whatyareckon

By Clay Waters ~

The front page of The New York Times Saturday Arts section featured a castigation of the new Marilyn Monroe “biopic.” Critic-at-large Amanda Hess’s insidious critique focused on a single scene of the film showing a “beatific, photorealistic fetus.”

Why? Hess doesn’t come out and say it, but one suspects she fears such images risk humanizing “the fetus” (which of course is already human) threatening to complicates the pro-choice “clump of cells” position.:

As [Monroe] swigs champagne on the beach with her two lovers, the stars above them realign into an expanse of wiggly sperm. Cue gestational montage! A clump of cells appears. A pulsating embryo sprouts, resembling a gelatinous crimson shrimp. Soon a beatific, photorealistic fetus is floating in a sparkling peach brine, its fully articulated form dappled in inexplicable rays of light.

Hess seems to be denying the photographic evidence regarding what a fetus actually…