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    Can One of Opera’s Greatest Singers Get Her Voice Back?

    Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, recently said: “She was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn’t tackle.”Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met.Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.“It is a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. “I’ve had two years of nightmare at this point.”Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby — her voice, she said, came out “scratchy and strange” — but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.Lioness: Rachvelishvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, where she studied after auditioning with a Whitney Houston song.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesShe delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later — months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband — who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.“You start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,” she said. “Of breath, of body. Everything.”Her husband spoke softly. “She was my lioness,” he said. “I am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.”A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche — of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been “fixed.”“Every singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. “It’s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.”Rachvelishvili warming up with her husband, who has become her vocal coach.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesMaria Callas couldn’t undo her instrument’s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote, “There is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.”That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villazón, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.“Every singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,” Rachvelishvili said. “I just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.”THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE — she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory — Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.“I sang Carmen for so many years because I didn’t have easy high notes,” she said. “I took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.”Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” with startling refinement in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” early in 2019.Rachvelishvili and Otari Maisuradze with their daughter, Lileana, who was born in November 2021. Rachvelishvili’s vocal problems began when she was pregnant.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesHer future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi’s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in “Les Troyens,” “Werther,” “La Favorite” and “La Gioconda” were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner’s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde — the province of big-voiced sopranos — might be possible.Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert “Aida” in Italy that summer, “She was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.”Still, he added, “you could feel, here and there, the great singer.”When she sang “Khovanshchina” in Paris so soon after giving birth, it was possible, because of the role’s low center of vocal gravity, to believe she was back in her old shape — even if a short excerpt posted by the opera company suggests that her tone had grown more fragile, her vibrato wider, even beyond her high notes.“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said, “with a completely different voice.”“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said of performing after giving birth, “with a completely different voice.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesIn the past, her muscular support had originated down by her pelvis, but that was disrupted by the pregnancy and birth. While she searched for a new approach, her next engagement, “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in early 2022, was disastrous. The Princesse’s high notes, once easy for her, refused to come. At the premiere, Rachvelishvili fled the theater in despair before her curtain call, something she had never done.“It was the most horrible experience of my life, not being able to sing the way I wanted,” she said. “I couldn’t go out after a performance like that. It’s not the old Anita they’re used to, or I’m used to. I’m not going out; it’s insulting to them, to La Scala.”She canceled the rest of the run, then moved on to Munich, where she had a long rehearsal period before she was supposed to sing her first Didon in Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” A doctor saw inflammation on her vocal cords; it could have been allergies, acid reflux, a hormonal imbalance or laryngitis, or some combination of those factors.Unable to produce high notes or offer the elegant control of volume and texture for which she was admired, she left before the premiere. She began to lose faith in herself, which set off a vicious cycle with her physical problems.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” she recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”She was also her family’s breadwinner. Maisuradze had long ago devoted himself to supporting her career, and even star singers are freelancers.“The responsibility is huge, because everybody depends on me working,” she said. “I have my parents to take care of, and my family, and the baby. People said that if I couldn’t sing, I should just stop. And I said, ‘Will you feed my family if I stop?’ I have to at least try and try and try. I need to bring some money to the table.”But in summer 2022, she had to drop “Cavalleria Rusticana” in London and “Aida” in Salzburg before they opened. Leaving the “Aida,” Rachvelishvili released a statement citing back pain after the birth of her daughter and asking “all haters and even some colleagues” to “please stop inventing stories about me losing my voice or nonsense like this.”She retreated to Tbilisi to work. And early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” Rachvelishvili recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesThe tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.“There’s nothing harder to watch than a person onstage with you that you believe in so much, and she’s struggling,” he said. “There were clear signs the top wasn’t working like she wanted it to, and she was working desperately to make it work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.”She canceled a fall run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met, but arrived there to sing “Aida” in December. Rachvelishvili thought the first performance went passably, but the company’s administration disagreed.“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” Gelb said, and he decided to remove her from the coming “Carmen” and a solo recital that was to have taken place earlier this month.“I had a painful discussion with her in my office, because I wanted her to hear it from me,” he said. “I said that we needed to wait until she was back singing well again, and then we’d be happy to have her return. She had a hard time accepting that.”EARLY THIS YEAR, RACHVELISHVILI was able to get through another “Samson,” in Berlin, and a new role, Charlotte in Massenet’s “Werther,” in Athens, with her body feeling more dependable. But when she returned to Munich in the spring for “Aida,” she began having terrifying panic attacks onstage, paralyzed by fear of the high notes, and left after four of eight performances.“She’s such a tough character, but she’s human,” Jagde said. “That was what I saw progress for her in a negative way: less belief in herself because of what was happening. The physical affected the mental for her.”“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said of Rachvelishvili’s practice routine. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesDropping out of all her engagements after early June, she had minor surgeries for stomach problems and to lessen the effects of acid reflux, and another procedure to remove what she said was a small polyp on her vocal cords. Since then, she has been at home in Tbilisi with her husband and daughter. Lileana, she said, is “worth everything. She’s even worth never singing again.”But she still hopes she can have both. Rachvelishvili and Maisuradze have been painstakingly reviewing her instrument and technique, going through scores phrase by phrase and restitching together her different registers, returning to the basics.“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Of her high register, Rachvelishvili said this month: “It’s not as perfect as I want, or as I had it a few years ago, honestly. But it’s much easier; it’s there; it’s not difficult anymore to take them.”The clock is ticking: A new role, Laura in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” is scheduled for April in Naples, before a revival of “Aida” in Munich. Noting her voice’s solid technical foundation, Muti was optimistic.“She is young,” he said, “so she will come back. We are waiting with great enthusiasm.”Rachvelishvili has fought her panic with therapy, antidepressants and meditation, but it still lurks. “All the physical problems, the vocal problems, are gone,” she said. “Right now, I’m just battling with myself and my head to make sure that when I go onstage soon, I will feel calm inside. The joy of being back is so big that it overtakes me sometimes.”She described a recent video call with her manager. “I was doing a high note in Dalila’s second aria,” she said, “and he stopped me: ‘I see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid, just go for it. You can do it without fear in you.’ And I did it, and it was perfect.” More

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    What Opera Singers Gained, and Lost, Performing While Pregnant

