Abstract
In films of the 2000s and 2010s, the father is rendered as lacking the communicative competence that allows intimacy to develop. Intimacy is established as he learns to express vulnerability and to hear the child’s voice. This chapter considers the trope of the wise child whose ‘innocent voice’ reveals truth and the agentic voice of the child used in the construction of family. It finds the innocent voice of the child is used to add value to the child (and so attract the father’s choice) while the child’s agentic voice is used to affirm the rightness of the father’s pursuit of autonomy and self-actualisation. This chapter also explores the shift from the child to animals as ‘locus of truth’ and source of unconditional love.
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McNulty Norton, D. (2021). Voice. In: Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6_9
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