February 2017


From its early days cinema has showcased violence.



Before, During, After




Elements of Film Violence




Positioning the Audience


In Conclusion


Works Cited


It has occurred to me that within the confines of the Superhero sub-genre that so dominates modern Hollywood output that there is a single relationship that underpins the Superheroes’ actions and their relationships to order and society. This relationship is between the Superhero and his father. Several recent releases reiterate this relationship, but it has its most clear articulation in Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) the film that set a structural template for the Superhero film. Thinking of fathers inevitably leads to Freud, Jung, et al and I’m going to use this post to suggest some ideas about the relationship between the Superhero and his father. The psychoanalytic ideas I shall refer to are those of the Symbolic Order and the Father Complex to highlight an essential structural element of this style of film. By investigating this we will see how the structure of the Super-Hero film hinges on the resolution of the subject/father relationship.

The relationship between the Superhero and his Father is a dominant theme in all the major Super-Hero releases from the past 30 years. For the purposes of this paper I will refer to Superman, X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000), Spiderman (Sam Raimi, 2002), Daredevil (Mark Stephen Johnson, 2003), Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005), The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011) and Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011). Each of these films articulates a father/son relationship that must be resolved for the hero to achieve their aims – a clear instance of the father complex (where the subject is formed/dependent on the father).  In several of these films the father figure is not a relation but another who assumes the patriarchal relation, such as Uncle Ben in Spiderman or Professor Xavier in X-Men, however it is their role as the representative of symbolic order, as a force which imposes law and regulates desire that is important. Often it is the removal of the father by a violent act that operates as the catalyst for the plot in these films (i.e. there is no Batman without the death of Bruce Wayne’s father Thomas).

The Traumatic Father

An initial trauma concerning the father can be seen across many of these films. The attempts to cope with the traumas, and the subsequent resolutions, are what drive the films forward. In Superman this is as dual trauma as two fathers are present; both die prematurely and the conflict of the central character’s choice between the two, forms much of the dramatic axis. Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El has been passed from one father to another and so moves between two opposing Names of the Father/Symbolic Orders. The two father figures in Superman are opposed; there is the god-like natural father Jor-El who initially exists in relation to Kal-El as the perfect Real Father- his relationship existing in Kal-El’s pre-linguistic state.  However through the use of audio recordings and teaching he becomes the representative of one type of Symbolic Father, imposing language and order onto the young child as he travels to earth. However Jor-El is subsequently displaced by the adoptive human father, Jonathan Kent. Kent is presented as distinctly human, preaching home-spun wisdom rather than the universal forms that Jor-El communicates.  At this point Jor-El moves into being representative of the Imaginary Father, a fantasy projection of the imaginary ideal on which Clarke models his Superman persona, represented by the command of Jor-El that;

The father becomes the son, and the son becomes the father.

In Superman’s decision to reject the rules of Jor-El and to change time to save Lois Lane from death we see a rejection of one, non-interventionist symbolic order (and the imaginary father), to another that approves of compassion – the acceptance of an alternative symbolic order. The human has triumphed over the divine, Jonathan has defeated Jor-El (this is especially so in the special edition which contains a scene explicitly dramatizing this conflict).

This acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father is a key element of these films. The reconciliation of the Superhero to their fathers signals an acceptance of the symbolic father and the rules and morality associated with them. In Batman Begins Bruce Wayne initially rejects the rules of the Symbolic Father in his quest for vengeance. His father, a doctor and philanthropist, was defined by his compassion. At this point in the narrative Bruce Wayne attempts to shoot his parents’ murderer, Joe Chill, but is thwarted by another assassin.  This failure prompts a movement to China where Wayne takes up with a surrogate father Henri Ducard who teaches Wayne the physical skills required to complete his quest for vengeance. However it is Wayne’s rejection of Ducard’s invocation to kill and eventual acceptance of his Father’s principles that leads to him ascending into heroic status and becoming Batman. Similar to Superman, who dramatizes his conflict in his dual persona, a tension arises between the Batman and Wayne characters. Ironically it is the Batman figure who takes the place of Wayne’s father as a caretaker of Gotham, whereas Bruce Wayne becomes a mask.

Similarly problematic schisms with father figures occur in both The Green Hornet and Green Lantern. In The Green Hornet Britt Reed initially rejects the rules of his father, behaving in irresponsible and childish ways. His ascendancy to hero status comes at the realisation of his father’s true worth at which point he endeavours to uphold the journalistic ideas his father held dear. In Green Lantern Hal Jordan is crippled by fear, an anxiety picked up by watching his own father die in a plane crash. It is only by realising that the image of his father that he holds is an imaginary ideal that he can fully take his place in the Symbolic Order. By rejecting the Imaginary Father of his own ego-construct and embracing the lessons imparted by the Symbolic father, Jordan is able to conquer his own fear and save the planet from the fear entity Parallax.

