We here at DadWagon won’t know the answer to that until after this weekend, when the documentary about four LOs from across the planet actually opens. That’s assuming we can all get sitters, of course.
Babies offers little in the way of context. It’s pretty much just straight-up babies, all the way through. Adult dialogue is untranslated, and parents mostly hover just on the edges of the frame. Balmes gets a little mileage out of the disparity between Namibian Ponijao lying in the dirt, sticking bones in her mouth, and little white Hattie singing Native American chants in her San Francisco music class. But for the most part, the strength of Babies is the way it babies babies babies babies babies universality babies babies babies, babies babies babies miracle babies babies.
The Huffington Post, meanwhile, asks “Sure they’re cute, but what’s the point?”:
Babies seems like “Baby Einstein” minus the toys, or the Elmo’s World “Hello, Baby!” segment minus the funny furry guy. All that’s left is a study in emotional manipulation in four different languages. How can you tell the difference between something moving and something manipulative? Moved audiences gasp and say, “Wow.” Manipulated audiences mile and say, “Awwwwww.”
Babies is not for everyone — it’s a slow, contemplative piece of anthropology, and those of us who have trouble slowing down (I am guilty here) will find themselves fidgety at times. But it’s also the kind of film that has what I’ll call a Doppler impact — it comes slowly at first and then, after walking out of the theater, the cumulative power of it gobsmacks you.
Carly Berwick, writing at Next American City, asks a question you don’t hear asked much around my neighborhood: So when did 3-year-olds start needing an education?
It is, of course, a fact of nature in the Upper West Side, that not just 3-year-olds but also 2-year-olds, and perhaps even 1-year-olds, need an education. Berwick, who was writing a review of Elizabeth Rose’s The Promise of Preschool: from Headstart to Universal Pre-K, makes a point that I think applies here. Basically, parents (and voters) want to see their early childhood education look as much like school as possible, even if that’s not always age-appropriate.
I got that sense going through the Universal Pre-K process: in a big auditorium meeting two months ago, the bosses of NYC’s early childhood education program talked a lot about “teaching to standards,” which I found almost as repulsive a construction as the “interview” process that private preschools have for 2-year-olds.
The institutionalization of preschool in my neighborhood seems also to be tied to the moving of that invisible line between daycare and preschool. Two-year-olds “need” an education, I think, because all the working moms and dads here, who have left their children with nannies and in group care since their piddling maternity/paternity leaves ended six weeks postpartum, want to feel like there’s some enrichment coming out of these impossible life choices. So instead of calling it daycare, call it a deeply educational experience that will help your kid get into one of them fancy prep schools, and sleep better at night.
(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)
Six-time all-star, zero modeling skills.
The sports highlight of my childhood was the day my father took me to a Harlem Globetrotters game in Boston. I must have been 9 or 10—an age when professional athletes seem less like guys who’ve simply honed their skills to perfection and more like wizards, capable of feats so far beyond the realm of us mere mortals that they come off as almost imaginary. For a nerdy, awkward, unathletic kid, the Globetrotters’ preordained but highly entertaining win over the Washington Generals was like a live episode of Transformers.
Wait, I think I’ve made an error here. It wasn’t my father who took me to the game! It was my mother. Or maybe it was him after all. Who knows?
This right here should tell you something about the father-son-sports relationship in my family: It doesn’t exist.
Oh, I had a sense when I was growing up that sports—and we’re talking spectator sports here, and in particular the American holy trinity of baseball, football, and basketball—existed, and that people not only watched games on TV but cared about the outcomes. And I know that my dad had a standard fifties childhood that involved baseball games and baseball fandom (his brother, my uncle, was famously photographed with Willie Mays Snider Koufax, um, wait, which baseball great was it?). We played Wiffle ball in the yard sometimes, and I think I owned a catcher’s mitt—it might even have been the one he had as a boy. But if he followed any team at home, he kept it mighty secret.
My mom, actually, was the sports fan in our household. The Cardinals were her team, since she’d grown up in St. Louis. Her fandom wasn’t devout, but you got the sense she cared how the team did.
Which leads us to why any similar fandom failed to develop in me: location, location, location. I grew up in Western Massachusetts, and while you might think that would put me in the Red Sox camp, you’d be wrong. Out in Amherst, we had a sense that we were different from Bostonians, and just because we lived in the same state didn’t mean we had to act like them and cheer for a team that played more than two hours’ travel away.
Then, when we moved to southeastern Virginia in my teenage years, there was the same problem: no local sports team to connect with. (Of course, by then it was too late anyway.) And no one at home to make me give a damn about players far away. Ridiculously, my dad now teaches at UConn, one of the most rabidly sports-obsessed schools in the Northeast, and they follow the progress of the women’s basketball team as if they actually care.*
If I sound a little resentful, it’s because maybe I am. As an adult, I’ve grown to realize how important sports are to life in America. At one of my first jobs, my boss had just come over from MLB.com (or was it NHL.com?), and I always felt this gap between us—and between me and many other colleagues. One of the fundamental things they care about is something completely alien to me. It’s like religion: There may be a god, or there may not, but it just has nothing to do with me. I shrug my shoulders, keep silent, and hope the conversation shifts to something I can handle, like late-nineteenth-century British novelists or Korean food.
Actually, though, sports is not entirely alien. In fact, I really like seeing live games, whether it’s baseball, basketball, football, hockey, or whatever. Since I moved to New York, I’ve seen the Yankees, Knicks, and Devils play; I’ve been to the U.S. Open. I’ve even watched the Cyclones play out in Coney Island and the amateur pugilists battle at the Golden Gloves. There’s a thrill to actually being there that I don’t get from televised events.
Now, of course, that creates a dilemma. While I don’t have a son, my daughter, Sasha, could go either way—continue in the family tradition of indifference, or become fluent in a third language, the sports dialect that’s been spoken around her uncomprehending father for decades. The latter option is clearly the one I’ll pick—it’s best for the baby, right?—but it’s going to require my becoming the kind of father who watches games on Sunday afternoons or Tuesday nights or whenever these things take place. I’m going to have to figure out what an ERA is, and what running backs do, and… I’m at the limit of my vocabulary already!
Still, I’m looking forward to this. After all, it’s an excuse not to study Mandarin and instead to sit on my butt and drink beer and yell at the TV whenever possible. Which will surely teach Sasha the lessons she needs to learn, whatever those are.
[*Side note: Both my younger siblings married (or are seriously dating) people who care deeply about sports, and I believe they’re trying to adopt their spouses’ passions. Huh.]
It’s not that anything bad happened to Sasha. I’m just… let’s say curious? I mean she’s taken the stuff in the last couple of months, so like if she doesn’t get into Harvard, or if she grows small horns, can I start a class action?
This could be the one great event that brings all parents in our generation together!
