The vengeful dad

Violence, paternalism, and antifeminism in New Hollywood cinema

Bibliographic Data

ID21783363
AuthorsHarrison Whitaker (0009-0002-7580-7995, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume23
Issue2
Pages307-329
Publication date2025-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17400309.2025.2481553
OpenAlexW4411212408
LanguageEN
References cited32

While studies of New Hollywood have long identified the vigilante as a key type in the era’s films, the exact nature of the figure’s extralegal violence has gone unexamined. Films often cited as emblematic of 1970s cinema’s fixation on men who enact their own form of justice — Joe (1970), Death Wish (1974), and Hardcore (1979) among them — center not just anticrime avengers, but specifically avenging dads. The vengeful dad is thus a key type for understanding some of the larger ideological moves of the New Hollywood era. Often conflated with the more general vigilante figure, he represents a specific flavor of paternalistic backlash against evolving social norms and perceived social decay; his ‘justice’ is enacted in reaction to the violation of his daughter’s sexuality, leading to violent confrontations which often play out across class lines. Critically, his inability to balance the demands of work with the stresses of a collapsing domestic sphere is dependent on the inadequacies of his spouse, depictions of whom feature tropes which can be traced back to the literature of the burgeoning ‘men’s liberation’ movement contemporaneous with New Hollywood. This article demonstrates how the vengeful dads of New Hollywood not only offer a critical reformulation of how that era’s filmmaking is understood but also presage seemingly unrelated cinematic depictions of the father in the 1980s and beyond

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Hollywood · Media studies · Movie theater · Paternalism · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Media, Gender, and Advertising

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