The Hidden Hand that Rocks the Cradle

It has long been known amongst people with whom I am acquainted that my cultural tastes tend to, shall we say, err away from the sophisticated... (yes I will grumble if a film is in black and white or has subtitles - unless the film is in English, in which case I quite like them - a strangely common quirk, apparently).

This is probably due to the early childhood trauma I endured when my mother took me to see the French-language version of Cyrano De Bergerac at an arthouse cinema at the age of 7.

In the final, deeply moving and poignant scenes, where De Bergerac is tragically succumbing to his fate, I - having sat still for the best part of two hours through this nonsense and now becoming really quite agitated indeed - sighed very loudly and demanded of the whole cinema:

"Oh, why doesn't he just hurry up and DIE!"

Cue a rapid exit stage left from me and my mortified mother...

Since that time, my film tastes have been firmly routed in the pedestrian, consisting almost exclusively of: 1) comedies starring John Cleese; 2) time travel trilogies, and; 3) ludicrously over-acted straight-to-TV "psychological thrillers" of the type that are ten-a-penny on the usual streaming services.

I like the third category in particular, because they are one of the very few genres of film in the modern world to typically not be "agenderised", as in, they are not simply vehicles for pushing some kind of hideous social engineering, which most films - especially anything big-budget or star-studded - invariably are.

So they'll have some nonsensical News-of-the-World-esque storyline, where some glamorous socialite disappears at sea, fakes their own death, reinvents themselves as an ordinary suburbanite, only for it all to be revealed when the seemingly creepy next-door-neighbour turns out to actually be an undercover private detective who discloses all their dark secrets... (in fact, the supposed 'death' of Michael Mosley would make a good storyline for one of these films).

Just pure fantasy escapism, which is what I want when I watch a film, not to be further pummelled with "the agenda", which I get enough of the rest of the time.

So I thought I was in safe, tried and tested territory when I elected to watch 'Inconceivable', billed as a psychological thriller with the tagline, 'Deception Hits Home', and starring the king of over-acted psycho-dramas himself, Nicolas Cage.

Inconceivable tells the story of a wealthy couple in their forties, Angela and Brian (Cage), who have everything they could wish for in life, except a sibling for their four-year-old daughter, Cora. They struggled to conceive Cora, Angela having suffered a series of miscarriages, so eventually they resorted to using a donor egg, and they have one remaining embryo from the same donor, which they want to use for their second baby, so that Cora has a full sibling.

However, Angela did not have an easy pregnancy with Cora and it is recommended by doctors that she doesn't attempt another, so they decide to look for a gestational surrogate instead.

Around this time, they have befriended a mysterious newcomer to their town, a young woman called Katie, who, like Brian and Angela, has a four-year-old daughter, Maddy. Katie is single and explains she was forced to flee with Maddy from an abusive husband, but otherwise gives few details about her past.

Katie and Angela become close, and Angela decides to ask Katie to act as her surrogate, which Katie agrees to do.

However, during the pregnancy, Katie's increasingly erratic behaviour inspires Angela to do some more digging into her background, where she discovers Katie is the egg donor she used to conceive Cora, and that she was also the donor that resulted in the birth of Maddy, although she had not given birth to Maddy herself.

Katie had tracked down the woman who used her egg to produce Maddy, decided this woman wasn't taking care of Maddy sufficiently, and kidnapped her. Angela realises Katie is plotting to do the same with Cora, and to keep the baby she is currently carrying (a boy they have named Gabriel).

There is a final showdown scene where Angela reveals what she has learned to Katie, to which Katie reacts by stabbing Angela, and then herself, to make it look like Angela has attacked her. Both are rushed to hospital where Katie gives birth to a healthy baby boy.

Angela's husband Brian learns the truth and takes baby Gabriel from Katie, telling her she will never see him again. Katie is then incarcerated in a psychiatric facility.

The final scene shows "happy family" Brian, Angela, Cora, Maddy and Gabriel resting serenely on a bed together.

This film did not sit right with me - not because it was ludicrously over-acted or diabolically poorly scripted, these things tend to rather endear me to such offerings - but for other reasons that really came into sharp clarity when I watched another hammy psychological thriller, 'When The Bough Breaks', with a very similar storyline.

