Bye-Bye, Baby: The Ethics of Infants in Peril

Written by: Kendra Spring Klasek

It's every mother's worst nightmare, the ominous silence prompting the glance into the back seat, only to find the car seat empty.  Or perhaps this one, an enormous snake slithers menacingly over your screaming bundle of joy. For me, worst of all is the thought of me gone and my child left helpless and alone, facing certain death in terror and isolation.  The fact that someone else swoops in is bitter consolation.  The fact remains that he cries out for his mommy and she is gone.

Here we will be exploring this and looking at child endangerment on 'The Leftovers' and in other media as well.




Whether it is an emotional spur which keeps us watching or sets us off on an angry Twitter tear (to the delight of PR exes, everywhere) infants in peril will always strike nerves and conversation.  Not to mention, all of that badass water cooler cred because, let's face it, any show which holds equal disregard for infants and adults must be edgy and envelop-pushing.  It's a tactic that works every single time.

It always works because it is elemental.  We are biologically hard-wired to react.  You don't have to have any emotional connection to any character in a particular scene to have your instinctual buttons pushed by this form of overt manipulation.  There is nothing more helpless than an infant and no instinct more deep-rooted than maternal protection. 

So, I ask you . . . is it cheating? That's our first question.

Our second question might be more obvious, but might step on some toes.  I've never been one to tread lightly, so put on your steel-toed boots and follow me.

Are infants actors?

Before you answer, "Of course!  It's all make-believe, they are hired as actors, their parents are paid and they are credited like anyone else!", ask yourself this: What is an infant's "motivation" to scream his bloody head off?

A baby isn't going to laugh it off between takes and hope his last poopy diaper makes it into the gag-reel.  If an infant looks traumatized, that's because he is.

Here's what the nay-sayers might argue: it's not serious trauma.  He's hungry or wet or wants to be held.  Maybe it's gas. A gassy baby is perhaps the angriest human being on this green earth.  For a baby, though, that's traumatic, especially when those needs purposely go unmet in order to continue to elicit the desired response.

A traumatic event is something which hurls us beyond the bounds of our personal safety or breaks us out of the glass case of our naiveté before we are emotionally equipped to handle the consequences.  For an infant, this can be as simple as the realization that help doesn't always rush in when we call for it.  This realization must come with time in order for growth or self-sufficiency to occur, but for a two or three month old child..and on camera?

Where do we draw the line?

Should there even be a line at all?

Let's look at the alternatives.

First, you could use a fake baby.  Second, you could change your story to exclude the infant.  Third, you could allude to the infant but never actually show anything.

We've all seen option one in action.

We've probably scoffed at how fake it looks.  The other series I cover, 'Outlander', featured a scene with a fake dead baby.  The problem directors and producers have with this option is negative blow-back from viewers, even the same viewers who might react negatively to a real baby being used because of the cruelty factor.  With 'Outlander', the jokes came immediately.

Many dubbed it the "American Sniper Baby".

For those scratching their heads, this is the 'American Sniper' baby:

Photo courtesy: The Telegraph Online

Dear readers, the things I do for research . . . I had zero desire to see 'American Sniper', but I watched it just to see the context of the fake baby scene. Even just a google image search had me snorting with laughter.  I mean, seriously . . . now we know what REALLY happened to the Baby Jesus from the Mapleton Nativity.

So, what do I get for my trouble? A child getting tortured and eventually killed by a drill, first in the leg, then in the head.  Gee, that's swell . . . and the fake baby?  It's a non-issue.  It looks completely silly, but the omission of an actual infant wasn't out of concern for the baby's comfort.  It was simply to make filming easier because "babies are unpredictable".

Okay, so obviously, the fake baby option is less than effective . . . especially when the audience needs an emotional connection or, at the very least, needs to believe in an emotional connection between infant and adult characters in the scene.  Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller give beautiful performances, but all you can see is that damn baby doll.

Options two and three may bring up censorship concerns, but it becomes a balancing act.  How deep is your desire to make your point and what if your audience, whom otherwise might have loved your story, refuses to stick around till the end?

One particularly polarizing scene came from director Jonathan Glazer, for whom button-pushing is a particular hobby.  His 2014 film, 'Under the Skin', starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien disguised as a young woman, depicted a little boy no more than a year old left abandoned on a deserted beach in Scotland in the growing dark, crying plaintively and searching desperately for his mother.  Scarlett's character notices the child but walks away, leaving him to be a helpless victim of nature and the elements.  If I seem to be taking a bit more time setting up this scene for you, it's because it effected me so greatly.  I was haunted by it for days afterwards and still feel an involuntary shudder at it's memory.

