Movie of the Month: Revolutionary Road

Please let this be fair warning, but if you didn't see Revolutionary Road, you may not want to read the rest of this blog entry. There is a part of me that does not want to share any of this information with someone who hasn't seen the film and there is this other part of me that feels like I need to be like a newsie on the street corner begging people to see this film. Needless to say, if you haven't seen this great movie yet, you need to. In fact, you need to go as soon as possible because I don't know how much longer it will be at the theatres, and you should see it before the Oscars so that you might have a good vantage in judging it in comparison to other films. Also, as just a side note, I think I might start this new "Movie of the Month" entry post. So, Revolutionary Road will be my selection for the month of January, consider this post two days late.

The films stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, two people disillusioned and maybe reillusioned by 1950s American culture. Plot-wise, the film follows Frank to his city job where he feels like nothing but a machine in a cog, while April remains at home in the suburbs as nothing more than a copy of those around her. Both are jaded by their intellectual understanding of what it means to fit in. One of the lines in the movie suggests that once thought they were above it all, but as April soon realizes, they are not above anything--that they are nothing but copies/machines, things that they hated before moving to suburbia. Of course, the film contains a number of other sub characters, but perhaps the one worth mentioning would be Frank and April's realtor's son, a former mathematics PhD who has been previously committed in a mental home/insane asylum. While seemingly "abnormal," this character, whose names escapes me, acts as the Shakespearean "fool" who contains all of the knowledge, who attempts to inform the Wheelers of the full impact of their decisions, and in fact, seems to be the only one that can understand them and their lives.

Non-plot wise, what I found interesting was the film's indictment/assessment/evaluation of American suburbia. I was able to do a minimal bit of research about the film and the book in which the film is based off of. The film seems to take on not only problems about life outside of the city, but also issues of gender, sanity, economics, sexuality, and parenthood. What does it mean to have children? What causes someone to fall out of love? How much danger is involved in having an abortion? Why do men's desires take precedence over women's in relationships? All interesting questions. All questions tackled with in the film.

Now, the little bit about the film that I truly want to talk about is the ending, which, of course, I know have to give a spoiler warning about. [So don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.] The "climax" of the film seems to be when April gives herself an abortion, post-12 weeks, which the film has repeatedly claimed is dangerous to do after 12 weeks. When April does give herself an abortion, she walks downstairs and stands in the open window way--what we see is Revolutionary Road, we see the street they live on, the world they inhabit. She stands there as if claiming, "Look at what you have done to me. Look what you made me do." As she remains there, the camera shows blood spots on her dress and a pool of blood forming below her. As the point, the viewer sort of realizes that things aren't going all that well. She runs to the phone, calls for help....next thing, Frank is in the hospital telling his neighbor that she waited to long to get to the hospital. I think this is the crux of the film, and for me, something I really want to debate with people. Is she just giving herself an abortion because that is what she wants to do, or is she committing suicide? There are so many signs that suggest the latter. Perhaps that was the only way out of escaping suburbia.

For me the scene echoed a number of instances in Byatt's Babel Tower when Daniel gets calls at the hotline from mothers who abandoned their children, wandering about England and wondering if it was the right thing to do. They were so illusioned as to what life was supposed to be like, what women's roles where supposed to be. This film just made me think about this more and more. Is the only way to escape something is complete abandonment? But it also made me re-evaluate my own desires and my own wants/needs. This is a question that I have continually asked myself, again and again, and I am sure it is a question that I will continue to grapple with more and more in the coming years as I mature into adulthood.

Go out and see Revolutionary Road. Hopefully you will think it is a great film! And if you enjoy it, hopefully you also cried because of how sad it was.

Secret Life of an American Teenager

Because of DVR, I was lucky enough to catch a marathon of the first six episodes of ABC Family's new television show, Secret Life of an American Teenager, and of course, it wouldn't be a typical summer without latching onto some weird television show that I will indubitably not end up finish watching once school starts. Of course, the big "secret" is that teenagers have sex and that you can get pregnant the first time that you have sex. Wow! I didn't really know that those facts were that secret.



Monopolizing on the rather public pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears, ABCF decided to jump on the disturbing "new" trend of redefining "family values." Every episode is followed by a PSA about preventing teen pregnancy, however, it seems the only way to deal with it is to get married and have the kid (uh, disgusting). Of course, I was overly thrilled at the idea that Amy, the main "pregnant" character might actually succeed in getting an abortion. I mean, since the first episode, the word was mentioned and the seed planted. However, I should have known that a network with "family" in the title wasn't going to allow sweet teen Amy to actually follow through with it. This weeks episode was the final straw. She actually made it into the operation room of the clinic after being bombarded by a pro-life, evangelical ex-cheerleader and her new boyfriend who wants to marry her and make everything better. The naivete of half the cast is so lame and sort of passe when it comes to TV drama.