    “It’s adjustable, yes?” Standing in a dressing room in the opera house in Montpellier, France, in May, the soprano Maya Kherani tugged at the waistband of her tiered skirt. A draper kneeling behind her shook out the hem while the costume designer looked on with satisfaction.“We’re lucky,” she said, cupping her hands around the smooth orb of her belly. “It works for the character.”Kherani considered herself fortunate not because she had landed the role of Autonoe, a lead in “Orfeo,” by the Baroque composer Antonio Sartorio. Instead, Kherani, who gave birth on Sunday, was relieved to discover that her costumes in this modern-dress production came with elasticated waists and flat shoes that would make it bearable to sing and act while 32 weeks pregnant.Better yet: The stage director Benjamin Lazar decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the staging, making it the driving force behind her character’s quest to win back her errant lover.“It works dramaturgically really well for my character,” Kherani said in a FaceTime interview from Montpellier. “In my gestures and in the staging, I am referencing the pregnancy. Everyone’s really supportive, which is not always the case.”In most musical professions, pregnant women — not their employers — determine how long they continue to work. When opera singers want to perform pregnant, however, they rely on the good will and skill of a creative team: drapers who add strategic ruching to costumes; stage directors who might change a risky piece of stage business or adapt their concept to include the pregnancy.All too often, though, pregnant singers lose work. And yet opera is a rare business in which pregnancy and childbirth can directly and positively affect the core product — the voice. The science behind the phenomenon is still poorly understood, but it is such a noticeable and common occurrence that it has become something of a truism in opera: After childbirth, the voice seems enriched with warmth, creaminess and depth of color.Kherani found her voice improved after becoming pregnant. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” she said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesChanging bodies, of course, go along with the changing voices. A growing number of women in the industry are speaking out about what they feel are cancellations motivated by their appearance rather than sound. Officially, opera houses say they are concerned about safety. Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, said, “As a general rule we are interested in the safety and well-being of all artists working for us.” The Metropolitan Opera said in a statement that “if a pregnant singer wishes to perform, we make sure it is safe for them to do so.”But not all cancellations reflect the wishes of the pregnant singer. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke said in a video interview she was removed from a production weeks before opening when the company learned she was pregnant, and that she lost a role at another opera house after her management told the company she would be in her second trimester during the performances. A fellow singer later told her the production would have required Cooke to go down a slide, but Cooke said safety was not mentioned in the cancellation, nor was she consulted.“The industry still views you as their property,” Cooke said. “Your choices are their choices.”Like other singers who were eager to speak about pregnancy and motherhood in opera, Cooke asked me not to name the companies that canceled her contracts. In part, this was because of fear of retribution. But also, as the soprano Kathryn Lewek told me before her last performance in the Met’s recent run of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” the goal was not to shame or remove certain administrators or directors. “We want to help bring about change,” she said.More than five years after the #MeToo movement sparked an overdue investigation of sexual harassment and misconduct in classical music, the field is buzzing with voices calling for more equity around pregnancy and parenthood. The soprano Julia Bullock, who gave birth to her first child last year, has taken to Instagram to post about performing as a lactating mother. The mezzo J’Nai Bridges publicly shared her decision to freeze her eggs at a time in her career when she is a sought-after Carmen — a notably physical role. Social media is especially vital for singers because so many are freelancers, lacking the organized lobbying power of unions and working much of the year on the road.After a singer gives birth, Kherani said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Facebook, the Momology private discussion groups for mothers in the performing arts are bursting at the seams. The classically trained Broadway singer Andrea Jones-Sojola, who created the first group in 2010, caps membership at 500 for each group to create a cohesive support network. This year, she opened a fifth. Jones said pregnancy-related cancellations are an important thread. “A lot of women were afraid to make it known publicly,” she said. “They were afraid to fight for themselves.”Singers also turn to each other for advice on how to navigate technical challenges during pregnancy. Many report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power. Much of that power comes from the muscles and tissue singers learn to activate for what is known as appoggio, the internal support they lean on to control the breath flow. For some women, the presence of the unborn baby is like a corset they can push against.Dr. Paul Kwak, an ENT specialist who works with opera singers, said voices are affected by the hypervascular state the body enters in pregnancy as it creates more blood vessels and increases blood flow through tissue. Because the tissue and muscle in the vocal folds can become engorged with that extra blood, he said, “it can change the ways the vocal folds themselves oscillate.” At the same time, changes to the abdominal cavity create pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. “Some women like it,” Dr. Kwak said, “they feel they have a support there, a shelf to push against.”Lewek, who sang the role of Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” through two pregnancies, described the experience as one of adjusting “to the fact that a human is taking up square footage in this very delicate part of my anatomy where I work.” By the second trimester, she said she felt as if she were performing “on steroids.” “Everything was so easy,” she said, “high notes just came shooting out of me.”Many singers said the improvement of the voice after childbirth may be the result of integrating tools used during pregnancy into their vocal technique. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” Kherani said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.” The changes in her body’s center of gravity also made her hyperaware of her posture, another important factor in singing. After a singer gives birth, she said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Dr. Kwak said richness was a difficult factor to study scientifically. A singer’s vocal tone, or timbre, is shaped by the tissue in her mouth, tongue, pharynx and face, he said, adding that it was possible this tissue became more supple after pregnancy. But studying its changes during and after pregnancy isn’t easy. “That’s why it’s such a mystery,” he said.Many female singers report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesRecovering from childbirth can be traumatic for many singers, who have to reacquaint themselves with a body that has changed most radically in the very area that is the powerhouse of their art. The soprano Erin Morley said she lost 30 pounds in the first week after each of her three deliveries. “I found it much easier to sing during my second and third trimesters than I did during the fourth trimester,” she said, echoing many mothers I asked about their recovery following childbirth.Six weeks after delivering her first child by cesarean, Lewek performed the Queen of the Night at the Met. (Morley sang the role of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, having just given birth to her third, and the two singers spent their breaks breastfeeding in the same dressing room.) The week before rehearsals started, with her “entire support system slashed in half” by surgery, Lewek was still able to sing only up to a high G, a full octave below what Mozart’s music required.With the help of a physical therapist, she devised a workaround. “I found a diaphragmatic rather than muscular way of supporting staccati in Queen of the Night,” she said, “that, overall, I would never want to sustain my entire singing career. But it got me through that gig and it opened up a new set of skills.” Her tone, too, opened up, after the births of each of her children, when she said she noticed “a blossoming of the tone quality of my voice that now has lent itself to bigger repertoire.”She wondered: “Was it the pregnancies that really changed my voice, or was it the recovery?”Lewek said she was fortunate that she was able to perform her star role in the “Magic Flute” up until being eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. But during that same pregnancy, she was abruptly removed from a different role, shortly after she had shown up to rehearsals with a visible baby bump. Citing safety concerns involving the set, the company urged her to withdraw, she said, even though she felt comfortable with what the production required of her. When the company added financial incentives and promises of a future role, she relented.“It wasn’t my decision,” Lewek said, “but my agent said I should grab the offer and run.”Morley said she lost a major role because of concerns she wouldn’t fit through a trap door in the set. And during a later pregnancy she lost a role because it required singing an aria standing on a chair in what would have been her second trimester. “I was really considering making a statement,” she said, “but these were companies I wanted to work with again, and I was very worried that there would be repercussions.” Besides, her contract was paid, which she knew was not always the case in such situations. “It felt kind of like dirty money,” she said. “Like they were paying me so I would not talk.”One singer who went public was Julie Fuchs, after she was booted from a production of “The Magic Flute” two years ago at Hamburg State Opera, where she would have sung the role of Pamina four months into her first pregnancy. When Fuchs announced on social media that she was out of the production, her feed lit up with outrage. Many commentators suggested misogyny was to blame for the company’s decision, although the director, Jette Steckel, was a woman. After arbitration, Fuchs settled with the company under terms that do not allow her to speak about the case.The company said the production’s flight scenes made it unsafe for a pregnant Pamina. “The legal situation for the protection of the expectant mother is clear,” its director of artistic management, Tillmann Wiegand, said in a statement at the time, “and we will never take a health risk, even if only a risky scenic action could take place on the stage.”Kherani at home with her daughter Eila and husband Zaafir.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesInnovations in set design and technology can make opera stages a risky work environment. Wagnerians are especially likely to find themselves airborne. Morley said she came to an agreement with the Met to bow out of a planned Ring Cycle during her first pregnancy because as one of the Rhinemaidens she would have had to fly in a harness. But when Zambello learned of the pregnancy of a Valkyrie in a Washington National Opera production, she adapted her concept. While the other Valkyries made their entrance by parachute, she had this singer run onstage trailing hers. “I said, ‘OK, you are the nonflying Valkyrie,’” Zambello said. “They were all wearing flight jumpsuits and I said, ‘we’ll just make yours baggier.’”The mezzo Isabel Leonard was in her first trimester when she sang Cherubino in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met, a trouser role — a male character sung by a woman. A dancer from childhood, she said she wasn’t showing at the time and told no one.Leonard said reconciling the rights of pregnant singers and theatrical standards required a more honest and open conversation. “We are storytellers,” she said. “How far into realism are we going? There has to be a bigger discussion within companies, production by production.”Those channels of communication may open up as more singers enter the administrative suites of opera houses. Bullock, a founding member of American Modern Opera Company, said her organization was looking into formalizing financial support for artists who needed to travel with young children. For a recent tour in Europe, her contract included a per diem, accommodations and travel fare for her infant and designated caregivers.“I can’t really expect that from every arts institution where I work,” Bullock said. “But if you want my presence fully, so that I can really do the job that you’ve hired me to do, this is a part of it.”The soprano Christine Goerke joined Detroit Opera as associate artistic director in 2021. She credits motherhood with propelling her into the dramatic lead roles in Wagner and Strauss she is now known for. “It allowed me to reach into these bigger roles in a way that suddenly felt like that’s where I belonged,” she said of the changes to her voice postpartum.A vocal champion of parents’ rights in opera, she said she recognized the complexity of the situation. “Now that I am on both sides of the desk, I can see the different sides of this. It is difficult to have a pregnant Octavian,” she said, referring to a trouser role in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” However, she continued, “before a snap decision is made, I would like to see conversations between the artist who is pregnant and the director and bring in other people. It may be that you can come up with a different solution.”Many singers said opera houses were beginning to be more attuned to the needs of singers who are traveling with children. They might provide information on local nanny services and playgrounds or retain the services of a pediatrician along with the ENT who is on call in every theater. Lewek said together with other mothers she was preparing a list of best practices to improve equity for pregnant artists and parents in opera houses. She would like to see unilateral cancellations become a thing of the past.“This is not Hollywood. There is another priority why we’re hired to do the job,” she said. “It’s the voice.” More

