Warner Bros. to change tagline of 'Orphan' flick
Submitted by Kerry on Wed, 2009-06-03 19:34.
June 3, 2009 / kansascity.com
We're talking about the tagline of the movie trailer, not this poster. And that tagline is:
"It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own."
Yeah. Here's more on the marketing campaign for the horror flick "Orphan":
The movie won't hit theaters until July, but the campaign has already received blistering reviews in the adoption community. The Internet has been humming with outrage over the film's perceived promotion of negative stereotypes about children who need families. More than 900 people joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott, while Warner Bros. executives found themselves blasted with e-mail.
Particularly offensive, say advocates, is the tagline in the trailer: “It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.”
Hollywood's negative portrayals of adopted kids go back at least to “The Bad Seed” in the 1950s and continued into the 1990s with “Problem Child.” “But it's been a long time since a movie caused this much angst and worry ... even before its release,” said Adam Pertman, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, an adoption research organization.
While acknowledging that little can be done to prevent the release of the film, parents at least hoped to do something about the trailer, which they worried would upset kids who stumbled upon it online or in theaters.
And here's where the story diverged from the script: Warner Bros. agreed.
“We made a mistake,” said Scott Rowe, a company spokesman. “We get complaints about virtually every movie ... but in this case, we went back and said 'You're right ... and we're sorry.'“
The tag line should be edited out by next weekend.
| Chicago Tribune
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The official Warner Brothers trailer can be found here: http://orphan-movie.warnerbros.com/
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Actions and Reactions
I'm just wondering how long it will take for adoption-bloggers to start linking Esther's behavior to real-life RAD-like experiences.
hitting a nerve
I think the biggest controversies usually arise when there is some truth to it. It somehow hits a sore spot that has been kept hidden and when that is being exposed, infuriation follows.
The tagline: "It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own” hits a nerve in the adoption community, because it relates to one of the commandments of adoption "though shalt love thine adopted child as much as your own". It also fits very much with the credo "raising an adopted child as if it were your own".
All this is very forced. In reality some adoptive parents really don't love the child they took in their home. Sometimes there is no recognition, sometimes adoption leads to a horrible mismatch of temperament and sometimes the fun is over once children move beyond the toddler phase, but talking about that is breaking a taboo.
The problem with such commandments and taboos is that people actually start believing they adhere to them. My adoptive father would swear he loved me as much as he would have a child of his own, he died believing he did so. Yet I knew him better than that. No son of his would have dropped out of university. A son of his would have been more successful chasing girls. A son of his would have made a better carreer. And much of that would probably have been true as well.
I deeply disappointed my adoptive father and much of that relates to my personality. I did my best to please him. He did his best to love me and we both failed.
The eyes don't lie
I can definitely identify with what you wrote, because in my case, love and acceptance definitely had a physical appearance.... I could see it in another person's eyes, and I can still hear it in the echos of my mind when I let myself hear my Agrandmother's voice telling me over and over again, "You are NOT one of us." God I hated how often she would reminded me I was not HER blood. God I hated how cruel she could be.... just because her son did not father me.
Ironically, I happen to be one of those "matched children", which means my physical characteristics were "carefully chosen" to look as though I could have passed as being a biologic child of the infertile couple who
purchasedadopted me to make their family complete. Had I been a boy, I wonder just how much it would have bothered my Adad I was not "his". Instead, I was the girl who had to be all my Amother was, only MORE. I can't begin to express the sort of pressure that put on me.... especially when my Amother was one of those people who always had to be the most "perfect" human specimen.It's very difficult not being the child your parents really wanted, or the child who didn't measure-up to the dream. It's even more difficult being the sloppy-seconds... the one who sees first-hand just how much the biological child is favored over the adopted one.
Defensiveness
I saw all the hype and anger on the AP boards about this movie. What I find interesting is how often APs take things personally, as almost a personal insult or attack. There also seems to be a hyper sensitivity to how the "we" are perceived in the outer community, and a constant fight to maintain a certain prescribed image. I agree, often it's about hitting a grain of truth.
Get 'Em...
LOL...ok, maybe it's because I'm a huge horror movie fan...and I aways root for the bad guy, but when I saw the previews for this movie, my brain went: "GET EM ESTER!"
And I have to say I loved, loved, LOVED the character of 'Patty' in the original 'The Bad Seed'.