The Cider House Rules is a film based on a novel that came out when I was a senior in college. It is a novel and a film about abortion. People will say that's an unfair, reductive statement, but the title refers to an argument made by characters in the book that the rules about the Cider House should be made by them what live in the Cider House, i.e., rules about women's bodies should be made by women.
I bought the book because I knew women who had to make their own choices about abortion. Because I am the creature that I am, I was asked to go through the experience with them, even though I had not impregnated them. I was asked to go through it with them because they were afraid, and I had big, strong hands.
In the filmed version of the book, an old friend shows up in early scenes.
Dr. Larch and his assistant, Homer Wells, run an orphanage for abandoned children. Homer was also an orphan left at the orphanage, now becoming a doctor. Doctor Larch, played by the late Michael Caine, shows an ancient and horribly scratched 16mm print of King Kong to his collection of orphan children. One of the youngest, a boy named Fuzzy, who was again not adopted earlier in the day, comments on the scene where Kong gingerly examines the silk dress worn by Ann.
He says, “he thinks she’s his mother! That’s why Kong holds her; he thinks she’s his mother!”
I have a 16mm copy of King Kong that I would watch nine or ten times a year for many years. Now that there’s HD TV and Blue Ray, all of my 16mm equipment is in storage, but for a while, as I could feel my mind slipping deeper and deeper into the depression that imprisoned me for so long, the sound of a 16mm projector kept me alive some nights.
I should point out that the children in The Cider House Rules aren’t orphans in the sense that they don’t have parents. They’re foundlings. They have parents, but their parents surrendered them. They were the children of women who didn’t have abortion as an option. That’s the point of the film.
I saw King Kong for the first time when I was a child. It was shown on the “Horrible Movie” television program that Channel 16 had for a while. Late Saturday night, I hid under an afghan knitted by my grandmother in our playroom that smelled like a new puppy, watching Kong fight dinosaurs to protect “his mother” while my brothers protected me.
The next day, In Sunday School, I drew pictures of gorillas instead of Jesus. Randy Yates said it was cool. Jim Wilkerson said I drew the top of the building wrong. Jim was right. Even today, he has a better artist’s eye than I do. Kong was my imaginary friend for most of my life. When I became a man, I wrote letters to Fay Wray, who had played “his mother.” I wrote about her other films that weren’t King Kong, and I sent her copies of books by Eudora Welty. She wrote back that she loved Welty and had a photo of herself with Welty and Lauren Bacall. Can you imagine?
A central theme of the story is that King Kong was protecting someone the rest of the world thought he was trying to harm. Homer Wells and Dr. Larch are doing the same thing and are accused of the same thing.
I’m not smart enough to understand or explain the complexities and depths of the scientific and moral implications of abortion. I’m sorry. I’m just not smart enough. A lot of people will tell you that they are, but a lot of people are liars. It would greatly help me if Jesus had spoken to the issue. They had abortions in the first century, but he never mentions it. That’s an issue he left for us to decide ourselves. He does that sometimes because he believes in us.
I’ve held women’s hands when they went in for an abortion, and I’ve held their hands when they decided not to have an abortion. The issue of someone aborting a child that wasn’t mine never came up. The one time someone did try to carry my child, her health went bad, and the fetus died on its own. She very nearly died herself. I don’t ever talk about that.
This is something I try never to say. I am smarter than most of the people making laws about abortion. I do not doubt it. I have met them. You’re very likely smarter than them, too. I don’t like ever saying I’m smarter than anybody. That’s ungentlemanly and unchristian, but when it comes to making laws that decide how other people live, I’ll make an exception.
That’s the issue. If I’m not smart enough to figure this out, can they be?
Here’s what I believe: whatever my opinion on abortion might be, it should count for half of what a woman’s opinion is. That’s the only way I can think to balance this issue of men making decisions about women’s bodies as if they owned them. The people who operate the wombs should have twice the power to make decisions about them that I do. I think that’s fair. If they decide to ban abortion, I’ll accept it. If people who use the bathroom that I use make the decision, I will not.
Women should make the rules about women’s bodies, just like the people what live in the Cider House should make the rules about what happens in the Cider House. That’s my entire point. That’s the entire point of the book and the film.
The Cider House Rules is a brilliant and sad film. It’s older now, but you can still find it. John Irving, who also wrote “The World According to Garp” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” wrote it.
“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England”
Yes. This.