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    Rachel Weisz, ‘Dead Ringers’ and the Glorious Horrors of Pregnancy

    The first episode of the new female-fronted television adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 psychological thriller, “Dead Ringers,” splices together footage of four live births with shocking forthrightness. A plastic-gloved hand grips the bloody head of a newborn and tugs it from the birth canal as another cradles it from below; a baby is pulled briskly out using a pair of elongated metal forceps clasped around its skull; a scalpel is drawn sharply through the surface of a prepped and sterilized abdomen during an emergency cesarean section; hands are thrust inside and a small body is lifted up. “Why are you wearing my vagina like it’s a [expletive] glove?” shouts one patient at the doctors working busily out of view.The montage is a feverish, pugilistic sequence of grunts and cries that presents modern obstetrics as a high-volume industry, an assembly line made up mostly of soft, fleshy parts and powered by adrenaline. When at last the twin gynecologists who are the focal point of the series (both played with startling acuity by Rachel Weisz) are able to pause and rest for a moment in the quiet of an empty hospital room, I couldn’t help letting out my own sigh of vicarious exhaustion.In the television world, babies are a convenient way to reinvigorate stale interpersonal dynamics, or a point of narrative pressure that forces characters to make dramatic choices. But births, in all their beauty and gore, are rare. We’re used to a certain sleight of hand, carefully placed cuts and scenes where fresh-looking mothers in hospital gowns hold clean, swaddled infants in their arms. Real birthing is something more radical: Pregnancy involves a terraforming of the body that might appear terrifying if you were to see it at time-lapse speed. Inside a pregnant body, the volume of blood can increase by at least a third: It swells the hands and limbs; fluid accumulates in some tissue, like the legs, causing it to bloat like an oversaturated sponge. Soaked in hormones that relax the tendons and ligaments, the joints in the pelvis loosen and the shape of the foot is remolded under greater weight. During labor, the pelvic floor, which helps to hold organs in place, can stretch or tear permanently, causing them to resettle in unfamiliar ways.Thinking about all this puts birth in a different generic register depending on how it is framed and depicted. Having a child might be a blessing or a difficulty within the tropes of a domestic drama, but the actual mechanics of bringing that child into the world verge on body horror, the genre perhaps best typified by the films of David Cronenberg. He made his reputation as a horror auteur with movies like his 1986 remake of “The Fly,” in which a scientist accidentally fuses his DNA with that of a common housefly. In his worlds, familiar physiology is bent into strange new shapes, showing us that the seeming fixity of our bodies is only a soothing illusion.Weisz had been fascinated by both Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” which she saw in the theater in 1988, and the real-life story of the Marcus brothers (renamed Mantle in the film), twin gynecologists who, having withdrawn from public view, were found dead in the apartment they shared in New York City in 1975, their messy lodgings strewn with bottles of opioids and barbiturates. These “miracle workers” who specialized in helping barren women conceive and give birth, met an end that cast doubt on the infallible authority of doctors. The story cut to one of the insoluble tensions in reproductive care: that the individual assigned to work so intimately with your hopes and fears and physiology is essentially a complete stranger — maybe even a dangerous one.Amazon Prime VideoRachel Weisz plays twin gynecologists in “Dead Ringers,” a new series based on David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller.Niko Tavernise/Amazon Prime VideoCronenberg’s film played up the psychic conjunction of the twins, a monstrous codependency that functions perfectly until, suddenly, it does not. Weisz’s new adaptation is less claustrophobic, less a psychological study than a psychosexual thriller in the vein of some of her favorite films in the genre, “Bad Timing” (1980) and “Don’t Look Now” (1973), in which the externalizing of the characters’ private desires and fears rearranges the world itself. Beverly and Elliot — one a nurturing obstetrician, the other driven by an insatiable appetite for food, sex and biomedical research — are working to open a slick, hyper-modern birthing center and seek funding from an ultrawealthy investor. Beverly’s goal is “to change the way women give birth, forever,” but Elliot’s is something more fluid — she wants to continue her illicit laboratory work growing fetuses in artificial wombs, but most of all she wants to make her twin sister’s dream a reality. They negotiate, in alternating agreement and opposition, the contradictory drives toward individuation and the need for others, repulsion and love.What “Dead Ringers” manages to get on the screen feels, in terms of television, urgent and new. It publicizes bodily processes long held in a secretive personal space, making them available for discussion. Together with her collaborators, Weisz — who is an executive producer on the show as well as its star — has summoned a discordant vision of female experience: the grisly, unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful fact that birthing is a life-altering event rather than a collective fantasy.In February, I spoke with Weisz over Zoom from her home in upstate New York. She wore a plain shirt and thick glasses of crystal-clear acrylic that gave her the look of the most stylish professor on a comp-lit dissertation committee. Weisz radiates the poise that was the signature of her early career, looking impassive until something unexpected grabs her attention and she breaks into a warm smile. As we spoke, her bearing made me search myself continually for something pleasing to say. Dark-haired, heavy-browed and possessed of an intent gaze, she still has the features of the fresh-faced English rose who stepped into the spotlight in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty.” The face holds more emotion now, and has a greater capacity to convey softness or threat or an ambiguous sort of danger lying beneath its placid surface.In recent years, as Weisz has moved into a more boundary-pushing phase of her career, you can see her cracking the beautiful, cultivated exterior to reveal moments of vulnerability and even ugliness that touch the viewer at a visceral level. These characters — like the power-obsessed Lady Sarah of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Favourite,” or the willful and transgressive Ronit Krushka of “Disobedience” — are women of appetite who evoke curiosity rather than simple admiration. Watching these performances, you have the feeling that something instinctive and utterly convincing has roared to life within Weisz. Her performance as the driven, obsessive Mantle twins is an extension of this movement toward playing women who don’t represent some ideal, but are instead embodied, desirous beings struggling to negotiate the weight of that desire.We’re used to a certain sleight of hand, carefully placed cuts and scenes where fresh-looking mothers in hospital gowns hold clean, swaddled infants in their arms. Real birthing is something more radical.When Weisz proposed a gender-flipped version of “Dead Ringers” to a producer at Annapurna Pictures, she was intrigued by the intricately enmeshed personalities of the twins, the way they negotiated their fraught obsession with each other. “It just seemed a very fertile ground,” Weisz explained. “A twisted, codependent relationship between identical twins, whatever their gender, who are brilliant in their careers.” Unlike Jeremy Irons’s diametrically opposed siblings in the Cronenberg film, whose complementary personalities could seem to form a single person, Weisz’s are intricately enmeshed: Though Beverly is introverted, she’s hardly passive, and pursues both her love affairs and the mission of creating a more humane, women-directed way of birthing with quiet focus. Elliot curbs her own scientific imagination, her appetite for grander interventions like eliminating menopause or aging, in service of what she perceives to be Beverly’s needs. Weisz fills the dual roles of Beverly and Elliot with her own raw, organic power, guiding patients through labor with quick, steady hands and a tone that’s firm almost to the point of coldness.But some of the most affecting moments in the series come when she’s tapping into maternal vulnerability, as when she portrays Beverly’s discovering that she’s had another miscarriage, the latest in a gutting series. The camera hovers over her hand holding a bloody piece of toilet paper in a shot that is almost from a first-person perspective. The effect for me, as a viewer, was the opposite of an out-of-body experience: It was a sight that I had only experienced in my own life, and for a moment my mind raced through the consequences that it implied — was I menstruating, had I forgotten to take my pill, was there something deeply wrong inside of me? You could say that the series normalizes these physiological processes by showing them onscreen, but they are already normal — they’re just the unseen part of the iceberg that is having a body.Weisz’s experience as a parent — she’s a devoted mother