A Rudimentary Theory of 'Dad Media'
A Father's Day-week ramble on nostalgic visions, interpreting manhood and litmus tests for crisis points.
“Dad Media” is far from being a fleshed out academic concept. It is a sweeping term, covering a wide range of fatherly consumption preferences. What dad’s like to watch, listen to and read are highly dependent on individual circumstances. Your father might be a theater enthiusiast, a car nut, or both. Maybe dad loves alt-rock, maybe he is an oldhead hiphop fan. If you grew up in a Chinese household, it is likely your dad’s on-screen heroes are Jackie Chan or Chow Yun-fat. Among Indian father figures, the equivalent macho cultural icon might be Amitabh Bachachan. Perhaps your dad dogmatically follows nothing else but a single sports team. The interests of father’s are highly relative.
In saying that, if I surveyed a crowd asking them for examples of typical “dad films” or a “dad TV shows,” I would wager that a pattern of responses would emerge. These are movies populated by men in suits or uniforms. Lawyers, soldiers, sailors, special agents and presidents embody a righteous moral order. Delineations between good and evil could not be more clear cut. In a substack piece on ’90s Dad Thrillers (which also includes a beautifully constructed genalogical timeline), journalist
defines the subgenre as “action movie(s) you might be able to convince your wife to see because it’s sort of about politics, science and/or legal stuff.” The best representation of this moment in Hollywood history might be Harrison Ford’s legendary run of blockbuster conspiracy flicks throughout the mid-’80s and the ’90s. Witness (1982), The Fugitive (1992), Air Force One (1997). These films expertly distill both the liberal triumphalism and anxiety of a Post-Cold War geopolitical order.Beyond the ’90s thriller, I find that a lot of works in the “Dad Media”-sphere serve a similar purpose of celebrating and processing man’s role in their given era of political crisis. Narratives, conciously or reflexively, responding to Fukuyama’s End of History have since mutated into an all-out nostalgia craze. The Mission: Impossible franchise. Yellowstone and the Sheridan-verse. Tulsa King or anything else that revives the career of an old action star, or revamps nostalgic genre tropes is on the list. These are mass-audience commodities, meant to satisfy the broadest base of international dads as industrially possible. They are predictable, colour-by-the-numbers plot lines that may hint at bigger intellectually complex ideas, but primarily satisfies a base male desire to defy some form of social programming. This is a narrative culture of daring rogues and rebels, revolting against a vague, repressive system that threatens their established way of life. The “good ol’ days” will return by force.
Fundamentally, these films and series’ provide an outlet for men to process their position in a world that has left most of them behind. Middle-aged blokes are drawn to stories and figures that help them make sense of their purpose as fathers, but also as men in a world experiencing incomprehensible transformations every milisecond. For those born in the 70s, the formative years of their youth and adulthood were marked by pronounced shifts in the zeitgeist. In the wake of the ’68 counter culture movement, the paradigm shifted from hippy culture, to revolutionary militancy to the yuppie craze in the span of a few short decades. In the 2000s, the 24/7 news cycle bombarded global consumers with excessive images of innovation and catastrophe alike. iPhones were getting released more frequently, and international conflicts flared up in every corner of the planet.
Economists assess oncoming crises through macroeconomic and financial market indicators. Political scientists might attempt to evaluate levels of social unrest or the erosion of state legitimacy. Environmental scientists, rising temperatures and melting ice caps. However, the average dad’s metric for what the world’s pressing issues are found in the media they consume. Asides from Facebook misinformation campaigns and A.I. generated political attack ads on Instagram Reels, for many dads in the 2020s films and TV shows continue to be their main cultural reference point. Especially among the Gen-X breed of dads who were raised on a copious amount of cable TV programming, a loose canon of works across decades and genres can be strung together.
My own obsession with cinema is largely thanks to my dad’s love for all sorts of action media. Cop thrillers, crime capers, war epics and heist movies were all living room staples. Whether it was ’80s classics like First Blood (1982), or 2000s blockbuster properties like Fast and the Furious, our father-son bonding was often defined by ultra-violent, high octane theater experiences. In the last couple of years I have developed into quite the obnoxious film snob, but my fondest cinematic memories still center around buff, aging men slogging it out and shooting at each other with really big guns. At one point, The Expendables 2 (2012) was probably my most watched movie. Though that film and those like it have aged quite poorly in my books, reactionary hypermasculine blockbusters still fascinate me. Yes, the action genre probably hosts some of the most brainless, repetitive and socially regressive works. But, between the CGI blood squibs and the car chases that are just a minute too long, these stories also reflect some of the most pressing questions and desires of their times.
Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man (1993) is one of my favorites from Hollywood’s golden age of action cinema. Starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, the film follows a bad boy Angeleno cop and a psychotic criminal waking up after four decades of imprisonment in a “cry-penitentiary.” In the film’s imaginary future, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara have merged into one mega-city called San Angeles. In what feels like a perfect distillation of the observations in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, L.A. and its surrounding urban localities are transformed into a sterile crime-free utopia. An upper-class technocratic paradise free of profane language, junk food and undeseriable dissidents who now dwell in the sewers out of sight from the politically correct elites.
Demolition Man is far from being a subversive text. The film’s premise was invented for no other reason than to serve as a vehicle for two box-office heavy hitters. The film is full of corny gags. In one scene, Stallone’s Sergeant John Spartan finds out that future sex is totally virtual. He sits awkwardly across from Sandra Bullock as they don Cerebro-like headsets, neurally zapping each other with epileptic flashes of nudity. The movie is dumb fun, but Brambilla’s take on the utopian urban lifestyles of the near future is coded with the insecurities of the male sex in the late 20th century. In 2032 San Angeles, man is emasculated. This is a future where excessive male violence, crassness and aggressive virility has been deemed obsolete. Spartan foils an authoritarian scientist conspiracy by defying the rules of this dystopian future: by being a brutish, sexy cop. Here, the action hero reassures male viewers that they will not be outpaced by any technological or political development. For even cryogenic stasis can’t satiate his carnal spirit.
Recent dad-oriented blockbuster releases have continued this tradition of expressing disatisfaction through action-based cinematic fantasies. In David Ayer’s 2024 conspiracy thriller The Beekeeper, Jason Statham plays a raspy, ex-government operative who goes on a vengeful rampage against crypto-bro telemarketers (who also happen to control the White House). Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning ends with Tom Cruise beating a sentient A.I. program that has managed to take control over the global nuclear arsenal. Defying all the odds, man is able to trap the genie back in the lamp. These releases posit that men can triumph over the buzzword digital crisis through sheer manly delusion. Hollywood has dumbed down the threat of shady e-commerce practices and lethal A.I. programs into people or things that you can shoot. The studios are selling an illusion of control to moviegoers who have never been more powerless.
Nowadays, “Dad Media” is a manifestation of the end times. As fathers come out in droves to see Tom Cruise hang off of a bi-plane, or stream their macho Westerns at home, the world around them is falling apart. Beyond toxic red-pilled men’s rights rhetoric, people are being actively monitored, disenfranchised and murdered at the hands of Tech Bro-profiteers backed by increasingly authoritarian states. American tech companies like Palantir are not only involved in facilitating war crimes abroad, but also in developing an even more invasive domestic surveillance apparatus for the U.S. government. In 2025, most men have zero ownership or agency in their lives. The movies they rent and stream, their money, their metadata, their identities are all intangible assets they view through LED screens. In theory, your whole digital personhood can be erased in a single key stroke. It’s open season in the corporate cloud. “Dad media” is the anaesthetic for a patriarchal system that has now begun cannibalizing it’s own ranks.
Addendum
As the title of this newsletter suggests, these thoughts are far from open and shut. By it’s nature, I think pinning down what drives a quintessentially father-oriented piece of media is really difficult. We are certainly far enough from the potential genesis of “Dad Media” (the ’80s action films which most Gen X dad’s grew up with), but the excess of content produced for this demographic since then requires a much closer reading. Furthermore, dear friend and fellow substacker
also pointed out to me that this “theory” leaves out the significant other in this equation. How does “Mum Media” fit into all of this? Surely contemporary mother’s have a selection of works to channel their own anxieties and fantasies onto. Aren’t they just as invested in making sense of all the structures of injustice and conspiracy that define are daily lives?This is no doubt a topic I want to re-examine in the future, so if any of these threads interest you at all, drop me a line!