Interstellar and father-daughter relationships
Note: Contains spoilers for the film Interstellar.
Interstellar and father-daughter relationships
by Jen Davies, nerd
Jan 7, 2025
My mother told me that when I (a girl) was born, my father was relieved because he wanted to teach his children about engines and camping and it was more socially acceptable to do “tom-boy” things with a daughter, than it would be for my mother to teach a boy about her pastimes (eg, baking). That was a reflection of the gender expectations of the 1970s and 80s to a great extent, but even today I imagine there are communities where my father’s relief isn’t unusual when a baby girl arrives in the world.
After her father has a closed-door conversation with the school principal about a fight the daughter had with a student over discrepant textbooks…
Daughter: “How did it go?”
Father: “I got you suspended.”
If you’ve seen Interstellar - and if you haven’t, you should - then you know the scene, and it’s just such a wonderful back and forth between Murphy and Cooper. Even though she’s clearly becoming her own woman, as when she determines on her own to translate for the “ghost” in her bedroom, we are provided several instances of Cooper’s influence on her emerging sense of who she is. She is a brilliant thinker, and he gets her suspended from school so she will get a break from the mind-numbing inaccuracies of the standard school curriculum. Cooper strives to teach her correct behaviour but he also appreciates her initiative, like when he tells her to stay home but she sneaks into the truck for the ride to what turns out to be the space centre so he puts her to work and takes up her suggestion to use the bolt cutters on the fence. Knowing she can handle it, Cooper tries to be gentle but does not sugar-coat it that he cannot predict when he will return from the exploration mission. It’s a key part of the plot, though, that Cooper intends to return to Earth and see Murphy again.
In reality, fathers and daughters tend to have slightly different kinds of relationships than fathers and sons. A daughter is unlikely to be treated as a mini-me by her father. Daughters seem to have a way of convincing their fathers to do uncharacteristic things like sitting for tea parties. Adolescent daughters particularly are legendary both for frustrating and endearing themselves to their fathers.
Narrative Flexibility
When father and daughter relationships are so unique from father-son relationships, why are father-daughter relationships so rare in film? And please disregard crap like the Taken movies, where a daughter could be substituted for any other mcguffin-to-rescue that the protagonist might have strong feelings about. Films where father and daughter interact as a key part of the plot are rare.
The father-daughter match-up in a plot frees-up a screenwriter from a lot of expectations that might otherwise be present in a father-son story: The father doesn’t have to be macho, in fact it seems more acceptable for a man to be vulnerable if he’s dealing with his daughter. Verbal and physical demonstrations of affection are more acceptable, which allows for more poignant moments in such stories. The father will still play the role of teacher, but without the expectation that the child will emulate him directly because the sex/gender expectations are not there, the daughter gets more flexibility from him so the range of what-happens-now choices is much larger than son-copies or son-fails-to-copy and some consequences that follow.
Where a plot wants to use gendered perspectives on a situation (eg, a man’s lens and a woman’s lens), a father-daughter story still enables the writer to do that without concern about sexual tension. Attraction becomes a plot point that the writer can choose to ignore - or add strategically via a romantic partner for father or daughter or both, but at least there isn’t an embedded expectation that romance will be present in a father-daughter story. In some ways a father-daughter story could leverage the manic pixie dream girl trope, but simplified (no romance required).
An even more recent example of the way a father-daughter dynamic creates more narrative freedom was in 65, a movie with dinosaurs and laser guns in which Adam Driver’s character Mills has to figure out how to rescue Ariana Greenblatt’s character Koa from prehistoric Earth. Koa becomes found-family for Mills as the only other survivor of a spaceship crash, and her inability to speak his language is a lovely metaphor for the way that adults often struggle to communicate with their adolescent children. Mills doesn’t have to be macho, he has to be flexible with his expectations while he coaches her on how to survive on a deadly planet. Koa finds beautiful things and solves problems her own way, and because she is just a child the story can emphasize affection between them without the burden of romance. 65 is a good time, I recommend it.
Interstellar remains my favourite film in great part because the father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murphy is so genuine, and well-acted. Spoiler: Even when Cooper encounters Murphy on her death bed as a 100-year old woman, Cooper looks at her with the loving eyes of a father, and Murphy’s language regresses to that of an adolescent for a moment when she shows him the watch she still wears.
There’s something unique that a father-daughter relationship can bring to a movie vs a father-son story or a heteronormative romantic pair-up. There were two good scifi ones in the last decade or so, hopefully we’ll continue to see more of them.
#interstellar #matthewmcconaughey
#65movie #adamdriver #arianagreenblatt
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