of two who had her second child in 2018 at age 48 — has gone hand in hand with her decisions to explore these looser, rawer, less polished characters with their unusual thirsts and hungers. When I asked her about her own experience with birthing, what she remembered most intensely was the horrifying tales of deliveries gone wrong that others seemed eager to tell her. “The one thing I did notice the first time I was pregnant was the amount of times people came to me to tell me terrible stories, some terrible things that happened,” Weisz said. In response, she actively sought out accounts of positive outcomes, to get a sense of all the possibilities, all the branching pathways. She gravitated toward Ina May Gaskin, a midwife and prolific author who pioneered techniques for low-intervention birth and home birthing. In the then-male-dominated field of obstetrics, Gaskin was the first midwife to have a procedure named after her — the Gaskin maneuver, adapted from the practice of Guatemalan midwives, in which turning a woman from her back onto her hands and knees helps to ease the baby’s shoulder through the birth canal. Just as Gaskin pushed for women to be able to give birth outside the specialized medical environment of the hospital, a common refrain throughout the show is the idea that pregnancy is not a disease, and pregnant women are not sick. “You don’t have to possibly be cured,” Weisz said, paraphrasing Beverly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just a natural part of life.”Weisz, a producer and an actor, has moved into a more boundary-pushing phase of her career. Thea Traff for The New York Times“Dead Ringers” is a sort of antidote to this culture of pressurized, overdetermined moralizing over the ways that women choose to navigate the experience of pregnancy — or at least a temporary anesthetic. Though it engages with important issues about reproductive technology and birthing, it also seeks out a deliciously profane set of possibilities. The notion of the nuclear family could be retooled, could mean a pair of identical twin sisters raising the offspring of an ex-lover’s brother, or an uncanny Southern Gothic brood of perpetually pregnant daughters, headed up by a pontificating patriarch obsessed with the eminent gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who conducted experimental anesthesia-free surgical operations on enslaved women. Breeding could be a house of horrors, or a laboratory of startlingly new kinds of tenderness, as in a scene in which Beverly’s lover, Genevieve, a TV star who was once her patient, delivers an erotic monologue about how she wants to impregnate her. Under the existing laws of biology and anatomy, the fantasy is impossible, but only narrowly so: In the world the twins want to create, desire can meet reality in dark, mischievous, complex ways.To bring that vision to life, Weisz collaborated with the screenwriter and award-winning playwright Alice Birch, whose play “Anatomy of a Suicide,” an exploration of mental illness as experienced by three generations of women within a single family, was performed at the Atlantic Theater Company across a stage divided into three sections. “She’s so brilliant at creating all those levels of complexity where you’re, hopefully, in a state of pleasure, being entertained and you can’t tell what’s right or wrong,” Weisz explained. “It simply isn’t clear.”Soon after meeting, they began riffing on topics such as the French performance artist Sophie Calle and imagining the twins’ parents — ordinary anorak-wearing Brits — standing in the rain gazing at the magnificent birthing center created by their terrifying daughters. In the end they agreed that the Mantle twins’ new gender changed “everything and nothing.” Though their anatomy allowed for plot points that the male Mantles would never have encountered, the twisted specificity of their entanglement is in a moral and psychological world all their own.In Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” the twins’ female patients are little more than loci for the projection of male fantasies and fears. The mutated women Beverly hallucinates signal his alienation from the female bodies that are the site of his work. Unsurprisingly, the consequence of swapping the gender of the story’s protagonists is a more robust interest in women and pregnancy — the deliveries, miscarriages, the intense and intractable particularity of each patient’s reproductive situation. “It just, I suppose, happened as a result of the doctors having the same bodies as their patients,” Weisz said. “They weren’t ‘other’ to them.” Women in Weisz’s series are what they are — complex, self-destructive, occasionally destructive of others — and the horror comes directly from their actions, from whom they can’t help being. The most graphic and upsetting moments of the series foreground routine obstetric procedures that are rarely viewed outside their specialized audience — C-sections, vaginal births, the movements and turnings of infants beneath the skin of the mother’s stomach — which brings up the question of why we as viewers are so insulated from the realities of reproduction. Horrific to whom? Disturbing for what reason? And whom does it serve to make birthing so opaque, so secretive?As Weisz and Birch’s vision began to take shape, Birch gathered a writers’ room made up of eight women. Weisz sat in on writing sessions, and there were occasional visitors: midwives, gynecologists, endocrinologists and embryologists who gave their thoughts on what needed to change in the way we view and support birthing. Under lockdown and Zooming in from various locations — some had moved back in with their parents; another became pregnant during the writing sessions while living on a boat off the coast of Cornwall — the writers shared stories and experiences of their own. Even amid discussions about the dystopian state of modern reproductive care, there was a distinctly utopian imagination at work. “How do we unthink what we think of as normal, and how do we make unmysterious what is still inherently mysterious?” asked Lileana Blain-Cruz, a director who participated in the writers’ room as a dramaturg. “It becomes a philosophical question — not just of the mystery of it, but of how systems inhibit progress and thinking.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThe writers’ room was intent on directing the viewer’s attention away from the debate over how a pregnant body should be, and toward the more open-ended question of how pregnancy could be: There could be soothing depictions of natural landscapes, soft silicon instruments, rigorously tailored personalized care. There could be gene editing, immortal wombs, eternally youthful skin and freshly grafted ovarian tissue. There’s an argument to be made that it’s impossible to talk about improving reproductive outcomes without talking about abortion rights; that it’s discriminatory to talk about fixing the way women give birth without addressing the high maternal mortality rates of Black and Native American patients; that it’s anachronistic to talk about pregnancy as though it were a thing experienced only by cis women — this show engages only tangentially with these topics. Instead, it takes hold of contemporary debates over medical ethics and class inequities in reproductive care, and treats them as playground equipment, as the terrain on which psychological dramas of a wild and unpredictable nature can be played out. As the arc of the show grows increasingly macabre, some of the portentous weight of birthing — the need to make the perfect choices, to give birth in an ideal and aspirational way — gives way to a wicked sense of fun.So much of the anxiety around reproduction in the United States has to do with the contradiction of being dependent and isolated at once: dependent on a health care system that must be paid for privately; dependent on a political apparatus outside your control that can force you to give birth while denying any resources or care to the baby that is born; isolated by the moral codes and prescriptions that circulate in the media and among the people in our lives. We often approach pregnancy with a hunger for clean, clear answers — the exact week at which a pregnant body should no longer be allowed caffeine or soft cheese, or the moment at which a bundle of cells becomes a legally protected human being — but living matter resists these attempts at containment.The womb is itself a paradoxical thing. In preparing for pregnancy, an entirely new organ, the placenta, is created. It infiltrates the uterine blood vessels and grows over 150 miles of capillaries to provide nutrients and oxygen to the developing fetus before it is unceremoniously expelled from the womb during birthing. But the placenta’s origin blurs the distinction between host body and fetus: Though it originates from cells in the outer layer of the embryo that burrow their way into the womb using a combination of digestive enzymes, substances that trigger suicide in target cells and by impersonating the host’s blood vessels, it is built in part from motherly resources. One’s self mingles with another across a semiporous border. By drawing boundaries, we lose sight of our radical interrelation.Alexandra Kleeman is a professor at the New School and a Guggenheim fellow in literature. Her newest novel is “Something New Under the Sun.” Thea Traff is a photographer and photo editor based in New York who frequently contributes to The Times. Her work focuses on human emotion conveyed through facial expressions and body movement. More

