In his book Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, Todd McGowan forms a concept of the anal, or primordial, or primal father based on Freud's conception of a primitive society based on enjoyment rather than prohibition, in Totem and Taboo:
"... In the horde, enjoyment is not readily available to everyone. It is confined to the strongest, the primal Father, who hoards all enjoyment (i.e.,all women) for himself. This Father enjoys without restraint, but only until such time as the sons, jealous of his enjoyment, conspire to murder him. According to Freud, this murder of the primal Father is the first social act, and the prohibition of incest—or, of enjoyment—follows directly on its heels. In establishing a social order in the wake of the primal Father’s murder, the sons recognize that, if they are to live together in relative peace, they must agree to a collective renunciation of enjoyment.Without this collective renunciation, no one can have any feeling of security, because there is nothing to mediate a life-and-death struggle for enjoyment. Force itself—and force alone—prevails: the strongest can enjoy himself, and all the weaker ones will not survive. The sons, however, had already opted out of this life-and-death struggle at the moment they conspired to murder the primal Father. In this first moment of collective action, the renunciation that would ultimately become the incest prohibition has its genesis. After this point, the enjoyment embodied by the primal Father becomes only a memory, the object of fantasy for all those who have agreed to give it up. That is, the murder of the primal Father has the effect of triggering fantasies about the enjoyment that he experienced prior to his death. These fantasies sustain those who have sacrificed their own enjoyment in the collective renunciation that made the murder possible, and they provide the reassurance that, if enjoyment is inaccessible now, at least it once was accessible for someone." (p. 26)This concept then leads up to the idea of the 'anal father' as an archetypal link to the archaic primal father (named anal due to his halting at that stage in infantile development, wherein the idea of possession leads to an obscene surplus of enjoyment - i.e. "the terrible twos"). As McGowan points out, the fantasy of this primal or anal father posits a venue of fantasy wherein pure libidinal enjoyment can exist, the kind we seldom see outside of fantasy, sci fi, or porn films, or HBO series' like Rome and Game of Thrones. On a less obvious level, there's a new brand of 'anal father' that's not as violent but still oppresses with his enjoyment - he fails to embody the non-du-pere often because he sees himself as a friend to his kids, one of the guys, but the result can suffocate and rob children of their enjoyment.
There's a nature documentary where we see a whole beach full of ready-to-mate female sea lions, all being ministered to by the one dominant / battle-scarred male. Any other male tries to step in and get some and the main bull drops whatever rutting he's started and goes flopping over to drive away or fight the interloper. This is 'nature' in its most uncivilized form, one we see in cavemen movies, and David Lynch, and some pornography. The obscene / primal / anal father gives us the model for uninhibited jouissance which we are simultaneously denied, and therefore promised in the future. If we kill him, and we always do, the fall-out of our freedom is that we can't ever experience his enjoyment and so must renounce enjoyment altogether; the murder needs to stay a secret and be the 'last' murder.
But the primal father is hardly down for the count. He lives in our dreams and nightmares, ready to abuse us, to take our innocence, to drive us to murder him, to promise us grand initiations where we one day will enjoy as he does, to take us to the movies, help us make a friend of horror, or introduce us to his entourage..
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| Bull sea lion with harem |
In cinema these characters find their true fruition for theirs is a visual dominance - they love to be seen on their throne, flanked by half-naked voluptuous maidens, mocking the younger, handsomer, more virile party crasher standing haughtily before them. The most primordial and instantly recognizable figure for most kids of a certain age is from Return of the Jedi....
Darth Vader is a classic 'dark father' but a joyless authoritarian; his mask which hides a presumed phallic hideousness is his main 'primal' aspect, as is his own awareness of his son having come to kill him (see #3, Kurz). In McGowan's paragraph above, Vader would be the father who has forgone enjoyment, with no sense of humor or sadistic flair. Jabba, on the other hand, rolls large. In the added scenes digital director's cut he even calls for a musical number filled with spastic muppets! And of course, we all remember Leia's sexy shell bathing suit -- the one instance of sexual 'skin' in the whole damned series, so it's worth noting her nudity is in the service of a giant slug who likes to eat live beings. Jabba's corpulent primal fatherness is such it overflows the conventional iconography of the kid-friendly films, hinting at a darker Game of Thrones style sadistic / human trafficking vibe lurking underneath the innocent laser beams and chasm swings. Darth Vader might blow up your home planet, but he doesn't put you in skimpy costumes (and do god knows what else).
More than just a typical space dictator, Ming is a great primal father, with his harem to which he seeks to add the comely blonde Dale Arden. Especially in the original serial he's full of crafty tricks, such as promising Flash he can go free, then decreeing he's free all right, free to fight the three-horned beast of Mongo. Ming uses his great power to crush opposition but when cornered he resorts to crafty trickery and Flash, unconsciously registering him as a father figure, believes and obeys every new trick, never dare running him through with a sword during any of his ample opportunities.
