Letters to the Editor
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We are a nation of infants
There are certain things that movies cannot address without ruining their chances to make money. One of them is abortion. If the word "abortion" is associated with your film, you'd better be aiming toward the indie market or some DVD genre niche.
There are 3 ways for a filmmaker to deal with abortion:
(1) Clearly pro-choice. Poof, there goes 1/2 your audience. Bye bye audience.
(2) Clearly pro-life. Poof, there goes a different 1/2 of your audience. Bye bye audience.
(3) Taking no particular stand. Poof, you just pissed off both sides. Or confused them.
Case in point: Alexander Payne's film "Citizen Ruth," from around 1997 (I think). This is the only film Payne has made that has not made oodles of money. Its lead actress, Laura Dern, should have won an Oscar for her insanely great performance, but nobody saw the film. Why? Because it's about two sides of an abortion battle, who each seize on a paint-huffing loser's unwanted pregnancy as a focal point for their respective causes.
Average Joe Filmgoer: "Hey, wanna see 'Citizen Ruth'?"
Average Joe Filmmgoer's friend: "What's it about?"
Average Joe Filmgoer: "Something to do with abortion. Apparently it's a comedy."
Average Joe Filmgoer's friend: "Ummmm....let's see Ace Ventura Pet Detective 4: Which Pup Pooped? instead!"
It didn't used to be this way. In the 1980s all sorts of films were dealing with unpleasant topics. As somebody noted, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" involved an abortion (a scene that was handled well -- neither preachy nor completely lightheartedly, just as it might really happen).
Note also that there's an episode of the TV sitcom "Three's Company" that revolves around an abortion misunderstanding. Krissy (Suzanne Sommers) has a wart on her hand, and talks to her roommates about having it removed. Mr. Roper (or is it Furley?) hears the conversation through a door, and thinks they're talking about terminating a pregnancy. The confusing goes on and on until the craaaaazy ending.
In the 1970s and part of the 1980s, films had more guts. People suffered real consequences for their sexual hook-ups. People got veneral diseases. Show me one movie in the 2000's about young people that directly addresses that HPV and herpes are a fact of life for over 50% of sexually active adults. Show me one major movie in the 2000's where a character ends up getting an abortion.
Even homosexuality is a much more grave subject than it used to be. In the 1980s gay characters were no big deal. "Revenge of the Nerds" had a gay nerd who hung out with the only child nerd, and nobody really made an issue of it, because it was a comedy or something. Nowadays if you have a movie about gays, it has to be all important and emblematic like "Brokeback Mountain," where the characters suffer and are misunderstood and confused the whole time.
So in sum: Abortion, venereal disease, unusual sexuality, and anything else "weird" must be hush-hush in a movie world where commerce completely trumps art, and where a nation of infantile, overly sensitive audiences, who demand "family" films at the same time they gladly overlook the mass slaughter of Iraq families in the name of U.S. political interests, force their strident yet inconsistent set of ever-shifting non-principles on the increasingly desperate media.
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I think Knocked Up treats abortion in a refreshingly subtle way
It's unfair to say the film avoids Alison's decision to not have an abortion, though that decision is made off-screen. One of the film's best moments is the scene where Alison cries uncontrollably in her sister's OB-GYN's office after seeing her ultrasound. The doctor is oblivious, though the audience is not, to Alison's clearly mixed feelings about being pregnant.
When Alison and Ben discuss it on the phone, she tells him that she has decided to continue the pregnancy. The implication seemed clear enough to me: she considered having an abortion. The happiness Ben expresses at this can be read either as Ben's implicit anti-abortion bias (though I did not see it this way), or as his sincere happiness (I believe it was also in th NY Times review that addresses the fervent desire of the Apatow male arch-type to mature, he just needs some kind of impetus).
Anther letter writer wisely pointed out that we know going in to the movie that she's not going to have an abortion (indeed, a comedic drama called Knocked Up would have a hard time making that plot point a suspenseful one, and the movie is already over 2 hours long). Since we know it's a nonstarter, Apatow and the cast are right to dispense with it quickly, but I think it's to their credit that they do it with some nuance.
There's a well-intentioned, but misguided, idea in pro-choice rhetoric that the decision to have an abortion gets made only after a woman has weighed it against the options of carrying the pregnancy to term and/or placing for adoption (curiously, the decision to have a child in this rhetoric is never made have carefully weighing an abortion). I've done no longitudinal studies on the subject, but I worked for several years as an abortion clinic counselor. What I saw was that the reality for a lot of women, which Knocked Up gets right, is that some options are ruled out before they're considered.
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how can you have sex and NOT think, at least in some part of your mind
i could be making a baby. true, you use contraception, but that could fail. what if it does? i think you should be prepared to "set up shop" and love that baby, woman/man - but that's just me, don't pounce on me with both feet.
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KO Doesn't Omit Abortion--It Demonizes It.
I think it's a bit disingenous to talk so much about Dana Stevens without quoting the most important part of her second piece:
"I didn't discuss a brief scene in which Alison's mother brings up the subject at lunch (though if memory serves, the mother never uses the word, either—instead, she euphemizes about "taking care of" the situation). ,,,the lunch scene discredits the mother's moral standing. When the mother (Joanna Kerns, who played the mother on TV's Growing Pains) goes on to tell Alison the story of an acquaintance who had an abortion and later went on to have a "real baby," the subtext is clear: Here is a woman who doesn't value human life. Why should we care about her opinion?"
When I saw Knocked Up, people in the theater gasped during that scene at the mother's callous hatefulness. By aligning the "pro-choice" position with that nasty, insensitive, shrewish (and female) character, the movie is actively anti-choice.
I think it's interesting that so many allegedly pro-choice women can't admit this fact. Maybe they share Apatow's "abortion is necessary but I condemn people who go through with it" mentality.
Also interesting that Tracy omitted the fact the Dana Stevens referred to her own abortion in her piece today.