Sunday morning reading brought me to this line, in between sips of coffee:

Has the image of fatherhood in the “Taken” films fallen out of step with modern conceptions of masculinity? @AndrewAoyama explores what it takes to separate fatherhood from anger in this week’s #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing:

I clicked. Under the header, “Modern Men Are Still Figuring Out Fatherhood,” The Atlantic’s Andrew Aoyama wrote:

If today it’s hard to watch “Taken” without at least some disgust at the glorification of Neeson’s bloodshed, perhaps it’s because the traditional conception of fatherhood his character embodies has begun to fall out of step with shifting understandings of masculinity… Discipline was for generations the father’s domain, and righteous anger gave fatherhood meaning. A rage like Neeson’s could be justified as defining a family’s realm of acceptable behavior.

A few words on the absurdity of this:

I love Liam Neeson’s second act. It’s up there with Leslie Nielsen’s as maybe the most direct hit in discovering untapped camp potential so late into a distinguished career. Here’s a man who paid his dues — for God’s sake, he stayed in perfect deadpan for hours as Ralph Fiennes waved a full-on Colonel Klink accent at him in scene after scene of Schindler’s List — and just as the industry was about to scrap-heap him as a “serious” actor, he found box-office treasure as one of Hollywood’s great stock characters, the killing machine with a heart of gold.

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