Photo: First Comes Love
Though I've recorded all of HBO's Monday-night documentary premieres this summer, I haven't done a great job of watching them in a timely manner once they're recorded. (I...literally just finished the Pussy Riot movie this weekend.) But as a judge-fan of all the reality shows about ladies and girls getting pregnant by accident and/or hiding their pregnancies and/or breaking new ground in the area of wasting money on stupid shit during and after their pregnancies, obviously I wasn't going to sleep on Monday's premiere of First Comes Love. Filmmaker Nina Davenport wrote, directed, shot, edited, and narrated the story of her decision to get pregnant on her own, when she was forty-one and not in a relationship, and the film takes us through every stage of the process, from thinking about it to having fertility treatments to lining up a donor to getting pregnant to having the baby and through the challenges of his early life, by the end of which I...wished for her sake that she'd kept all of it to herself. Her sake, not mine: I ate it up with a spoon.
The reason most of the "oops, I'm pregnant!" shows exist is, it seems clear, to serve as cautionary tales for viewers to take contraception seriously and think through the implications of unplanned pregnancy -- physical, emotional, and especially financial. Davenport gets pregnant on purpose and solicits the input of several loved ones who point out that, as a documentary filmmaker, her income is uncertain at the best of times and a constant source of stress in her life, and yet when the arrival of her son JASPER (ugh) ends up costing her, like, money and stuff, she seems totally unprepared. For instance, we see her make a trip home to visit her (fairly recently) widowed father, during which she whinily confronts him about his willingness to kick in for her kid. "I just have felt really hurt, and sad, and disappointed, that although I find myself a single mother, that you, as my father-- that I don't feel like you registered, in any way, what I'm dealing with. I don't have a husband, and Jasper doesn't have a father. Kirk and Tim [her brothers] have everything. They have wives, they have multiple houses -- they don't need help! I do need help!"
Let's back up for a second. Even if you haven't watched this thing yet, you are, no doubt, an excellent reader, and have noted, in my synopsis, the circumstances under which Jasper came into this world, which is to say, Davenport didn't "find [her]self a single mother": she made herself pregnant, through a long series of deliberate decisions, none of which was an accident. When she started the process, she didn't have a husband, and though she might have hoped otherwise, she never expected Jasper necessarily to have a father; though her sperm donor is Eric, a friend who's still in her life, and who we see hanging out with Jasper a little, we'd also seen Davenport recording herself repeating to Eric the terms of his donor agreement, specifically that he would have no custodial rights and that she would make no demands on his finances or even on his time for the upkeep of the child that science would build out of their discrete genetic material.
Furthermore, the point in the movie where Davenport is calling her dad to the carpet for not helping her out -- and make no mistake, she means helping her financially; since she lives in New York and he lives in Michigan, she would have had no expectation that he was going to pop over and babysit or something -- comes around an hour past the point when she tells him she's pregnant and he replies, "Call the abortionist!" Okay, not really a cool joke to make, but he does go on to explain his position with a bit more nuance -- to wit, that she's financially insecure and shouldn't be attempting parenthood on her own.
Back to the dispute: she complains that she needs help, and her dad answers, "Kirk once talked about being a potter and throwing pots for life. He could have done that, and then he'd be-- have even less money than you. But he didn't, he decided to go to law school and earn a good living, and he did. You could have done the same thing." I mean...fucking A right. There are benefits to leading the life of an artist as opposed to pursuing a traditional profession, and presumably Davenport has enjoyed those over the years, but she also chose to make another person and install him into this life, and she has to deal with the consequences without expecting that someone who made different choices would bail her out. Like, she's forty-one. She had plenty of time to think through all the implications of this pregnancy between all the daily hormone injections.
Toward the end of the film, Davenport and her aunt, her late mother's sister, undertake to go up to the attic at Davenport's childhood home to go through her mother's things and decide what to keep, during the course of which she comes across an old newspaper clipping about a house fire. When she asks her dad about it, he explains that his own father, an alcoholic, is assumed to have fallen asleep with a lit cigarette that started a fire in their home; Davenport's father, along with his sister and mother, got out safely, but his father died. He goes on to tell her that his father's drinking was so bad that he had a hard time keeping up a medical practice in any city where they lived, and that as his bad reputation would spread, they'd have to move to a new town where no one knew him and try to start over. So like, maybe this kind of financial insecurity and this general feeling of an unsafe childhood informed Davenport's dad's views on the ideal circumstances under which to bring a child into the world? I hope after she heard this story and then thought back to the way she tried to guilt him into writing her a cheque to cover the situation she "find[s] herself" in and felt like a prize asshole.
In the end, Davenport tells the camera that it was all worth it, because what else is she going to say. (I mean, I'm sure it is, but...you know.) And since she is the sole person responsible for every aspect of the film, she presumably has some awareness of how she comes across and left in even the unsavory stuff to show the complexity of the whole motherhood project. Even so, it ends up a fascinating document of privilege and entitlement, and boy, I loved judging my way through every frame.