The Fascist Mother

Part-time florist and devoted mother-of-one Rebecca Winstone has a shopping list, and it goes like this:

I need a basic toolkit. A small-calibre pistol with a silencer. Car battery. A pail of water. A coil of rubber hose, small diameter.

It’s a shopping list for torture, made of common household items (okay, apart from the pistol) that – like in one of those practical guides on how to stretch the budget in a time of austerity – the resourceful housewife could use to break another human being.

But of course Rebecca Winstone isn’t a mere housewife, nor is she just a florist: she’s ex-CIA, and somebody took her son. This is the premise of the television series Missing, which screened for ten episodes on the American network ABC during the northern spring of this year. The first nine-tenths of the series are innocuous enough, and feature Winstone chasing her son’s captors and being shot at in some of Europe’s most picturesque locations. The tenth episode is where the meat is. The burnt, torn and slashed meat.

We had seen a parent go down this road at least once before, in the film Taken starring Liam Neeson, of which Missing is highly derivative. Taken too had a torture scene, a carefully constructed affair that had to be got to and worked through, and thereafter cast a shadow on Neeson’s character and on our ability to recompose the image of the loving father in time for the happy ending. Whereas for all its moral hedging and its leaving the bloody business off-screen, Missing is actually more unpleasant; its torture scene, for being spoken as opposed to shown, more brutal and calculating. Then there is the other, more illustrious television precedent. If 24 supported the view that torture is acceptable in order to prevent large-scale murders, Winstone’s actions in Missing supplant reason of state with reason of family. They make extreme caring the condition for inflicting extreme pain.

There is your victim, a CIA agent by the name of Violet Heath who has switched to the other side and refuses to give up the location of Winstone’s son. Time is of the essence, for in a few hours the boy will surely be killed. Winstone gives her the rundown.

Here's how it's gonna go. First I'll break your fingers one by one, knuckle by knuckle. I've always heard that the thumb hurts the worst but I wonder when all ten are busted up how can you tell one from the other? Then I'm going to take out your teeth but not with pliers, with a hammer, and you have thirty-two, so that's gonna take a while. Then I'll shatter your kneecaps, and because I will do anything to see his smile again, if by then you're still not talking we'll move to electricity: your feet in water, using a car battery.

The shocks won't kill you, but when your flesh starts to burn you'll get religion. You'll be begging god to let you die, but the only god in here is me. You'll be passing out from the pain, especially when I cut you, and make no mistake about it Violet, this is not your teenage angst Goth girl cutting – I'm going to cut you to the bone. I'll time the shocks to keep you alive. That's really the worst part, wanting to die but being kept alive just enough to suffer. And the sad truth is that in the end you're going to tell me where my son is.

What makes this speech particularly nasty is that it really is a scolding. Violet looks about the age of Winstone’s son, and is as bratty and deceitful as he is compliant and caring. Although they don’t know each other, Winstone seems above all disappointed in her. The ‘goth girl’ line reveals this undercurrent: firstly, you don’t know what pain is – no young person can know – and secondly, who raised you to be so bad, so unlike a child of mine? I could have been a good mother to you, if only you had let me. But it’s too late now.

I may be wrong but I think it’s a new thing, the mother who tortures. When it comes to mothers whose children are abducted, the more standard response is the one exemplified by the passage of Tony Jordan’s novel Taken (no relation to the film) excerpted on the book jacket:

It’s like this: if cutting off my hands will make this man go away, and return my son to my bleeding arms, I’d do it. no hesitation. That’s the kind of bargain I’m willing to make.

This is the trope that is dutifully deployed in the first nine episodes of Missing, where it is established to everyone’s thorough satisfaction that Rebecca Winstone will walk through a shower of bullets for a chance to see her son again. But then when given the chance she is equally willing to accept the pain of others. She’ll cut off the hands of perfect strangers if that’s what it takes. And these to be sure aren’t innocent strangers, but neither does Winstone’s character simply cross over into the traditional fatherly roles played by Neeson in Taken or by Mel Gibson in Ransom. For these fathers, a rescue mission is always already a quest for revenge: the bad people must be made to suffer, and it’s the father’s job to ensure that they do. The violently bereaved widower turned vigilante played Charles Bronson in the 70s and 80s was the apotheosis of this. He’d shoot you in the face even if you had nothing to do with the death of his family.

