

This does make more sense - there are more shows recently about mother/daughter relations (and father/daughter or mother/son relations) but I suppose up until recently it was the father that was the (for want of a better phrase) primary "adult figure" that a child had to live up to, and daughters were probably not expected to grow up to be the "man of the house" in the way that boys were.

But still - I do wonder why America embraced this trope so readily and why other nations (the UK for example) seems happy enough to have left it alone. I am not saying there aren't stories of father/son conflict in UK fiction, but if the sheer number that fill the US canon is..... overwhelming.

If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say it's because America is an incredibly young country with not as much history or culture backing it as other lands. In the newborn years of a country, national structure is only just starting to be built, and so families and local communities wind up having to rely on themselves more than ever in order to get by. While England already had sprawling cities and respectable towns with well-established political and police forces taking the run of the place, Americans largely lived in just-barely-settled wilderness and had to put up with experimental forms of local government in the absence of nobility. Smaller, younger, less structurally established communities inevitably rely heavily on family because not only does your family make up a sizeable portion of the population, but it's really the only structure you can truly rely on in a world where the villagers might decide the next day that John the Leader was shit at fighting off those beavers and maybe we should start listening to Carl instead.

Because this cultural experience with experimental local government ultimately lead to what would become our democracy, the cultural memory of the importance of family remained with us for some time too. As the United States grew and became a more established nation not only in it's inner workings but on the international platform, more people found themselves willing or sometimes even forced to break away from familial obligation in order to find their place in the newfound clockwork of a quickly complicating nation. America really just found it's current mark on the world during the World Wars, a very recent era of history in which families were ripped apart and their individual members were forced to make do on their own, and the nation had to move on from looking inward to thinking about what role it wanted to play to the rest of the planet. So the time in which family was important was not that long ago and our culture still clings to it in some regard, but it's falling away as the times change and as America changes.

[USS Monitor]

This does make more sense - there are more shows recently about mother/daughter relations (and father/daughter or mother/son relations) but I suppose up until recently it was the father that was the (for want of a better phrase) primary "adult figure" that a child had to live up to, and daughters were probably not expected to grow up to be the "man of the house" in the way that boys were.

But still - I do wonder why America embraced this trope so readily and why other nations (the UK for example) seems happy enough to have left it alone. I am not saying there aren't stories of father/son conflict in UK fiction, but if the sheer number that fill the US canon is..... overwhelming.

If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say it's because America is an incredibly young country with not as much history or culture backing it as other lands. In the newborn years of a country, national structure is only just starting to be built, and so families and local communities wind up having to rely on themselves more than ever in order to get by. While England already had sprawling cities and respectable towns with well-established political and police forces taking the run of the place, Americans largely lived in just-barely-settled wilderness and had to put up with experimental forms of local government in the absence of nobility. Smaller, younger, less structurally established communities inevitably rely heavily on family because not only does your family make up a sizeable portion of the population, but it's really the only structure you can truly rely on in a world where the villagers might decide the next day that John the Leader was shit at fighting off those beavers and maybe we should start listening to Carl instead.

Because this cultural experience with experimental local government ultimately lead to what would become our democracy, the cultural memory of the importance of family remained with us for some time too. As the United States grew and became a more established nation not only in it's inner workings but on the international platform, more people found themselves willing or sometimes even forced to break away from familial obligation in order to find their place in the newfound clockwork of a quickly complicating nation. America really just found it's current mark on the world during the World Wars, a very recent era of history in which families were ripped apart and their individual members were forced to make do on their own, and the nation had to move on from looking inward to thinking about what role it wanted to play to the rest of the planet. So the time in which family was important was not that long ago and our culture still clings to it in some regard, but it's falling away as the times change and as America changes.