The redeeming features of the show, however, are Molly Ringwald as Amy's mom and India Eisley (quite the newcomer) as Amy's sister. While Molly Ringwald is playing the opposite end of her 80s roles, she does a pretty good job of acting like the adult version of her former roles, sometimes. India often steals the spotlights from the other characters of the show. The dry delivery of her lines seems to make her acting style seem raw and lame, however, her quirky lines and forward-thinking sensibilities outweigh her own childishness concerning her inability to understand adult relationships. And before I forget, I have to mention Francia Raisa as Adrian (the school's resident bad girl who enjoys sex and quite frankly may have the best lines of the show so far) and Amy Rider (Ben's friend and resident romance/sex statistician who seems to know more about sex than those two dudes from Loveline).


So, what is Amy's way out of this pregnancy? Well so far her options are abortion (which is probably a no-no), marrying Ben (which is lame and shouldn't happen), or getting together with the baby-daddy (which will probably happen for ratings and plot twists). Ah, conventional television.


But what really bugs me is that ABC Family won't just give her the abortion. Doesn't that happen in families? Is every family so story book? There are no gay families on the network. It seems as if the most they are willing to do is have inter-racial families (that are because of a foster agency not because of choice). (While I'm not an expert on the whole network, I'm pretty sure my statements are true, and if not, I apologize.)


Anyways, I'll keep watching it for a while, and who knows, maybe like Gossip Girl, a follow-up might appear in the future.

Welcome to Gilead....

At first I wasn't going to write about this until a friend of mine made a Facebook post with her own personal take. Let's just say my blood curdled when I was checking the news on CNN and came across this interesting headline: "Plan calls Pill, IUD abortions." It had the little camera icon next to it, which means that it was a video. Usually, I don't watch their videos because you have to let them load and sit through some cheesy commercial, however, with a headline like that, how could I possibly pass up some fervent discussion I knew was going to stem from this already controversial headline and amazingly interesting (and quite horrifying possible) subject at hand.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/08/01/todd.defining.abortion.cnn

What? Are you serious? So supposedly in some final act of Republican hoo-haa, the Bush administration is trying to push some bill/act through Congress that would question the scientific stances on birth--conception or implantation? To back up my already growing astonishment, I raked some other news sources and came across this article by The Wall Street Journal (thanks Callan).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121745387879898315.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

After just talking to Fink about how her Catholic college doesn't cover birth control, I realized that she could potentially be buying abortions under the new regime if this legislation is being passed. Yet again, I recall conversations in Scholars', of course all in Stave's classes, about abortion and what women go through to get them. I mean, do we really want to start having hanger-wire abortions and coke-a-cola douches again? Hell no. I still am just incredibly shocked by the hubris of man, thinking that he has the right to tell a woman what she can do with her body. Really.

All of this for me is just foreshadowing many conversations to come in my 1033 class. I've already printed out several articles, and I can't wait to start presenting some of this information to students to start getting them all riled up about personal and political issues. Of course, as the title of this blog alludes to, this is nothing more than a Atwood's dystopia coming to life before our very eyes. She warned us all, and unfortunately, a lot of us aren't taking her seriously.

The WSJ articles states, "A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying 'the life of a human being.'" ... The article goes on a bit later, "If the draft regulation were to prompt some insurance companies to drop coverage for prescription birth control, 'that would be fantastic,' said Tom McClusky, a strategist with the conservative Family Research Council." OMG!? Are you serious? (I must hand it back over to Callan who ingeniously in her response to this posted a picture of the Duggar family, asking the question, "Is this what the American family should be like?" It wasn't framed that way, but it was along the lines of, is this what's going to happen without birth control. Of course, I don't think it would because we would still have under the counter abortions and new, ingenuous ways of aborting.)

So of course my own personal response to this issue is to want to go out and protest any possibility of this happening in our country. However, I realize that I'm probably part of a growing minority when it comes to this issues. Trying not be defeatist and wanting to flee America is not going to change the fact that continually this country is moving slowly towards fundamentalism. Sure, we haven't started bombing each other, segregating the nation, and taking away women's bank accounts, but with the way the environments keeps deteriorating, the economy weakens, and religious indoctrination continues...I just don't see any other possibility for this country. I mean I remember being in Ecofem and talking about the wars that America is going to be fighting 50 years from now over water. I mean I just can't handle it. Why do we have to impose religious beliefs, fuck even scientinfic beliefs onto others. I don't remember there being all of this hoo-haa when Lamarck (I think that's his name) was fucking up the agricultural life of Russia. Sorry for the mini-rant.

So what can we do? Callan says we should wish that Stevens doesn't drop dead and that Obama wins so that he can put more Democrats on the bench, but is that all we can do? No. We have to continue to educate others and show that having an abortion is not evil. Abortion is an option, and let's face it, sometimes it can be the best option. Should we keep bring babies into a world that would rather rip itself apart than live in harmony? Why is it that people feel the need to have their own biological offspring, is it some biological imperative or is it a hegemony that we have already bought into for so long we can see our way out of it?