The C-Section in American Movies | Chaz's Journal

Twins are not the only kind of high-risk pregnancies that would be a candidate for C-section anywhere in the US except in the movies. In Jason Reitman’s film of the same name, Juno is a teenager, a demographic more susceptible to eclampsia and prolonged labors, and, unless they deliver their babies prematurely (another teen risk factor), their immature pelvises are sometimes not big enough. The petite Juno has a full-term, full-weight, vaginal birth. The teenage mother in “Children of Men” does the same, assisted only by someone who’s not a midwife. In "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," Precious delivers two babies (one off-screen) even though being obese, being a teenager, receiving no pre-natal care, and, to America’s great shame, being African-American (did you know there is a staggering 243% difference in maternal mortality rates between white and Black Americans?). And even though the AMA has no protocol for delivering demonic fetuses, even Rosemary’s baby was a successful (albeit heavily sedated) vaginal birth. At least they delivered pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” by C-section. The other character who was expecting, however—the movie’s real woman—didn’t need one.

Vaginal deliveries in movies can be comedic, like the birth scene in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” or in “Nine Months,” or “Knocked Up,” or “The Dictator,” or “Ace Ventura 2,” or “Big Momma’s House,” or the homebirth in a kiddie pool in “The Back-Up Plan,” or even the birth of a cute little tentacled alien in “Men in Black.” When C-section births do occur in movies, however they’re overwhelmingly horrific. The shock of medical footage spliced into Dwain Esper’s geek-show exploitation movie “Maniac” (1934) was just the beginning of a tradition of hideously gory ones in horror movies like “Prevenge,” “It’s Alive,” “Inside” (performed with scissors), “Devil’s Due” (self-inflicted), and “Mad Max: Fury Road” (post-mortem). Not only does “The Clinic” have a C-section, but the “I” in its movie poster is a (very undersized) C-section scar. Bella has her half-vampire baby by screaming, bleeding C-section in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1,” but even harder to take is the brutal and claustrophobic C-section in “Prometheus,” where a woman subjects herself to an unanaesthetized extraction of an alien fetus inside a futuristic surgery capsule, as automated lasers cut through her belly and forceps shaped like an arcade claw machine grip rip an alien out of her abdomen. (It can be argued that this is more accurately an abortion, but the machine’s surgery sequence, from long cauterized incision to staples, is identical to how C-sections are done.) And what about the aftermath? Rachel the replicant dies from an off-screen C-section in “Blade Runner 2049.” By the time we join the story, there’s nothing left of her except her genetically engineered bones in a box buried under a tree.

Why are C-sections so stigmatized in movies? The stretch of a theory is that directors would prefer to take sole responsibility for how they “deliver” a film, and don’t like to think about how cutting—the editor’s job—is really part of what births a movie. But that’s a laughably tenuous explanation, and the real answer is more obvious. A C-section is a dramatic lead balloon. A protagonist’s response to challenges are the cornerstone of good drama. If a character is pregnant in the first act, then the obvious resolution to her story is to rise to the difficult task of birth by the third, emerging heroically at the end having conquered her challenge. The effort and struggle and noise of vaginal birth looks better on screen than the woman’s anesthetized passivity in a C-section. Most significantly, having someone else (i.e. a doctor) solve a character’s climactic problem is too deus ex machina to make for satisfying drama. These are logical reasons, but to impose these Hero’s Journey conventions as a cultural myth upon real-life childbirth experiences does a disservice to women who've had C-sections. There's no narrative of triumph in the culture where they can see themselves represented, and the repercussions of that lack can be more than just hurtful—they can be catastrophic.