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    Rihanna Rep Confirms the Singer is Pregnant

    Widespread speculation on social media during Rihanna’s halftime performance turned out to have merit: The singer, who starred in the Super Bowl halftime show, is pregnant, her representative, Amanda Silverman, confirmed on Sunday night.Rihanna, 34, performed for the first time in nearly four years, running through a quick medley of her hits. But, just as soon as fans applauded her return to the stage, Rihanna began to hint at her growing stomach in a ruby red Loewe jumpsuit and matching bustier, while singing fan favorites like “We Found Love,” “Diamonds” and “Only Girl (in the World),” occasionally rubbing and gesturing to her belly.the whole timeline afraid to ask if Rihanna is pregnant pic.twitter.com/KGQEhItzqx— Ira (@iramadisonthree) February 13, 2023
    This is not the first time Rihanna decided to make a splashy baby announcement: In January 2022, Rihanna and her partner, ASAP Rocky, announced they were pregnant through a series of photos taken by “fashion’s favorite paparazzi,” Miles Diggs, according to Vogue. Rihanna gave birth to a son in May.Fans have been waiting for a new Rihanna album since 2016 and pinned the start of a comeback with her halftime performance. Would she bring out a special guest? Release a new song? Announce a new tour? Instead, new rumors swirled.Once her publicist confirmed the news, reaction from fans was equal parts supportive and concerned. They expressed their admiration, but also some trepidation about how much longer they would need to wait for the next album.Caryn Ganz More

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    The Empty Spectacle of Marilyn Monroe’s Fantasy Fetus in ‘Blonde’

    “Blonde” pretends to imagine how Monroe would have felt about her pregnancies. Instead, it jarringly shoves a C.G.I. fetus into her midcentury mind.In “Blonde,” the director Andrew Dominik’s fever-dream fictionalization of Marilyn Monroe’s life, Monroe (Ana de Armas) gets pregnant in a celestial fantasy sequence. As she 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.Monroe is lured into aborting that pregnancy, but when she conceives a second time, her sentient fetus reappears. Now, it’s telepathic. “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” the fetus asks Monroe. “You’re not the same baby,” she whispers toward her own belly. The fetus replies: “That was me. It’s always me.”Marilyn Monroe’s chatty, regenerating fetus — she calls it “Baby” — has emerged as a scene-stealing sensation. Critics have called it “goofy,” “despicable” and “cruel.” Some have even pegged it as inadvertently propagandistic — this mode of fetal puppetry is a familiar anti-abortion gimmick. But Monroe’s dialogue with her pregnancy, which originated in the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based, is also a product of the star’s troubled self-conception, and in that context, the fetus’s corny, sanctimonious message makes a kind of sense. What is jarring is the contemporary look of the fetus: a schlocky, seemingly computer-generated figure that recalls pop-culture fantasy images invented long after Monroe’s death. It’s a rendering so lazy, it suggests a stubborn incuriosity about how Monroe would have actually experienced her pregnancies, even as the film presents them as character-defining events.Pregnancy can inspire profound acts of projection. The fetus, an unseen body inside of a body, suspended between nonexistence and existence, is defined by parental expectation and cultural imagination. It is the personification of a mother’s desires and fears, her sublimated anxieties and internalized judgments. And the Monroe of “Blonde” has plenty of issues to cast onto a prospective baby. Abandoned by her father and abused by her mother in childhood, she has become world famous as an infantilized sex object who calls all of her lovers “Daddy.” Her ventriloquized fetus is voiced by the child actor (Lily Fisher) who plays Monroe as a little girl, when she was still Norma Jeane. When Monroe communicates with her fetus, she is talking, with pity and loathing, to herself.“Blonde” is stubbornly incurious about how Monroe (Ana de Armas) would have actually experienced her pregnancies.NetflixWhat I can’t understand is why the thing looks the way that it does. In putting the fetus on display, Dominik has made a tediously literal attempt to depict Monroe’s interior life. But why would Monroe, in the early 1950s, imagine her fetus in the form of a C.G.I. baby? Why would her visualization of pregnancy resemble the smooth-skinned, preternaturally glowing fetus that appears, 70 years later, in the pregnancy app on my iPhone?The maternal imagination is not, after all, a spontaneous soul connection. It’s a historical construction, one informed by the aesthetics, politics and technology of the time in which the pregnancy occurs. And the magic unborn in “Blonde” is an ahistoric imposition — an image that feels plucked from the narrow imagination of a modern male director. At the time of Monroe’s first pregnancy in the film’s version of her life, fetal imagery was a rudimentary fascination. Photographs published in Life magazine in the 1950s included black-and-white images of a squid-like translucent embryo and skeletal fetal remains. The vision of the fetus in “Blonde” — spectacularly well lit, fused with cosmic imagery, presented as a free-floating independent being — was not developed until after Monroe’s death. It has its roots in a 1965 Life magazine spread, “Drama of Life Before Birth,” by the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.For the magazine, Nilsson produced a series of photos of sperm, embryos and fetuses representing the stages of human gestation. Though the cover subject is advertised as a “Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac,” a note inside clarifies, “This embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.” Nilsson was celebrated for capturing “living” fetuses within their “natural habitat” (women), but he largely photographed the lifeless products of surgical abortions and miscarriages, which he then submerged in aquariums, lit sumptuously, staged to appear as if they were floating amid starry skies, and shot at a remove.Nilsson’s photographic tricks obliterated any trace of an actual woman’s body. The images, published at the height of the space race, were constructed as alien, analogized to galactic exploration and coded as masculine. One image of a 13-week fetus, which looks as if it is nestled inside a nebula, is titled “Spaceman.” Life quotes “a leading Swedish gynecologist” who declares: “This is like the first look at the back side of the moon.”The 1965 Life magazine spread of Lennart Nilsson’s photography has profoundly influenced the pop-cultural life of the fetus. A note accompanying the article said the “embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.”Photo 12/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesThe Life feature would profoundly influence the aesthetics of both anti-abortion activists and the director Stanley Kubrick, whose model of the Star Child in his 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was partially based on Nilsson’s shots. In turn, Kubrick’s serene, fiberglass-smooth, omnipotent being would inform decades of imagined pop-culture fetuses, from the wisecracking, doll-eyed fetus of the 1989 rom-com “Look Who’s Talking” to the computer-generated fetal images that drift through pregnancy-tracker apps and animated internet videos purporting to explain “life.”These images have the power to remove the fetus from the realm of a pregnant woman’s visceral experience and expose it as a public visual spectacle. And they yank the mind toward a pernicious modern suggestion: that the idealized fetus exists independent of a woman’s body; that it floats, in the cultural imagination, far above the earthbound woman herself.Now, this vision has been nonsensically ported into the midcentury brain of Marilyn Monroe. That is a suspect choice, given Dominik’s insistence on recreating the iconography of Monroe’s life in obsessive detail. “Blonde” blinks between full color and black-and-white, shuffling aspect ratios and swapping lenses to more closely mirror Monroe’s most famous photographs and scenes, which Dominik then twists to signal Monroe’s perspective on being made an object.In an interview with Decider, Dominik explained that he visualized the fetus in an attempt to access “Norma’s feelings” about her pregnancies. “Baby was real,” he said. “I wanted Baby to be real.” And yet Dominik’s brief glimpse into Monroe’s mind reveals nothing. All that can be found in there is a YouTube womb-cam.In her book “Disembodying Women,” the medical historian Barbara Duden traces the public exposure of the fetus — and its rising cultural supremacy — over the latter half of the 20th century. She calls this process “the skinning of woman.” “Blonde” is also a movie about a woman being flayed by the culture at large. First, by the Hollywood of her own era, which made her into a sex symbol. And now, by the Hollywood of ours, which has claimed to access her mind, only to serve up a recycled stock image of a magic fetus. More

