print
Got a news tip for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
Orphan opens today. You know the one. Yuppie parents, devastated by a miscarriage, adopt a young, faux-sweet little girl who immediately begins to plot their demise. (“I don’t think Mommy likes me very much,” she coos in the trailer.) Since there are no other major horror movies on the market, it seems poised to sell its share of tickets this weekend.
The movie falls into that most persistent canon of horror, the Bad Seed nightmare. There are a lot of them—The Omen, The Good Son, The Unborn. The idea of children with a hunger for torment may be sick, but the demonic little kid has become the cliché of clichés in this genre, interchangeable with a masked guy wielding a knife.
Orphan, though, has struck a particular nerve. Because the little girl at its heart is adopted, specifically at an older age, some adoption advocates have decried the movie as a promotion of the idea that there’s something wrong with older orphans, that they’re somehow tainted. The most prominent of these pieces, in The Daily Beast, dips into the history of Romanian dictatorship and American adoption to offer a series of strident attacks against the movie, damning it as “lazy, irresponsible, and cruel.”
Guess what else, though? The writer of the piece, Melissa Fay Greene, makes it clear she has not seen the movie. Sigh. She also refers to the movie’s marketing as a “PR campaign,” which borders on self-parody. She thinks the ads trade in a currency of stereotypes, but come on. Watch the trailer embedded below. Does this girl strike you as someone who serves as a stand-in for adopted kids in general?
Other than ignoring the crucial distinction between a movie and its marketing team, Greene, like other protesters of movies like this, seems to be under the extraordinary impression that horror movies promote a bottom-line allegory, some vague moral imperative. This is misguided. Horror premises are intended to be superlative; to take such a setup on its face is to devalue the very thing it’s designed to do. It expressly targets latent social tensions and charges at them without regard, the idea being that movie audiences respond to blunt, seedy provocation. Which, frankly, they do. With few exceptions (Jaws comes to mind), horror movies do not create or enforce prejudices; they play with them, and it's oftentimes to subversive effect.
Think about it. Does The Exorcist throw down for the devil because a priest dies in the end? Does seeing Wrong Turn mean you’ll never drive through West Virginia again? For a more recent example, should every mortgage broker who eschews conscience to bolster her bottom line be dragged to hell?
Well, maybe, actually, but you get the point. As it happens, Orphan has a hysterical 11th-hour plot development that effectively nullifies any protest anyway. But as long as there are movies like this, there will be people who seize on them in service of some broad tirade that inevitably goes further than the movie does. Lazy and irresponsible, indeed.
Related links:
Sun Kil Moon Announces New Album Among…
Jack White Announces March Tour Dates
Listen to Cursive's New Album, I Am…
Alexandra Lawn Leaving Ra Ra Riot
The 50 Best Movies of 2011
The 50 Best Movies of the Decade…
The 20 Best Movies of 2011 (So…
A Day In The Life Of Seryn
Album Stream: Eisley - Deep Space
Video Premiere: Rhett Miller - "Tower of…
Live From CMJ: Robert Ellis
Song Premiere: Milagres - “Quiet Street”
Nice article! It was great when you mentioned Jaws as a film that reinforces prejudices. Although, to be honest, lots of animals get a bad rap on film... snakes, spiders, bees, ants. Even pirahnas, :) anything that can bite or sting will be make it into a horror film.
I was not interested in this film until I saw the buzz that it created. Can't wait to watch it now.
I think saying that "horror movies neither create or reinforce stereotypes" is like saying violent television doesn't effect children.
Just because there's a plot twist and the kid isn't a "stand in for all adopted kids" doesn't mean this won't effect people and change their perception of adoption.
I imagine those in the tourist industry in Virginia were none too happy about "Wrong Turn" and I don't know how the Catholic Church feels about "The Excorcist", but adoption is something that needs to be promoted in our culture and built up as a viable option for people who want to have kids. If you think movies like this don't take us two steps back from that, then you're kidding yourself.