Considering the Civil War had people literally fighting their own relatives, I think it's pretty silly citing the World Wars as a turning point that shook people out of their familiar obligations in a way they never had been before. The fact that nobody took advantage of the Civil War to re-colonize the US, along with the growth of the military and increased centralization under the Lincoln administration, would also be far more relevant than WWI for establishing the US as a major player on the world stage and developing our political institutions. (We really didn't do much in WWI.) WWII is a big deal, but I would still argue that it had less of a transformative effect on American identity. We didn't have a series of Constitutional amendments related to WWII that dramatically changed the nature of our society and our legal system, and we don't have the same reverence for WWII-era leaders that we do for Lincoln. WWII established the US as the world's top superpower, but the US had been a major player before that, and it had been urbanized for a while. We had a colonial sphere of influence in the 19th century, sticking our noses in Japan, the Philippines, Liberia, etc.

[Forsher]

On the other hand, US Television shows have one over-riding message about being (a) a cop/detective/agent/whatever and (b) in relationships... it doesn't work. So, they can't have kids, they're not allowed to, but they still have to have families and, therefore, family drama** so the characters (in their thirties or forties) must be defined as children. The British mind seems to not care about this message so they lack this problem. As the ultimate proof, if there is a child they vanish and hardly ever appear (or less so than they should, Bones, at least when we still watched that, being a particularly blatant offender).

But it's not just US tv shows. The entire canon of US fiction (books, films, plays etc) appears to have this obsession as well, stretching way back to before TV was around.

Let's put it this way, I* didn't notice any particular father/son thing with Joad in The Grapes of Wrath... there, I'm done with my review of American literature.

The more interesting point is that I do have a bit more familiarity with what I'll call the British fictional tradition which, as I said, positions people as orphans or parents, and that this is probably why it stands out (the father/son thing).

*This doesn't necessarily mean much.

If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say it's because America is an incredibly young country with not as much history or culture backing it as other lands.

I spluttered.

Parts of the US aren't particularly old. However, you ever heard of this thing called the 4th of July? That's where the entire country pretends for a day that more than the Eastern coast is particularly old.

[Hirota]

Babylon 5

Wait, wait.

What Father & Son issues? Sheridan got on fine with his dad. Sinclair's dad died when he was young (but I don't recall any particular issues).

The only ones I remember having any issues was Lochley, cos her dad was an alcoholic. Ivanova didn't get on with her dad.

Edit: Oh and I guess Bester might have had some issues too.

[Giovenith]

If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say it's because America is an incredibly young country with not as much history or culture backing it as other lands.

I spluttered.

Parts of the US aren't particularly old. However, you ever heard of this thing called the 4th of July? That's where the entire country pretends for a day that more than the Eastern coast is particularly old.

Ah yes, the fourth of July, the day when we celebrate the parts that are less than 300 years old, as opposed to most other nations that were already older than that by the time we were "born."

I don't see what you're spluttering about. You don't seem to have contradicted anything I said.

[The Serbian Empire]

Except that doesn't entirely explain it, because Tom Paris, Stephen Franklin, Jethro Gibbs, Ben Sisko, Luke Skywalker, Tony McGee, Angel, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Dinozzo, Wesley Wyndham Price, Jed Bartlett and the rest can hardly be described as villains.

Good guys have problems with their fathers. Bad guys have problems with their fathers.

Write a list of twenty American male fictional characters - good or bad - and odds are at least five of them will have had problems with their father, one way or another.

I was just curious

In fact, ask twenty guys and you'll probably find four or more who have issues with their fathers. Art replicates life.

[Giovenith]

Except that doesn't entirely explain it, because Tom Paris, Stephen Franklin, Jethro Gibbs, Ben Sisko, Luke Skywalker, Tony McGee, Angel, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Dinozzo, Wesley Wyndham Price, Jed Bartlett and the rest can hardly be described as villains.

Good guys have problems with their fathers. Bad guys have problems with their fathers.

Write a list of twenty American male fictional characters - good or bad - and odds are at least five of them will have had problems with their father, one way or another.

I was just curious

In fact, ask twenty guys and you'll probably find four or more who have issues with their fathers. Art replicates life.

Who has a perfect relationship with either of their parents?