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    The Many Violations of the Violent Birth Scene

    Does the gory surprise C-section in “House of the Dragon” represent a grim historical reality, an urgent political statement or a worn cultural cliché?“Are you sure you want to watch this?” my husband asked as we cued up the “House of the Dragon” premiere last week.We had both seen the online warnings that the “Game of Thrones” prequel kicked off with a “grisly,” “brutal” and “gory medieval C-section.” I had undergone a cesarean section a couple of years ago, during the birth of my son, and now I was again pregnant and preparing for the possibility of a second surgery. But yes, I was sure I wanted to watch it.I was, I guess, curious about what the most horrific interpretation of the procedure might look like. I’m still thinking about the scene — not because it is so violent, but because its violence is framed as so profound. Like so many depictions of pregnancy, its visceral and emotional possibilities are largely obscured by a tangle of clichés posturing as insight.King’s Landing, after all, is not a subtle place. At the top of the episode, an uncomfortably pregnant Queen Aemma foreshadows her fate: “The childbed is our battlefield,” she tells her daughter, Princess Rhaenyra. “We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.” Meanwhile, her husband, King Viserys, is ominously confident that this pregnancy, after a run of miscarriages and stillbirths, will finally produce a male heir.Instead, the queen’s labor reaches a dangerous impasse. The grand maester informs the king that the baby is in a breech position, and that “it sometimes becomes necessary for the father to make an impossible choice” — to “sacrifice one or to lose them both.” Viserys approves the surgical removal of the baby without Aemma’s knowledge or consent. As birth attendants restrain their desperate, confused queen, the grand maester slices into her belly. The queen dies, and her baby dies soon after.Throughout the violent birth scene, the queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen.Ollie Upton/HBOWhat is the meaning of this gruesome spectacle? George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the book on which “House of the Dragon” is based, has the queen die in childbirth in an unspecified manner; only in the show does it become a murder by way of a rogue belly slicing. In a series of interviews, Miguel Sapochnik, one of the showrunners and the episode’s director, exhaustively explained the resonance of the choice. The scene — intercut with a bloody jousting tournament mounted by the king in premature celebration — was designed to be “a distillation of the experience of men and the experience of women” in Westeros, Sapochnik said. But it was also meant to reveal “parallels to our own past and present,” he added. It represents the grimness of childbirth in the medieval era, from which Martin’s fantasy world draws, when “giving birth was violence”; but it also represents the grimness of childbirth in post-Roe America, when the scene reads as “more timely and impactful than ever.”“Anxious not to get it wrong,” eager “not to shy away” but also “not to sensationalize,” the creative team — the episode was written, directed and edited by men — enlisted two midwives to advise on set and innumerable women to screen the sequence before it aired. The scene, Sapochnik promised, was just the beginning of a whole season of portentous births, each seeded with additional gender commentary. The theme of this birth, he explained, was “torture.”The sheer violence of the scene didn’t shock me. (Earlier in the episode, a character slices off a man’s penis and tosses it atop a pushcart piled with various severed appendages — violent spectacle is a major element of the show.) But the implied profundity of the violence struck me as faintly ridiculous. The loading of meaning onto the queen’s death felt like an attempt to sidestep the criticism that dogged “Game of Thrones” — that it indulged in senseless violence against women. But the imposition of sense on such violence can also feel unsatisfying, as the female character’s interiority is subsumed into the creators’ effort to make a statement.The showrunners intercut the childbirth scene with the cartoonish violence of the jousting to make points about both the past and the present.Ollie Upton/HBOThe scene creaks under the weight of so many signifiers. The queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen. We see her moaning in the background, tangled in bedclothes. We zoom close on her delirious face in gauzy light, evoking the softness of a maternity shoot. Often we see her from above, as if we are peering down on her in a surgical theater. Or we spy her from beyond her rounded stomach, as if we are attendants assisting in the delivery. We look down upon her as she is cut open, drained of blood and stuffed with reaching hands.As the scene wears on, the camera itself seems moved by cowardice. It retreats further and further from the queen’s perspective, assuming a remote and clinical gaze. Often it looks away entirely, focusing instead on the cartoonish gore of the jousting,which comes to stand in for the violence of the birth. The queen’s screams are silenced, overlaid with the sounds of a roaring tournament crowd and the outlandish squishing of skulls and brains. In its desperation for meaning, the scene does become senseless.Being pregnant can feel like passing from the physical world into the world of signs. Pregnancy is weighted with so much metaphorical significance that it is even a metaphor for significance — pregnant with meaning. But I’m not pregnant with meaning; I’m just pregnant. And so I watch depictions of pregnancy and birth from my own removed position, curious what my experience signifies to other people, and what it is supposed to say about our culture and politics.The “House of the Dragon” C-section is neither historically accurate (the mother’s life was valued over that of the fetus in much medieval teaching, as Rebecca Onion detailed in Slate) nor particularly of the moment (post-Roe, many women are begging doctors for surgical interventions in their pregnancies). But it does access a persistent cliché: The C-section is a birth choice loaded with stigma, as Leslie Jamison noted in an essay on the procedure last year. It is coded as “both miraculous and suspect, simultaneously a deus ex machina and a tyrannical intervention” — the antithesis of a “natural birth.”This construction voids the mother’s role in childbirth, ceding it to a patriarchal medical establishment. The riddle from “Macbeth” — which posits that because Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, he is not “of woman born” — persists. On-screen pregnancies still rarely end in C-sections. When they do, they are the stuff of horror. As the film critic Violet LeVoit has argued, the vaginal birth is framed as the climactic final struggle of the hero’s pregnancy journey. A C-section, then, renders our hero a victim — and a failure.None of this coincides with my own experience. I didn’t feel bad for having a C-section, or feel that I didn’t truly “give birth” to my son; I felt that my doctors and I did what was medically necessary to deliver him safely. And yet I feel nagged by this imposed narrative, and I am reminded of it whenever I see a birth scene shot from above, as the “House of the Dragon” one often is.Birth was, for me, an overwhelmingly sensory experience, not a visual one. During labor, I couldn’t see past my own abdomen. My strongest memory of the surgery, which the hospital shielded from my view with a raised blue tarp, is of the uncanny release of pressure in my anesthetized body when the baby was removed. As it was happening, a doctor asked if I wanted her to photograph the moment, and I impulsively agreed, thinking that I could always delete the image if I couldn’t stomach it. When I look at the photo now, I recognize my son’s features emerging from the bloodied edges of my body, but I don’t recognize the point of view. It is as if I am reliving another person’s memory, not my own.So no, the depiction of violence in birth does not bother me. But the bird’s-eye view of it does. The camera’s insistence on its lofty perspective, on looking down on the birthing woman’s full body from a spectator’s remove — that strikes me as the real violation. In those jarring shots, the depiction of male violence becomes indistinguishable from the male gaze.Maybe future “House of the Dragon” births will resonate with my own feelings about childbirth. And I’m sure other parents, bringing their own experiences to the episode, left it with different interpretations. But that is the trouble with trying to distill the entire “experience of women” into a scene — the idea is absurd, even in a fantasy world. More

