celluloid children
Being a first-time parent means having baby on the brain pretty much all the time. Even when I’m not thinking consciously about the baby — usually when she’s asleep and I’m trying to catch up on the life I used to have — I’m still thinking about the baby.
Take the recent memoir The Unheard, for example. Several people recommended this book to me because it’s by a deaf guy — I’m hard of hearing, he’s hard of hearing, so we must have lots in common! OK, sure, the author has thoughtful things to say about being deaf. But what really broke my heart while reading this dark, hilarious, sad book was its constant reminders of Africa’s ongoing health-care crisis and how it affects, most grievously, its children. A two-year-old baby that only weighs five pounds? Knowing that a third of the kids you meet under the age of five will die before reaching that birthday marker? Grim.
On an airplane flight last December, I watched the costume flick “The Duchess.” The movie stands out for me now for two reasons: its searing scene of baby abandonment, and the fact that it’s one of the last movies I got to watch all the way through before having a baby myself. As a colleague with a five-year-old daughter pointed out recently, “I haven’t watched a movie in about, oh, five years.”
Available time or no, I still find myself thinking repeatedly of two very different films: “Witness” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
The first has the dubious honor of being a movie that my own mother literally could not sit through — not for the cowboy shoot-’em-up violence at the end, but for the child-in-danger violence at the beginning. “Witness” came out in 1985, when my little brother was two years old. My mom couldn’t help but link the little boy — the witness of the title — with her own vulnerable baby, and it was just too terrifying.
The second isn’t really about a man who knew too much — like, say, a scientist who figured out the meaning of the universe. Rather, this Alfred Hitchcock classic is about a man who accidentally learns something about a murder and whose son is kidnapped to keep him quiet. James Stewart plays the man who knew too much, but the movie belongs, as they say, to Doris Day, who plays his wife. Not only does she get the big climactic scene in Royal Albert Hall all to herself, she’s also the mama bear who, in her determination to find her little boy, gives the movie its quintessentially Hitchcockian touch of urgency.
There’s a creepy scene early on, when Day finds out that her son has been kidnapped and goes into hysterics; Stewart, playing a doctor who happens to carry tranquilizers on vacation in North Africa, force-doses her with a sedative to calm her down. Scarier still is the scene at the end of the movie where Day, having found the house where she knows her son is being hidden, sings the perky-yet-depressing song “Que Sera Sera” to call him out of hiding.
Why this strange song? Why is she forced to grin and bear it, literally, when all she really wants to do is rip that house to shreds in order to find and save her kid?
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
