The Auteur of Fatherhood: How Steven Spielberg recast American masculinity

The Auteur of FatherhoodHow Steven Spielberg recast American masculinity Phillip Maciak (bio) In november 2012, the Obama White House held a special screening of Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln. The event was something like a summit for American dad culture. Barack Obama, as the father of two young daughters, had already become the foremost ambassador of the straight-leg-jean, mortifying-dad-joke style of Gen X male leadership (even if he was technically a late boomer). And here he was, hosting the exhibition of a film based on Team of Rivals (2005), Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnum opus of "dad history" (tomes about war, politics, and [End Page 160] "Great Men" that make excellent gifts for boomer dads), and made by Spielberg, the conflicted boomer king of what you might call "dad cinema." In films like 1998's Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries he had produced with Tom Hanks, Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), Spielberg had blended gritty, gory realism with male sentimentality and defined an entire genre of onscreen dad history. But Spielberg did not become the premier dad auteur of American cinema just by making movies that micro-targeted men who wear cargo shorts year-round and assert dictatorial control over their home thermostats. He also did it by being one of the greatest popular critics of the failures of dadly masculinity in the twentieth century. Nearly every one of his films is, in some subterranean way, about his parents' divorce, and many of his most iconic films—from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) to the Indiana Jones series—are haunted by absent fathers, dads abandoning their children for obsession, for pride, for madness, for infidelities large and small. Spielberg makes precision-crafted films to flatter dadly sensibilities; he also makes movies for children, warning them that, one day, those dads might choose to disappear. And sometimes—especially of late—he makes movies that do both. In the years that followed that screening, Spielberg's interrogation and articulation of dad culture has only continued, with movies and series about dads (like last year's autobiographical feature The Fabelmans) and for them (like Masters of the Air, the Apple TV+ miniseries about World War II pilots that premiered in January). Spielberg, it's now clear, is not just an ambivalent avatar of the dad culture he grew up with. Instead, his films have helped invent the "dad" as we know it. ________ but what is a "dad," anyway? While "dad" has come to be a with-eringly descriptive adjective (dad jokes, dad rock, dad hats, dad bods), conjuring up harmlessly bad puns, rock bands that have lost their edge, soft-crowned caps, and soft bellies, for much of [End Page 161] Click for larger view View full resolution Nearly every one of Steven Spielberg's films is, in some way, about his parents' divorce. Spielberg on the set of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with Henry Thomas in 1982. [End Page 162] the twentieth century the word was still becoming a noun of its own. Children have been calling their fathers "dad" since the sixteenth century at least, and across many, many different cultures. Linguists suspect its etymology is simply that it's a sound that's easy for babies to say. But it has only been a meaningful epithet in the American vernacular since the early twentieth century. As sociologist Ralph LaRossa writes, the idea of the dad as something separate from the father—or rather something that came to be associated with a very specific, modern version of fatherhood—is a product of the Machine Age between the two world wars. Tracking usage of the phrase in popular magazines, LaRossa found that "dad" went from hardly ever being deployed in articles about fatherhood at the beginning of the century to appearing in almost two-thirds of articles by 1929. LaRossa credits this meteoric rise to changes in the conception of the father's role in the American household. At the end of the nineteenth century, notes the historian John Demos, the dominant cultural image of the father was the...