Mr. Mom

Mr. Mom (1983), written by John Hughes and directed by Stan Dragoti, is a role-reversal comedy in which the protagonist, Jack Butler (played by Michael Keaton), revises his understanding of masculine identity when he loses his job and, after his wife returns to work, assumes the domestic responsibilities of the household. The film humorously dramatizes Jack's unfamiliarity with household appliances, but the main focus is on his adjustment to his new role as a SAHD (stay-at-home dad) and his gradual acceptance of homemaking as a job to be done with pride rather than as a demotion from his “real” social role as the family's sole breadwinner. As a concept, Mr. Mom quickly became a cultural icon, and the term remains a catch-phrase describing fathers with primary domestic responsibility.

Mr. Mom reflects the growing incidence of single and stay-at-home fathers at the time of its release, a trend that resulted from the combined impact of rising divorce rates, economic stagnation, and the growing number of working mothers after the mid-1960s. The film can also be viewed as a response to intensifying feminist critiques of conventional middle-class masculinity and fatherhood. Above all, however, the film expresses a post-1970s examination and rethinking of masculinity, in which defenders of fatherhood lamented the absence of positive representations of fathers in film and television and an emerging men's movement sought to redefine fatherhood as a “growth experience” and liberate men from stereotypical sex roles.

Jack's liberation begins by his becoming “one of the girls”—he socializes with women made single by divorce and develops stereotypical behaviors associated with housewives, such as watching soap operas, gaining weight, and gossiping. However, the film insists that Jack is still very much a man. For example, a male stripper, seeing Jack sitting with his women friends, gives Jack his phone number, but Jack asserts his heterosexuality by passing it along to one of the women. The 1980s was a time of “remasculinization” for white males, and Jack eventually pulls himself together, sharpens his appearance, and becomes a “superdad.” He is rewarded by getting his job back without having to compromise his integrity. Thus, although the majority of middle-class American men who take on primary household responsibilities do so because there is no one else to do them, Jack Butler's tenure as a Mr. Mom is only temporary. Moreover, because his wife intends to continue working, the family will probably have to hire a nanny.

As a comedy—the typical genre used to represent fatherhood in the 1980s—Mr. Mom presents a utopian solution for an issue that had been a disturbing subtext to family relations since the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. While films such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Ordinary People (1980) criticized feminist polemics by demonizing women's ambitions and showing fathers as clearly better parents than mothers, who were portrayed as selfish and emotionally inaccessible, Mr. Mom rewards both men and women for putting the children first. By depicting what has been called the “new fatherhood” as something other than a reactionary response to feminism, it sought to counteract, and even deny, the divisive gender politics generated by the late-twentieth-century rethinking of gender constructs.

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