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    Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains.

    The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace.When I was four months pregnant, just as my midsection had grown vast enough to convert my pregnancy into a public event, I escaped to the movies. I saw “Men,” Alex Garland’s May horror film about the young widow Harper (Jessie Buckley), who sets out on a restorative countryside getaway only to be terrorized by a village full of unsavory male archetypes — pervy vicar, passive-aggressive nice guy, condescending cop — all played by Rory Kinnear.Near the end of the film (spoiler alert), one of these men spontaneously sprouts a distended belly much like my own. A slimy slit ruptures between his legs, and one of the other guys slithers out of the hole. He grows a belly and births a third guy, who grows a belly and births a fourth guy, and so on, until the film’s full cast of men has replicated at Harper’s feet.A few weeks later, I was beached on my bed at home, watching a screener on my laptop for Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection,” when I was again confronted by the specter of a menacing pregnant man. The thriller, which debuted in theaters last week, follows the tightly wound corporate hot shot Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots David (Tim Roth), a man from her past. Maggie reveals (more spoilers!) that 22 years ago, David lured her into an abusive relationship, impregnated her and ate their baby. Now he informs her that the little boy he gobbled is gestating in his gut and missing his mommy. “He’s moving,” David tells Maggie, handling his middle-aged paunch like a baby bump. “Would you like to feel him?”In Alex Garland’s “Men,” a young widow (Jessie Buckley) is terrorized during her countryside getaway by a village full of unsavory male archetypes (all played by Rory Kinnear).A24Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection” follows a corporate hot shot, Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots a man from her past (Tim Roth).IFC MidnightSo the horror villain of the summer is the pregnant man. He represents the patriarchal domination of women, or maybe the cyclical nature of male violence, or maybe the surreal outer edge of psychological trauma — but whatever he’s supposed to signify, he implicates me. My pregnant state, grafted onto these men, is pitched as the apotheosis of grotesque social commentary, a sight meant to be so bizarre, disturbing and deep that it is preserved for the crowning spectacle of a horror film.Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce “Rabbit Test,” the sentimental 1994 rom-com “Junior,” or the elaborate rollout of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album “Montero,” during which he traipsed around the internet sporting a photorealistic bump before simulating birthing an LP. Of course, some men can and do become pregnant — trans men — but works that exploit the idea of the pregnant man rarely acknowledge the reality of the pregnant man. He must exist purely as a fantasy, a counterfactual, a metaphor. Like a mythical boogeyman, he has stalked the culture for generations, occasionally appearing to impart a lesson on gender relations in his time. Now he has shape shifted from a clown into a creep — a visceral interpretation of male control over women’s bodies.Over the past several weeks, I watched many of the artifacts of the pregnant man genre. I started with “Rabbit Test,” Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, “Rabbit Test” is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.Its “first pregnant man” conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. “Rabbit Test” is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt.“Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal and Doris Roberts, is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.AVCO Embassy Pictures, via PhotofestThat shifted a little with “Junior,” the 1994 rom-com in which an embryo is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s musclebound abdominal cavity. “Junior” is from the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” era — a time when men and women were pitched as fundamentally different organisms, but when men who attempted interspecies communication were praised for accessing their “feminine sides.” Schwarzenegger (playing, naturally, a scientist) literalizes the trend when he is impregnated as a part of a clandestine medical experiment, pumped with estrogen and reduced to a maternal cliché. Suddenly he is craving pickles with ice cream and weeping at Kodak commercials.“Junior” is built on a sight gag: pregnancy as a laughable twist to Schwarzenegger’s herculean form. But pregnancy has the power to render any body ridiculous. And yet, as I trudge down the street, my increasingly preposterous dimensions inspire such affirmational outbursts from strangers that I feel at the center of an immense gendered conspiracy, where the self-evident absurdity of my physical situation is instead pitched as the cheerful apotheosis of my life as a woman.Maybe that’s why, watching “Junior,” I was struck by the sensitivity of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Though he is dropped into a parade of offensive scenarios (there is an interminable sequence of shoddy drag) and fitted with a limited emotional range (pregnancy is uncomfortable and confounding, never degrading or grim), he endures his ludicrous situation with unexpected grace. His pregnancy makes him not into a joke, but a father, and a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson. And when he hurls a rival scientist across a laboratory and fashions an abortion rights slogan into a steely Austrian-accented catchphrase — “My body, my choice” — it feels earned.In “Junior,” Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly sensitive performance as a pregnant man makes him a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson.Universal PicturesIf Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” were real, she would be older than the 23-year-old Lil Nas X, whose own interpretation of pregnant imagery exists on an elevated plane. The campy visual world of “Montero” — which also finds him riding a stripper pole into hell — seems unbothered by gendered expectations at all. Like Billy Crystal’s in “Rabbit Test,” Lil Nas X’s prosthetic belly is just a costume, but this time it’s worn by a queer pop star rapaciously churning cultural shibboleths into internet chum.Now, just as Lil Nas X has chucked the pregnant man into the recycle bin, the movies have reclaimed him and primed him for a heel turn. Hollywood’s comic interpretation of the pregnant man always masked some deeply misogynistic ideas, and now they have emerged from the subtext to define the character himself.“Men” is a film that does not challenge the gender binary so much as wallow in it. Harper’s ill-fated getaway is suffused with dour shots of fertility idols and portentous biblical references; before she is terrorized by a pack of pathetic and violent men, she chomps an apple she’s plucked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “messing around” with ancient masculine and feminine symbols led him to the image of “a guy with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina births a succession of bad guys, rendering them all as laboring parents and mewling babes, it reads as a kind of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.The imagery of “Resurrection,” on the other hand, originates from nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb. He requires no padding or prosthetics. He just asserts that there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. Watching Roth’s riotously unsettling performance, I felt freed from the reality of my own pregnant body, and also a little bit won over. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. Though I am of course aware of the biological process through which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me that people get pregnant by gobbling up live infants, I might believe it.After plodding through decades of pregnant-man tropes, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed of the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphor and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental trials of pregnancy, he must also contend with intense social pressures: He feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by medicine and estranged from his own identity.The backlash against gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” — and the assertion that it somehow “erases” women — is unintelligible to me. It is the coding of pregnancy as the paramount expression of femininity that make me feel expunged. The gendered constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than they do on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is clarifying. It is not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.For me, the most unsettling image in the annals of pregnant-man movies came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the one that followed. Throughout her weekend of horror, Harper is in touch with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives overnight to find her. When Riley steps out of the car, we get the film’s final reveal: She’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents horror in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman — she must be nurturing, preternaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that, but I know how I felt: like a punchline to an old joke. More