Not Winstone, who is fundamentally good. She joined the CIA to make the world a better place. She abhors torture at the service of the state, and has the ham-fisted flashbacks to prove it. Her job is to care, and this fierce, elemental caring legitimises all of her choices, be they tactical, strategic or moral. ‘I am a mother!’ repeats Winstone ad nauseam throughout the series, and then again one last time as she stands over the wounded body of the arch-villain before shooting him, execution-style. ‘I am a mother!’ Therefore, even though you are no longer a threat to my son, my family or my country, I am going to kill you now, extra-judicially, as an expression of my love.

The torture, too, was part of the caring, and justified itself by existing within the sacred sphere of the family. It was, as Winstone explained to her victim, the price that she had to pay in order to see her son’s smile again and thus hers alone – Winstone’s – was the pain that mattered: the moral pain of having to go to such extraordinary lengths to preserve the integrity of her family unit.

Even before we make the obvious connection between this dynamic and the patriarchal application of state power, whereby illegal interrogations and killings are framed as protective, caring measures, we must observe that in the Missing scenario the kind of violence ordinarily exerted by the state is effectively repackaged and privatised, a move that is best accomplished via the mediation of the figure of the mother: she who, unlike the divorced father played by Neeson, can then go back to nurturing, seamlessly slot back into the role that defines half of society and everyone’s morals. The mother must torture because motherhood itself is an ethical imperative and has to be preserved at all cost.

I don’t offer this very forgettable television series as a cultural symptom, or the index of an ideology, except insofar as its screening on a commercial network is a further sign of the utter normalization of torture as spectacle in American popular culture – a spectacle that is by now as trite as it is gratuitous, and that barely needs the dramatic stakes to be raised in order to be performed. This much is unsurprising, uncontroversial. I am more interested in the picture of motherhood that was pieced together in order to construct and market the show: how simple it is, how shallow and at the same time intense, hyper-saturated. The fascist mother of Missing stands as the diametric opposite of the absent mother: in fact her presence – even while she is physically separated from her child – is all that there is.

The Absent Mother

Then Sally and I

Did not know what to say.

Our mother was out of the house

For the day.

In the United States at the end of World War II, when their men came back from the front and their labour was no longer required, women were faced with an injunction: your baby or your job. In New Zealand in 2012, new legislation will require single mothers on a benefit who have another child to apply for work when their youngest turns one or risk losing their entitlements: your baby then your job. It’s nearly seventy years later and two countries that are geographically – if not politically and ideologically – far apart, but if there is such a thing as a Western view of motherhood, its transformation is all in these two statements, and opens up questions that invest broader social issues and perceptions. What does it mean for mothers to be there in one case, and not be there in the other? How does that differ from the kind of presence required of fathers then and now? What are the implications for the autonomy and agency of women, whether or not they are, have been or intend to become mothers?

I am not qualified to attempt to answer these questions to any great depth, but I feel confident enough to make one suggestion: that a hypothetical study of #NoMums would yield very different results from the ongoing examination of #NoDads. This is especially true if we make the two propositions literally a question of presence and absence. Earlier this year, in my own contribution to the #NoDads corpus, I examined an how-to guide on being a Great Dad that blamed the traditional absence of fathers from childcare and upbringing on ‘work, family situation or a limited understanding of the role of a father’, and sought to correct it by imparting the skills and the attitudes necessary to take full-time care of the children. But persistent throughout the book was also the sense that Great Dad’s number one task was in fact to spend ‘quality time’ with the brood: to give them his full attention, to resist the temptation to turn on the TV or let them play on the computer when they’re bored, to be a positive model of behaviour. Whereas for mothers still – it seems to me – the core requirement is to be there, to provide that fundamental presence that anchors and defines childhood, as well as ensuring the safety and wholesomeness of the home and the constant monitoring – sometimes via appropriate agents such as teachers and sitters – of the children's activities and whereabouts. And this presence of the mother is demanded at the same time as the economy, the state and society require of her that she be out of the house, working, reducing her burden on welfare and on the family resources and yet – because Rosie’s choice is always wrong – never gain proper, meaningful personal independence.