"The figure of the "other father"--the obscene, uncanny, shadow double of the Name of the Father--emerged for the first time in all its force in the novels of Joseph Conrad; what we have in mind here, of course, are figures like Kurz in Heart of Darkness or Mister Brown in Lord Jim. In the midst of the African jungle... the hero encounters Kurz, a kind of "master of enjoyment," a paternal figure which comes close to what Kant called "radical evil," evilness qua ethical attitude, qua pure spirituality... Conrad depicted what remained hidden to Freud... namely the "primordial father" is not a figure of pure, symbolic brute force but a father who knows... The ultimate secret of the parricide is that the father knows the son has come to kill him and accepts his fate obediently" - Slavoj Zizek (Enjoy your Symptom!, p. 158-156)
4. Daniel Day Lewis - as Bill the Butcher - Gangs of New York (2002)
He is both the former lover of Leo DiCaprio's wench (Cameron Diaz) and the murderer of Leo's father, but said father was killed in a fair fight, so Leo's motivation for revenge seems pointless.. and as Bill knows who Leo really is, the plot is known in advance, as with Kurz above. Though he's not disfigured he is scarred and wears a ridiculous stovepipe phallic hat which contrasts nicely with the exposed bald phallic obscenity of Brando and Ming (above). Bill's refusal to be killed in the plot, and his 'Native American' anti-immigrant violence marks him as a remnant of the past, unwilling to die a peaceful dinosaur extinction death...when he does finally die, Bill's lust for life his 'out in the open' hate will become just a secret of Leo's glum generation. Characters like Bill, Kurz and Ming serve as figures of fantasy that fill a missing place in our ego ideal, the father who is not castrated, who has opted out of the latent stages of maturity and remains a wild, untamed frontier. He must inevitably be killed and absorbed but ideally some of that fire remains in the usurping son, though in a much more controlled and empathic form.
Narrator: " There are not many men yet--just a few tribes scattered across the wilderness, never venturing far, unaware that other tribes exist even. Too busy with their own lives to be curious, too frightened by the unknown to wander. Their laws are simple: the strong take everything. This is Akhoba, leader of the rock tribe, and these are his sons, Sakama and Tumak. There is no love lost between them. And that is our story."
6. LYNCHIAN TIE:
Frank - Blue Velvet / Mr. Big - Lost Highway / Baron Harkonnen -- Dune
For true deep insight into the primal/anal father and his conspicuous enjoyment check out the works of Todd McGowan or Slavoj Zizek. They use Lynch films as springboards for whole books on the subject. Here's a choice quote from McGowan's The impossible David Lynch (which I reviewed for Bright Lights in 2008):
"What is the Law's secret? That the Law is nothing but its secret, that the Father never really was alive with enjoyment, except in the fantasy of the son. This becomes evident when the Mystery Man, just before shooting Mr. Eddy, presents him with a video screen that displays him in obscene enjoyment. What we see on the screen, however, is not Mr. Eddy enjoying himself but him watching other people enjoy. The Father, the master of jouissance, turns out to be capable only of watching others enjoy, not of enjoying himself. In this sense, the fact that Mr. Eddy is a pornographer makes perfect sense. While we may imagine (i.e., fantasize) that the pornographer is constantly awash in enjoyment, he is actually constantly awash in enjoying the enjoyment of others, of merely observing enjoyment. The Mystery Man lets Fred know that the Father has never held the secret of enjoying women, as Fred had previously supposed, and that Mr. Eddy is an impotent pretender. As Lacan says in Seminar VII, "If for us God is dead, it is because he always has been dead, and that's what Freud says. He has never been the father except in the mythology of the son."32 In other words, Mr. Eddy's enjoyment, his vitality, existed only within Fred's fantasy, insofar as Fred supposed its existence. Fred can now know this secret of the Law because he has already sacrificed his object, and, having made this sacrifice, he represents no threat to this Law. Thus, it is only after having sacrificed our enjoyment to the Law that we learn this is a sacrifice made in vain." - (p. 174-5)
"Dead Poet's Society is invested in Keating (as a representative anal father of enjoyment) to such an extent that it does not even depict his authority as authority... Precisely because he doesn't appear as an alternate authority, Keating's authority is all the more powerful--over both his students and us as viewers of the film... unlike traditional symbolic authority the anal father appears as one of us; he's on our side, not on the side of authority. Hence Mr. Perry and the headmaster can only look on in envy at the authority Keating wields. " (McGowan, Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, pps. 49-50)
The casting of respect-void comic Dangerfield as a slimeball father--full of abusive oaths, threats and incestuous intent unchallenged by his doormat wife--was a touch of casting genius that shows Oliver Stone is hip to the obscene comic dimensions of the archetypal primal father (the laugh track congratulates him for his incestuous tyranny). This is a man who undoubtedly sees himself as hilarious and it's that comic coarseness that makes him so terrifying and dream-like --a pure archetype of evil self-absorption, he exists only to be killed. I used him for the list instead of that even more repellent gangster in The Cook, the Thief, the Wife, and Her Lover but they are the same, the father as a vortex of hideous enjoyment who all but demands his future son-in-law kill him.
