father image

Since it’s a film focused on a father-daughter relationship, I note that the late Mike Nichols, who directed Ms. Weisz and Mr. Craig in “Betrayal” on Broadway in 2013, once told me that the father-son relationship was the most central in drama because, as Joseph Campbell said, “if you are a boy, every enemy is potentially psychologically associated with the father image.”

Conservatism, as a right-wing ideology, is centered on the “strong father” image.

As a corollary to the “strong father” image, fascism is a very “masculine” political ideology.

Bellow extracts from Farber’s essay the recognition that movies have come to offer “curious and exotic but psychic images … making you think such thoughts as ‘The hero has a mother complex,’ or ‘He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image which he says he carried around in his stomach.’

That was my father image on screen.