For the Boys: The Princess and the Pea
My husband and I got a rare break from the incessant demands of childcare the other night when my parents came and took my children to stay with them for an entire week. We celebrated our first night of freedom with a trip to the movies. It was hot out and we decided to go see The Heat. It was supposed to be funny and didn’t look particularly mentally taxing, which seemed to fit the bill for the evening.
We chose a theater near Union Square to catch the movie and as we walked by we saw many people gathered there.
Hundreds certainly. Thousands, maybe.
They were in a pen created by metal barriers, reinforced by a battalion of police officers who stood, hands on hips, on the other side.
We couldn’t cross the square without asking permission of an officer to go behind the barrier and then asking again to be released. The people who stood there held banners made from bedsheets and placards with slogans scrawled on pizza boxes.
They were quiet mostly. There was a feeling of mourning, mostly.
Our movie was starting soonish and we were both hungry, so, rather than cut across the square and be forced to deal with all of that, we went the long way around to find someplace where we could quickly grab a bite.
After artfully stashing my chocolate covered pretzels, Diet Coke and yogurt in my bag, we went into the theater and found seats. My husband and I engaged in our usual negotiations about what row to sit in: he going right to row 2, me to row 15; both eventually ending up together, somewhere in the middle. As always, we silently conferred about the previews, shaking our heads disapprovingly at the stinkers, exchanging raised-eyebrow glances at those that looked promising.We munched our snacks, basked in the air-conditioning, and held each other’s hands.We were ready to be care-free and to laugh at a ridiculous profanity-laden film, that we could never take our children to see.
And The Heat was funny!
The whole audience was rollicking: laughing loudly at every crazy, inappropriate thing that wackily-vested, frizzy-haired Melissa McCarthy said; guffawing whenever characters onscreen rolled their eyes at uptight Sandra Bullock with her stupid, fussily bobby-pinned hair and her tailored lady suits.
My husband was issuing these deep belly-laughs with a wet choking quality, and as I watched him wipe tears from his eyes and lean back in his seat so that he could relax more deeply into the laughter, I noticed that I was distracted, merely issuing a polite chuckle here and there.
I really wanted to laugh but for some reason, like an annoying pebble in my shoe that I just couldn’t ignore, I found myself picturing the photos printed out on paper and glued to the back of pizza boxes, the slogans painted in neon colors and outlined with sharpie, and the people who I’d seen, somberly standing in an improvised cage surrounded by uniformed officers.
I felt like a wet blanket. I was there to escape– to have fun.
So when Melissa McCarthy ripped off Sandra Bullock’s uptight trousers and knelt staring at her fastidious beige Spanx, completely aghast at the rigid little woman before her and the depth of her control issues, I tried to get into it. It was really funny. Really.
But then, there was this other scene– it’s a really funny scene–it’s in all the commercials, so you know it’s a highlight– where our girl-power buddy cops hang a perp by his ankles upside-down over a fire escape. And the perp is this young African-American man, who admittedly is a drug dealer who has information that our ladies need, but I found myself distracted again, unable to relax back into the film.
Oddly, I found myself reflecting on The Princess and the Pea.
We all remember the story:
There’s this prince who is determined to marry only a “real” princess. He meets all sorts of beautiful girls but finds fault with all of them– they are not “genuine” enough for him for one reason or another. Then, in the middle of a violent storm, a bedraggled girl shows up at the palace doors, claiming to be a princess who needs shelter for the night. The Queen suspects this drowned rat must be lying, so she places a pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather-beds and then sends the girl to bed. In the morning everyone is stunned when the girl emerges looking exhausted, and complaining of bruises on her body from some horrible lump in the luxurious bed.. She eventually admits that she was tossing and turning all night long, unable to escape the pain of whatever was under the mattress. She must be a real princess, everyone decides, for only a real princess could be sensitive enough to have detected that tiny pea.
I never liked this story. It irritated me that the ideal princess was so delicate, so over-sensitive, that she couldn’t just roll over, away from the teeny pea lump, and get some rest. She seemed like a prima-donna, annoyingly over-sensitive, just indulging herself in pointless drama.
But here I found myself, unable to just roll over and settle back into a trivial summer comedy, because I’m focused on the young man on-screen, whose humanity and civil rights are being completely disregarded (to great comic effect) by people who exploit their power and authority and take extreme measures to do what they, admittedly, passionately, feel is necessary in order to protect the community.
Every time that the audience rolls their eyes at Bullock’s namby-pamby insistence on creating a dialogue with a suspect or following protocol, I find myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat. Every time McCarthy whips out her gun to get her way and says something crazy, I find myself unable to just enjoy the film and laugh with everyone else.
And I’m annoyed with myself, because I don’t want to be that girl— the one who’s so sensitive that she can’t take a joke. But still, I find myself staring into the darkness, distracted completely by my circling thoughts, like annoying lumps in my mattress that I just can’t avoid.
I have two sons. They are 4 and 6. Just little guys.
And through being their mom, I find myself deeply enmeshed in the world of little boys and all of their exuberant “boyness”. I’ve loved watching these boys at play, watching them grow up.
I love them: the way their sturdy little legs all-of-a-sudden break into a full-on run, those soft-rounded boy bellies that mark them as our babies even as they gruffly try to be cool, even the way you can make any one of them hysterical with the barest mention of poop.
I’ve smiled at these boys on the playground, at their dimples and their scabby knees.
I’ve watched them strut around the neighborhood wearing capes.
I watch them, all of them, with their scratched plastic Spiderman figures, or race cars, or random robotninjaaliens, clutched tightly like totems as their arms swoop majestically through the air and they mutter to themselves, unself-consciously engrossed in a wild, heroic adventure.
I’ve watched their eyes shine with admiration when they watch bigger boys, boys who have skateboards, and ear buds, and heavy backpacks loaded with stuff.
And as much as they are the same, I can’t ignore this nagging, lumpy difference.
A difference that I cannot get away from, though I don’t really feel comfortable talking about it.
A difference so deeply ingrained in our culture, that it can be the unquestioned foundation for a joke.
A difference which means that my sons will grow up with a sense of safety and security and a trust in authority that will not be afforded to some of their friends.
In 8 or 10 years, some of these boys’ parents will be teaching them to walk slowly and to keep their hands out of their pockets, to speak softly and keep their eyes cast down, while my boys will still enjoy the luxurious freedom of running haphazardly down Flatbush Avenue.
And though it doesn’t feel right to spend all night lying on that lump- feeling it press into me, bruising my flesh, leaving me exhausted and in pain- it is not right to just roll over and go to sleep either.
I never wanted to be a princess and I find myself really unsure of what exactly to do now.
Zeke and Destroy 