Non Threatening Boys*: Daddy's Issues and The Rise of Post-Patriarch Pulp

"Taken, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Law Abiding Citizen: we lovingly called this cluster 'divorced-dad movies'."

Words: Nadia Gopaul

I wouldn’t have had to fake the volunteering hours required to graduate high school if those dreaded every-other-weekend visits to my dad’s counted. Few things marked the passage of time, but movies managed to captivate during a time in which I often felt held captive.

Years later, my boyfriend and I bonded over recognising the genre of films I’d watch during these visits – stuff like Taken, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Law Abiding Citizen to name a few. We lovingly called this cluster divorced-dad movies. What I realise now is that those movies weren’t just filling time. They were processing a wider social phenomenon in real time. And judging by the box office, we weren’t the only ones watching.

My parents’ divorce made sense to everyone but my dad. What felt like a clean solution to the rest of us became, for him, an existential question. Divorce wasn’t just the end of a marriage: it was state-sanctioned loss of identity. Overnight, he went from main provider and household authority to outsider, a man exiled from the Sopranos-era McMansion he’d presided over.

And just a few years later, the world watched a similar collapse play out en-masse. Not irreconcilable differences, but the 2008 recession; a mass, systemic divorce from the roles that had defined men. Mortgages imploded. Jobs vanished. Authority evaporated. Millions suddenly found themselves dispossessed in a world where their perceived worth had been tethered to a stability that no longer existed. The cruellest part? None of it was on their terms. In Dad’s mind, he didn’t choose to leave his whole life - a judge decided. Homeowners didn’t choose to lose equity - banks decided. Laid-off workers didn’t fail - executives decided. Every loss was externally imposed, which bred a single, clarifying rage: the system screwed me.

What collapsed in 2008 wasn’t just the housing market, it was the middle class itself, and with it, a political middle that stability makes possible. You believe in institutions when they’ve mostly worked for you; you’ll tolerate compromise when you have something to lose and something to gain. But when rule-following people saw their jobs and homes vanish while bankers got bailouts, moderation died.

Hollywood, consciously or not, responded with fantasy. The men whose lives had been restructured by economic precarity and domestic collapse were given a new role to inhabit; one that restored their power inside a world that had taken it away. On screen, the father wasn’t obsolete; he was the lone saviour, the only one who could see the truth, the only one who could act. And so, we got divorced dad movies, or as I like to call them, Post-Patriarch Pulp.

These are the ingredients of Post-Patriarch Pulp:

• Institutions are corrupt, incompetents, or indifferent

• Authority is useless or actively obstructive

• Only the father sees the truth

• Only the father can act

In Taken, Liam Neeson plays a man no longer needed by his ex-wife, no longer central to his family until his daughter is kidnapped. His obsolescence becomes destiny: only his very particular set of skills, his insight, his righteous fury can save her. The state is nowhere. The police are compromised. Only Dad can fix it.

In The Taking of Pelham 123, Denzel Washington isn’t just a dispatcher; he’s a man demoted from authority, accused of taking bribes, stripped of dignity. His dispossession mirrors the recession’s humiliation: men once trusted to run trains, homes, families suddenly diminished. But when a trainload of hostages is hijacked by a Wall Street fraudster ruined by financial collapse, Denzel must prove he can still protect someone. The hostages become surrogate dependents whose survival determines his patriarchal worth. His wife calls mid-crisis, but there’s no going home until he’s proven himself. Because, in this genre, and in that economic moment, a man’s domestic authority is suspended until he re-establishes value in the public arena the recession humiliated him in. The city’s bureaucratic machinery is laughably impotent, and so – as expected – if Dad wants it done right, he must do it himself.

If you want the logic of Post-Patriarch Pulp in its purest, most unhinged form, look no further than Law Abiding Citizen. Gerard Butler plays a character who feels like what would happen if Heath Ledger’s Joker were cast as the protagonist. Both see corruption everywhere; both expose institutional rot through impossible moral dilemmas. The difference isn’t the critique, but the permission structure. The Dark Knight (Summer ‘08) presented that kind of retributive logic as terrifying and worth pondering. Law Abiding Citizen (Fall ‘09) presented Butler’s twin worldview as seductive and cathartic. Eighteen months and one financial collapse had turned the villain into the hero. The audience was no longer watching Joker-logic from the outside; they were invited to inhabit it.

These movies didn’t just entertain, they offered a blueprint. Post-Patriarch Pulp taught that paranoia is a form of insight; that institutions are enemies, not arbiters; and that punishment is proof of righteousness. In these films, the hero is hunted because he is right. This is the emotional scaffolding of conspiracy thinking. The man who believed the system usurped his authority becomes the man who believes shadowy forces are stealing the entire nation. Hollywood didn’t create conspiratorial masculinity, but it provided the script: agency restored through unilateral action, truth always hidden, persecution as the highest validation.

Which brings us to Trump. To understand why he became sacred to millions of men, you have to understand this worldview. If the system is corrupt, then the man punished by it must be righteous. If authority judged you wrongly, then authority judging him wrongly confirms everything you’ve believed. Trump is not their politician. He’s their protagonist. Their wrongly accused father. Their lone man against the system. Their Joan of Arc: a figure whose purity is proven by the violence of the state. A man turned saint by the scale of what tries to destroy him.

Every indictment becomes an anointing.

Every scandal, a sacrament.

Every attack, a reminder that he is “the chosen one.”

Post-Patriarch Pulp promised that when institutions fail, a righteous father will rise to save us. Trump simply had to show up and say I am that father. And millions, galvanised by the movies, believed him.

This isn’t about pitying or absolving men. It’s about understanding what happens when a group accustomed to uncontested agency suddenly loses it. For men who’d been raised to believe power was their natural setting, the recession felt less like economic turbulence and more like existential theft. Post-Patriarch Pulp didn’t create their rage, it projected it. And the political world we’re living in now is, in many ways, the real-world sequel: a generation of men trying to reclaim a role they were told was theirs by birthright, devastated to realise that it no longer is.

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