No Man Is an Island but Most Have a Peninsula

I have stated before that I wouldn’t review a movie if I didn’t like it. Art critics tend to be those that can’t do the things they critique. On someone’s advice I went to see About a Boy. I didn’t like it for lots of reasons but this isn’t a film review. I had bigger problems with the ideas expressed in the movie than I did with the movie itself (although I had big problems with the movie).

It’s one thing to be preachy and another thing to be preachy without having the slightest idea what it is you are talking about. Boy, along with millions of other pop culture sources, puts forth the suggestion that if you aren’t out there procreating then you are leading a meaningless and unfulfilling existence. Without a family your life is shallow and selfish. Hugh Grant portrays such a man in this movie; a man without wife, child, or a job. He is idle and rich. He spends his days watching TV and preying on women for his own amusement. He admits it himself that he is shallow.

As vehemently as the film tries to paint his as a wasted life, it portrays the lives of several women to be worse off in motherhood. He attends meetings for single parents (all women) to have sex with the attention-starved single mothers. The single mothers are abandoned, lonely, desperate, and, in one case, suicidal. At least the Hugh Grant character, as big of a heel as he seems, has not left a failed marriage and a fatherless child in his wake. If you want to find the real assholes of the world make a film about deadbeat fathers. Because this is Hollywood (everyone is British but it's still Hollywood) you know that he is going to see the joys of fatherhood.

This is a very destructive and dangerous message and it is extremely pervasive in our society: that every one of us is meant to have children. The fact is, most people shouldn’t be parents because they really don’t want to be parents and because they aren’t very good at it. People feel such incredible pressure to have children because of all the buzz around them telling them to do so. They go on to have children they don’t want and they make terrible parents.

Grant forms an odd friendship with a teenage boy. He has almost nothing to pass on to the child as far as wisdom, as far as anything the child can use to better cope with the cruel world he finds himself occupying. The child’s mother is even less capable of parenting the child. Why the fuck would you even bother having a child if you had nothing to pass on in the way of wisdom? If you can’t teach your child anything valuable as far as life on this earth then maybe you should figure this out yourself first before bringing a child into the world. Jesus, could you imagine parents in a primitive society not teaching their children to deal with the harsh realities of the world around them? You may as well let your child be raised by wolves, or eaten by them.

To state my point I would just like to say that if you don’t want to have kids then by all means remain childless. Your life will not be meaningless and shallow, certainly not any more so than it may already be. There are plenty of parents whose lives are meaningless and shallow. Depth and meaning can come from many things besides passing down your DNA. If you decide that you do want to have a child then try to gain a little wisdom along the path of your own life so that you can share with it your kid. Homo sapiens have been overly successful as a species and it is no longer imperative that we all procreate. If you already are a parent it is never too late to be a better one.