“Gimme Shelter”: The Pro-Life “Fight Club”

I’d like to begin by telling you that Gimme Shelter, starring Vanessa Hudgens, James Earl Jones and Brendan Fraser, is the pro-life event of the decade. (You’ve got to see this! It’s the best pro-life film ever!) In fact, it is.  But there are two things you’re not going to get out of Gimme Shelter that you might get at some other pro-life events.

1. A feel-good reminder that “God always wins in the end,” that “babies go straight to Heaven,” or that you’re totally awesome for showing up. “Seriously, thanks so much for doing this for the babies” (that is, driving to a theater). That’s a kind of artificial victory, with pizza and coke at the end.
2. A long list of Holocaust-style facts and figures in a dimly lit church basement, such how many boys vs. girls are aborted each year in the US, how many weeks it takes for a fetus to develop eyeballs, or how many percentage points more likely it is for a post-abortive woman to get breast cancer. This sort of event may look more promising to right-brained people, but all too often it’s just a horror fest. After the “show,” we all go home, feeling a secret satisfaction that we’re now good and miserable, and that at least we’re not “of this world.” As we retreat, we call out “Lord, come quickly!” As much as we dwell on the horror of abortion, we won’t even take the first step into the battle for life.

There’s something’s missing in these ways of presenting the pro-life cause. In Gimme Shelter we see a horribly realistic beginning that struggles into a beautiful and just as realistic ending.

Pro-lifers are supposed to defend life, and real life is a story—it’s about what happens on the way. We can’t skip those difficult beginnings on our way to “The End of Man: The Good.” On the other hand, when even our beginnings are nothing but the cut and dry facts of life (“Unborn babies are human, all human beings have a right to life, therefore unborn babies have a right to life”) we shouldn’t be too surprised if the theater’s empty before we get to the Beatific Vision.

Gimme Shelter gets it right. It’s about real life, and it tells it like it is–as a story, complete with monsters. And when the world sees this story on the weekend of January 24, it will put our stagnant culture on the edge of its seat.

Once upon a time, in a dark and lonely place, there lived a child. She called herself “Apple” (Hudgens). Her father had abandoned her at birth because he was too immature to handle her. He had a bright future ahead of him when he accidentally brought her into the world, and he wasn’t going to let real life get in the way of his “dreams.” It’s not as if this jock (Fraser) were serious about his night with that Latina chick (Rosario Dawson) who showed up at one of his buddies’ parties when he was a junior in college.

But sixteen years later, when Apple flees her ruined, drug-addled mother and shows up at her father’s suburban dream house, she is dead serious. “I want out of the system!” She demands. That system is the “dark and lonely place” I mentioned a few seconds ago. You see, she had run away from more than her mother; she fled what had ruined her mother more than any unwanted pregnancy could: The impersonal, dehumanizing welfare system.

In some dark places, having a baby can be nothing more than a good way to save up for the fix you’d already planned on getting from your dealer. It’s not like you really have to take care of your baby anyway.  Apple’s mother had carted her off to day-care centers, social workers and public institutions, even leaving her for a time in the foster care system. For sixteen years, Apple was passed around among strangers, each of them weighing her to see whether the state payouts they could get for taking her in were worth the trouble she might cause. When a foster-father molested her, her caseworker didn’t believe her complaint, and returned her to the custody of her mother. When her mother physically abused her, Apple knew that she had no choice but escape.

Away from that horrible world, and in the luxurious home of her Wall Street absentee father, Apple discovers that she’s pregnant. Dad’s new wife wants to keep a clean house, and one stray cat’s enough without adding a kitten. So Dad breaks the news to Apple: If you want to stay in this house, you’ve got to “turn the page.” If she tears out the pages of this chapter of life, pretty soon it’ll be just as if it never happened. Apple responds, “Like you did with me?”

A nervous Apple sits alone in the dim florescent lighting of the clinic’s operating room. A nurse jerks the door open just long enough to say, “Could you hurry up? The doctor’s coming.” Apple averts her eyes from the sharp, metal tools of “extraction” that surround the operating table. She takes off a shoe, remembering the Ziploc baggy she’s been keeping there to protect her first ultrasound. She glances at it: a picture of a thing—like herself—a stray occurrence that nobody would want unless they could fit it into their plans or find a use for it. Once upon a time, in a dark and lonely place, there lived….

I’ll stop there. Gimme Shelter doesn’t offer a “pro-life message,” pre-processed and displayed for your consumption like a happy meal. This movie is just like real life—it’s a story, but it’s no fairytale. No, Apple’s dad doesn’t suddenly change his mind and rush to the clinic to embrace her and her unwanted baby. No, her mother doesn’t magically turn her life around and apologize for using her all these years. No, (spoiler alert!) when an elderly priest (James Earl Jones) offers her the hope of prayer, Apple doesn’t accept Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior right then and there, and God doesn’t mechanically bless all her troubles away. But yes, Apple flees from the abortion mill. Yes, she becomes homeless. Yes, a pimp tries to stuff her into his SUV. Yes, Apple chooses life.

There’s no happy ending for those who don’t have the guts to face down the shadow of death. For Apple, choosing life means facing homelessness, hunger, human trafficking, danger, risk and desperation. Pro-lifers need to see this movie just as much as their opponents do. For those who really live it, life is a battle, and we need to learn that the battle to end abortion is a story about real life. Not just the first part of it; not just the end—but the whole of life.

Stephen Herreid is a Fellow at the John Jay Institute, arts editor for Humane Pursuits, and a weekly columnist at Aleteia.