The Surrogate Father

Spiderman & X-Men both use surrogate father figure to depict this resistance of entry into the symbolic order.  For Peter Parker Uncle Ben occupies the place of the father. It is Parker’s rejection of his uncle’s teaching that leads to the uncle’s death. Only by embracing his Uncle’s axiom that;

With great power comes great responsibility,

can Parker take his place in the social order. In X-Men Charles Xavier presents a different father figure in that he remains constant throughout the film, with no traumatic separation. However it is Wolverine’s/Logan’s rejection of the Symbolic Order that brings him two Xavier’s School. By taking his place there, and accepting Xavier as the Symbolic Father, Wolverine is able to learn about himself. In X-Men 2 a conflict between an opposing father, General Stryker, is created in which Wolverine/Logan is given a choice. By choosing Xavier, and rejecting his creation at the hands of Stryker, a relationship similar to the Jor-El/Jonathan Kent dynamic is revealed.

The Failing Father

In Daredevil a dissonance about the relationship between the Imaginary Father and the actual father underpins the motivation of the central character.  Matt Murdock believes his father to be a hard-working ex-boxer. When he discovers that he is actually a hired thug for a local mobster he runs away – a trauma that leads directly to his loss of sight. Full of grief Murdock senior cleans up his act, but this just leads to the traumatic event (his death at the hands of The Kingpin) that creates Daredevil. Murdock achieves resolution by defeating The Kingpin and resolving himself to be the type of man his father should have been.

Final Thoughts

I have written this to give a broad overview of the father issues present in the genre with a limited number of examples. However father complexes are clearly visible in Thor (Kenneth Brannagh, 2011) between Thor and Odin, and Loki and Odin; Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) between Superman and Jason; Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) between Wayne & his father but also, in a twisted echo, between Batman and the Joker; Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992) between The Penguin and his father; and Kick Ass (Mathew Vaughn, 2010) this time with a daughter – Hit-Girl and Big-Daddy). One wonders whether a female oriented Super-Hero film, Wonder Woman maybe, would replicate this dramatic axis, or replace it with a mother anxiety instead?




The November Man is overall a silly film, a later entry into the Liam Neeson/Taken inspired Geri-Action series. This time Pierce Brosnan dusts off his suits and gets to play a retired spy dragged out of retirement, etc. Nothing special, but a reasonably well put together film (despite Brosnan’s rather alarming action-gurn). What is of note, and what really got my back up, was the insistence, in such a throw-away film, to depict a rape against the main female character (played by Olga Kurylenko, another Bond alumnus who plays a very similar character in Quantum of Solace). I don’t actually mind the fact that her character is raped – it makes sense – but what got to me was the insistence on seeing it – in POV. Not much  mind, but enough. And it got me thinking. Why isn’t it enough for us to know she was raped? Why then later does this character have to suffer a flash back that leaves her useless and unable to avenge herself (you know – so the guys can do the killing)? Why does her whole character have to be defined this way?

Now The November Man is throw away, I doubt we’ll care about it in 5 minutes. But we will care about the preponderance of women being raped in film, and the consistent use of rape as the way to torture, threaten, and emotionally scare women. Once again women’s sexual “virtue” becomes a dominant aspect of their character. How they react, how they’re scarred, how they recover becomes part of the continuing moral grading of women based on sexual morality (and how men have to come in and deal with it). The woman is inevitably passed from one man (bad) to another (good) – although both are violent and murder others. But hey I guess that’s just how men express love, and hate, and maybe hunger. By shooting people.

Does any of this matter and what does it have to do with refrigerators?  Women in Refrigerators is a website set up in 1999 to catalogue the various atrocities that happen to female characters in comics, started after a Green Lantern found his dead girlfriend in the aforesaid white good. And it’s an extensive list in which women are transformed from people to motivating factors, and of course the worse their death/rape/mutilation the greater the cathartic violence the hero gets to enact. This at a time when Hollywood is becoming more and more male-centered (check out this Variety report).  Maybe we need a Hollywood Women in Refrigerators? I think, however, that it would be so extensive so as to break the internet.

As long as we keep seeing women in terms of sexual virtue, in which their whole lives are defined by a sexual trauma that can only be redeemed by a “good” man we’re going to keep having wider social issues concerning real relations between men and women. As men we need to start objecting when women are reduced to this. And we need to start recognizing how it also de-humanizes us – in which we are reduced to vengeance machines carrying massive anxiety about sex and sexuality. Frankly it’s not very grown up.

In 1974 Laura Mulvey published her ideas on the male gaze, suggesting that Classical Hollywood reduces women to passive objects simultaneously desired and hated by a ‘male’ camera. Although Mulvey’s ideas are not perfect, and are deeply rooted in Oedipal silliness, her idea got traction because she was on to something  important that overall women are being used for plot motivation, from which male characters act out the male audience’s anxieties. Indeed, these days, women barely feature in Hollywood films (only 30% of speaking characters). Lots has been said about the harm this does to women. And quite right. But we should also consider the harm it does to men, in limiting our ideas about women. They become problems, not people. And if that’s all we see it becomes real. Picking on one representation is neither here nor there and The November Man doesn’t matter. But women, and men, do.