Which leads me straight – well, straight-ish – to The Cat in the Hat. Let’s call it a stop in that journey, a snapshot from a time and a place in which this maternal presence might have been understood in a particular way. Although I hasten to reassure that I don’t intend to take the book as a sociological document or index of its time. If nothing else, Theodor Seuss Geisel was too programmatically weird, as well as too politically subversive, to counsel that always questionable move. So take what follows simply as an entry for the yet to be commissioned book on #NoMums, or as an opportunity to reflect on a small gallery of images.

The first one is this: a house on a hill on a cold rainy day. A boy and a girl stare disconsolately through the window at the greyness outside. And right off the bat – this is page one of The Cat in the Hat – I wonder what it is that the children are looking at. And I know (although having by now read the book approximately a sesquillion times I cannot honestly say that I remember feeling this way when I opened it for the first time) that they are alone in the house, which will be confirmed in a couple of pages. ‘Our mother was out of the house / For the day.’ Two lines that suffice to signify that the children are alone since who else by the mother would be with them? But at this stage they are just looking outside.

The year is 1957. The place is a house on a hill outside of an unspecified town. The boy and the girl in the window are latchkey kids, a phrase that had been known to the American public at least since 1944. Home alone and instructed not to open the door to strangers, children such as these were synonymous even then with neglectful parenting but at least they were thinkable and not an absurdity. The book begins, in other words, with a scene that is within the realm of the ordinary.

The second image come forty-six pages and roughly two thousand words later, and is this one:

The first glimpse of the mother returning, a sight that brings consternation to the children and their petulant pet goldfish who are by now surveying a house thrown into total chaos by the Cat in the Hat and his impish companions, Thing 1 and Thing 2. So that second image must be paired up with a third one, representing the outcome of the rupture of the domestic order in the mother’s absence:

Conversely, the reappearance of the mother signals to the children that they must put everything back in its place. Even if the chaos wasn’t their fault – it doesn’t matter. Mum cannot be allowed to see what the house got up to while she was away. The resolution to this potentially catastrophic crisis is brought about by the cat, who returns atop his miraculous tidying machine and swiftly picks up all the things that were down, and puts them away. So the order is restored just in time for the mother to open the door and speak her only lines:

Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?

At which point the book ends, tantalisingly, with another question: what would you do if you were thus confronted – would you tell your mother about what went on? And in that question the value of her absence is suddenly transformed: for it illustrates how her spending the day in town, which at the outset seemed to have left the children sad and bored, is what made possible their secret world of play, and the irruption – with a BUMP! – of the bringer of lots of good fun that is funny. It’s like when other people are not in the frame and Calvin’s limp stuffed tiger is turned into Hobbes: it takes an absence, and more particularly the absence of adults, and even more particularly of the primary caregiver, to achieve that kind of transformation.

What complicates this reading a little is that in both The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (where, to make the premise look even worse, mother leaves for the day putting the children in charge of clearing a whole lot of snow) is that Sally and her brother don’t seem in fact to be having that much fun. Their dominant emotion is growing apprehension at the mess that the cat is making. In the first book it’s the cluttering of objects; in the sequel it’s a single pink icing stain that travels from the bathtub to mother’s white dresses and from there to a wall and to Dad’s ten dollar shoes, then to the rug in the hall, to Dad’s bed and finally to the snow surrounding the house. Apart from the wonderful invention (‘The thing that takes spots off a dress / Is a wall!’), the stain puts the children’s anxiety in sharper focus. Clearly it is not it that bothers them – it’s the thought that mother will see it.

Now perhaps what they fear is that they would be blamed for it, for having eaten cake in the bath and so forth (if you take the standard approach: of course the Cat in the Hat, like Calvin, is a product of the child’s imagination, etc.), but I think that more fundamentally that stain, like the clutter before it, is a sign of transgression, of all the things that the children get up to – or fantasise about – unbeknownst to their parents, and like all such signs must disappear in timely fashion so that the children can resume their place by the window and give again the outward appearance of having missed their mother terribly.

In the last scene of The Cat in the Hat Sally and her brother are composed again, and smiling. They are the image of those ‘abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls’ of the primers lamented by John Hersey and to which The Cat in the Hat was a direct response. Thus if on one hand we may interpret the children's reaction to the cat as the interiorisation of a set of rules or proper behaviour and domestic decorum imparted to them by the mother (hence the goldfish's increasingly shrill protestations about the things that absolutely cannot be done while she's away), her absence is both what enables the children to transgress those rules and – crucially – to practice dissimulating their transgressions. But if that is the case then it is almost as if she had planned it that way all along, and that final question upon her return were part of a ritual, a test of disobedience. Thus in that closing image the absent mother – I don't know, what would you say? – may just have become the unlikely wise parent.

