{"id":69733,"date":"2014-04-15T11:00:20","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T15:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=69733"},"modified":"2019-02-04T11:21:39","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T16:21:39","slug":"the-dadliest-decade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/15\/the-dadliest-decade\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dadliest Decade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why were the nineties so preoccupied with fatherhood?<\/em><\/p>\n

Some decades are summed up easily, the accretion of clich\u00e9 and cultural narrative having reached such a point that we hardly need say anything at all. The sixties: hippies, drugs, revolution, rock-and-roll. The eighties: Young Republicans, greed is good, massive perms, Ronald Reagan. This is reductive, obviously, but it\u2019s also helpful cultural shorthand. The nineties, like the seventies, have a less unified narrative: there\u2019s gangster rap, Monica Lewinsky, Columbine, Kurt Cobain, O.J., MTV, white slackers on skateboards, and the LA riots, but they\u2019re all disparate, disconnected. There was no counterculture powerful enough to write the narrative from below, no one mass-cultural or political trend hegemonic enough to make itself the truth. Some enjoy calling this diffusion postmodernism, though most everyone else agrees those people are assholes.<\/p>\n

But there was, I contend, a current that ran through the culture of the nineties, a theme that has not to my knowledge been recognized as such. That theme is the heroic dad. <\/p>\n

The nineties have sometimes been framed as an assault on family values, what with the Culture Wars and the president\u2019s penis\u2019s interchangeability with a cigar and all, but it was the nineties that saw the dad ascendant in popular culture. By 1990, even the youngest baby boomer was twenty-six, and most of them were solidly in their thirties and forties. They were losing their grip on cool. And they were having kids. It was only natural that they\u2019d want to dramatize the experience. Granted, Bill Cosby, arguably the most quintessential dad in TV history, reached his peak popularity in the mideighties\u2014but the early nineties saw an explosion of hit dad-based sitcoms: Coach<\/i>, Married \u2026 with Children<\/i>, The Simpsons<\/i>, Home Improvement<\/i>, Major Dad<\/i>. These continued to proliferate throughout the decade; witness Full House<\/i> and Everybody Loves Raymond<\/i>, among many others. Many of these were just trying to get a piece of the megasuccess of The Cosby Show <\/i>and Roseanne<\/i>. But when those sitcoms are discussed, they\u2019re often applauded for their working-class heroes, while the recentering of dad is less often highlighted. (This is exactly how Reaganite politics worked, too: use lip service to the working class to retrench economic power.)<\/p>\n

The trend is more obvious in Hollywood, where the dadventure<\/i>\u2014don\u2019t look for that term elsewhere; I\u2019m making it up right here\u2014found greater traction than ever in the nineties. You\u2019ll recognize the dadventure if you give it some thought; it\u2019s a subgenre in which the protagonist is a capital-F Father, one whose fatherhood defines both his relationship to the film\u2019s other characters and supplies the film\u2019s central drama. In a dadventure, the stability of the family is threatened\u2014whether by violence or drama, it\u2019s almost always because of some negligence around the dadly duties\u2014and only dad can save the family by coming face to face with his fatherly responsibilities. In the end, he learns just how much fun being a dad can be.<\/p>\n

Between 1978 and 1988, there were a total of three dadventures that made the box-office top-ten for their respective years: Mr. Mom<\/i>, Back to School<\/i>, and Three Men and a Baby<\/i>. But then came the nineties: between 1989 and 1999, ten<\/i> dadventures hit the box-office top ten, and they\u2019re worth listing in full:<\/p>\n