It has been with a depressing familiarity that Hollywood has got itself in a mess this Oscar season about the lack of racial diversity in its nominees. Not only is this the second year without any non-white nominees for the key awards, it smacks of the same attitudes present since Hattie McDaniel accepted her Oscar in a Whites Only hotel for a film that painted slavery as not that bad and a nice backdrop to the problems of wealthy white people. Meanwhile the argument about equal pay for women goes on, spearheaded by Jennifer Lawrence, and the startling lack of  female directors is still to be noted (it’s worth listening to this excellent interview with Lexi Alexender on the topic) while male directors with a history of failures keep getting work.

All this came together in my mind while watching the execrable Pixels directed by journeyman Chris Columbus who has had some success (most notably with the first two, most boring, Harry Potters, Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire) and some sizable flops (the $100 million Bicentennial Man being the most offensive). That Columbus gets a budget of $88 million for this dross when directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Mary Harron have barely made any films in the past 10 years shows how much the gender problem lingers throughout the Hollywood system. God knows how much Adam Sandler got for his lazy performance, but I’ve no doubt he probably made double the money that Michelle Monaghan received. Worse still this film puts a capable actress through the indignity of playing an horrific male-fantasy of rebound MILF; the sort of woman who goes for men who basically harass her when she’s in a fragile emotional state. Watch as Sandler, playing a TV repair guy, literally says “Wow” as she enters and then proceeds to explain that he’s shocked that any man would leave her because she’s so hot! Instead of, like a real person, phoning his boss and getting him sacked, she tolerates this eventually deciding that the schlub has potential. The rest of the film is lazy as hell, and continues to demean women throughout, seeing them exclusively as the reward for male effort – including one character having a threesome arranged for him by the President because he helped save the world. In a kids movie. It’s also an incredibly white film, with non-white characters limited to support (in fact the only two significant non-whites, both male, need to be rescued by our white heroes in the film’s tepid denouement). The only engaging character in the film is Q*bert, an animated sidekick – and even he is transformed into a sexy-hot-female-warrior so one hero can live his weird cyber-sex fantasies. Did I mention it’s, y’know, for kids?

Generally considered as a flop Pixels managed to drag in $244 million globally, meaning it probably covered it’s costs. But it stands as an excellent expression of all that’s wrong with Hollywood – a story conceived around a cool idea, but one that no-one thought through; misogyny from the get go (the cast has two characters called Cyber Chick #1, and Cyber Chick #2); lack of diversity; and a horrible view of its audience.

Yes the Oscars are an affront. Yes the pay-gap is wrong. But the problem will not be solved by a few awards, or a few pay rises. Until it hits the execs who put this tripe together, who treat their audience as a bunch of idiots with the emotional intelligence of zero, nothing changes. Please stop spending your money on this stuff – seek out the work of female directors, make an effort to watch films made by, and for, diverse people. Otherwise there’s another 100 years of this.

Having scandalized a nation with the excellent Dressed to Kill (1980) De Palma planned to go one better with his next Body Double, this time re-mixing Vertigo and Rear Window and then adding some madness that’s all his own. It’s more polished than its predecessor, but lacks the visceral shocks, although much is made up by the gleeful deconstruction of male spectatorship in a film in which a crime is solved because the protagonist (Craig Wasson as a loser B-Movie actor) surfs porn channels at night. The twist is so ludicrous it trumps all other elements in this thriller that once again throws the audience a dirty look and suggest that watching films might just be a bit perverted.

Wasson is Jake Scully an actor fired from a terrible vampire film because he suffers from claustrophobia. He goes home and finds his wife in bed with another man (worse than that, he makes her “Glow”). A new friend (Gregg Henry) offers him a place to stay, in what must be the most 1980s location ever, the Ultramodern Chemosphere complete with rotating bed and a telescope that spies on the hot woman dancing opposite. Mix in a mysterious Native American TV engineer and a murder plot soon hatches in which, in the least subtly phallic way imaginable, a woman is killed by a very large drill. Haunted by this woman Jake cracks up, watches porn and spies Melanie Griffith (as porn-star Holly Body) who has some familiar dance moves. Jake, being a bit mad, decides the best way to follow up his observation is to star in a porn-film opposite Holly, a scene which includes Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing their subtle anthem Relax (and I mean the actual band turns up, not just the song).

On paper nothing should work about this film. The protagonist is unlikable, the plot hinges on ludicrous behavior and coincidences and the finale involves a dog misidentifying his owner, but the whole is done with such (heavily 1980s) style and verve that it works, dashing though its running time at breakneck speed. It also makes some neat observations about the male audience, and the differences between being a Peeping Tom and watching porn. Just as in Dressed to Kill women are not represented well, there are only two really, but the men are far worse: a bunch of selfish, obsessive voyeurs. And De Palma’s willingness to throw in every thriller trick makes it hypnotic watching.

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