Adoption As Seen By a Child
During family movie night some years ago, I lunged for the remote control to stifle “Jerry Maguire” during a sex scene I’d forgotten about. What I managed to hit was the fast-forward button, and what ensued onscreen might be described as high-speed porn.
My daughters laughed, mostly at their father, but there was a lesson to be learned: The media is a minefield.
Parents of young children know this; parents of adopted and foster kids know it even better. It’s a lesson I was reminded of when “The Boss Baby” became an unexpected hit, and some adoptive and foster parents found themselves dealing with messages their children find painful.
A few years after the “Jerry Maguire” debacle, my gift for gracelessness was tested again when my daughter and I were watching “Despicable Me,” and we arrived at the sequence in which Gru, not yet a good guy, returns the adorable orphans because he can’t be bothered with them anymore.
This time, I was frozen in place: What was the girl beside me — who was adopted — going to think?
Awareness has certainly grown among film and TV executives in recent years: Not everyone in their audience is part of the proverbial ideal nuclear family. But there’s no escaping the fact that rooted in our culture’s literary DNA is a proclivity for treating the disrupted family unit as a poignant narrative device.
The “Despicable Me” series is pretty good for adopted and foster children; the orphans transform Gru into a decent animated human being, and they all form a fast familial bond.
But being a consumer and a film critic has led me to understand that what might leave one unaffected can deeply disturb the other. “The Boss Baby” isn’t about adoption, but it raises a delicate question: Is parental love finite?
The infant-like character of the title, voiced by Alec Baldwin, disrupts his older brother’s previously idyllic existence, pushing him aside, telling him he’s passé and implying that his parents don’t have enough love to go around. It’s a story line that could kindle insecurity in any child getting a new sibling, but more so for one who is caught between biological and foster parents, has been shuttled from home to home or has joined an existing family.
Admittedly, we parents can wax more indignant about this stuff than the kids ever would. I used to worry, once in a while, about “Modern Family,” a television series in which an adopted daughter is Vietnamese, like my daughter. The show is not above making Asian jokes. But she loves “Modern Family,” probably because it’s funny. That’s basically it.
What does bug her are movies and shows in which adoptees are other than normal kids. She cited “Parenthood,” which was the target of withering criticism on adoption blogs. “They always make adoption a big problem,” she said, speaking generally.
Elsewhere, my foster son adores “The Boxtrolls,” the 2014 stop-action movie in which a young boy is “kidnapped” (as in rescued) by a gnomish tribe of gentle subterranean garbage collectors; until late in the game, the boy has no idea he is not himself a boxtroll and ultimately reconciles his human family and the one underground.
I’ve also found an enlightened attitude in some very unlikely places: “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip,” for instance, was largely concerned with the three rodents’ fears that their father figure, Dave, would leave them for kids more like himself. It treated the issue with sensitivity.
I’m no expert. Arguably, anyone incapable of operating a remote control shouldn’t be entrusted with children. But I have some. They possess a variety of origin stories and, some might even say, issues. And it would be nice if, when they watched a movie, they always felt at home.
For the non-nuclear family, the media can be a minefield.