Incarcerated by Mussolini for Communist activities, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) had plenty of time to wonder why workers around the world had not embraced Marxism. In his Prison Notebooks, he concludes that proletarian revolt was restrained by "cultural hegemony," multiple institutions in society reinforcing the values that buttress capitalism. Influenced by Gramsci, Louis Althusser (1918-1990) called such institutions Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), arguing that ISAs control not only the way people act but also how they think about their very identities. In his list of multiple ISAs—religion, politics, education, art, the media—Althusser includes the family.

Family is the subject of The Fighter, released in December 2010 and nominated for multiple awards. Filled with stunning performances, the film functions as a foil to Althusser, in both senses of foil: something that reflects as well as something that deflects. Based on the true story of a family living in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the 1990s, The Fighter is pitched as a boxing-triumph movie. Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) surmounts multiple setbacks in order to win an international boxing match. Ho hum.

But in fact the film offers much more. Micky is not the only fighter. His half-brother, Dicky (the astonishing Christian Bale), became "The Pride of Lowell" when he knocked down boxing great Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978. Now a shadow of his former self, Dicky shadow-boxes in a crack-house, knocking down people who get in his way. Rather than punches, the brothers' mother, Alice, throws dishes and a frying pan at George, Micky's father. And her seven adult daughters get in a hair-pulling cat-fight with Micky's new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams). Though this bellicose behavior can be credited to gritty working-class conditions (a vulgarity reflected in the film's raw dialogue), all the fights center around one issue: the control of Micky's boxing career. The film, then, is about hegemony, each fighter presuming to know what's best for Micky: it focuses more on conflict outside the ring than inside as competing "loved ones" summon Micky to endorse their vision for success.

Althusser argues that ISAs "summon" individuals to act a certain way. He calls this summoning "interpellation," a word related to "appellation": the name by which one is called. Think, for example, of a mother who calls out her children's full names—first, middle, and last—when summoning them to obedience. Alice, the mother in The Fighter, has given her second son an appellation that rhymes with that of her first, hoping that Micky might echo Dicky's former success. Positioning herself as her younger son's manager, Alice thus interpellates Micky to rhyme with Dicky. And her seven scary-haired daughters endorse her assumption that Dicky will be his trainer. Ironically, Micky announces early in the film that "The next fight is going to show who I am!" This reinforces Althusser's point: even when someone thinks he freely chooses his identity, he fails to realize how much his "subjectivity" has been subjected to the interpellations of family.

Like Gramsci, Althusser does not attribute hegemony to only one cultural power. Other state apparatuses besides family summon us. Think, for example, of television advertisements that call out to us, seeking to sway our behavior: "You deserve a break today"; "It's all for you!"; "Be all that you can be!" For Althusser, television interpellates behavior as much as family does. So it seems quite fitting that The Fighter begins with the filming of a television documentary about Dicky. Staring into the camera, Dicky announces that his brother will follow in his footsteps and become the next "Pride of Lowell." Micky then joins him on the couch, visually symbolizing how Dicky summons Micky to follow his lead. We soon see the camera follow Dicky on the street with Micky walking several steps behind as though to follow in his glory—a point reinforced when Alice later tells the television crew that "Micky used to follow Dicky everywhere." Dicky, in fact, tells people that HBO is making the documentary about his own "comeback," even though Micky is the one training to fight. We therefore question how much the camera controls what Dicky says, his presentation of self and brother shaped by the apparatus that films him.

The false consciousness generated by family and television becomes clear halfway through The Fighter, when the television crew reveal that their documentary is not about Dicky's "comeback" but about his fall into cocaine addiction. The fall is literalized when Dicky twice jumps out of the second-story window of his crack-house and falls into a bin of garbage. Both jumps are in response to his mother's knock at the crack-house door, as she summons him to train Micky.

The film echoes Alice twice knocking for Dicky with Charlene twice knocking for Micky. Unusually long takes of the knocking at Micky's door force us to consider whether Micky is also being summoned away from addiction. His drug, of course, is family, who set up well-paying, unfair matches in which he gets clobbered. Not wanting to be seen in Lowell after a recent defeat, Micky takes Charlene out of town to see Belle Epoque, a foreign film that puts him to sleep. Charlene's disgust about both family and film makes us realize that Micky is addicted to the belle epoque of Dicky's past: a past he cannot reenact.

Micky pronounces "I'm quitting" only when Dicky is incarcerated—for larcenous attempts to raise money in order to "train" Micky year-round. The film dissolves an image of Micky over Dicky's jail cell, as though alluding to Micky's imprisonment by the family's expectations. When we next see Dicky in the agonies of cocaine withdrawal in his cell, we sense that Micky must go through his own withdrawal.

But how can one withdraw from the power of family? This question underlies the scene in The Fighter when HBO broadcasts its documentary about Dicky's demise. The film intercuts Micky's viewing with that of his mother and sisters, along with shots inside the jail, where prisoners cheer for a swaggering Dicky as their screening of the documentary begins. Significantly, The Fighter relates all three television viewings to the next generation. First we see a traumatized Alice remove Dicky's four-year-old son from the room; then we watch Micky call his ex-wife to request that their daughter, Kasey, not see the documentary; and finally we witness the increasingly appalled Dicky pull the plug on the television after his child appears in a shot. When the prisoners protest, Dicky justifies his actions by saying, "That's my son." The montage makes us wonder how extensively the sins of the fathers will be visited onto the children. Or, to use the language of Althusser, we wonder whether it is possible to escape the hegemonic interpellations of family.

Althusser thought not—so much so that fellow Marxists became disturbed by his elimination of human agency. In response, cultural materialist Raymond Williams (1921-1988) suggested that "residual" values might enable resistance to cultural hegemony and hence "emergent" change. The Fighter first alludes to "residual" values during the HBO montage. As Micky watches degrading footage of Dicky, we see a huge wooden cross—the sign of redemption—on the wall between him and the television. When he tries to redeem his daughter from the documentary, however, his ex-wife tells him that Kasey needs to see "who you are." Like Althusser, she assumes that Micky's subjectivity—who he is—is confined (as in prison) by the interpellations of family.

Charlene, in contrast, opts to believe in redemption. Her second knock at Micky's door comes immediately after the documentary, when she offers him unconditional love. And the very next shot shows Dicky kneeling in prayer—the first of two times in jail that he knocks at the gates of Heaven. What follows seems to be the door opening: Micky returns to a gym whose owner once told him, "Let go and let God." Allowing "residual" values to guide him, Micky becomes an "emergent" boxing phenomenon. He succeeds, however, because he weighs the advice of all around him, including that of Dicky from jail. And when he wins his first of many matches, he kneels in prayer in the boxing ring, as though acknowledging the summons of a Higher Power. What follows is Dicky's true "comeback," when (unlike Gramsci) he is released from prison and continues to pray.

This is not to suggest that The Fighter is a family-friendly (!) Christian film. But because the filmmakers consulted the real Dicky and Micky (who chat with the film camera during the closing credits just as Bale's Dicky and Wahlberg's Micky chatted with the HBO camera at the film's start), we might assume that residual values from the brothers' Irish Catholic background inflect the narrative. The film thus reverses the trajectory of the HBO documentary within it. Inside the crack-house (where Alice knocks), we discovered the documentary is about Dicky's fall rather than "comeback." But inside Micky's house (where Charlene knocks after the documentary), we discover the Cross: a sign of comeback from the Fall. Contra Althusser, those summoned by the Cross believe in freedom of choice: to jump out a window or open the door to one who knocks.

Crystal Downing is professor of English and film studies at Messiah College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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