Why Does Every Action Hero Suddenly Have Daddy Issues?
I’ve always been a sucker for a superhero with daddy issues. I can’t help it. Blame all the Marvel comic books I read as a kid. Ever since I discovered that the reckless space pirate Corsair was Cyclops's dad, I've never been the same. (Neither was Cyclops, actually.)
Still, even for me, the amount of dead and/or bad dads haunting the reluctant heroes of Netflix’s recent thrillers is, frankly, exhausting. Take The Night Agent’s Peter Sutherland, whose father’s murky legacy as a possible traitor fuels his obsession with justice in the recently released second season. Or the holiday hit, Carry-On, where TSA Agent Ethan Kopek struggles to come to terms with his father’s criminal past, which derailed his dream of becoming a cop. And let’s not forget about The Recruit, in which CIA lawyer Owen Hendrick’s late father is haphazardly invoked as both a ghost and a guidepost for his misadventures in the show’s new season. The reluctant heroes of these tales all share a familiar backstory: the absent, dead, or morally compromised father whose shadow defines their journey.
Done right, an absent father can give someone like Tony Stark real depth. But that’s not what’s happening here. Instead of richly drawn characters with layered backstories, the heroes in these particular stories are oversimplified to the point of banality, with their dads' issues lazily filling in for meaningful character development. If you watch all three in a single binge, you'll leave wondering if a hero can be motivated by anything—or anyone—other than his daddy.
To be fair, this fixation on absent patriarchs isn’t new. Hollywood has been mining paternal trauma for decades, from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Every character needs his motivation—an explanation for why he is the distrusting FBI operative, the unmotivated TSA agent, or the doofus lawyer-turned-spy that he is—and dead dads are an easy route to pathos. They also have thematic virtues, having functioned as a symbol for fractured masculinity and crumbling authority ever since Hamlet set out to avenge his beloved father’s death. Those themes are certainly still relevant today, in our era of shifting gender norms and declining faith in traditional institutions. That said, with the semi-exception of The Night Agent, none of these shows are using the deceased dad trope in pursuit of such themes.
In the first season of The Night Agent, Netflix’s most watched series of 2023, the hero Peter Sutherland struggles with the lingering question of whether his father was indeed a traitor. His doubts drove the season’s core exploration of who can be trusted and effectively captured people’s growing skepticism of the American government. Squint hard enough at Sutherland’s daddy issues, and you might just see the fallout from the 2020 presidential election. Daddy issues continue to drive Sutherland in the show’s well-crafted second season. To prevent a global terrorist plot, Sutherland goes rogue, just like his daddy did. He brokers intelligence deals with bad actors behind his supervisor’s back and ultimately lands himself in prison, where he is granted a similar opportunity to redeem himself that Sutherland Sr. was offered. These full-circle moments are nice, but there’s no deeper meaning to extract here. In season 1, the absent father trope was an effective metaphor for larger themes about trust and authority; season 2 simply uses it as a way to hang an entire question—will Peter meet the same fate as his father?—over the recently announced third season.
As for Netflix’s monster holiday hit, Carry-On, there’s no overlap between Peter Sutherland and Ethan Kopek’s daddy issues. Sutherland’s made him more ambitious, driving him to prove himself at the highest level of government. Kopek’s made him less career-driven, leaving him stuck scanning IDs at LAX, where Jason Bateman’s evil character (known only as “the traveler”) draws him into his terrorist scheme. Kopek’s journey is so overly reliant on the absent-father trope that Bateman’s character even calls him out on it toward the end of the movie, when Kopek asks him if he wants to know why he flunked the police academy polygraph. “Let me guess, your dad.” Bateman answers. "You lied for sad, old Dad, right?” Yes, obviously. Bateman continues: “You protected him then they threw you out and you’ve been like him ever since right? A loser, a waste, and asleep.” Of course, the movie ends the way all heroes' journeys do: with Kopek successfully overcoming his daddy issues and defeating his enemy, Jason Bateman in a Hat. Or, as Kopek puts it right before he kills Bateman, “I guess I woke up.” Woof. So much for subtlety.
There’s nothing unusual about an action flick using a crappy father as fuel for a hero’s journey. What is strange, though, is having one of your movie’s main characters mock you for doing it. When Bateman snarled, “Your dad, right?” it seemed less like a sarcastic response to the question Kopek posed and more like an accusation of unoriginality aimed at Carry-On’s screenwriter, T.J. Fixman—or maybe a meta mea culpa from director Jaume Collet-Serra for not coming up with a better backstory for Kopek. Either way, this strange moment of recognition once again leaves us with no deeper meaning to excavate—and no connection to the larger cultural moment.
Winks like the moment at the end of Carry-On recur throughout The Recruit, Netflix's other escapist spy show. In the second season, which premiered last Friday, young CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks repeats his season 1 move: he opens a piece of "graymail" (spy lingo for a top-secret operation), triggering another chain of dangerous events. This time, however, the graymail sends him to South Korea, where (surprise!) viewers learn that Hendricks' dead father had been stationed there before his death. The sudden revelation feels like a cheap and clunky way of making Hendricks more likable; it's a method for injecting psychological depth without doing the hard work of character development. Hendricks even acknowledges this in a Carry On-esque moment when the graymailer brings him to the apartment where he lived as a teenager when his father died. “And you brought me here, why?” Hendricks asks. “To emotionally manipulate me? Because that’s super heavy-handed.” I couldn’t agree more. Calling attention to the tropes you’re using doesn’t make them more interesting. If anything, it just makes us wonder why these characters don’t have different backstories. In other words, why lean on the dead-dad trope only to lampoon it? And why lampoon it at all if you’re still clinging to it as a catch-all explanation for your character’s vulnerability?
What’s most frustrating about this pile-up of daddy issues is that plenty of other motivations could drive these protagonists. Heroic men need not always be chained to their fathers! Consider Jackson Lamb from the delightful spy series, Slow Horses. Lamb always has time to save the day if it means embarrassing his old bosses at M1, and his seething resentment makes him a relatable hero to anybody who hates their 9-to-5. Or Mark Scout from Severance who, in the show’s first season, is spurred to action not by the haunting legacy of a deceased family member but by the supportive presence of his very alive, very loyal coworkers. Finally, there’s Joel from The Last of Us. If he had a Joel Sr. haunting him, we, blessedly, never heard about him. What mattered to Joel was protecting Ellie from the people after her immunity, with the tragic loss of his own daughter powering his every step. Every one of these characters is just as emotionally complex as their daddy-issue-laden counterparts, but their struggles feel fresher, more specific, and ultimately more engaging.
Look, I get it. We’re not talking about prestige television here. These works are fodder for escape, not critical analysis—less Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, more Clear and Present Danger. Still, the fact that this trio of massively popular releases fails to subvert or even thoughtfully utilise the absent-father trope—rich as it is with implied meaning about patriarchal authority and crumbling institutions—at a time when those exact narratives are popping up everywhere in our daily lives, is a missed opportunity. In the face of such caution, it’s fair to wonder if these creators really have nothing to say about men or if they’re just afraid to say it.
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