This evening I watched an episode of ‘This is Us’.
I was home by myself eating pasta at the time, because it was past 8pm and this
is my life now. Described by Channel 4 as a ‘US drama charting the lives
of individuals whose paths cross and stories intertwine’, I did not set out
with particularly high hopes. The trailers looked like E.R. without the laughs,
but it was that or watch episode 1,386 of ‘Professional Masterchef’, so I
decided to indulge the saccharine fluff for 42 minutes.
In the first episode, viewers are introduced to two
characters who are about to have triplets. Doubtless both husband and wife have
names, but they have been wiped from my memory in the wake of the FURY I felt
watching the first hospital scene.
In it, a wise old owl (doctor, male) tells the
hopeful young couple that they need to have a ‘talk’ about the position of the
babies. The woman, lying prone on the bed, recovering from a recent and very
vocal contraction, agrees immediately. She knows they need to have a talk about
the position of the babies. She knows the doctor is trying, in the roundabout
and indirect way SO OFT ASSOCIATED with the medical profession, to tell them
that the babies may not all survive. However, before either she or Dr. Ancient
can finish their sentences, the husband has intervened. He is handsome. He has
a beard. He is sporting a gilet and an expression of quiet, spiritual hope.
Best of all, he is the man, and the most virile man in the room at that. He, in
short, knows best. He will not listen to the doctor’s concerns. He will not
even countenance having a potentially difficult conversation about the birth of
his triplets with his wife. He knows everything will be ‘OK’. He knows ‘only
good things are going to happen today’. “How?” I hear you cry. How does he know
there is no need for concern?
It is his birthday. That is how. It is his birthday
and he knows only good things are going to happen. He knows this with his whole
heart, and he makes his wife repeat it after him. She, amazingly, does not
reply with a sturdy ‘fuck off, darling’. Instead, she says “I love you” in a
dreamy way, and then repeats his affirmation after him, like a cult initiate
gamely reaching for the Kool-Aid. Even the doctor doesn’t tell him to throw
himself into the nearest sharps bin, choosing instead to twinkle at these naive
young lovers and their wonderful hope, and leave her to get on with it.
Do you know what happens next?
One of the babies dies. It struggles on the way
out, gets wrapped in the umbilical cord, and dies. And it is clear to me that
this is an important allegory, placed cleverly in the middle of an otherwise
mediocre drama, in order to remind people that men do NOT get to make these
decisions on their own, and the woman in the hospital bed does NOT get ignored
when she is clearly stating a preference regarding decision making and
childbirth. Particularly not when she is being ignored in favour of an
infantile obsession with fate and birthdays, and a wilful ignorance of physical
facts.
The fact that this tragedy is immediately resolved
by the couples’ adoption of a tiny black baby found the same day on the steps
of a local fire station is immaterial to the allegory. Probably.
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