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    ‘This is Going to Hurt’ Finds Dark Humor on the Maternity Ward

    “This Is Going to Hurt,” a dramedy starring Ben Whishaw, kindled debate in Britain about hospital care for pregnant women and the pressures on doctors.LONDON — In December 2010, Adam Kay was working on a British maternity ward helping a more junior doctor to perform a cesarean section. Kay had successfully delivered well over 1,200 babies, but this operation was a disaster.The mother had an undiagnosed condition affecting the placenta, and she should not have been allowed to go into labor. The doctors only just managed to save her life — she lost 12 liters of blood — but they couldn’t save the baby.“You want healthy mum plus healthy baby, and it was the first time I’d had neither of those things and was the most senior person in the room,” Kay said in a recent interview. He said that he had felt traumatized but that the reaction from the hospital “was like I’d sprained my ankle or something.”Adam Kay, who created the show and wrote the book it is based on, said its central character was supposed to be reprehensible.Charlie CliftAfter that incident, Kay left medicine. A scene revisiting the operation does not appear in “This Is Going to Hurt,” a medical drama written by Kay and starring Ben Whishaw that premieres on AMC+ and Sundance Now on Thursday after being a hit in Britain. But plenty of other episodes from his six years of working in hospitals do, in fictionalized form.Given that the show tries to show the reality of life on a maternity ward, some moments are harrowing. But many are also funny, including a moment when Whishaw’s character, an overstressed and underpaid doctor called Adam, has to retrieve, from inside a woman, a toy egg containing an engagement ring — the woman had inserted it as a surprise for her boyfriend.The show was commissioned shortly after Kay published a warts-and-all collection of diaries (called “This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”) documenting his life in British hospitals. That collection, released in 2017, sold more than 2.5 million copies and was translated into 37 languages.Kay described the book as a “confidence trick,” where silly anecdotes were used to sell a book that contained serious comments about health care and about how politicians treat doctors and nurses (it was published the year after doctors in England went on strike over working conditions). The book’s success led to Kay’s meeting Matt Hancock, the British health minister at the time, to push for more funding for doctors in need, and to his writing columns in newspapers.Kay said that the current health minister, Sajid Javid, had also sent a note, saying that his wife liked the book. Kay’s reaction, he said, was to wonder about the minister, “Have you read it? It’s you who needs to read it.”Whishaw and Michele Austin, who plays a midwife in the show. Anika Molnar/AMCDespite his prominence, when “This Is Going to Hurt” appeared on the BBC in February, Kay didn’t get a universally positive reaction. Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, which tries to combat negative ideas around giving birth; and some users of Mumsnet, an influential parenting website, labeled both Kay and Whishaw’s acerbic character misogynist for mocking women in his care. There was also criticism over the absence of pregnant people’s voices in the show, while Hill said that the birthing scenes would be unpleasant to watch for anyone expecting a baby or who had gone through a traumatic birth.Sitting in a London hotel bar recently, Kay, 41, seemed confused by those responses. “I heard criticism that the show should be about mums,” he said. “But that’s someone else’s program. I’m a bloke who used to be a doctor.”Whishaw’s character was also meant to be reprehensible, Kay added — a doctor so under pressure that his life falls apart, affecting others around him. Once a few episodes had aired, Kay said, the public debate changed and he started getting emails from doctors thanking him for raising awareness of the mental health struggles that medics can face.The show wasn’t really about the ward at all, Kay said, but about the pressures doctors are under at work, including unsustainable hours, bullying bosses and patients, low pay and often disintegrating home lives — with little way out. Whishaw’s character can be seen as passing his troubling behaviors onto a colleague, Shruti (Ambika Mod), a younger doctor meant to be under his wing.Those mental strains are still “a taboo topic” in many hospitals, Kay said. “Doctors are not meant to get ill, and they’re specifically not meant to get mentally ill,” he noted, adding that a doctor dies by suicide every three weeks in Britain.The pressure on doctors in the country is only getting worse, he added. There is a severe shortage of workers in the N.H.S. — the service has around 100,000 vacancies — and staff were already suffering burnout long before the pandemic. “When I left, I was a total outlier, as no one ever stopped being a doctor,” Kay said. “Now everyone’s got one eye on the exit sign as the workload feels absolutely unsustainable.”Ambika Mod plays Shruti, a younger doctor on the maternity ward. Mod said that she received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming.Anika Molnar/AMCDespite the message at its heart, Kay and the show’s two lead actors — Whishaw and Mod — said in interviews that the series was a joy to make. Whishaw said in an email that when he got the script it immediately “rang out with a truth.” The dark comedy “was exactly the type of humor people use when faced with awful things,” he added, “and I liked the awkward, flawed, troubled person at the center of it.”Mod, in her first major role, said that the two actors received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming, including learning how to deliver babies with forceps and how to perform cesarean sections. On set, real doctors, scrub nurses and anesthetists appeared as extras, she added, while prosthetics helped give the show its realism.She said that she was surprised by viewers who called the show’s operations gory and intense in posts on social media. “I didn’t think about that at all when we were filming as we would just be surrounded by pools of blood and amniotic fluid talking about what we were going to have for lunch,” she said.Kay said that, despite the show’s focus being on Britain’s health service, he hoped it would touch a nerve in the United States, too. He imagines that “a labor ward’s a labor ward, wherever it is,” he said. After his book came out in 2017, he got messages from doctors in countries including Chad, Belarus and Venezuela, he added, saying that the themes also rang true for practitioners in those countries.“This Is Going to Hurt” was written as a one-off series, and Kay said that he had no plans to do a follow-up. He knew he would hit his “shelf life as a writer” at some point, he said, and when that happened, he expected to return to medicine, to teach or to try and change health policy.“I’ve got a lot of guilt about leaving,” Kay said. “Obviously, I believe the arts have enormous value, but you’d have to have quite some ego as a writer to think it was anything other than 10 steps away from saving someone’s life in an operation.” More