Apart from watching him on the big screen ever since Braveheart, I don’t know Brendan Gleeson from Adam, but I felt like standing up to applaud him when I read that he said: ‘I got very tired of watching fatherhood portrayed as something that was almost an abuse or that was toxic in some way’.
Bravo. Maith an fear. As tired as I am of watching the endless depiction of men and fathers as awful, toxic, terrible beings, it must be infinitely more maddening to be a male of the species and be subjected to continuous lectures about how defective you are as a human simply by virtue of your sex. When men aren’t being portrayed as being toxic and vile, they’re usually playing a dumb and hapless chap, who messes everything up for the women in their lives.
This is true even of Peppa Pig, so our kids are getting this message at a young age – and we see harmful tropes not just in movies, but in an increasing number of shows, especially the god-awful tripe that’s churned out for streaming, where the masculine character is often an unfeeling, unthinking jock who will likely come to a bad end.
Gleeson was speaking at a London Film Festival about a new film, H is for Hawk, which follows the story of academic Helen MacDonald who, distraught after the sudden death of her beloved father, Alisdair, finds solace in training a goshawk named Mabel. It is, according to Screen Daily, a frank exploration of mental health issues amidst “arresting wildlife photography and a fervent appreciation of the natural world”.
It is also about the tremendous warmth and joy and immeasurable importance of having a good father. Alisdair Macdonald is shown “returning sporadically in the stubborn, stabbing pangs of grief and vivid memories that haunt Helen’s every waking moment. Shown in flashbacks, Gleeson imbues the character with such warmth, infectious enthusiasm and curiosity about the world that we readily join with Helen in mourning his untimely death.”
Many of us, perhaps most of us, who have lost our father, will understand immediately those “stabbings pangs”, the terrible rupture and shattering after the loss of someone so beloved, so central, so essential, to our lives. Grief can be a frenzied marauder.
But most fathers aren’t toxic or awful, even if those who are understandably get much of the headlines and the attention. Without good mothers and fathers, the world would have succumbed to violence and despair long ago. It’s why Christianity emphasises the importance of family: and family is what brings out the best in both men and women.
Gleeson said that the film said “so much more about what is really important about paternity, and what is really important about fatherhood, and why the beauty that is within of that, needs to be celebrated”. He is tired, he said, of watching fatherhood portrayed in negative terms on screen.
“I think dads have got an awful hard time lately. And I don’t believe that every dad is toxic, and I don’t think anybody else does either.” That was an important point, in my view. Most of us don’t think every Dad is toxic, yet we are fed this relentless, divisive message all the time, to the point where it must be having an influence on our culture and on what appears to be a waning desire to form families.
“I think I suddenly got very tired of watching fatherhood portrayed as something that was almost an abuse, or that was toxic in some way, or in some way truncated by where you had these emotionally stunted people walking around that couldn’t hug their kids, whatever it was,” Gleeson explained. That’s also true. Some parents – both mothers and fathers – are cold and unloving. But thousands of generations of Dads have worked themselves to the bone to support and love their families. Mothers do to, of course, but no-one is disputing that.
An oft-made criticism of dads in prior generations was that they may not have been demonstrative enough: that feelings in general were more repressed and there may have been insufficient hugs and regular declarations of love. That was not my experience, but I accept it was for others, perhaps more so in the tougher years in which our parents’ generation was raised.
I recall, however, an old friend of my mother’s, a woman who became one of the first of her sex to rise to one of the most senior positions in what was then known as the Civil Service, addressing that criticism. “I saw my father breaking his back working from dawn to dusk on a tiny farm in Gneevegullia to send us to school,” she said. “And that was love”. It surely was.
Brendan Gleeson said that: “When I had my kids, I realised I no longer have the option to be pessimistic.” That’s marvellous. He’s right, of course, having children not only prompts dads to be more positive about the world, it makes parents want to leave the world a better place. Parenting – and the masculinity associated with fatherhood – should lead away from destruction. It should be the opposite of nihilism.
“I think young men need to see [the film].” he added. He believes fatherhood needs to be reaffirmed. “I really just want to celebrate paternity and how much and how deeply it affects things.”
“I think this particular film is so beautiful in the way that that’s what it’s trying to do. The memory of this man is that he was a proper, good man who gave love to his daughter.”
I’m no Pollyanna, and I know we can’t view the world through rose-tinted glasses. I’m fully aware that many men run from their responsibilities and abandon their families – horrendous, selfish actions which used to be far less acceptable in the bad old days when we were all supposedly too judgmental.
But wholly negative portrayals of dads and men – and castigating all masculinity as toxic – will only make that problem worse. I’m with Brendan Gleeson on this: we should celebrate fatherhood and the proper, good men who love their families.
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