This obsession with getting the goods, and the simultaneous downplaying
of living with the result, again seems to stem from an impulse to make things as “normal” and as unqueer as possible. The parents in these portrayals mouth platitudes that align them with depressing heteronormative myths, such as the belief that a potential parent should feel empty and lonely without a child. “Without [parenthood],” mourns Danis in
He’s Having a Baby
, “I feel very empty. Without it, I feel very incomplete.” The next shot shows him walking sadly on his treadmill, while in the background we hear the opening bars of “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You.”
But there’s more going on. In this film, a baby seems to be merely another acquisition to go with Jeff’s treadmill, artworks, and potted palms. Thus children become yet another means by which queers are folded into a larger consumption-oriented, and hence less radical, American culture. If queers have Subarus, house payments, even our very own “Rainbow” Visa card, how threatening can we be? I wish I could say that queers are resisting this consumer-driven image of parenthood, but the recent appearance of the glossy magazine
And Baby
, aimed at same-sex parents and laden with advertisements for products, does not seem to indicate that we are.
THE PUSH TOWARD NORMATIVITY ISN’T SIMPLY SOMETHING that is thrust upon queer parents by a homophobic media empire. In some cases, it’s an impression that queer parents themselves seem eager to embrace. For instance, a 1996
People
magazine article arguing that queer (excuse me, “gay or lesbian”) families are “so different, so much the same” presents a gay father, Ron Frazier, whose description of his and his partner’s decision to parent enthusiastically endorses
People
’s safety-insameness angle. “We weren’t stereotypical gays,” he explains. (He doesn’t elaborate on what “stereotypical” might mean, but we can assume Frazier and his partner refrain from cranking “It’s Raining Men” to earsplitting levels on school nights or wearing feather boas to the Stop-n-Shop.) “So when people saw that we were just two ordinary men, they realized there was no cause for alarm.”
People
certainly isn’t going to call our attention to the problems with this viewpoint; it’s too busy assuring us that it “helped” (helped what?) that Heidi Frazier’s dads “live their day-to-day lives in relative anonymity.”
This issue is more complex than simple avoidance. The
People
article points to an ongoing problem faced by queer parents: Like oil and water,
queerness and parenting seem to resist blending. “Becoming a parent was the straightest thing I ever did,” a friend wrote me when she found out I was working on this article. As writer Mary Martone, a queer new mom, argues, “Babies make lesbians disappear.” She describes herself as a “big, short-haired gal,” but notes that the social stigma she usually encounters tends to evaporate when she’s with her small daughter. At those times she’s often placed into some acceptable social narrative—for example, that she has a husband who happens to be somewhere else. The usual view of parents tends to adhere to the logical syllogism “If parent, then straight,” as well as its corollary, “If queer, then not a parent.”
Although Frazier and his partner, Tom, have lost some of their gay friends because of their mutual commitment to fatherhood, parenting has trumped sexual preference as the governing social factor in their lives. “Now our friends are mostly heterosexual couples,” says Frazier. Regardless of how common this phenomenon is (many areas have relatively few other queer families to befriend), it’s outrageous that this loss is marked not as an isolation that Ron and Tom must live with but merely as something that “doesn’t seem to have bothered them much.”
Now, I’ll be the first to say that hanging out with straight folks is not a horrible fate. The point is that queer parents are being forced to make an either/or choice. Without a doubt, we need more varied representations of queer parents in the future. But we should also pay attention to the grain of truth in the portrayals we have: that queer parents are simultaneously thrust inside and kept out of mainstream culture. The queer parents in TV shows, films, articles, and books whom I admire are those who can acknowledge the paradoxes they live with, those who give me some insight into what life is like when such paradoxes must be negotiated every day. I laugh when Johnny and William, the new dads profiled in
Daddy & Papa
, question the politics of acquiring a Volvo station wagon. I’m pleasantly surprised to find a portrayal of a disabled queer parent in the Lifetime Original Movie
What Makes a Family
. And I feel relief when folks like Patrick Califia and Matt Rice remind me that pervs are parents, too. These are the kinds of queer-parenting lives I want to see: messy, complicated, flawed. They don’t simply announce that queers can be parents; they queer the institution of parenthood itself.