Not only was my son the same age as that little baby when I saw the film, he was wearing the same fisherman's sweater from Gap Kids that my son is sporting in this photograph.

It took me over a month to go back and finish watching the film.  Initially, I turned it off after the baby on the beach scene and cried for a good long while.

When asked about the scene, Glazer had this to say:

"We had that scene in all the versions of our screenplay, although it changed into what you see now. What we wanted to do was to demonstrate the difference between her and us. We could show a scene that we know would affect human beings, and then show Scarlett and how she responded to that and how faraway her response was from ours. It measures the distance, really, between us and the alien. It's in the savagery and the brutality of that moment that we see the alien."

About the actual filming, he explained:

"It was a difficult scene for everybody. Just on paper, even before we shot it, it was a scene that people talked about. The baby's mother was obviously distressed because the baby was crying, but the image is intensified through its context in the film: On set, the baby's mother was just out of frame, a foot and a half away, and the baby is only crying for 10, 15 seconds. I mean, when we were casting the baby, I had wanted a toddler, but when you have that little window of opportunity to shoot that shot, you have to be able to rely on the child to cry when you need it to. So we went younger, and I remember in the casting, as soon as the mother put the child down and walked away, the baby would cry. Obviously, we could then rely on that to achieve what we needed."

These quotes were taken from an interview he gave to Kyle Buchanan of Vulture.com.

It's interesting that his desire was not to traumatize the audience, but simply to show the disconnect between Scarlett's alien nature and our own human biological instinct.  Yet, traumatize us he did.  Scrolling through the comments section to that interview, we find these very telling reactions:

"I don't care what distance he was trying to capture- that scene was utterly disturbing and anyone that feels it should be visualized has no humanity. This director is a scumbag. People need to stop wondering if they can do something and figure out whether they should." - boomer123

"Attempted to watch this film last night and during that baby scene my wife became extremely agitated and I had to shut the film off and console her.  Our son is eleven months old and it was just too much." - fergbird

"I have an 11 month son (although this comment is 7 months after your comment) I had to leave the room - I stood and sobbed in the kitchen for ages :( my husband said that he was also distressed by that scene. We didn't (couldn't) watch the rest of the film." - annette.green

So you, as a director, have something to say, but your audience shuts down on you.  Are the parents of the world simply uncultured and too easily offended or is the sacred apple cart of our very nature being upset, here? 

I wouldn't call someone a scumbag, necessarily, but 'boomer123' actually makes a valid argument out of an old cliche.  Just because you can doesn't mean you should.  It's the burden of responsibility which comes part and parcel with working with babies who don't have the ability to give their own consent.  

Now, though, we need to get to the nitty gritty of our issue.  Why are babies the go-to kick in feels for so many directors?

Because it's easy.  We are going to respond and even negative publicity is still publicity. It doesn't even have to be done well, it only needs to involve a real baby.  'Outlander' was not as egregious as 'American Sniper', but it's still not going to garner the same response.  I have a particular beef with artists (be they directors, actors, comedians, writers, painters, musicians, etc.) who shock simply for the sake of shocking.  It's cheap and easy to shock and much harder to genuinely move the emotions of your viewer.  

So if the use of an actual infant shuts down your audience, option one elicits giggles and snide remarks and option two hobbles your artistic vision, then what about option 3?

Well, for a beautiful example of that, one should look no further than 'The Leftovers' itself.  In the penultimate episode of season 1, 'The Garvey's at Their Best', we see Laurie visiting her OB.  She is in the middle of an ultrasound and mulling over a possible abortion when the Departure happens.  We can pan over and see with her whether or not the fetus has vanished from her womb or we can play it like Lindelof does. We can stay with Laurie and let Amy Brenneman tell us the story with her eyes, and she does.  It's powerful and advances the story, and tells us something about her at the same time.  Perhaps most importantly, it maintains a sense of mystery and the horror of the great "unknown".  This is essential. The baby being menaced by the snake is not.  The latter is shocking for the sake of being shocking and as a mother, I resent being the go-to puppet at the end of those strings.

Lindelof is better than that.  We are better than that.

Do you think the use of infants and toddlers in peril in film and television is cheap manipulation, 

artistry, or both?

Do you want more chat about The Leftovers? Get your fix by listening to The Living Reminders Podcast with detailed show discussion and amazing interviews with cast, crew, writers and directors of The Leftovers on HBO.