Big-screen scenes of childbirth go well beyond giving you cramps. They're enough to make you want to get your tubes tied.
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As a kid, I often had to reassure my friend Paula Zaretsky in the middle of one of our regular Saturday matinee excursions. When-ever a pregnant woman came on-screen, she would gasp and say. "Uh-oh, uh-oh." Paula would later grow up to know more about sex than either Masters or Johnson, but she was still naive at this point and those waddling women made her jumpy. I would tell her that everything was going to be just fine. Because, really, what could go wrong?
Remember how childbirth used to be in the movies? The menfolk would gather outside the bedroom, smoking pipes, looking distressed, patting each other on the shoulder with resignation. The doctor would come rushing in looking a bit puzzled, as if he hadn't done this kind of thing too many times (this worried me, too). Women would be recruited to bring boiling water and clean towels. "They're making soup,'' I told Paula with some authority.
Brief screams of agony would be heard coming from the bedroom. Then there would be an infant's cry, a quick cut to the relieved papa, and the smiling, sweating doctor would come out of the inner sanctum to confirm the good news: "It's a boy." (It's just about always a boy. A girl, presumably, wouldn't be worth all this brouhaha.) Then there'd be the scene of the parents staring with wonderment at their beautiful newborn (ever see a newborn?). Finally, the soup was carried down-stairs--to be eaten for dinner, I figured.
These halcyon days ended when Paula and I sneaked into Otto Premingers extravaganza The Cardinal in 1963, an event that traumatized us for life. For those of you who have forgotten this classic, let me recap. Tom Tryon, the oldest son of an Irish Catholic clan that wants nothing more than to have their boy become a priest--no, not just a priest, a Bishop--comes home from his studies in Rome to find his adored sister Carol Lynley in love with a Jew. Needless to say, he interferes, and as a direct result Lynley (1) runs away with a Flamenco dancer, (2) gets knocked up and (3) winds up in a whorehouse. When Tom comes to her rescue, she is. despite having what seems to be a perfectly flat stomach, in labor. At the hospital the doctor comes out with the bad news: "Her pelvic structure's abnormally small. The child's head is unusually large. Normal delivery is impossible. I'll need your permission to do a fetal craniotomy. We have to crush the child's head."
Go ahead, read that again. Her pelvic structure is too small? The child's head is too large? These are possibilities? Paula ran to the bathroom to puke. I stayed for the even worse news to come: Either the mom or the baby has to go, and Tom is the one who is supposed to decide for his sister who it will be. You've already guessed the outcome, right? To kill the baby would be a sin, so the sister has to die in agony. This is a possibility?
For years, Paula and I would look at little babies, trying to decipher whether their heads were the right size. We'd give their mothers knowing and solicitous looks. Mean-while, birth control pills came on the market, and Paula and I started taking them before we ever even had sex. To this day I am certain that all those people who attribute the declining birth rate among educated women of my generation to modern birth control are missing the point. It was movies like The Cardinal that stunted the growth of our maternal instincts.
Why am I even thinking about these things at the moment? I'll tell you why: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While I was to see many hair-raising birth scenes in the movies over the years--more on this later--it was last November's trip to see Kenneth Branagh's opus that truly unleashed my repressed memories and prompted me to put all this into perspective.
Very early in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the teenage Victor's mother gives birth (it's a boy) in a scene that looks like an outtake from Freddy Krueger in the Age of Enlightenment. Seated upright in what seems to be a precursor to the electric chair, Mrs. Frankenstein dies splattered in blood after being, apparently, drawn and quartered in an attempt to bring another badly needed boy into the world. Oddly enough, Branagh, playing the horrified teenage Victor, looks about the same age as his mother. Leaving that aside, consider that Victor's father, the poor wretch's husband, just happens to be the attending obste-trician and proceeds to "deliver" the baby with his shirt off, as if fully expecting the bloodbath he ends up drenched in. Just one more thing about the 1800s to make you glad you live in the age of potential nuclear holocaust.
All this occurs at the beginning of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and ostensibly provides the motivation for Victor to create a monster by borrowing an ear from this corpse, a rib section from that one. I myself didn't get the connection. At any rate, Victor is soon seen with a bucket in hand under a woman whose water has just broken (she's in one of those pre-electric chairs, too), so he can gather up the precious amniotic fluid he needs to perpetrate the most ghastly birth scene in memory. The monster (supposedly played by Robert De Niro, but I'd swear it's Jim Belushi under all that stuff) comes gushing out of his birth chamber screaming, writhing in slime and getting progressively pissed off at his creator.