How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place
Monica Nolan / FALL 2003
AT THE SEVENTY-THIRD ACADEMY AWARDS IN MARCH 2002, four out of five of the Best Actress nominees were honored for playing single moms: Unwed mother Juliette Binoche brought happiness to a small town by making its residents candy in
Chocolat;
Ellen Burstyn went nuts as the pill-popping mom of a heroin addict in
Requiem for a Dream
; Laura Linney struggled with child care, a bad love affair, and her fucked-up brother in
You Can Count on Me
; and Julia Roberts triumphed (at the box office, at the Oscars, and on the screen) as the eponymous heroine of
Erin Brockovich
.
Brockovich
was sold to viewers as the true story of a feisty trampy-dressing, smack-talking, pink-collar single mom who brings corporate giant PG&E to its knees for poisoning the environment—and, incidentally, picks up a million-dollar bonus on the way. It was an inspirational, particularly American success story (do good and get paid for it) and presumably a vindication for single mothers everywhere, especially all those trashy-looking ones with kids by more than one father.
Certainly Erin Brockovich was an improvement over early cinematic single moms, who first existed as “fallen women” transgressing the moral code by having extramarital sex and abandoning—or being forced “for their own good” to abandon—their children. These films hinted at the mostly unacknowledged economic realities of women, who had fewer chances to be self-supporting outside marriage. Movies like
Madame X
(remade five
times between 1916 and 1966) and
Stella Dallas
(also remade multiple times, most recently as the 1990 Bette Midler vehicle
Stella
) focused on the unfitness of the single mom, emphasizing that her sacrifice in giving up her children resulted in the improvement of the kids’ class status.
In the 1940s and ’50s, when wartime taught women that they could be economically successful on their own, and as divorcees and widows became more common, Hollywood switched gears. Single moms, here transformed into the dreaded “career women,” were now messing up not their kids’ economic chances but their psyches. The most spectacular example was the 1945 classic
Mildred Pierce
, in which Mildred kicks out her deadbeat husband and builds a successful restaurant chain, only to have one daughter die and the other turn into an amoral murderess.
It wasn’t until Ellen Burstyn hit the screen in 1974’s
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
, as an aspiring singer with her young son in tow, that single motherhood became a place of possibility rather than pathos. Other women’s lib–influenced films like 1977’s
The Goodbye Girl
and 1978’s
An Unmarried Woman
followed; an upbeat ending to the single mom’s story was now an option. Yet the evolution of the American family on film is more roundabout than it is a straight line of progress. After all, the flippedout single mom in
Carrie
came between
Alice
and
An Unmarried Woman
;
Mommie Dearest
and
The World According to Garp
were made only a year apart; and single moms have sacrificed all for their children as recently as 2000’s
Dancer in the Dark
. The recent plethora of single moms on celluloid is less a case of progress than an indication of the incredible amount of interest and anxiety centered on the rising number of female-headed households.
As we watch films grapple with the problems of working mothers, mothers having sex, and, most important, absent fathers and the implications for raising children, there are a number of surprises. Films that are hailed as showing the “real” single mom, surviving and triumphant, often conceal conflicted feelings about working moms and children raised without fathers. Romantic comedies aimed at a female audience are full of conservative subtexts as well as laughs, while in the genres typically thought to appeal to men—action, horror, sci-fi—there has been an explosion of single-mom heroines in stories that send a radical yet unmistakable message: We’re better off without Dad.
IN THE PAST DECADE, SEVERAL SINGLE-MOTHER DRAMAS HAVE played the reality card, most notably
Erin Brockovich
and
Riding in Cars with Boys
, both based on true stories. As real as these stories purport to be, they are also the thematic heirs to the maternal melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. For better or worse, these movies foreground what are seen as “women’s problems,” all the while concealing the process by which they become both problems and exclusively women’s territory.
