Father Knows Worst

I ONCE ASKED my Jewish studies teacher, a mother of eleven, why women were expected to take care of children, and not men. "Women have breasts," she said, enunciating every word slowly while gesturing vaguely at her chest, "that they use to feed the babies. Men don't." In the years since, when I read serious feminist tomes about a woman's role in society or had lengthy discussions with friends about working mothers, or even when I listened to university lecturers and petulant classmates prattle on about "essentialism," the audacious simplicity of Mrs. Cohen's answer always came to mind. Women were biologically geared to nurture babies, and men weren't.

At a screening of the new Kevin Smith film, Jersey Girl, it seemed to me that Hollywood shares this view--the movie industry's new-age feminism notwithstanding. Watching Ollie Trinke (played by Ben Affleck) fumble his way through diaper changes and bottle feeding, I felt a queasy sense of déjà vu at his ineptness. Over the years, we have suffered endless comedies about fish-out-of-water fathers, standard fare like Mr. Mom (1983), where Michael Keaton tried to take over running the household when his wife went to work, or Three Men and a Baby (1987), where three swinging bachelors found their lifestyle stymied by a baby that landed on their doorstep, or last year's Daddy Day Care, in which Eddie Murphy's foolproof plan of opening a day-care center is wrecked by his inability to take care of a gaggle of hyperactive children. For Hollywood, missing mammary glands have always been a sign that the child-care gene was missing as well.

But, then again, American movies have always been strangely ambivalent about paternal figures. In his 1996 Life Without Father, family researcher David Popenoe traces the decline in patriarchal authority in America from its apogee in the Puritan era to its deflated status today. Popenoe attributes the decline to a number of factors--such as men's dependency on work outside the home, the rise of individualism, mandatory schooling (which placed another moral authority in the lives of children), the Victorian cult of the mother, and modern feminism--all of which helped transfer household authority from fathers to mothers.

SO PERHAPS it's not surprising that, with few exceptions, Hollywood has portrayed single fathers as parental buffoons kicked into shape by the difficulties of child care. The genre has been around for decades. The Three Stooges poked and bumped their way through baby care in Mutts to You (1938) and Sock-a-Bye Baby (1942); a trio of cowboys on the lam found a baby and meaning in their lives in John Ford's 3 Godfathers (1948); and Bob Hope found himself with child after a baby was abandoned at the United Nations in A Global Affair (1964). Other films too exploited the unnaturalness of male child care, such as Sitting Pretty (1948), about a family that employs a weird male babysitter, or even The Bachelor Father (1931) about a man who decides quite late in life to get to know his children. "What shall we call you?" his children ask him. "'Sir Basil' seems a little distant, but 'Father' is out of the question."

Not that it was all absurdity. In the 1960s, sitcoms such as My Three Sons and A Family Affair showcased levelheaded, dignified patriarchs who gave single fatherhood an imprimatur of social respectability. Still, childcare is rarely shown as a choice of these fathers. In the films, fatherhood of the tangible, hands-on kind is something that happens when life goes awry. Dad becomes a Mom when his spouse dies ( Jersey Girl), when he loses his job ( Daddy Day Care and Mr. Mom), or when he finds an abandoned baby ( Three Men and a Baby). The crisis and the gender-inversion resolution create the ensuing comedy, with men doing their best to disgrace their gender by their pitiful ignorance. Such films typically include sight gags that involve a horrible diaper change, and they invariably include a shot of men holding the baby awkwardly at arms' length. Most have some kind of "freak-out" scene, when it dawns on the man that by golly, this little ten-pound bundle that yelps and drools and chucks is here to stay.

Predictably and disappointingly, Jersey Girl follows this same time-wearied formula. It is an adequate comedy with some nice touches to it, particularly the opening scene in which little children talk about their families, and Smith captures the funny awkwardness of the inarticulate youngsters. Thankfully the film is reluctant to degenerate into complete slapstick. Instead it errs in the opposite direction and is at times quite maudlin, with a goodly number of soul-searching speeches and meaningful looks into eyes.

The main protagonist in Jersey Girl is Ollie Trinke, a high-powered PR executive, married to Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez), a successful literary agent. Manhattan is their oyster. They attend swanky parties where they cavort with the rich and famous and go for romantic horse and carriage rides in Central Park. But the high life they lead is curtailed when Gertrude dies in childbirth, leaving Ollie with a broken heart and a baby.

