June 29, 2009
Why I Hate My Sister's Keeper
A Rant
An interesting weekend at the box office. The Proposal held its own at number two; "family" drama My Sister's Keeper took number five; and pseudo-indie flick Away We Go even managed to break in at number ten.
Just say no.
I utterly refuse to see My Sister's Keeper. Why? Because it's a fucking Hollywood weepie -- a "women's" genre invented in the fifties or so. Suffering mom? Spunky dying kids? For Christ's sake, could it get any more generic? And didn't we already do this with Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment??
I'll admit, I'm a bit on edge about "family" films (and "family" values) these days. Every day it's something new. Jenny Sanford proclaiming that "parenting is the most important job there is". The latest Hollywood starlet saying "my children are the most important thing to me". Even some lame-ass Dove commercial proclaiming that "becoming a mother is the most sacred passage of womanhood".
I'm not on planning on reproducing, so I guess I'm never going to be a real woman by these standards. I also resent it when the nuclear family unit -- which, let's face it, was historically crystallized for the sake of reproduction -- is lionized as the best invention ever. It's really not. Especially for women. I feel like we're still living in the fifties or, worse yet, deliberately re-creating them. Ugh.
Which brings me back to my hatred of movies like My Sister's Keeper. It's not just the obsession with the traditional family unit. It's that these "chick" flicks purport to show women's strength, while really re-iterating its traditional, family-based limits. Women are strong because they live through dying kids and bring together fucked-up families. Women are strong because they can cry. Women are in strong, in short, only through their ability to withstand emotional pain, which is (perhaps unsurprisingly) directly linked to their family's well-being.
Oh, and of course the very definition of these movies as "chick" flicks. The biological class of "women" are going to enjoy watching this film because they like crying about family crises. Aristotle would be so down with that theory.
I wonder what a "chick" flick of my life would look like? I don't have a traditional family unit, so where would my strength come from? Dying friends, I suppose. That's another commonplace in "chick" flicks. But why must there always be someone dying?
No thanks. My "chick" flick is going to be a broad comedy. Me and my friends are going to go drinking and man-chasing in Vegas, a la The Hangover. Or maybe an indie flick. I much preferred the family values of Away We Go. At least it didn't believe in marriage. And it acknowledged the horror of a non-functional nuclear family, which is the norm in my opinion.
Better yet, I think I'm going to go back to crafting my own fulfilling life and career. I guess that's a male prerogative by our society's standards. No, really. Obama may have admitted to being an absentee father, but if you noticed, he didn't actually apologize. Men don't. That's because maintaining the family isn't the "natural" job of a male. They're allowed to put work over family, as long as they hang around enough to be called "father".
Women aren't. Can you imagine what would happen if women started publicly proclaiming that sometimes they just couldn't be there for their families because work was too important? I predict a lynch mob would ensue.
At any rate, I guess I'm not allowed to join real women's club, and it appears that I'm going to have to deal with being societally gendered male. Pay raise, anyone?