The early scenes of
Brockovich
promise a film focused on the social difficulties of single motherhood: Erin’s got no job and bills to pay, and her babysitter’s moving away. Yet, quickly and unbelievably, these troubles are overcome. First, Erin blackmails her way into a job at a law office, then her child care problems are solved when George—a biker with a heart of gold and lots of free time—moves in next door and takes on babysitting duties with nary a discussion of payment.
The film defines Erin as a sacrificing mom on a grander scale than ever before, which justifies her “neglect” of her children and boyfriend; this is explicated in a late scene in which Erin’s son picks up one of his mom’s work files and reads about a girl his own age with cancer. “Why can’t her mommy help her?” he asks. “Her mommy’s sick, too,” says Erin. The boy finally gets how important Erin’s work is, that she’s mothering a whole damn town (a justification that, alas, will not fly for most working mothers).
If
Brockovich
is about a supermom, 2001’s
Riding in Cars with Boys
resides at the other end of the spectrum; it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who never gets to grow up. Though the film’s publicity suggested we were going to see the story of a bad girl’s triumph (“She did everything wrong, but got everything right,” smarmed the poster), this film is a success story with all the good parts—the parts that actually show the heroine succeeding—missing.
Adapted from Beverly Donofrio’s memoir about her tumultuous early adulthood—pregnant and married at fifteen, divorced a few years later—and her efforts to get a college education and make it as a writer,
Riding in Cars
is, it turns out, less about how Beverly triumphs over adversity than about how her son struggles with and resents her. As we move back and forth between the past and the present, the ongoing dilemma is not how Beverly’s going to make it out of Wallingford, Connecticut, but whether her
son, Jason, will be able to free himself from her domineering influence. In fact, we never do learn how Beverly made it out; we see only flashbacks to her miserable marriage and have to be content with the fait accompli of educated-writer Beverly in the contemporary scenes. What happens in between is a mystery.
The film’s anxieties about single motherhood are obvious: At every turn, Beverly is surrounded by her father, husband, or son, all acting to control this immature woman. At the close of the film, Jason drives off, stranding his mom without a ride. She calls her dad to pick her up. In a film that takes as its metaphor the power and freedom that cars give, Beverly is still getting rides from boys until the very end.
In some respects, though,
Brockovich
and
Riding in Cars
have moved ahead of “realistic” forerunners like
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
and
An Unmarried Woman
. In the latter two films, the perfect man was the reward for achieving self-realization, and the absence in
Brockovich
and
Riding in Cars
of male partners for their heroines allows for the possibility that self-realization can be a reward in and of itself. Yet this absence also strengthens the link to the maternal melodramas of the past; like the mothers in
Madame X
and
Stella Dallas,
Erin must sacrifice male companionship to become a more perfect mother, while Beverly is so carefully passed from son to father and back again that there’s no room for a boyfriend.
Far more nuanced and complex portraits of single moms appear in the Cher vehicles
Mask
(1985) and
Mermaids
(1990), Allison Anders’s
Gas Food Lodging
(1992), and, more recently, the film
You Can Count on Me
(2000). Part of their power is that they are not only about the “issue” of single motherhood. The resonant
You Can Count on Me
, for instance, focuses on the relationship between a ne’er-do-well brother and his normal-on-the-surface sister, Sammy, who despite their differences are grappling with many of the same problems. When single-mom concerns do come up, they often originate outside the family, not within it. (When Sammy’s arrangements for picking up her son after school are disrupted by her narrow-minded boss, for instance, we’re meant to blame him for being a tight-ass, not her for working.) The mothers in these films are imperfect, yet always adults: Motherhood hasn’t swallowed them up, but we never think of them as bad parents.
