Celluloid Excellence

Son and I went to see Knocked Up last evening. And then I spent practically all night dreaming about the movie. When was the last time that happened, a movie having that kind of effect on my mind? Probably George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, which was like what, 1980? No, 1979. So, a while.

Knocked Up was that good. Nay, great. Son pointed out on the drive home that at a couple of points in the movie, especially the crucial scene between the main guy character (Seth Rogen) and the main girl character's (Katherine Heigl's) sister (in an unbelievable performance from director Judd Apatow's real-life wife, Leslie Mann) outside the delivery room, several of the audience were hitting the lines, word for word, as the dialogue played out. THAT would indicate a pretty good repeat viewing audience, eh?

It wouldn't be hard for me to spend this blog riffing like Keith Richards about the several deep political messages embedded in the flick. Ross Douthat from National Review already did a pretty good take on that angle of it all. Suffice it to say that while the average evangelical Christians I know would be greatly shocked by the language (F bombs fly like freakin' Dresden), alcohol and especially drug usage (massive), and zero-subtlety depictions of the OB-GYN world (yes, there are a few seconds -- real? hard to tell -- of an actual birth, uh, down there, you know)...shocked enough to likely leave the theater...the ultimate message of this movie is of a piece with what they, we, believe. And have been trying to sway the culture on for the past thirty years.

And I'm not gonna lie to ya...you can read about all the statistics you want re the drop in teen pregnancies and the drop in abortion rates and whatever...but when Big-Time Ho-Lie-Wood releases a movie that all but says, I mean right up there on the screen, that abortion is the taking of a human life...there is HUGE vindication. There shouldn't be, I know, but there is...

Because the film is structured the way it is, the baby at eight weeks is already being acknowledged as a living thing, a viable thing, viewable via the magical technology of ultrasound. We're not talking second or third trimesters here, basketball-in-stomach sized here, we're talking eight weeks. And in four week segments after that, neatly done as intros to the next chapter of the story, we get more ultrasounds. And the baby gets bigger and bigger on the screen, until it's basically overspilling the screen towards the end. Any thought of "mass of tissue" just disintegrates in a presentation like this. Whoomp, there it is: Head, heart, hands, feet. A human being.

Of course, my dream-spiced sleep may have been because the story of the guy and the girl, and what happened after they got together, is very similar to our story, my wife of 25 years and I. VERY similar. The way I handled the news of the pregnancy, the fights, the Big Fight (brought on in no small part by my continued pursuit of partying), the split, and the reconciliation. And then the baby. Who was, and is, my son. Among all the other things to recommend about this flick, from the way it skewers the Hippie Insensibilities of the Sixties/Seventies (Becker and Fagen from Steely Dan may still be in the hospital) to its utterly democratic sharing of POVs for the guy and girl characters, the ending is magnificent. Baby born, being loved by both parents, screen fade to black...and then back up for some home movie shots to finish, with people in the audience going aww-w-w and me fighting back tears as the baby girl is now two, now three, now four, looking incredibly like a little of Rogen and a little of Heigl...

I can't help myself...I have to end with this: A political party that, for whatever its other flaws, supports The Right To Life is a political party that's got it right. And a political party that, for whatever its other virtues, supports abortion is a political party that cannot, and must not, be trusted with the big and important decisions about life -- LIFE -- in this country.