I figure a whole new generation of girls has been put off childbirth by Branagh's film just as Paula and I were by Otto Preminger's.
To be fair, though, Branagh's crime is merely one of the more outrageous in a long line of similar cinematic offenses. Somehow, when I see childbirth presented realistically in public television documentaries on the wonders of life, I don't cringe in horror at what are, admittedly, daunting biological displays. Only when Hollywood takes it upon itself to dramatize the miracle of birth do I wish I were dead. Women don't just die in childbirth--their insides get ripped out. They can't make do with routine deliveries--they have breech births, babies choking on umbilical cords, babies with gigantic heads!
Let's get back to the '60s, the decade that picked up on the promise of the much earlier Gone With the Wind with its famous "I don't know nuthin' 'bout birthin' no babies" birth event. In Hawaii (1966), Julie Andrews, who had previously lifted our spirits with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, plays the wife of dour missionary Max von Sydow, who takes her to live among the heathens he wants to convert. Julie is sassy and sweet and everybody loves her, even though Max makes them all cover up and quit being so happy. When Julie begins to give birth you can only imagine that everything's going to be hunky-dory, since she has, after all, saved deformed babies from being buried alive by the carefree Hawaiians. Julie lies there, belly flat, looking strong and ready for anything. Max won't let the island midwives in because he knows that they're pagans and can do it better by himself. Julie starts to experience a lot of pain, and she's sweating and panting like Jim Belushi. Then she starts to yell, "What's wrong with the baby?" Julie shrieks. Her husband tells her that the baby is in the dreaded breech position, and all Julie can do is yell and cry far a really long time. Fade to black. When we come back, Max is holding the kid aloft, smiling and saying, "It's a boy," as if it was he who accomplished something akin to passing a bowling ball out the end of his penis. We find out that the mid-wives, according to custom, would have killed the baby, proving they're no Catholics. Julie goes on to have more kids, but at least we don't have to watch. Max proceeds to champion laws forbidding booze and sex, which, under the circumstances, does not seem so unreasonable. Hawaii, the island, has never fully recovered.
Rosemary's Baby (1968), which may, come to think of it, have been on some metaphorical level about the fear engendered in women by seeing films like The Cardinal and Hawaii, concerns the maternity adventures of a young Catholic woman played by Mia Farrow. Mia and her husband, John Cassavetes, move into the spooky old Dakota building in Manhattan and befriend the creepy Sidney Blackmer and his wife Ruth Gordon, who keeps bringing over chalky desserts. After eating one of Gordon's mousses, Farrow passes out and dreams she's making love to a monster while her husband and the neighbors look on. This is probably the kind of thing that happens in the Dakota all the time--after all, it has been home to everyone from Lauren Bacall to Yoko Ono to Rex Reed. Farrow gets pregnant, and instead of turning chubby and radiant, she grows ghastly pale, gets dark circles under her eyes, and loses so much weight she looks like she'll end up giving birth to a tiny white mouse. Instead of pick-les and ice cream she takes to eating raw meat. And why not, since it's the progeny of the devil inside her. Just as she's about to go into labor, Mia figures out who the dad really is, but nobody believes her (shadows of things to come decades later) and when she starts to give birth, the devil worshipers tie her arms and legs to the bedposts, drug her and bring in dozens more devil worshipers to grab at her breasts while chanting witchy lyrics. Mia passes out, and when she wakes up they tell her the baby's dead. She soon learns better. Sidney Blackmer refrains from announcing, "It's a boy!" saying instead, "He has his father's eyes. Hail Satan!"
Less believable than Rosemary's Baby, and yet a relief from the usual childbirth agonies, is the classic 1980 remake of The Blue Lagoon--in which, you recall, two little cousins get shipwrecked without benefit of adult supervision and grow up to be Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. (Chris is the one in the large diaper; Brooke has her hair glued to her breasts.) They figure out how to have sex, and before long Chris finds Brooke squatting by a tree, howling. They don't know what's going on, and he keeps asking, "What can I do?" but Brooke can't answer, and all of a sudden a baby plops out on the ground. It's a boy.
