Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting

Alison Willmore, in her review of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” aired her humble request to Hollywood that when it makes a film which features a young, precariously situated couple, with no obvious love-bond yet who have conceived a child, that it at least –- then -- bring up the possibility of abortion.  Certainly seems reasonable, except since by expecting the film leads us to think of the late-term child rather than onset protoplasm, I thought the request actually out of place here.  Yet I appreciate the attack in any case, for the film, if not as bad as critics have taken it as, is vile, very much advocating Willmore’s other concern with the film, that you haven’t known human fulfillment until you’ve had a kid. 

You could be an Adonis, and be a rival -- for a moment.  But as the film shows with the comparison of Chris Rock’s character, Vic, leader of the men with babies for being amply besot with them, against Davis, a single man of exceptional endowment -- muscles, good looks, the sexy job, and even if now just with but one, surely at his beck and call armfuls of ripe gorgeous babes spread out in conveniently-remote-from-one-another exotic locals -- it’s not to your advantage to be the Greek hero when the times are all Christ submission and community of grace.  You’re allowed it -- rivalry -- for a moment, ’cause isn’t there even with Christ some admirable, some singular, standing up to God?; but if you don’t let up it’ll leave you seeming impressive solid granite the rest of us will nevertheless walk around, pleasantly more attendant to generous broad blue skies and relaxed human activity, the multiple other attractions available to us in the park.  You’re the best we could imagine, before we became endowed with children and got with humanity’s overall central pattern; now you’re the gorgeous gladiator we admire, but which never shames us for registering more and more as being delimited to the arena of boyhood while we partake in the communal flow opened up by adult life.  And that you finally did end up with kid, saved you.  Getting in with the times has saved you the stress of having to keep your musculature proving it might never lapse to the point of acknowledging defeat – which, even if somehow successful, is counter-intuitive enough to draw our consideration, but never having us thinking that something central had now just been disproved:  eternity is across generations, not in the distinction arisen in one:  it's better to be average, but with a kid.

And this is probably best case.  The next is that you’re in service to someone who is fecund, as the fat sales assistant is, bearing the worst of her master’s – store owner Wendy’s -- lapses, aping out the worst of her ridiculousness to pacify her effect, sitting on her hands when her personal possessions get smashed in error … but at least she isn’t abandoned.  

But if you’re with kid, you’re part of the group which seems bent on mending any difficulties they have, surmounting any limitations that have been conceived -- the obtuse will become attendant when it matters.  You’ll cross paths many times, and though you may never know one another, the possibility is ever possible – and if you do it’ll be to fortify one another, attaching into one greater complex macromolecule, interlocking and expanding, exhilaratingly, by divine right.  This ex potencia, which still exists for the young couple for not talking abortion, for at least being oriented the same as the other far better economically situated couples, would have been denied them if they’d considered abortion.   Their (even if playfully) at-war ocean-side food carts would never port into the safe and secure denizens of the affluent, in loyal vassalage, but also recognizably within the same family, as the full-sized margarita stand by the pool of the super rich race driver baits their income-makers with.  They’d be the egregious wedding photo the adopting parents try to hide, but without any excuse.  People can be goofy as they enthusiastically become part of the married fold – it’s odd commemoration, this Los Vegas-style, but the attitude is essentially right, and they’re in it all the same.  What they don’t do is have an abortion, inflict willingly the worst possible out-0f-your-hands calamity.  God’s ways might be unknowable, but it’s easy to spot the mechanisms of the Beast; they tear vicious gaping cuts through the fabric of reality we’ve all collaborated to knit, leaving all of us feeling shaken and sundered.  Asocial kid killers, with knives -- slash, slash.  It's obvious what we're at some point going to have to do with them.