Men and the Work of Mourning

The other night I watched Florian Zeller's 2022 film The Son, based on his stage play of 2018. I now wonder whether I saw the same film that Rotten Tomatoes gives an approval rating of 29%. Nothing I've read of the film on the web matches my experience of its portrayal of how patriarchal masculinity wreaks havoc in men's lives by forbidding them access to their own grief. 

Peter (played by Hugh Jackman) is the loving father of a newborn son by his second wife, Beth. The unfinished work of fathering his deeply troubled seventeen-year-old son Nicholas from his previous marriage to Kate breaks through this idyllic frame. Peter longs to connect, and at key moments succeeds in expressing his love toward Nicholas. Yet at every turn, he blows past acknowledgement of the psychic pain that lies behind the boy's troubling behaviour. The central trauma that's swamped his son's life--Peter's desertion of his first family--simply falls below the bar. 

Everyone in Peter's high-flying, over-achieving, overwhelmingly male professional world exudes a perfunctory warmth devoid of genuine empathy: inquiries about the state of his family are hollow gestures soliciting equally hollow responses that all is well. 

Later in the film comes Peter's devastating meeting with his own narcissistic, emotionally sadistic father, a conversation over lunch that quickly descends into a recapitulation of the heartless abandonment Peter himself suffered as a boy. In light of that scene, we understand more vividly his acknowledgement, near the end of the film, that for all his attempts to be a better father himself, his behaviour toward Nicholas has reproduced the patterns of his own upbringing.

Despite Peter's self-recriminations over a disastrous turn of events, the ultimate catalyst of tragedy subtending the whole plot is the web of emotional denial in which nearly every character is enmeshed, and in which nearly every character colludes, women as well as men. It's an ingrained pattern that goes on forbidding the deep recognition of loss. 

Without that recognition, the life that lies ahead for Peter is likely to admit of no more redemption than what has transpired to that point. His failures as a father aren't a matter of personal culpability, but of a system of relations in which he's trapped, of which he's a victim as well as a perpetuator. Throughout, it's the injunction--the quinessentially patriarchal and capitalist injunction--to get over it, solve the immediate problem, and move on with life that destroys the hope of either restoration or atonement.

The power and privilege that patriarchy accords men is a devil's bargain from which no one escapes with their life intact. Renouncing patriarchy isn't as simple as wishing it so: that's the lesson this film conveys. And perhaps that at least partly explains why audience reaction hasn't been more favourable, and why some reviews have more or less missed the point--a notable case being Nell Minow's dismissive assessment. 

As viewers we hate it--men hate it, and women hate it too--when men don't suck it up and soldier on. Insistence on easy, masterful resolution of loss is wired into our culture, just as it's wired into the fictional world of the film. Perhaps we're uncomfortable that the film too effectively holds a mirror up to our own intolerance of unresolved emotion, exposing our own reluctance to witness consequences that can't be easily ascribed to individual guilt or negligence. We're all for a sensitive male protagonist, but only as long as he holds it together, and isn't too flawed or damaged himself to save the day in the end.

The undoing of patriarchy is far from completed--in the world, but also within ourselves. Perhaps it can never be completed, because the allure of impervious mastery and the denial of vulnerabiltiy are too universal  ever simply to disappear, Perhaps there will always be wounded sons who go on to become clandestinely wounded and openly wounding men--some of them fathers in turn. Toxic masculinity goes on attracting a new generation of proponents. The construction of alternative masculinities is a work in progress. We're not there yet. We're only on the road.