Look, she is back

Dr Seuss. The Cat in the Hat. New York: Random House, 1957.
–––––– The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. New York: Random House, 1958.

Being a Great Dad for Dummies

He’s an amazing creature, the modern father. Possessing in equal part confidence, creativity, endurance, optimism, passion, patience and presence, he has thrown away the shackles of his oppressed forebears and reclaimed the prerogatives of his role. To those who doubt him, he has only one thing to say: I can do this, I will do this.

This is the modern father. No, better: the modern dad, for they are not quite the same thing. The father is authoritarian, backward-looking, distant and uncaring, whereas the dad is authoritative, meaning that when it comes to instruction and correction he sets boundaries without punishing, choosing instead to lead by example and with a clear mind; while in all other child-related things he gets involved, he mucks in and, most importantly of all, he cares.

I doubt you could find a better guide to the modern dad than Being a Great Dad for Dummies, the brain child of the three Wellington-based entrepreneurs – Stefan Korn, Scott Lancaster and Eric Mooj – who launched the website DIYFather.com after recognising ‘the need for social innovation in the fathering space’. It is on this website that you’ll be able to follow what the modern dad gets up to on a day-to-day basis and be informed on the risk of having friends of the opposite sex, read daddy’s rules for dating his teenage daughter or fantasise in melancholy fashion about a world without dads. (Without dads, we are informed by the author of this piece, there would be nobody to take the sons to the games, or show off daughters with pride. You get the gist.) However, absorbing as the website is, the guidebook is an altogether different object, and fixes in time the essential qualities of dadhood in a superbly coherent and concise way.

As is the case for most superheroes, Great Dad is defined by his origins, that is to say the circumstances in which he acquired his powers. Now you might think that these circumstances might in some way be related to the women’s liberation movement. Not so. Echoing a remarkably widespread rhetoric concerning modern fatherhood in the Western world, he is said instead to be the product of a ‘quiet’ or ‘peaceful revolution… among men who want to become more involved in the upbringing of their children’. Armed with the conviction – also in no way related to fem-lib – that ‘dads can do everything mums do except give birth and breastfeed’, and that ‘staying home looking after the kids is no longer a reason to hand in your man card’, Great Dad swats aside all the misgivings of his partner and of society at large in order to answer his calling. As a matter of fact, seeing that, if anything, it is mum who holds him back – as she may ‘have a tendency to 'take over' and secretly or unconsciously harbour the belief that dads are somewhat inadequate when it comes to dealing with babies’ – by overcoming these obstacles, perhaps even to the point of ‘sending mum back to the workforce’, Great Dad is able to do her feminism for her. Just one of his many surprising talents.

The elision of feminism as a historical phenomenon fits within the book’s benign and staggeringly under-theorised essentialism. Being inducted into the dad club means becoming nothing less than ‘a bona fide member of the human race, a piece in a puzzle that has been put together over millions of years’, but there is no triumphalism in this statement, nor does it follow that one should practice an old-fashioned therefore syllogistically more natural or correct brand of fatherhood. On the contrary, the book is relatively enlightened in some of its advice, notably when it comes to supporting the choices of the partner during pregnancy and labour, and in its rejection of smacking children as a legitimate form of discipline. Great Dad is a liberal dad, in other words, and with something of the well-adjusted about him. More to the point, however, his being modern and progressive is not the result of a historical process, much less the outcome of a historical conflict between different social actors. Rather it’s a spontaneous coming to terms, the realisation of a latent potential. Repressed for far too long by social prejudice and mum’s overbearingness, the dad within is finally able to shine.

This myth of origin out of the way, a proper analysis of the book would have to be based on what is and isn’t written, what is and isn’t included. But one would be remiss not to comment briefly on the language, which is not quite straight out of the usual style sheet for a For Dummies guide. If you get past the relentless cuteness and somehow stop yourself from hurling the book out the window after the fiftieth use of the phrase ‘your little champ’, you will note a most curiously passé prudish reticence, the kind that makes the authors exclaim, on the business of getting pregnant, that ‘there aren't many projects in life that start with a little nooky with your best girl!’ or advise, should the diminished sex after the birth be a problem, to ‘take cold showers and do plenty of exercise if need be’. Odder still is the suggestion that in high-stress arguments with a toddler, dad may want to take a deep breath and sing a song to himself, ‘perhaps Incy Wincy Spider’ – surely a scene that has never been played out on this planet.

