There's a little trend in movie-making these days that the New York Times helpfully pointed out in this Sunday's Style section: abortion is a no-show in movie plots. Two movies, especially that deal with pregnancy skip the topic entirely: Waitress -- about a cute woman with a no-good husband who goes through with the pregnancy even though she's plotting to leave the guy -- and Knocked Up, about a woman who ends up pregnant after a signal encounter with -- from what I read in the reviews -- a comically unsuitable mate. Keeping the man is the quandary of this movie plot, not whether to terminate the pregnancy.
The last time I remember abortion being front and center in a movie was Dirty Dancing, and the woman almost dies as a result. And it's a side-plot that tangentially affects the heroine. No, the message definitely is: nice girls don't have abortions in the movies. The Style section piece points out that abortion is treated more realistically on the independent film scene, according to Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival,
as do other difficult themes like drug addiction, incest, even infanticide, most recently in “Stephanie Daley,” about a teenager accused of murdering her newborn.
Ouch. Abortion being equated to infanticide and incest? And yah, I get that if the topic of the movie is pregnancy, having an abortion ends the plot pretty fast. But it's a pretty sad thing when the so-called values of the religious right have so permeated our culture we can't even have abortion as a side note in a plot device.
2 comments:
While I sincerely appreciate and can get behind your stance on the issue at hand, I really think you come at your arguement without all the pertinent information. To wit, I know that you have seen "Dirty Dancing" and "Waitress". But, as of last night [6-11-07] you had not seen "Knocked Up". I think that, in order to lend as much credibility to your opinion as possible, you should have viewed all the films discussed.
Furthermore...
Don't get me wrong. I am as pro-choice as any homegrown, forward-thinking San Franciscan is likely to be. But to call a small “spike” of 2 movies, which deal with the unwanted pregnancy issue, a trend is a little alarmist. In your entry, you mention the subplot of a ‘hush-hush” abortion in “Dirty Dancing”. But remember “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”? Remember when a young Jennifer Jason Leigh had to go to the doctor alone because the jerk that “knocked her up” didn’t have the courage to take her. What about the troubled Linda Fiorentino in “Dogma”? She worked as a nurse at a heavily protested abortion clinic, which made for a balanced discussion of religion and social issues. Or… What of the secret abortion that Toby Macguire’s character is asked to perform on Charlize Theron in rural New England in the 1940’s – a procedure that he learned from an avuncular doctor played by Michael Caine.
But I digress… I guess what I am saying is that two movies on a particular subject do not a trend make. In addition, one can certainly argue that, over the past decade, there have been plenty of movies taking on the subject of choice. One can only hope that there will be a trend of baby-kidnapping films starring Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage.
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