The “fertility film”: a conservative trend in Hollywood?
There was a moment in the tumultuous wake of Juno, Waitress, and Knocked Up when it looked like the abortion movie was going to become a genre. Fortunately, it seems that Hollywood’s interest in pregnancy has expanded, and we are now in the season of the “fertility film” (Baby Mama, Smart People, Then She Found Me). This is good news for the conservative movie-goer for whom the question “Should I carry my baby to term?” is far less interesting than “What happens to my world when I do?”
If conservatives are happy, there’s money to be won betting that someone at Mother Jones isn’t, and in this case it’s Alissa Quart, who wonders if such an unequivocally rosy view of motherhood is good for women:
. . . the truth is that these films are rather conservative at heart; their entanglements all end far more neatly than their real life counterparts. Teen Juno’s existence fractures into ironic shards with her surrogacy, true, but then Juno gives her infant to an elegant single mom for adoption and all is well. In her fertility film, Helen Hunt’s later life motherhood may have led to uncomfortable issues about biological kinship, but these disruptions are then corrected by motherhood. Same goes for Parker in hers, where her strange romance is relieved of its indie-film angst by the birth of twins. [...] All of these films end with a love object, a baby that is superior in the eyes of many women than a man would be. In these films, the baby represents eternity and the possibility of absolute devotion. It’s a relationship that, unlike romantic love or marriage, female viewers are thought to believe in without sarcasm.
I’m not sure why Quart is unhappy about the move towards seeing mother- and fatherhood as redemptive, given that it moves us away from trying to charge romantic relationships with the burden of making overgrown adolescents man up (which was always a bad bet on our part). Movies are full of men who start out juvenile, sullen, self-absorbed, or humorless, only to fall into relationships with women who offer a promise of salvation. I’m not sure why; confrontation with the responsibilities of fatherhood seems to have more raw valence than “love of a good woman.”
Take Smart People, one of Quart’s “fertility flicks”: when Dennis Quaid finally decides that he’s ready to grow up, he signals his maturity by asking Sarah Jessica Parker to take him back. In an uncharitable reading, he’s now saddled her with the responsibility of building a romantic relationship magical enough to save his soul. At best, she’s the merit badge he gets for his redemption.
This is why the rise of the “fertility flick” is a good thing. No matter how much of a long shot it was, getting the girl isn’t miraculous enough to redeem anyone. Is Hollywood beginning to recognize that participating in the creation of a new life might be?
Comments
Fecund market for “fertility movies”? I think it’s more a matter of Hollywood chasing a moneymaking idea. If a baby movie makes money, there will be at least half-a-dozen baby movies in turnaround.
Nobody can accuse modern-day Hollywood of anything like originality or risk-taking.
What’s most amusing about this is the Alissa Quart (love that name!) review - fussing about whether such movies are “good for women.” Gotta be a lefty, this gal: She allows WAY too much influential power for movies and assumes a deeper, more valid intuition for herself. Sure, Alissa, you know what’s best: Women of America are just mindless, boinkin’ rodents, ready to squeeze out pups at the drop of some pants. Darn it, they need guidance from self-appointed visionaries and social critics like yourself.
But in this dimension of reality, the one with electrons, air-breathing mammals and wraparound shades, most viewers consider movies disposable gimcracks, throwaway diversions that have zip lasting impact or meaning in their lives.
...As it should be. (’Course, I’m referring to EVERYDAY people, not deep-end thinkers.)
This dispassion oddly is both antidote and fuel for our cultural imperialism, the global juggernaut that so entices and rots. If Coca-Cola, logo-printed T-shirts and Tom Cruise disappeared in the next minute, they would not be missed for long – if at all. American popular culture is so fun, so vibrant, so… IMMEDIATE especially because its underlying insignificance is universally recognized - dispatching any tension of importance.
Average Joes and Joans are not superficial because they consider their own, active pastimes crucial - and constantly presented, unsolicited “sideshows” unimportant. They are stronger because of that knowledge, however unacknowledged it may remain.
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A friend of mine watched Casablanca for the first time about a year ago and told me afterwards “Now I know what it means to have lived the first twenty years of my life in a post-Casablanca world.” I’m not sure that such a powerful moment of recognition makes sense if movies are only insignificant sideshows.
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Have you seen “Bella”?
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As wonderful a film as it is, the next 20 years of your friend’s life may put “Casablanca” in a more measured context. First-person experience has a way of doing that.
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I don’t know the plot of Baby Mama, but I’ve heard some conservatives praise the “pro-life message” of Knocked Up and Juno. I seem to take the opposite view. Most people who are pro choice are still very uncomfortable about abortion, and like to pretend like it doesn’t actually happen and is just an abstract right that they possess. Hence the mantra “safe, legal, and rare.” Thinking about the million plus abortions a year is something they’d like to avoid.
Movies like these help reinforce their delusion.
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Thank you, Miss Rittlemeyer, for your column today. I’m waiting for the movie that doesn’t turn childbirth into a circus-like, wacky comedy routine with sweaty mothers huffing and puffing while others “coach” her on to glory while she screams for an epidural and the doctor saves the day.
Marcus, most women who are pro-choice truly believe that most abortions are obtained by poor minority women who would not want nor care for their baby if it were to be born, and who suffer at the hands of abusive men preventing them from obtaining birth control that would eliminate the need for an abortion. When I tell them that most abortions are performed on white middle-class married women, they totally shut down and won’t hear it. Why is abortion still legal? Because white middle-class men and women wish it to be so. If it were truly a tool of the poor and minority, Roe v. Wade would have been repealed long ago. They also do not want to hear about the strong causal link between abortion and breast cancer and abortion and future infertility.
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I don’t know where you get your statistics. According to the CDC http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/figures/s609a1t1c.gif
whites only make up 54% of all abortions, and that includes hispanics 21.5% of white abortions, so non hispanic whites only account for 42.5% of all abortions.
It also says that 83% of abortions are to unmarried women.
I don’t know what percentage of white woman who get abortions are unmarried. Assuming % of marriage populations is the same across teh population, we’re talking about 8%. My guess is it may be a bit higher, but nonetheless, it’s a very small percentage of all abortions.
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looking at those statistics, I mistakenly thought the 21.5% of abortions that were hispanics were the percentage of white abortions, when it was the percentage of all abortions.
That means that whites make up less than a third of all abortions.
I know that Hispanics now make up 30% of all abortions, which suggests that in the last 4 years, that number has gone down even lower.
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The most memorable personal tale Ron Paul tells is of watching in horror as a medical resident at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-’60s, when a six-month-old aborted fetus was dumped “in a bucket in the corner of the room. The baby tried to breathe, and tried to cry, and everyone in the room pretended the baby wasn’t there.”
PRO CHOICE IS PRO MURDER!
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Re: last post. So what did Dr. Paul do? Just watch in horror? Or try to save the baby?
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