From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
What It's All About
Hollywood now handles abortion with breezy self-righteousness. It didn't use to.
Who knows what drives Hollywood to make movies in little thematic clusters? Something starts to itch in the back of various minds, scripts get written, investors pitch in, film is shot and presto: A year or two later, or even a decade, three Vietnam flicks come out within months of each other. The same diffused gestation presumably accounts for the occasional outbreaks of sandals-and-toga epics. Just lately--with the release of "Alfie," Mike Leigh's "Vera Drake" and the coming "Palindrome," starring Ellen Barkin--the zeitgeist is whispering "abortion."
And whisper is probably the right word. Abortion is a Big Powerful Subject if ever there was one. But we are talking about movies here, and just as there is really only one kind of Vietnam film--the definitive right-war-in-the-right-place-at-the-right time drama has yet to be made--so, too, there is really only one kind of abortion drama that post-Roe v. Wade Hollywood permits, and that is one that ultimately endorses use of the procedure.
Take "Alfie" (which, even if you are a happily married Security Mom, you might wish to do, given the beauty of Jude Law in the starring role). In contrast to the original 1966 "Alfie," in which Michael Caine played a cruel destroyer, Mr. Law is a charming Cockney swordsman thrusting and parrying his way through Manhattan womanhood. In one of many fertile subplots, a pregnancy ensues. When in the same predicament, the original Alfie procures a gruesome illegal abortion for his mistress and dissolves in anguish when confronted with the reproductive consequences of sex. It "brings it home to you what you are when you see a helpless little thing like that lying in your hands," Alfie says.
In the remake, neither Alfie nor the woman raises any other solution than the "safe, legal and rare" one, so off they go to a clinic. The scene takes perhaps two minutes and has the emotional wallop of a pharmaceutical ad. It's just as NARAL/Pro-Choice America would want it: Keep your judgmentalism off her body, man. Looming far larger in the "Alfie" remake is the hero's, er, sword of seduction. It goes flaccid. It may be diseased! Cliffhanger! Memento mori! The triviality would make you weep if the film weren't itself so trivial. An unplanned baby means a quick trip to the clinic, but an endangered penis? Now that is distressing. That is cause for soft-focus soul-searching.
"Vera Drake" is a more solemn film and takes abortion and its toll much more seriously. This seriousness is surely due to both the maturity of its director and to the era in which it is set, the socially stratified Britain of 1950, when the unborn were still protected under quaint Victorian law. As in "Alfie," however, the audience is asked to accept that abortion is the obvious solution for the unhappily pregnant. The film's chief objections are that rich women abort in more comfortable and sanitary environs, which is obviously unfair, and that unlike male doctors, with their smooth talk and oak-paneled offices, working-class abortionists like Vera risk going to prison.
How differently abortion was handled in films before 1973, when birth control was new, abortion was illegal and most people still had retrograde habits of associating bed-hopping with baby-making. In 1963's "Love With the Proper Stranger," we learn in the opening scenes that Natalie Wood is pregnant with Steve McQueen's child after a brief and, for him, forgotten encounter. From that moment on, as they try to find an abortionist, there is a sense of portent, of a clock ticking, of what they freely call "the baby" growing. And suspended between these two virtual strangers is the possibility of what could be and their awareness that families and love could make it happen--that extinguishing their child is not the only conceivable outcome.
Given what a towering source of anguish abortion has been for the country, both before and after Roe, it is surprising how seldom Hollywood has taken up the subject. Until this latest litter of flicks, the only prominent one was "The Cider House Rules" (1999), in which Michael Caine played an abortionist-as-hero. (Hollywood loved that one: two Academy Awards!) What is striking, but not surprising, about films that do tackle abortion is how the "products of conception" end up having no claim on the audience's sympathy. They're like so many extraneous scenes left on the cutting-room floor. Perhaps expending screen time on what--or who--might have been would clog the narrative, and anyway, what a drag.
Better to touch on the melancholy and physical suffering of the adults. Better yet to cast any such suffering in solipsistic terms that will be pleasantly painful for the audience while not forcing anyone to think too hard about what, exactly, was aborted. Thus the new Alfie, jogging to keep warm as he waits outside the clinic, muses: "I find myself having regrets. Here's another kid you'll never get to know--your own." I, me, mine, you, and yours but, er, what about the kid?
There is an unexpected answer to that, in the case of Alfie, so if you plan to see the remake and want every scintilla of surprise, stop reading right now. It happens that, once inside the clinic, the pregnant woman, who is black, decides not to have an abortion--though she doesn't tell Alfie--and he learns that he is a father only months later. Yet it is not exactly a pro-life moment when he does.
In the film's most unintentionally chilling line, with the baby gurgling right in front of us, the mother explains that she spared the child because there was a chance it might have belonged not to Alfie but to her dark-skinned boyfriend. Alas, the baby is born a tell-tale light brown. The audience is invited to see how much happier these three adults would have been if the infant had been made to disappear.
The next best thing is to declare the baby an Unperson, and in this regard the main character in "Vera Drake" practically embodies our euphemistic post-Roe society. Kindly Vera "helps young girls in trouble" in a way that will cause them "pain down below," some days after which "it all comes away." At one point an anguished young woman asks what Vera means by this last phrase. Vera smiles brightly; she will not elaborate. It seems that she does not let herself think beyond her merciful acts to their grisly conclusion, rather as terms such as "pro-choice" cast abortion as something positive.
Now, one probably shouldn't make too much of any of this. These are movies, not Talmudic scrolls, and are a reliable expression less of American culture than of the half-dozen or so creative minds involved in writing and directing them.
Still, it is worth noting that the moral qualms that make it to the big screen are unfailingly those of people who favor abortion. "Vera Drake," for example, is more concerned with inequities between social classes, and between men and women, than between strong adults and the defenseless young. Oh, there is nuance: Tears roll down cheeks, brows furrow and adults gaze off mistily into the middle distance. But they are not the pangs of conscience experienced by those who consider abortion to be a kind of killing and who also care for the welfare of vulnerable women. It would take a countercultural producer with a brave heart, and a passion for the subject, who is willing to madly max out his bank account to make such a film.
Too bad there is no one like that in Hollywood. Or is there?
Mrs. Gurdon writes "The Fever Swamp" for National Review Online.
