All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues

[eruthros]

I was watching some of the making of Indiana Jones specials just yesterday. See, I finally saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the other day, so I'd be able to understand references to it. (These are the perils of teaching archaeology, guys.) And it was so incredibly awful that then I decided to go remind myself of better Indiana Joneses.

I was watching the Last Crusade special, and in the first minute of the special Steven Spielberg shares this amazing line with us:

I wanted to flesh out Indy's relationship with his father. And I said, here's a time we can really do a really good character study of who gave birth to this guy.

And I realized, omg, this explains so much about Hollywood! They don't understand the birds and the bees; they've seen so much television where people only have daddy issues that they believe in some sort of male parthenogenesis. In order to be as masculine as possible, male heroes are born of fathers who they can't live up to, never mothers who might soften their aggression. All the best cowboys do have daddy issues; they can never have mommy issues. WHO KNEW.

And this is how we get Jack on Lost, and Jeremiah writing letters to his dead father, and basically everybody on Heroes (or so I'm told), and everybody else on tv whose entire adult life revolves around their father's judgment.

Comments

[joie-de-livre.livejournal.com]

This is a spectacular tidbit, and it will inform my life for quite a while! Many thanks!