THE SURROGATE: FILM REVIEW
Movement politics, especially as of late, has been fond of aphorism. This, of course, isn’t new. “The Whole World is Watching” and “The Personal is Political” were sure to stir the heart of any young radical during the rise of feminist and anti-war movements. Now, with social media, the impulse to hashtag has accelerated a trend toward pithiness—each week, a new phrase seems to explode online, guiding one’s eyes and directing them on how to live their life. My body, my choice. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Girls support girls.
Unfortunately, real life is rarely ever so clear-cut. While these ideals are indisputably noble, there is an endless number of hurdles that can render a slogan impotent when its clean lines bump against the complex nuances of the day-to-day. Put simply, living a life in line with a set of lofty morals developed through careful thought is damn hard. In Jeremy Hersch’s film The Surrogate, a woman who embodies millennial sensibility must navigate a situation and a series of ethical dilemmas that are truly novel.
In the first scene of Hersch’s debut film, Jess (Jasmine Batchelor) tells her ex-boyfriend that she does not want to get married and marital commitment is not a good fit for her. In the next scene, she finds out she is pregnant. In this situation, however, she is not afraid of commitment. The audience quickly learns that Jess has agreed to be a surrogate for two of her best friends: Josh (Chris Perfetti) and Aaron (Sullivan Jones). Their joy is palpable, and Jess proudly arrives at pre-natal yoga mentioning, “it’s not mine.” She’s very happy to be able to live in line with her ideals here; only six years after the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, she’s able to fulfill her friend’s dreams through what she seems to view as a very achievable commitment. There is a sense of pride in not just fulfilling the personal role she is taking on, but also in fighting norms any way she can—in New York it is illegal to pay for a surrogate, so Jess’s queer arrangement emerges only from her vast commitment to her relationships. They all go out to dinner together, affirming their little queer family over expensive wine (and a Coke for Jess) and laughs.
Moments later, their faces fall in a doctor’s office as the triad learns that the fetus has tested positive for Down’s Syndrome. Jess immediately buries her feelings and puts on her game face. She arranges a visit to a community center for children with Down’s Syndrome and forms a forced and eager relationship with the mother of a child at the center (Brooke Bloom). She is, by all accounts, making the best of a difficult situation, such as by reminding everyone about how lucky it is that Josh and Aaron are high earning, and perhaps, as she states, in the best situation to raise a child with Down’s Syndrome as anybody could be. Josh and Aaron, however, aren’t so sure. They are doubtful about whether or not they could financially provide for all of the needs of the child. Things get more complicated as each withholds their personal morals from the other: Jess cannot tell her friends that she believes they must raise this child, and her friends cannot tell Jess they think she should get an abortion. Until, of course, they do. She, though, struggles to hear it.
Jess, I’m sure, is prone to the same Googling as I am. A quick Wikipedia search will tell you that as genetic testing has become available for pregnant people, a vast number of fetuses with Down’s Syndrome have been aborted. In Denmark, they have nearly eradicated the chromosomal difference. This impulse, on a structural level, is a clear-cut case of eugenics; that is, the scientific-intellectual tradition that began in the 19th century, which aims to use scientific and technologic models to breed out “undesirable” populations, often defined through the lens of disability. As a Black woman, Jess undeniably understands that eugenics is a strain of thought that has also been racialized, and that societal labels that designate some populations as desirable and some as undesirable have never turned out well for marginalized populations.
The Surrogate premiered at SXSW 2020 with barely a sound, but this quiet film is nothing to turn one’s nose at. The tone is reminiscent of an Annie Baker stage play or the neorealism of another contemporary reproductive drama, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Conversations meander and neuroses take center stage as in Joe Swanberg’s Easy. The acting style is naturalistic—Batchelor performs a tour-de-force, her stage training jumping out as she carries the intense moral quandary to its conclusion. All characters deftly make clear to the audience, or perhaps any willing in-world conversationalist, the unsaid anxieties that bubble below their respectability politics. Hersch frames shots in a way that contributes to the naturalistic tone of the work by allowing the focus of the scene to slip out of the camera’s eye, thereby trusting his audience to remain engaged in how Jess and company will maneuver out from between a rock and a hard place. Quiet moments linger, and dialogue spills from characters' lips too much and too little. It is difficult to articulate what exactly makes the performance of a real person seem like a real person, but the cast of The Surrogate seems to hit the nail on the head.
Tales of identity are difficult; people risk becoming merely symbolic fixtures of a didactic message; the more conservative and whiter crowd can be allergic to conflicts that spring from anything perceived as a conflict of identity. But Hersch’s characters don’t become trapped in their identities, and perhaps this is precisely because they are aware of them. Jess knows that she cannot force her friends to parent, but she also knows it would not be fair for them to shift the burden of post-pregnancy to her. They are people who are navigating the difficulty of knowing the personal is political— but is it always? Can you do something just because you feel like it? Can any aphorism or piece of advice or self-help tell you what to do with your body? Can anyone else? How can our actions align with our morals, especially in a world where intersections of identity and circumstance create impossible binds? What Jess chooses in the end may or may not be morally satisfactory to the viewer, but what Hersch’s truly intersectional work makes clear is that these things are never so black and white.
