Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons and the proud parent of a newborn baby girl — he already has two sons — says he fears he is “slip-sliding into full-blown fuddyhood”:
When Matthew was born in 1999, I remember spending a cold Saturday afternoon that fall nesting in the basement living room of our Brooklyn apartment with the newborn baby. The Scorsese film “Goodfellas” came on cable, and I was excited; I hadn’t seen it since it had been released a few years earlier, and it was the No. 1 film on my Top Ten list that year (I was a professional film critic at the time). I settled in for a long, enjoyable afternoon getting reacquainted with the film. But about 45 minutes into it, I had to turn the TV off. There was so much graphic violence in the movie that I literally couldn’t watch it. I had never been overly affected by that stuff, but somehow sitting in the room with that tiny little baby, and intuiting from that how precious human life is, and how fragile — well, I literally couldn’t continue with “Goodfellas.” It wasn’t one of these “I’d like to, but I really shouldn’t” moments; it was “nope, can’t do it, goodbye.”
So, flash-forward to last night. The kids were asleep (Baby Nora in my arms) and Julie and I decided to watch Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” about which we’d heard such good things. It got to the part in which the married protagonist begins his obsessive affair with Scarlett Johansson, and I swear, I could not watch it. It wasn’t the somewhat graphic sex; it was the deed being done, this creep cheating so vividly on his kind, sweet wife. I felt defiled just watching it. I said to Julie, “You’re not going to believe this, but this is making me really anxious. I hate watching this guy do this.” I tried to shake it off, but finally said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Well, let’s turn it off then.”
“Let’s.”
I’m still trying to figure out why I reacted so strongly to these scenes. I’ve seen far worse on film, and been unaffected by it. I confess that part of it must be that Scarlett Johansson has to be the most boring major actress around. Had the cad been boffing someone like Kate Winslet, someone who had a modicum of wit or mystery about her, maybe it would have been easier to watch, instead of seeing a character betray his wife with such a dumb, dull bunny. But deep down, I don’t think that’s it. I think I just couldn’t stand to watch this creep betray his good wife like this. And I’m left wondering if my visceral negative reaction had anything to do with the fact that while I was watching this, I held my sleeping newborn baby daughter in my arms.
It’s certainly possible. I am particularly intrigued by the Goodfellas (1990) anecdote. Last night I finally got around to seeing The Departed, which some critics have hailed as Martin Scorsese’s best film since then, and I was struck by how some of the sudden deaths — especially when they happened in rapid succession — made me think about how these people had once been babies like my own, and how lots of love and care, or at least work, had gone into raising them and making them who they were. I was more acutely aware than usual of what a waste death is.
My wife and I still watch action movies and the like while feeding the kids, though. That’s a whole other calibre of violence.
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