Solondz, women, and false relativism *SPOILER WARNING*
This started out as a reply to another thread, but I decided it deserves its own thread, instead, and it's somewhat more developed here. Spoilers are sprinkled throughout:
The "abortion --> hysterectomy" development is a major plot line in the film. However, because it's in keeping with movies' squeamishness with abortion (if a character has one, she has to "pay" for it in some way, by having emotional or physical anguish afterwards, even though the vast majority of women having abortions don't have those experiences) Solondz unfortunately has to play with reality in order to accomplish it.
The doctor is shown telling her parents that she had a hysterectomy done on her without her knowledge while she was under anesthesia from the abortion. She is shown waking up in the clinic, and her parents elect not to tell her, and as the movie progresses we see that she never finds out. But there are several reasons why this is impossible: 1) A hysterectomy is major surgery - the little storefront clinic Aviva is in would never have been able to perform it. She would have been transfered to a hospital. 2) Similarly, the recovery period for a hysterectomy is weeks long - Aviva would have been hospitalized for weeks, and there's no way she would not have noticed the pain she was in, or the surgical scar, or the fact that she was in a hospital. Yet in the movie she is shown walking out of the clinic the same day. 3) Even if you discount the first two reasons, Aviva would have noticed in the weeks and months afterwards that she was not getting her period, and therefore was incapable of getting pregnant. Yet we see her gamely trying to get pregnant with the trucker guy.
And yes, the film does play quite obviously with reality in other ways: chiefly the choosing of different actors and actresses to play Aviva at different stages. But the way abortion is portrayed is not on that realm: he's trying to say that this *is* the experience of abortion, and then with that as a foundation,(which has to be real in order for his argument to work), he then introduces other elements of the plot, and other fantastical elements, like Mama Sunshine and her kids, and the different actors.
So, even though the kind of complications of abortion as portrayed in the film are extremely rare (much more rare than complications of actual birth, by the way, especially for a 12-year-old like Aviva), Solondz chose to use this as his arc. Why? Is it fair to criticize him for distorting this complex phenomenon to its worst-case and most-rare scenario? Other people on this board would say no: that this is simply an artistic choice he's making, and it's done all the time in movies: movie psychiatrists are always twisted or tormented individuals, in movies, characters in labor always push out babies in record-breaking time, and have a much higher likelihood of having to be driven across the city by some nervous panicky driver, causing comic highjinks. So, is it fair to say that Solondz is being, himself, unfair, for employing a similar distortion here?
Yes. And here's why: the question of abortion is pretty damned central to women's status as human beings, and to their very survival: every country in which abortion is illegal has much higher maternal death rates, and all you have to do is check out stats by the World Health Organization to confirm this. It's a right women have fought long and hard to be able to gain, and in this country it's being attacked from all sides (and the movie did explore the way this is attacked, in the callous murder of abortion doctors -- although I wonder what Solondz is trying to say when the true tragedy is **SPOILER WARNING** that the bullet hits the child instead, implying that the real problem with murdering doctors is mainly that you might not succeed in killing your intended target?)
Anyway, I digress. Why do I say that it's unfair of Solondz to join on the bandwagon of how nearly every single movie, song, or TV show treats abortion? Abortion is treated, in these art forms, as either a) unspeakable, meaning, literally, the option is never mentioned even when the pregant woman is too young, too unstable, too selfish, etc, to have a baby; b) okay, you're allowed to say it's a woman's right, but only as long as you don't exercise it (see Sex and the City, Good in Bed, etc) or c) on the rare, rare occasion that a character has one, it has to leave her with emotional scars (Six Feet Under, Nine Lives) or physical scars (21 Grams) or destroy her fertility altogether (Palindromes). And yet, if women didn't have the right to have abortion, without fear or shame, it would be reducing them to slaves of their own bodies. This is a right that's fiercely under attack from people who don't even think women have the right to birth control. (Find me an anti-abortion organization that supports birth control, and I'll eat my hat. Not even "Feminists" for "Life" supports it.) And yet look how it gets eroded and attacked in the cultural sphere! To make my point, imagine if, in 1973, divorce had finally been made legal, and women's right to live with a husband of their choosing, rather than being forced by the government to remain married when they no longer wanted to be, had only just been granted. Now imagine that every movie that ever touched on the subject of divorce portrayed it as unspeakable, or a right that should never ever actually be exercised, or as something that will always scar a woman physically or emotionally! Not one movie in which a woman finally gets the courage to leave a stifling or abusive marriage and for whom divorce is a liberating thing.
If that were the case with movies about divorce, you would reasonably be able to draw several conclusions: 1) the movies were being dishonest, because that's not the actual experience of divorce in this country, and while divorce can be painful and terribly sad, it sometimes is exactly what is needed, especially when a one partner wants to control or even abuse the other partner; and 2) you'd also conclude that the question of women's liberation from bad marriages was not being treated fairly in films. You'd say: why is divorce always being shown as a horror, when it's shown at all? Are filmmakers trying to say that it's bad to be able to choose whether you stay married or not? And you'd, rightly, be pretty pissed. Well, that's what the situation is with abortion in movies and songs and TV -- the actual experience is distorted and twisted, and the sum total ends up saying some things about abortion that simply aren't true.