He's not as odious as most on this list, but the buddy to his kids style dad is just as unbearable, stealing as it were his children's enjoyment via his first trying to be 'a pal.' In Roy's case in CEOTK, he's the type of dad who cheats at board games, insists his kids see a cloying bore like PINOCCHIO (1) when they want to see something else (Roy saw it as a child, and wants to force his own childhood on his children), and ends up trashing the living room because he saw a UFO once, acting like an obsessive tantrum-throwing first grader, playing with his food and making giant mountains in his living room, smashing windows, uprooting the garden, instead of going to his job like a real man and keeping his mouth shut about the weirdness he saw.
From my Dads of Great Adventure on Bright Lights: "A dad might participate by playing ball or whatever when asked, but not to the point of being a burden, and not to the point of trying to be his child's "best and only friend," which nurtures a sense of deep mistrust toward the rest of the world, and prolonged immaturity, while simultaneously making the child feel he or she needs to protect and shelter their own parents. The dad of great adventure is driven by guilt to become everything and everyone to his children, including a "buddy" rather than an authority figure, but the child ends up taking on the parental role, sensing the dad's insecurity and fear, which leaves a gaping hole in the family dynamic that the child then feels obligated to fill. A good father knows that in playing "the bad guy," he also creates genuine enjoyment, a feeling of relative safety. The dad's demonstration of authority allows the child to relax his own guard."
"Fanucci is the old world type of deep oak patriarch, the one called 'the anal father' by Lacan. The odious ruler who insists on being seen enjoying (as in his conspicuousness and little bits of attention grabbing at the Sen Gennaro festival), who insists on being loved even as he robs others of their enjoyment. There's a great moment at the puppet show for example, that is the epitome of the anal father, when Fanucci makes a joke about it being "too violent" for him, and turns around expecting the whole crowd to meet his gaze and break out in approving laughter. When they don't even notice him amid the din there's a flicker of shame that passes over his face before he blocks it away and saunters off. This grandstanding exposes Fanucci as an easy target for a man as streamlined and rid of all personal pleasures as Vito. Using Fanucci as a cautionary example of how NOT to be as a mob boss, Vito cultivates instead humility, coupled with a canny ability to use the granting of favors as a kind of paperless, untraceable, untaxable currency, and beneath it all he keeps the ability to repress anger and then kill in cold blood. This is the 'gift' of bravery, and it's what any successful space cowboy also has, for he or she must keep a straight face when, for example, the walls are crawling with mutant tentacled wallpaper pattern demons as you walk past oblivious parents in order to get to the sanctuary of the bedroom..." (See: LSD Godfather)
The modern cult leader tends to believe that whatever comes out of his unconscious is the voice of God or some higher power, never questioning when that voice tells him he should have all the women and that any male threat to his rule should be cast out. It's fascinating because it represents a real return to the primal father, and the cult members go along with it as the promise of their own conspicuous enjoyment--in heaven if not sooner--is contingent on their subservience. To believe someone else has all the power is quite liberating, freeing the individual cult members of all responsibility and obligation beyond the simple tasks assigned. A strict vegan diet helps keep the flock passive, and soon after that 'god' is demanding all the 14 year-old girls in the house and, unless he's hiding on the border of Arizona and Utah, ideally getting caught and going to jail, most likely being allowed to continue his oppression via squeamish lawmakers who don't want to rattle the Mormon voter cages.
Manson took all that a bit further, as we know....
As master of ceremonies for a grueling, month-plus long dance marathon, Gig Young is charming, sympathetic and very dangerous; spinning the pain caused by the ceaseless, agonizing dancing (including weeding out the elderly via concentration camp-like races around the dance floor) into a joyous celebration of the human spirit. Shrugging off the pain of his contestants with a sympathetic trill in his voice, Rocky functions as the exact opposite of the non du pere who in forbidding enjoyment creates a forbidden space where enjoyment can occur. In demanding enjoyment (i.e. dancing) to beyond the point of exhaustion and death, he denies all possibility of true enjoyment (they'll never dance for pleasure again). It's a bit like your dad mailing you the bill for all the food you ever ate--right down the the Gerber's baby food and diapers of your youth--once you finally get a job.
And there's always the scariest one of all.... Noah Cross!
SEE ALSO: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers and a Man called Pollack
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NOTES:
1) Not to knock Pinocchio but as a kid it can be pretty dull with all the whimsical moments especially early on in the toy shop seeming to drag on near forever... boys especially don't care about pretty little princesses rotoscoping their way into life and dumb, spastic puppet boys taking forever to master their limb movement. It bored me so bad as a kid I think I threw up so my mom would have to take us home. The way Dreyfus insists on dragging his kids to see it shows that he allies himself with the notion of a classic kid's film that moved him a boy and therefore must move his children. Their own vote on their own entertainment doesn't count because he has posited himself as the master of childishness--he alone knows how to rebel against his own authority.
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