Hey cats.
Last weekend I saw a movie about a tirelessly career-driven adult who stumbles into single parenthood, necessitating a reevaluation of their priorities. To my delight, this was not the tired rehashing of the work v. family debate you might expect. “Despicable Me” (2010) tells the story not of a power-suited investment banking CEO wannabe woman (or some boring equivalent), but of a second string male supervillain vying for evil supremacy. Much like the production of “Death of a Salesman” I referred to in an earlier post, where changing one trait of the central family added new dimension to a cherished narrative, performing a simple gender swap allows the audience to look at the challenges of the work-family balancing act through a male lens. This gives the old screaming match over professional and familial priorities a modernizing breath of fresh air.
Seriously though, particularly for a kid’s movie, I thought “Despicable Me” did a very nice, balanced job of portraying the conflicting pressures confronted by working parents. Gru (the main character, voiced by Steve Carell) haphazardly adopts three little girls solely to use them as bait as part of an elaborate scheme to go into space and steal the moon, hopefully securing his standing as the greatest supervillain EVER. While the “awwww” factor of the three cute girls might be enough of an argument for the joys of parenting for some movies, this film does a pretty respectable job of constructing a genuine attachment between the members of the new family. Watch out for the amusement park sequence—I thought it was utterly delightful.
However, the truly noteworthy element of the portrayal of this dilemma is that the film doesn’t undersell the unique rewards of following your professional dreams: Through a series of moderately heartbreaking flashbacks, we see a young Gru have his aspirations to go to he moon quashed over and over by a chronically unimpressed mother. By lending his professional goals emotional salience of their own, this ensures that the kids-job battle is a relatively fair fight—a tough job in a kid’s movie, where it’s probably safe to assume your audience may come down pretty solidly on the kids side of the argument. In my opinion, the resolution of the debate is pretty artful.
In any event, as a feminist I deeply appreciate a film that presumes that men can and perhaps should feel *just* as torn between work and family as women do (how novel!). Since I at least currently plan to work when I have children, figuring out a graceful compromise between family and career is something about which I have a decent level of anxiety ahead of time. Frankly, this has been treated as a uniquely feminine challenge for so goddamn long, and it’s really irritating. To state the painfully obvious, last time I checked dads contributed pretty significantly to the creation of their kids, so why isn’t this something *all* working parents are expected to wrestle with, instead of just all working moms? If balancing professional and family life is increasingly discussed as a *parent’s* issue and not just a *female parent’s* issue—even in such a silly forum as a children’s movie—maybe that could lead to more practices and supports being put into place that make the balancing act more doable for everyone.
I suppose what I’m driving at is that I like this movie largely because it normalizes something I think should already be normalized, but isn’t. I benefited from having a father who was just as active in my upbringing as my mom, and many other moms. He worked (like my mom), but made time to be at home, come to events at school, and come to soccer and softball games, all because he felt it was important for him to balance time with me with time at work. I certainly don’t mean to imply that fathers who have trouble pulling this off don’t *want* to. What I *do* think is that it is maddeningly presumed in most *workplaces* that fathers don’t want to. Normalizing a father’s desire to balance work and family as comparable to any mother’s is a weirdly belated but very needed step in establishing true gender equality in our culture.
So now that my little rant’s over, we can talk about some more fun things in the movie. First of all, Steve Carell is wonderful as Gru. While watching the movie, I found myself doubting my memory that he was voicing the main character. Some celebrity voices in animated movies can be really distracting since you’re so conscious that THAT GUY is the voice of THAT SQUIRREL (or whatever), but Carell almost completely effaces himself while still creating a very entertaining character. Also, if you can see the movie in 3D (are you even able not to? I don’t know...), do it for the roller coaster sequence. I’m really ambivalent about the whole 3D cinema thing, but that shit was cool.
All in all, this is a perfectly fun movie. I would recommend seeing it in theaters if you can. In conclusion, I gave it a 4.
In psychological news: I’ve read approximately eight more pages of my meta-analysis book. My mentor requested an email update of my progress this week, which I just sent. Mercifully, I had some things to say. I’ve done some legitimate work (I swear), but I’m still feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to sit down and crank out as much work as I would like. Part of the difficulty is my ongoing commitment to my fellowship work--that's the project I've been interviewing people for, in addition to doing oodles of data entry. It's work I enjoy, but I would love to be able to carve out a week or two to devote solely to my thesis. We’ll see if that happens before the summer’s over... God willing.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the weekend!
<3
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