There is in the book a tendency, in other words, to infantilise Great Dad, to talk down to him at the same time as he’s encouraged to take on a fully adult role. But this too fits within a more important aspect of the design: namely, the fact that Being a Great Dad turns out to be a manual for early fatherhood only, up to the little champ’s first day at school. But if the tantrums of a three year old are enough to launch Great Dad into a self-soothing rendition of Incy Wincy Spider, one might well wonder what issues might arise later on, and if he has been properly briefed on how to deal with them.

More fundamentally, a preschooler poses no meaningful challenge to parental authority. It is therefore relatively easy to design a working and workable theory of fatherhood revolving around setting the kinds of boundaries that would equip a child to function amongst their peers in a playgroup or kindergarten setting – a tricky time, to be sure, but rather less challenging, in every sense of the word, than, say, adolescence. Or adulthood. Thus even before we get to the observation that every theory of parenthood is also implicitly a theory of society, and ask what kind of social model underpins the book, we find that the theory itself is incomplete, or rather, that it is the product of its limitations: meaning not only the fact that it stops at five years of age, but also that it does not conceive of families other than the nuclear kind (whether intact or broken), or of fathers except of the heterosexual variety. Utterly unsurprising omissions, these last two, if you are familiar with the genre, but which nonetheless underscore how normative and oppressive the soft, cuddly patriarchy of the Great Dad actually is.

Still, we may feel that we can speculate about how Great Dad may behave with older children, and reason that based on the caring model of the early years he won’t be the kind of father who fires nine hollow-point 45-calibre bullets into his daughter’s laptop because of something she wrote on the internet. That kind of violence – physical, psychological, existential – seems quite incompatible with the gentle prescriptions of Being a Great Dad. And it probably is, but I think it’s just not possible to be sure. Not without filling those blanks. How you go about relinquishing that early first-teacher role; how you respond to actual challenges to your authority, up to and including your daughter writing stuff about you on the internet; how you allow for possibilities other than your children being the best they can be, because personal development is not that linear or neutral, nor is it the fulfilment of a promise; finally, whom you not only help them but also allow them to be, is what determines the kind of father, the kind of parent you are. And in this respect too fatherhood as it is currently conceived, even in its more ostensibly progressive forms, strikes me as an imprint of society at large, therefore a deeply flawed thing.

Stefan Korn, Scott Lancaster and Eric Mooj. Being a Great Dad for Dummies. Milton: Wiley Publishing, 2011.

***

Right, I haven’t run one of these for a while, so here’s a Survivor-style competition with a pertinent literary prize. All you have to do is watch the video below in its entirety to be in to win a copy of Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, lovingly sent to you by me.

The video is over a year old and many of you will be aware of the Conscious Men, which are a curious complement to the Great Dad movement in that they are all about apologising for past wrongdoings, making the history of gender politics into a great cosmic struggle and at the same time suggesting the possibility of a utopian conclusion. For those who don’t know them, the clip is only 8 minutes and 22 seconds long but I fear you might be tempted to cheat or even poke your eyes out partway through so I’ve designed a little test to demonstrate that the proper attention has been paid. Kindly complete it and send the answers to me via email by, let’s say the end, of Sunday March 11, New Zealand time. I’ll pick a winner on Monday. If you just can’t do it post how far you got in the comments and if nobody else reaches the end I’ll declare them the winner.

Fill in the blanks or answer as appropriate

1. We want to apologise and make amends for those actions today, so that we can move forward together in a new era of ____
2. Many of the men who have oppressed or abused you are no longer _____
3. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to _____
4. Please indicate which of the Conscious Men is clearly just taking the piss.
5. I know that by forgetting about the past and joining hands in the present ____

Update: Out of the qualifying entries (pretty much everyone got everything right) I have picked out of a digital hat the name of loyal reader James Butler. Yay James. Please send me your postal address.

For question 4 James answered "cat-picture-guy, although piled-dreadlock-guy might be playing the long game", but I would have accepted pretty much any answer because let's face it any one of these people could have been taking the piss. But not all of them.