Then there are the single-mom romantic comedies. They’re meant to be a froth of fantasy, but what we usually get is Hollywood’s idea of what
our fantasies ought to be, rather than what they really are. And what women really fantasize about, according to height-of-the-backlash 1980s comedies like
Baby Boom
(1987) and
Look Who’s Talking
(1989), is staying at home and raising their kids in cozy nuclear families. And if the films of the 90s finally, tentatively accepted working moms, the need to couple them with dads became proportionately greater. As cultural anxiety about the destruction of the nuclear family loomed, films like
Jerry Maguire
and
One Fine Day
(both 1996) argued that everyone—Dad as well as Mom and kids—needs a two-parent family.
In
Baby Boom
, Diane Keaton’s J.C. is a high-powered Manhattan exec who suddenly inherits a baby. Initially, this looks like a radical twist on the
Three Men and a Baby
concept, as the film introduces the idea, in several comic sequences, that motherhood is no more instinctual for women than it is for men. But before the audience can grab another handful of popcorn, she’s quit her job and fled to a farmhouse in Vermont, a move that the plot reassures us is all for the best: J.C. has always dreamed of a house in the country. In this movie, children don’t entail real sacrifices, just changes that turn out to be redemptive. It’s the baby’s job to feminize Mom and, in the process, save her from the rat race.
The idea that a son—and in these movies, it’s almost always a son—needs a dad is a timeless one, as we see a decade later in
Jerry Maguire
. Dorothy (Renée Zellweger) is even willing to marry a man who doesn’t love her, simply because he’s so great with her kid. When, at the end, she tells him that she can’t be with him just for her son, it turns out he does love her—he just hadn’t realized it yet. In a scene straight from a Harlequin romance, he returns to claim her from a group of embittered divorcees, who applaud as the couple embraces. Jerry (Tom Cruise) is the yuppie who must be humanized, and mother and son are the humanizing agents. Jerry loves Dorothy because she is a mother, because she represents the moral, family-centered values that he is traveling toward for the length of the picture, away from the self-centered business ethics he started with.
One Fine Day
addresses the same work-vs.-family issue
Baby Boom
did, but also includes the “it’s good for men, too!” angle. Architect Melanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her son are mirrored by reporter Jack (George Clooney) and his daughter. On a day that the kids miss their class field trip, the two parents (who loathe each other on sight, in true romantic-comedy
fashion) must share child care in order to complete important job-related goals. But as their parallel stories play out, Melanie and Jack get very different treatment.
Although Jack is initially presented as the irresponsible parent, his turn at taking care of the children goes smoothly. When it’s Melanie’s turn, however, she loses Jack’s daughter and ends up standing on cars screaming the girl’s name as rain pours down and her mascara runs. Jack finds out, of course, and uses the incident to make Melanie admit her deficiencies, flaws, and need for help.
Similarly, when Jack is pulled in two directions by work and family, the crisis passes relatively painlessly: He soothes his unhappy daughter by buying her a kitten and makes it to his press conference on time. Melanie’s moment of conflict, on the other hand, is very public. Trying to have a quick drink with some important clients, painfully aware that her son is waiting to be taken to his soccer game, Melanie must announce in a quavering, Julia Roberts–worthy speech that her son is more important then these clients’ new business.
One Fine Day
’s magnetism consists of two broken halves irresistibly drawn together to form a whole, asserting that shared parenting can only take place within a nuclear family.
A SINGLE MOM AND HER KIDS ARE BY DEFINITION A FAMILY without a father, and the female-headed household is destruction of the patriarchy at its most basic level. Needless to say, in Hollywood, showing its unproblematic success is still a huge taboo. Contemporary single-mom films are truly reflective of our culture: A massive amount of energy is expended in a desperate attempt to prove that single parenthood is not good enough, even as an ever-increasing number of women parent on their own. (It’s important to note that this anxiety manifests itself onscreen with an almost exclusive focus on white, middle-class single moms, despite the fact that more than one-third of American single moms are women of color. Though this is part and parcel of the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood in general, it conveniently allows mainstream films to ignore the factors of class and race that are inextricably intertwined with single parenthood.)