Adam Lane Smith, an energetic and prolific author as well as a psychologist and self-help guru (two careers I consider deeply suspicious, admittedly) has an interesting essay on the degeneration of some beloved franchises in an essay entitled “The Scheduled Murder of Men’s Entertainment.”
In particular, he discusses the Star Wars sequels and what they did to Luke Skywalker, but he goes into greater detail about the God of War video-game franchise, which I admit I’m not familiar with.
Kratos slinks away from Greece in shame, finds a wife, has a son, and then neglects and abandons them both. When he is around them, he spends all his time agonizing over how ashamed he is of himself and everything he’s ever done. He’s hiding from the entire world and from himself. The makers originally intended to show him fat and out of shape. His (now dead) wife lays out a plan to reunite the verbally abusive deadbeat dad with his resentful son but she has to trick them both into doing it.
Following the tendencies of two of his professions, Smith delivers an analysis of this that is compelling:
The problem is that the creators are espousing a very specific post-modern nihilistic outlook brought about by weak fathers or absent fathers. Modern creators supported by Hollywood and big corporations have crushing attachment problems and broken relationships with their own fathers for a variety of reasons. They’re used to their saintly single mothers conditioning them to despise their own fathers. Men grow up worshipping their mothers, and women grow up seeing all men as worthless children incapable of real love.
As I read this essay, I keep hearing in my head the line from Fight Club: “We’re a generation raised by women. Maybe another woman is not what we need.” Of course, Fight Club meant this as a nasty joke (every generation ever is raised by women, as the audience is supposed to realize when hearing Tyler Durden pontificate), but Lane is serious, as have been many other commentators on the same subject.
The concern that the current trajectory of civilization is emasculating has been around for a while, going back at least to the publication of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but probably predating that. The Fight Club novel, also, immediately predated several nonfiction works on the same theme, and the film adaptation became a movie of choice for a lot of Gen-Xers probably because that theme was already in the forefront of the national mindset: The director intended the movie to be ironic, but many of us viewers treated it as dead serious.
Back at the end of the 1990s, these fears of emasculation were easy to dismiss—but that is no longer the case; now that the American Psychological Association has come right out and declared manliness a pathology, claims of attack on manhood cannot be called mere paranoia.
Sharp observers have noted for years that popular entertainments consistently treat fathers as worthless deadbeats or at least fools. This probably traces to Freud, but it has become most pronounced in the last three decades. Smith makes keen observations of the otherwise inexplicable destructions of characters such Luke Skywalker and Kratos: The storytellers responsible for these works simply cannot imagine a man growing old without also becoming crotchety, worthless, and a deadbeat. It is an ugly mixture of self-hatred and, more importantly, hatred for daddy.
Smith’s suggested solution to this problem is more stories that showcase manliness and masculine virtues, some of which he’s written himself. He’s correct that we now have a dearth of these: Simply browse the latest children’s books available at your public library, and you will see a quite a selection of grrrl power (and a peppering of smut, which blue-haired librarians love to give to children), with very few works designed to interest boys.
Admittedly, I prefer to write stories about girls myself, but I begin to think it’s time to ressurect the classic pulp genre of manly male adventurers who have young boys for sidekicks, in the vein of Terry and the Pirates or even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I don’t think any of the “pulp revival” authors have shown much interest in writing child characters, so maybe I should consider filling that gap.