Ollie takes the little Gertie to live with his own father in New Jersey. Ollie is pathetic at fatherhood. He immerses himself in work, ignores his daughter, and hollers to his father Bart (George Carlin) to tend to her when she cries or needs a feed. Bart gets fed up and goes back to work as a street sweeper, and a chafed Ollie is forced to take his daughter to work with him on a day when he has a big press conference. Ollie arrives late and is summarily flummoxed by a diaper change and the screaming baby. He proceeds to publicly trash the very client he is meant to promote. He loses his job and is blacklisted. Head hung low, Ollie retreats back to New Jersey.

SIX YEARS LATER, he has joined his father in the street-sweeping business, and his happy little Gertie is attending school. New Jersey might not have the glamour of New York but it is, in its own way, quite comfortable. So Ollie is torn. He likes the life he has in New Jersey, but he misses the rush he got from his job in the city. He can't help feeling that fatherhood cheated him of the life he was meant to lead. He knows that he is meant for more than street cleaning, but whatever it is doesn't come his way. He lives in no-man's-land, unable to pick up the pieces of his emotional or professional life. He continues living in his father's home and rents porn movies instead of finding a girlfriend or wife. But he has softened towards his daughter, who is precocious and pretty and a dead ringer for her mother. Gertie is sure about what she wants. She wants to stay in New Jersey, with her father, grandfather, her grandfather's friends, and a sweet young woman at the video store (Liv Tyler) who likes her father. These people make up a homey hodgepodge that Gertie calls family.

Thus the film's central conflict exposes an insurmountable chasm between New York and New Jersey, between fatherhood and manliness. New Jersey is where Ollie can nurture his family; New York is where he can be the man he wants to be. He cannot have both; being a good father necessitates a sacrifice of identity. It is not to say that either decision will make him unhappy, but that there is no compromise between the two of them that he can reach.

Like most of the films in this genre, Jersey Girl ends in a kind of euphoric retreat from reality. The closing scenes reveal the father figure standing at the cusp of a newer, richer, and more meaningful life, achieved through his involvement with the cute little infant he once considered abandoning. Fatherhood, the very thing the character reviled or felt uneasy about, has become an archway beyond which gleams an emotionally superior lifestyle. The family is completed, and the long-suffering child is ultimately better off with the father as primary caregiver. In an overwrought metaphor at the film's end, the father rebuilds the picket fence that the clumsy paws of testosterone-tinted maternalism had broken, and the household, though different, is whole once again.

What is interesting about Jersey Girl and Daddy Day Care is the new reality they envision. Twenty years ago, when Mr. Mom was released, the world of male child care seemed far more dangerous. Mr. Mom is a film that Phyllis Schlafly could have directed. A lousy economy causes Jack Butler (Michael Keaton) to lose his job at the auto plant. When he can't find another one and his wife Caroline (Teri Garr) lands a high-paying advertising job, Jack opts to stay home and take care of the kids.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR JACK, his home is a house of horrors, full of gadgets chewing up what masculinity survived his pink slip. The vacuum cleaner is nicknamed "Jaws," the washing machine moves menacingly across the laundry floor, and the popcorn machine spurts kernels like a machine gun. And the role reversal opens the door for family-destroying predators: Caroline has to fend off her sleazy boss's advances, and the neighborhood hussies pounce on Jack. No wonder he wears a prison outfit for Halloween.

While Mr. Mom envisions domestic fatherhood as dangerous for both men and the family, Jersey Girl and Daddy Day Care propose it as a new male identity. In the past decade, there has been something of a push for American men to reclaim fatherhood. My local library is filled with books, like Popenoe's Life Without Father, that deplore the plague of fatherlessness in America, entreat men to find their inner papa, and give instructions on how to correct errant paternal behavior. And, to a certain degree, Jersey Girl is merely another sign--or symptom--of this general feeling that clearly many in America share.

But the small film is symptomatic of another movement, as well. Activist groups are pushing to change the shape of families in America and to widen the parameters of acceptability by insisting that families do not need to have a mother and a father, but can function perfectly well with a father or a mother only. And the movies are coming down firmly on the activists' side. Like About a Boy (2002) and The Object of My Affection (1998), Jersey Girl is a movie that valorizes the alternative family, the default nucleus of one parent, or perhaps no parent, and extended friends, that converge to make the world safe and sound for the child. We can't all be in regular families, these films seem to say, and therefore the potpourri of people that get together for a Christmas party will do as well, if not better, and one good parent is just as good as two.

OF COURSE, the truth of it is that fathers don't need other fathers; fathers need mothers. Mothers are necessary to counterbalance Dad's masculinity and to keep him from becoming an androgynous amalgam of nurturer and disciplinarian. No matter how much we prop up fatherhood, and insist that it is the new motherhood, it is specious to assume that the role can stand alone.

Gaby Wenig is a writer in Los Angeles.