I had some time to kill (no pun intended) last weekend, so I watched Orphan. My wife and I have two adopted children, and watching the movie did not make me question our decision to adopt. Watching this movie was pure escapist entertainment, as I'm sure it was intended. To those whose decision to adopt could be swayed by watching a piece of fiction, all I can conclude is that their resolve was not too firm in the first place. Again, this is purely escapist entertainment! Nothing more, nothing less! Well done escapist entertainment, too. I appreciated the plot twist at the end. Made this movie much more than a remake of The Bad Seed.
This is a true 'once-upon-a-time' adoption story. Within it's telling, revealed are the seedy practices once employed by one Rosie O'Donnell funded -- Children of the World Adoption Agency. [COWAA] It 'was' located in Verona, New Jersey.
I allude to the past tense so it is not mistaken of mind that this agency's doors have indeed, remained self-closed since May of 2007. It is also from within these walls where plots were conceived and masqueraded around the workings of a real adoption agency. Therein, it is even apparent in Rosie's own penned words that she agrees with these activities. Sadly, one thing definitely not found in her book “Find Me” was a way to read between its lines. And as for this agency's downfall; the reasons lay in the dark history behind its corporate suicide!
Had someone found this company's blueprint for wrongful adoption?
Yet, there wouldn't be any such findings if the public would have inquired about this closure from the State. – Government spokesperson, Douglass Swann would not have given such an implicating description of its dissolution. How do I know these details?
… It was me that forced the State Attorney General Office to lean heavily on an already suspect New Jersey Department of Human Services. They in turn, were instructed to offer unto COWAA a take it or leave it proposition for the Board of Trustees. That thought withstanding, and whilst all faces were longer than the table at which they sat, it must have been the Chairwoman of the Board, a Mrs. Margaret Morrisey, who probably thought it better to reserve the company a more preferable choice-spot in hell! This of course, if there is such...
How did this all come about? …Truly, in a picture painted by ART! [Adoption's Real Triad!] This three-party dynamic of the New Jersey adoption machine has members that consist of an adoption attorney, an adoption agency and the New Jersey Office of Licensing [OOL]. Moreover, all three factions would unwillingly participate in an unwanted conspiracy. It is your choice for reason, be it greed or the betterment of mankind?
Therein, it was in 2001 when COWAA executive director Veronica Serio lied to the OOL. Never mind that she is the same woman who had actually helped the late Seton Hall Professor James Boskey write adoption law. [...Sell what it is that you secretly destroy?]
Alas, and as for ART's last member of this adoption equation, sometimes it just pays to look good while doing what one does! Or as perceived in this case, maybe the following committed acts would avert a possible true human effigy burning throughout the streets of Kendall Park, New Jersey! Although he had committed no wrongdoing, adoption attorney Steven Sklar would eventually lie to the State Supreme Court's Disciplinary Review Board. This was the second time his lie covered what I call an unethical adoption practice. Astonishingly though, there was not need for the use of his deceit... [N.J.S.A. 3: 3-39, 1 {b, c}]
The State Statutes of law grant all adoption attorneys the power to hide adoption fraud busting evidence. However, if word was to get out that his practice had withheld evidence...; well uh, does anybody have a cigarette lighter?
Sadly, and in reference to the state of affairs in Jersey, my victory in overturning an initial attorney ethics case dismissal ended up dashed at the Supreme Court's doorstep. I further realized the futility of it all when my mind grasped the intent of a letter sent by these so-called “of the esteemed.” Their corresponding words were marked of brilliance. They profoundly state, “Your grievance, even if true would not constitute incapacity or unethical practice.” This is odd, because it had worked in the demise of COWAA!
My son was born on October 20, 2001. I think he lives in New Jersey.
It is by the right to bring out the truth by means of the New Jersey Open Public Records Act, and my faith in God that allow me to make plans to one day meet my son. He will hear the real story.
My name is David Archuletta, an Unknown Father.