Adam Banks
It’s not unusual to experience overwhelming amounts of unease and uncertainty when you have your first child; there’s a societal pressure to be the perfect parent, and anxiety, sleep loss, and depression are all natural reactions to childbirth. What isn’t natural is the embarrassment new mothers feel when society vilifies them for breastfeeding their children in public. This fear that “a small piece of flesh might offend” is what pushes mothers like poet Hollie McNish into dirty bathrooms, and she is justifiably angered by this. In Embarrassed, a spoken word poem produced for C4’s Random Acts series, McNish dismantles the status quo, with the help of filmmaker Jake Dypka.
Embarrassed is based on a previous performance by McNish, but this adaptation is laced with something stronger, and McNish’s words do calculable damage to prudes worldwide, who should really find something better to complain about. Some of the more memorable moments include toy guns pointed at her head, water balloons and watermelons shaped like breasts, formula powder snorted like cocaine, and mothers, sitting in toilets, mouthing the words “I am not trying to parade this.” Her performance is buoyed by her choice to recontextualize images we associate with children in creative and unexpected ways.
This contrast is key, because Embarrassed is strongest when it illustrates McNish’s lyrical juxtapositions. Throughout the short, we’re faced with mountains of hypocrisy, such as the the top shelves of “family” news outlets lined with nude magazines, and “billboards covered in tits.” But I think the poem (and the film) gains serious momentum about halfway through, when McNish mentions that all of the major religious figures were breastfed in public, and from that point on, she is relentless and unforgiving in her (very justified) takedown of the naysayers: “For God’s sake, Jesus drank it. So did Siddhartha, Muhammad, and Moses and both of their fathers… and they weren’t doing it sniffing on piss, as their mothers sat embarrassed on cold toilet lids.” How can the conservative crowd disagree with that logic?
There’s even juxtaposition in the way this film is cut; while there are fast-paced, multi-shot sequences that act as punctuation marks, there are also slow, patient tracking shots that hone in on McNish—and other mothers—in a way that puts us so close to their predicament that we can smell the piss in the air. By the end of the short, the mood has gone from nervous and hesitant to triumphant and empowered, and it’s an absolute treat to see a film tear down the walls of stigma in such an innovative way. Don’t be deceived by the runtime, though: Embarrassed is dense with detail, and requires multiple viewings to dissect the nuances in the narrative.