‘Nothing else besides a father’: Logan and the paternal melodrama

Abstract

Oedipus, condemned by fate to kill his father and marry his mother, has long provided the trajectory for film melodrama theory. The Oedipal narrative shed light on the intergenerational conflicts that dominated Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, highlighting the contentious relationships between overbearing fathers and their rebellious sons.1 The influence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories enabled new readings of gender and genre, offering insight into the ways in which women’s inner truths and social realities could be ‘siphoned off’ into the dramatic narratives and expressive mise-en-scene of the domestic sphere.2 This approach finally acknowledged the long-suffering mother as central to the melodramatic imagination. But while maternal suffering is now understood as a ‘discourse of the obvious’, the sacrificing father remains noticeably absent from studies of melodrama’s genres.3 This essay moves beyond the Oedipal trajectory, shifting focus to another star-crossed father and his odyssey to home.