John and Laura Taylor are a successful professional couple in their early forties, struggling to have a baby. So they engage the services of a gestational surrogate, Anna, who - much like Katie in 'Inconceivable' - reveals herself as increasingly erratic and unstable as the pregnancy progresses.

Eventually, the Taylors discover she only took part in the surrogacy as part of a scam, and that she and boyfriend Mike were planning to sell the baby. But during the pregnancy, Anna develops feelings for John, so kills the abusive Mike and tries to get Laura out of the way, too.

John and Laura investigate Anna's past and discover a history of violence and severe mental health issues following an abusive childhood.

John pretends to return Anna's feelings in a bid to stop her escaping with the baby once he is born, but Anna realises he is faking so gives birth alone, intending to begin a new life with the baby. John and Laura manage to track her down, and John takes the baby from her side whilst she is sleeping, taking him out to the car where Laura is waiting. Anna wakes up and comes running after them with a gun, shooting at the car but not injuring anyone. Laura drives the car into Anna and kills her.

The final scene features "happy family" John, Laura, and their baby together at home.

After having watched this second film, I realised that far from being throwaway fluff, these productions were communicating a very sinister social message regarding the fundamental nature of human existence itself (and serving as cautionary tales about the dangers of too much Botox, as there's only about two actors in the whole of 'Inconceivable' who can actually move their faces...).

It is no secret that surrogacy has become wildly more popular in recent years, in assisting infertile couples (or even singles - or throuples) to have a baby.

The practice is particularly popular in celebrity circles, with many famous women acknowledging they have used surrogates to start or complete their families (and many more are rumoured to have used surrogates, even if they don't explicitly admit it, and parade around with moonbumps that periodically slip down instead).

While surrogacy is often portrayed in glossy media spreads as a wonderful, altruistic journey of life-affirming joy, the reality is often much darker, and always deeply ethically dubious.

Surrogacy as an industry very often involves poor women in desperate circumstances who are enduring various degrees of exploitation in order to provide rich Westerners with their made-to-order baby (and if the baby doesn't match order specifications, the legal owners of the baby may strenuously object, as this gay couple did, when the baby boy they had ordered turned out to be a girl).

Of course, there is one very prominent cultural offering that paints surrogacy in anything but a positive light, and shows how brutal, traumatic, and punishing it can be for the surrogate mothers...

The Handmaid's Tale.

The Handmaid's Tale features disempowered, poor and exploited women, forced to produce babies for rich couples. When the baby is born, it is immediately ripped from the arms of its mother, leaving her desperate with grief and at high risk of developing psychiatric problems, as this is a completely predictable consequence for a new mother of having the baby she has just carried for nine months and is powerfully physically and emotionally bonded to, taken away from her.

The consequences for the baby are just as significant and distressing, if not more so (at least the mother possesses the cognitive capacities to understand what is happening. The baby has no such ability and must only experience utter distress and terror, being taken away from the only other human they have ever known and left in the care of strangers).

We would not subject animals such as dogs and cats to such inhumane brutality, with kittens and puppies left with their mothers for at least 8 weeks, and often up to 12 (equivalent human age: four years) before they go to their new owners.

Yes, in some extreme circumstances - such as where the mother represents a direct physical danger to the child - it is necessary to remove the child at birth.

Yet this is not the case with surrogacy, where a wealthy couple has intentionally created a situation which engenders great trauma and suffering to both a (generally poor, underprivileged) woman, and her child (yes, hers), so they can have their made-to-order baby.

I'm afraid I have no sympathy at all for people who use surrogates. I certainly have sympathy for infertile couples desperate to have a baby, but there are many appropriate responses to that (fertility treatment, adoption, fostering) that don't involve commodifying human life and buying babies.

And if fertility treatment fails, and a couple is unwilling or unable to foster or adopt, then they will just have to accept that they can't have children, just as millions of couples around the world and historically have had to do. Enlisting less privileged people to provide rent-a-womb services should not be an option (not least because surrogacy laws are so lax that elderly single men are now able to buy babies using this route, and if background checks are lacking for the men who do this, follow-up checks are even less so).

Now, superficially, one might think that the two films I watched - Inconceivable and When The Bough Breaks - were in agreement with me: that they were showing surrogacy is riddled with dangerous risks.

