In 2007, 4,703 children between the ages of 1 and 4 and 6,147 children aged 5 to 14 died in America. I feel like that's actually less than I would have expected, but it's still an almost unfathomable toll in terms of grief. And I think it's unsurprising that even within the oft-filmed subsection of affluent white women who lose their children (God forbid we venture into the realm of families in poverty who lose children), it's hard to figure out how to make a movie about that kind of agony. We've got two movies in the genre following quickly on each other, the first featuring Natalie Portman as a mistress-turned-wife who loses her own baby with her new husband and struggles to find her way as a mother with her stepson:
And already in theaters, we've got Rabbit Hole:
I think it's fascinating that these movies both have bad-mother aspects to them. Lisa Kudrow blames Natalie Portman's character for the death of Portman's own child, saying she's proved she's "not safe" around children. The comment seems mostly like moral commentary on the fact that Portman's daughter was the result of her marriage to a man who left his wife for her. And while Kidman's grief is of course legitimate in Rabbit Hole, obviously Aaron Eckhart's character thinks there an extent to which she's a bad wife for not recovering more quickly. The world is a much less cruel place than it used to be, especially for those of us who live middle-class lives or better in highly industrialized first-world countries. Maybe we need to source the randomness of a universe that sometimes kills our children to something.