Back to Palindromes: The main tragedy in Aviva's life, as portrayed in the film, is not that she's a 12-year-old girl who has no other ambitions in life but to be a mother -- something which, societally, is a major, major problem. No, this is lost in the wave of horror Solondz gives her. The main problem isn't that he callously manipulated facts about biology to do it, although that's a sign that he's got an agenda. The main problem is this: Solondz wanted to make a film in which abortion, even when it's clearly the right choice (this girl is in no way mature enough to be a mother, and carrying the pregnancy to term is risky for a 12-year-old) is terribly harmful and turns the girl into a runaway, a murderer, a lost soul. She has a desire which is a sign of how young girls are devalued in this society -- again, think of how from a very young age she thinks that her only validation is to be a mother -- and yet, when she is saved from having her terrible wish fulfilled, that destroys her. Given the terrible things that happen to her as (Solondz argues) are a result of her abortion, it would've been better to have become a mother at age 12. Waaaait a minute -- what kind of a *beep*ing argument is that to make? Either a) Solondz agrees with that, which would cast a pretty bad light on whether he thinks women should aspire to be anything other than mothers, or b) what's more likely, he thinks both paths are equally *beep*ed up, and there's simply no hope at all for young girls like Aviva. Well, Solondz, abortion is not, in actual fact, worse than becoming a mother at age 12 because you think motherhood is your only value and you're tragically impatient to get there, because you think nothing else you could do with your young life is as good as that. (How many 12-year-old boys exist in the world who think that their only real value is as fathers? How many 12-year-old boys in the world sit making lists of their potential babies' names?)
It's not, as some reviewers and posters have said, that the film portrays "both sides" as equal. On closer look, here's what he says about the anti-abortion side: They are portrayed as people who, at their heart, have pretty good ideas, about caring for every child, no matter how disabled (look at Mama Sunshine and her array of children, and how loving and warm she is portrayed), and giving every fertilized egg a chance to become a baby. They are portrayed as people who would be good, if they weren't also hypocritical (meaning, not living up to an ideal that they should live up to) -- they judge Aviva as a "whore", and they are so misguidedly zealous in their desire to protect all zygotes that they kill doctors in the process. But, overall, they are portrayed as people whose moral core is basically good, and the tragedy is that they have strayed from it.
And the pro-choice side? Their only portrayal is Ellen Barkin, shown as being materialistic (it's as if there is no moral argument for not having a child when you don't want to, and the only arguments Solondz allows her to make are callous, shallow materialistic ones). And the ultimate effect of abortion is shown as being terrible. I'm sorry, but this is not only *not* even-handed, but Solondz ends up siding with, and portraying as morally superior, people who think women's role in society is principally to produce children!
And so, in what turned out to be a longer post than I meant, ultimately this movie is making a pretty backward argument about women, and hopes for any kind of liberating vision, and a pretty retrograde argument about abortion. He probably meant well, but he makes a fatal assumption to start with: he thinks that, since there are two sides to this argument, they both must be equally wrong and equally right. Not always, Solondz -- there are "two sides" to the debate over whether Black people are intellectually inferior, and there are "two sides" to the debate over whether global warming exists or it's just some strange invention by thousands upon thousands of scientists. But those "two sides" are ... right, and wrong. It's the same here.
On a societal level, the two visions for women are *not* equal. Taking away a woman's right to abortion is the forceful reassertion of male domination -- this is not "moral"!! This vision of women's role in society states that women should not have the right to birth control and abortion, which can only mean that whenever they engage in sex, they do so with the fear that they will again get pregnant. (For those who dismiss what a real tragedy this is, check out this link, to a blog of someone who is trying to reconcile Christian views on birth control with their desire to not have any more painful and problematic pregnancies. http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/02/18/a-christian-man-considers-contraception/
What view of women is expressed in not allowing women to prevent pregnancy? )
The other side thinks that women should have the right to decide when they have sex, with whom, and that when they do engage in sex, they have the right to have birth control, because they have the right to enjoy sex without paying for it with pregnancy. It also says that once women do become pregnant, it would be wrong to force them to remain so, because that would be violating the autonomy of their bodies.
It would have been a far better film if, rather than sticking to stereotypes, on all sides, and false claims of moral equivalency, he would have had the courage to go deeper. What if he had focused on the question: why is it that a young woman is willing to risk her life, her future, her whole selfhood, for the sake of having a baby? What kind of world is this, if this is what goes on? Who in society thinks that's just as it should be, and who in society wants to change it? Is it possible to change this? Why or why not?
Thoughts?