[The Serbian Empire]

In fact, ask twenty guys and you'll probably find four or more who have issues with their fathers. Art replicates life.

Who has a perfect relationship with either of their parents?

No one, but there's a lot of people in America who wish they could cut one or both of them out of the picture.

[The Serbian Empire]

But it's not just US tv shows. The entire canon of US fiction (books, films, plays etc) appears to have this obsession as well, stretching way back to before TV was around.

Let's put it this way, I* didn't notice any particular father/son thing with Joad in The Grapes of Wrath... there, I'm done with my review of American literature.

The more interesting point is that I do have a bit more familiarity with what I'll call the British fictional tradition which, as I said, positions people as orphans or parents, and that this is probably why it stands out (the father/son thing).

*This doesn't necessarily mean much.

If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say it's because America is an incredibly young country with not as much history or culture backing it as other lands.

I spluttered.

Parts of the US aren't particularly old. However, you ever heard of this thing called the 4th of July? That's where the entire country pretends for a day that more than the Eastern coast is particularly old.

Sections further in such as Sault Sainte Marie, Albuquerque, and New Orleans are almost as old, but between those spots is a lot of nothing.

[Giovenith]

Who has a perfect relationship with either of their parents?

No one, but there's a lot of people in America who wish they could cut one or both of them out of the picture.

*nod*

[Forsher]

Sections further in such as Sault Sainte Marie, Albuquerque, and New Orleans are almost as old, but between those spots is a lot of nothing.

The point is that US conceives of itself as a nation with 300 years of history. If you think 300 years is "incredibly young" for countries, you're dreaming. It's simply not true.

(And that's before we note that I live in an archipelago which has only been inhabited for about 800 years... let alone conceived of as a country in the way we understand it now... and there are plenty of other countries younger still.)

[The Grande Republic 0f Arcadia]

So, as someone who lives in the UK but gets exposed to a lot of American fiction (in books, films and tv) I have to ask - what is the obsession with fathers and sons?

Star Wars, The Godfather, Death of a Salesman, Babylon 5, The West Wing. You can barely get through an episode of NCIS without someone whining about their father (and this spread into NCIS LA, where Deeks has Daddy issues and NCIS NO where Pride also has Daddy issues), and even Star Trek has various characters who have issues with their father.

This obsession took a truly disturbing turn when Elementary took the unbelievable turn of INVENTING a father for Sherlock Holmes just so he could have a trouble relationship with him. (As far as I know he doesn't have a father in any of the books).

So - what is it with fathers and sons in America? Why are so many American writers obsessed with it, and have been for so long?

Okay, if you think we have an obsession with fathers and sins look at china with the baby girls on the side of the road. It is also a way to find character identity.

[Venerable Bede]

Almost every prominent Father-Son relationship in our fundamental literature has been troubled (Christ's relationship with God the Father being a notable exception, perhaps because he represents the supreme reconciliation of this estrangement, see the Prodigal Son). Henry IV and Prince Hal, Fyodor Karamazov and...all of his sons, David and Absalom, Jacob and Isaac, Zeus and Cronus, Laius and Oedipus. Even in cases where the father and son don't have some other personal trouble, there is often something else keeping them apart (Zeus and Heracles, Odysseus and Telemachus). It's hardly unique to America.

[USS Monitor]

I spluttered.

Parts of the US aren't particularly old. However, you ever heard of this thing called the 4th of July? That's where the entire country pretends for a day that more than the Eastern coast is particularly old.

Ah yes, the fourth of July, the day when we celebrate the parts that are less than 300 years old, as opposed to most other nations that were already older than that by the time we were "born."

I don't see what you're spluttering about. You don't seem to have contradicted anything I said.

Most towns in New England are closer to 400. And there are a bunch of Native American cultures that go back much further.

If you are going to count from 1776 instead of when the land was first settled, then most countries are younger than the US. For example, China, which people think of as "old" because that land has been inhabited by civilized people for a long time, dates from 1949. Many European and African countries are also 20th century.