But back to the real world. Remember the '86 remake of The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis? Even before David Cronenberg created the Jeremy Irons/Jeremy Irons twin obstetricians in Dead Ringers he filmed a memorable childbirth scene that addressed every woman's worst fear. No, not having Jeff Goldblum's child, though that's high on the list. I'm talking about, yes, having a not-quite-a-baby. When scientist Goldblum gets in his transporter accidentally with a fly and starts growing hair on his back, walking on the ceiling and throwing up on his food before he eats it, his girl-friend Geena sagely opts for an abortion. Except, uh-oh, they didn't get it right, and soon Geena is push, push, pushing until she fights and tries to get off the table. Then, something that resembles a large, insufficiently cooked pork roast comes shooting out of her. The doctors hold it up for her approval. Ahhhhhhhh-hhhhhhh! Oh wait, that was all just a bad dream. Whew, what a relief. Thanks, David, That was really fun.
Maybe it was this scene from The Fly the filmmakers behind last year's Angie were thinking of when they cast Davis as the star of that film. She spends most of the movie pregnant, listening to her friends' stories about leaking breasts, water retention, and a woman who pushed so hard she took a crap on the delivery (able. (Which is a lot better than having to hear about the joys of natural childbirth in my opin-ion.) Angle's delivery is a nightmare. Her doctor is a midget and needs a step stool to see her vagina; she's screaming, "I'm dying... give me drugs!" while her friends and nurses urge her to sing "One" from A Chorus Line. Finally, she delivers a baby. Yes, it's a boy.
Remember Paula? Well, Paula isn't stupid, so she never saw most of the movies just discussed. She got pretty good at checking out what movies contained scenes that might cause her to regress to the days of Carol Lynley and Tom Tryon. But who on earth would guess she had any-thing to fear from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for chrissake? True, if it were just any movie starring Kevin Costner, you might consider the plot possibility of his fathering a baby whose head is too large. But he's playing Robin Hood! There's nothing around him but the Merry Men and Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Paula called me up and told me she'd rather get another Dalkon shield than ever have to see this movie again. It turns out there are Merry Women in this Robin Hood. And one of them goes into labor in Sherwood Forest and the baby turns out to be in the breech position, Morgan Freeman, Robin's Moorish buddy, offers to help, and though the Merry People don't trust him, what's the alternative? Let Kevin Costner help? Freeman has apparently had some experience with mares in the Holy Land, and he brings the Merry Woman through the grueling experience. It's a boy, and they pass him around the crowd like he's a chocolate cake at Thanksgiving dinner.
I suppose the most appalling childbirth scene of all must be Arnold Schwarzenegger's in last year's Junior. But since I, like a lot of other people, it seems, know better than to see films about pregnant men, I wouldn't know.
For my money, the most appalling childbirth scene of all occurred in Bring On the Night. Michael Apted's documentary of that genius/humanitarian Sting, in which Sting and then girlfriend Trudie Slyter present us with the birth of the Son of a Rock Star. Since I wasn't so sure I even wanted to hear Sting's music, I found it amazing they were so sure I'd want to see his child born. Trudie wanders around, belly out to here, talking about how lighthearted Sting is now that he's grown up and left the Police (this was in '85). She points to her crotch and tells the director exactly where the baby's head has already "engaged." Right after Sting's first performance with his new band, Trudie goes into labor, and an exhausted Sting goes with her to the hospital. There, Sting nervously watches the fetal monitor as Trudie sweats in the stirrups. Finally, the doctor pulls the baby out and lays him (It's a boy!) on Trudie's belly while he washes away the slime. Sting is crying self-consciously, rubbing Trudie's thighs and head, for once in his life out of words. Later, he will say, "It was bloody and profound," but maybe he meant. "It was bloody profound." Is that just too precious for words? This is what the movies are really about: a private tender moment with the one you love.
I know there are many women out there who managed to overcome the trauma of seeing the same movies I saw as a preteen. Even so, I think that the whole trend of natural childbirth is the product of perverse psycho-logical denial of what women learned about childbirth from movies like The Cardinal, Instead of avoiding pregnancy like the plague so they'll never have to die giving birth to a baby bigger than they are, they embraced the whole excruciating process and pretended it was a deliriously beautiful experience to be in agony for hours and hours without resorting to any of modern medicine's painkillers. But surely some women out there identified with the sentiments of Look Who's Talking. Single mom Kirstie Alley quits her Lamaze class and is scared to death by the thought of giving birth. Her contractions are killers, her nurse thinks she's weak. Finally, she convinces the doctor to give her drugs ... lots and lots of drugs. My sentiments, exactly. Of course, when Kirstie finally makes it through her ordeal and the doctor hands her the baby, it's a boy.
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Martha Frankel interviewed Leonardo DiCaprio for the March Movieline.