Having It All vs. A $3 Million Orgasm

An Apparatus Approach to Baby Boom (1987)

[Contains spoilers because we have to talk about this]

Poster for Baby Boom (1987) via IMDb

Baby Boom (1987) – Apparatus

Boy, have I watched a film that was feature length and everything this week. I’ve had Diane Keaton on my mind because I keep telling people that the dress code for my wedding is “Diane Keaton in a Nancy Meyers kitchen”, so this week I watched a film co-written by Meyers with the film’s director Charles Shyer: Baby Boom (1987). It was definitely a film, arguably even two, but let’s get into it. The Review Roulette wheel turned up Apparatus as our approach and I was thinking “simple. This film looks like it’s about a career woman who acquires a baby and shenanigans ensue.” And to be fair, to an extent, that is what the film is about, but I was not expecting how far this film goes to feel progressive but actually be quite regressive.

So, J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton) is a high-powered businesswoman whose job discernibly is “Business”. We are vaguely told that she is an account manager who prizes her career above everything, even four minutes of raucous sex with a fully clothed Harold Ramis. J.C. then inherits a baby way too easily. She unwittingly signs for this baby at a gate in JFK or LaGuardia like she’s a DHL package no one ordered and is made to take her to a business meeting where the hilarity of the baby ruining her career ensues. J.C. ultimately decides she wants to keep the baby, jeopardises her career through a series of absolutely unnecessary actions on her part, loses her Harold Ramis and career, and then the second film starts about an hour in. J.C. moves to Vermont after she is fired, has a terrible time until Sam Shepherd forcefully kisses her, and then some yuppies on a ski vacation buy the baby food she has been making and J.C. remembers her career was Business and starts a baby food company.

The premise is fine. The execution is wild. So, if we’re looking at this film through an apparatus lens, we’re thinking about the structures of society and the portrayals of power dynamics, social relations, and cultural expectations within it. At the very beginning, J.C. is offered the chance to become a Partner at the Business job by her boss Fritz (Sam Wanamaker). Fritz tells her point blank that he is able to give his undivided attention to his career because he has a wife who takes care of the kids and the house and the cooking and the cleaning and makes sure his shirts are pressed, the emotional and physical labour of domesticity. He is completely open with her that it is unfair how society is structured enabling him to “have it all” because he is a man and he can. J.C. assures him that she doesn’t want it “all” referring to a husband and family and the whole American Dream shebang; she just wants the career. This conversation is even progressive by today’s standards for an older man in a position of power to acknowledge that he is not self-made in any sense and to analyse society’s structure so bluntly as to say “it is unfair, but this is the way it is at the moment and I want to be able to help you have what you want, so let’s have an open and honest discussion about how to get there.”

Starting with that blunt honesty about the gender dynamics of US Business especially, the film then continues to show the absolute worst version of a working mother and successfully discourages women from working and having children at the same time, which I truly was not expecting. J.C. is put into situations in the workplace with the baby for comedic effect but makes terrible decisions. For instance, knowing her career is in jeopardy from these repeated instances, J.C. then blames “new motherhood” for why she is late to an important meeting. In another scene, instead of allowing the baby to sit peacefully on her lap, as she is, while talking to her bosses for a very quick 2-minute meeting, J.C. decides it is time to try to force the baby to eat causing her to scream and throw the bottle at J.C.’s boss. Instead of doing reasonable, sensible, savvy things, J.C., who is constantly reminding people that she went to Harvard, has seemingly and entirely lost her prized identity as professional.

And I’m not saying motherhood is easy or these would be simple decisions to make in the moment, that having a baby thrust into your arms at JFK is not a jarring and extreme situation. What I am saying is that this film made the decision to show J.C., a woman at the absolute top of her game and shown as a powerhouse in high stress Business situations, immediately folding under the pressure and unable to make even the simplest decisions about her job and her child. She is immediately incapable of handling her job and motherhood at the same time. So, she loses her job and makes the impulsive decision to leave New York City for Vermont, buying her dream house from a paper and arriving to a rundown fixer-upper with snow inside, an empty well, and no heat.

The second half of the film is played as her rock bottom and subsequent redemption, but even that is hollow. She had an excellent salary in New York and presumably quite a bit of savings. She bought a brand-new car and this house in cash. But her plan is to be a stay-at-home mother in Vermont without a partner, and within months she is broke from repairs to the house. She had no long-term financial plan, and this really does betray her Harvard Business acumen she is always boasting about. Her rock bottom starts to turn around when Sam Shepherd kisses her on a street after a several scenes of sexual tension and her admission that she has never enjoyed sex nor had any recently regardless. Then she realises she can make a business out of selling her “gourmet baby food” (homemade applesauce), it becomes a hit, and in an indeterminate amount of time but the baby never ages so I would assume immediately, J.C. has a deal from her former Business job.

Here's the part that really cinches it. J.C. and Sam Shepherd have sex and we see her come downstairs floating in a bathrobe with the glow of a woman who has just had her first four orgasms all in one session. Sam Shepherd confirms that he only got 20 minutes of sleep, so they had a good long night of coital bliss. Love that for them, get that glow, Diane. But this is enough for J.C. to go to the Business meeting smugly returning to her former office to reject the deal offered to acquire her baby food business and expand the operation nationwide. She has one night of orgasms and turns down $3 million in cash up front, retained control of the company and refusal to relocate that she negotiated, and a salary of $1 million a year. That is not good Business. And in her speech justifying her rejection of the offer, she mentions Sam Shepherd as her reason to go back home (even though she could go home with all the money, retained control, and nothing structurally would change for her) and says if one of the largest food distributors in the country can sell her product nationwide, then so can she. So, she does, in effect, want it all as she wants to expand the company from her base of operations but turned down the ability to do so with a major investor and distributor’s resources. That, to me, is not Girl Power feminism; that is presenting a woman who is incapable of making sound business decisions because she became a mother and has the prospect of becoming a wife.

There is so much to say about this film. The way her ultimate identity is still tied to being a mother. She was incapable of corporate Business but suddenly is an entrepreneur with a thriving small business because she leaned into the domestic strengths of making baby food. She was the ultimate cool under pressure icon of an 80s businesswoman, but the second her domestic circumstances change she becomes shrill (genuinely shrill, screeching even) as she has repeated breakdowns and loses everything. This is not a progressive film, even for the 80s. I will not say this is a product of its time when we had films like Norma Rae (1977) or even 9 to 5 (1980) almost a decade before. This is just a classic regressive comedy that on the surface feels very progressive, but really, they portrayed every fear people have concerning a working mother by making J.C. go from top of her career to completely incompetent in record time. In terms of depicting the structures of society, I think this film does a good job to a point by acknowledging the gendered dynamics of the Business world, but then goes out of its way to blame J.C. for her own downfall rather than those unfair structures.

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Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am

Auteur

Nancy Meyers did not direct this film, but she did write it, and I was really shocked by how unexpectedly regressive it was. When I think of Nancy Meyers films, I don’t necessarily think of the most progressive ideals for womanhood, but I don’t think of her as actively regressive. Most Meyers films I have seen (admittedly from the 90s through today) often fall under the category of class fantasy in my mind, in which the people live supremely comfortable lives without a care in the world outside of their personal conflicts, which is absolutely fine but obviously a fantasy. Baby Boom did not feel in that vein really apart from J.C. finally having a night of glowing sex because one thing I definitely associate with Meyers is women living their best sexual lives which is a progressive pursuit in itself.