Yet look again, and it becomes plainly apparent that this is not really what they were depicting.

Because who are the villains of the respective pieces?

Not the wealthy couples who are using their financial good fortune to buy the reproductive services of much poorer, younger women, women with tragic histories of trauma and abuse.

No: the villains in both offerings are depicted as being the young women themselves, to the extent we are meant to feel jubilant when, in the final scenes of When The Bough Breaks, Laura Taylor kills her surrogate, Anna.

Anna, we have by this point learned, was orphaned at the age of three, and then went into foster care where she was systematically abused by her foster father, who she eventually retaliated against, before falling into a relationship with another abusive man, who forced her to participate in a surrogacy scam for his own financial benefit.

Then, whilst pregnant and full of hormones, Anna develops romantic feelings for the biological father of the baby she is carrying, John, and when she realises he doesn't return the feelings, runs off in dismay. She has the baby by herself, and just hours after he is born, he is stolen from her. She reacts in horror and fury and tries to retrieve her baby. Whilst she is do-doing, the rich, empowered, and far more privileged Laura, kills her.

Yet we are meant to believe Anna is the villain and Laura is the victim.

Equally in 'Inconceivable', we learn that the surrogate Katie comes from a terrible background, full of trauma and abuse, and that she sold her eggs in utter desperation - but that the process left her infertile, meaning whilst rich women were having her children, she was unable to have any herself. The embryo that the wealthy couple, Brian and Angela, had in storage, was her last egg and last chance to have her own baby. So, spiralling into ever-increasing grief-driven madness, she tries to reclaim her child in whatever ways she can.

Yet, when she gives birth to him, we are meant to see it as a victory that Brian immediately snatches him and tells her coldly she will never see him again.

The reality is that, in both of these films, the surrogates are actually the victims: systematically abused and exploited since childhood, and with no robust social or professional resources such as a strong family or good job, they are broken and desperate, making them easy fodder for rich, privileged people to take advantage of.

However, the message the films want to convey is not that they are exploited victims, but rather, that they were nothing but dangerous liabilities, useful only as reproductive commodities to produce a child, but after that, they are best disposed of - either locked away in a psychiatric institution or outright killed.

Just as is depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, too.

In this series, it is made explicit that the architects of Gilead regard "Handmaids" as the lowest of the low, and the only reason they haven't been sent off to work in a brothel or shovel toxic waste - or sent to the wall and killed - is because of their reproductive capacities.

Once they are no longer useful in that capacity, or once they react to it in an "undesirable" way (such as, bonding with their newborn baby), they are to be disposed of.

Just like in the films I watched.

These are all very sinister harbingers of what is to come, as infertility becomes more and more of an epidemic, and the costs of raising a child continue to soar.

We are therefore not very far off a situation where only the rich can afford to both raise a child, and engage in the fertility treatments couples increasingly require to have one, up to and including surrogacy, which the very poor will be forced to provide, because - as AI continues to gallop ahead - fewer and fewer work opportunities will be available, to women in particular.

("Struggling to survive on your government UBI stipend, two hours' daily electricity, and ration of bugs? Have you considered making the dreams of an infertile couple come true with the gift of surrogacy? Call us today!")

When these coerced surrogacy arrangements borne out of poverty and despair go wrong, and the surrogate mother becomes desperate to keep her child (as all mammalian mothers are powerfully hardwired to do), she will be depicted as a dangerous mentally ill liability who was a threat to her child, so thank God that nice, rich, respectable couple has him instead.

We are much nearer to this future than you might think, and already, rich and influential men like Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are paving the way, with other cultural influencers strongly recommending surrogacy over more conventional family models (e.g., that single men should acquire children through surrogacy rather than "risk" having a relationship with a woman).

Fortunately, various campaigning groups are starting to emerge, highlighting the horrors and dangers of surrogacy (for the surrogate mothers and their babies, not the rich people who buy them), and they encourage us to get involved, for instance by writing to local legislators about the issue.

Hopefully, these groups will start making some real headway and see this awful practice outlawed, or at least much more tightly regulated, before The Handmaid's Tale becomes even more prophetic than it already is.

And in the meantime, perhaps I will have to give up on ever finding any films that are reliably "agenda-free".

Or perhaps, all these years later, it's time I gave poor old Cyrano another go....

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