“Can you steal what’s yours?” asks Majka, one of the main characters in director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue VII, a series of ten one-hour films he made in 1989 about each of the Ten Commandments for Polish television.
We’ve looked at how theft affects an innocent man and how it (and sin in general) can make a guilty man either repent or plunge more deeply into it. Today’s film poses a different question . . . one surprisingly prescient for our times.
Majka is a young university student in Warsaw. She lives with her mother Ewa, father Stefan, and a little girl named Ania. Ania is ostensibly Ewa’s daughter. In reality, she is Majka’s, who had her out of wedlock at sixteen by her language teacher at the school of which Ewa was principal. The arrangement covered up the scandal and was supposed to allow Majka to finish her education “normally.” It also served to assuage Ewa’s frustrated maternal instincts because, after Majka’s birth, she could bear no more children.
Majka is increasingly frustrated with the arrangement and longs to have a life with her daughter. As Ewa has no intention of changing things, Majka takes Ania from preschool surreptitiously, intending ultimately to fly with the child to Canada.
Her first stop is the suburban home of Wojtek, her erstwhile teacher. He’s “moved on” from Majka and thinks she’s not sufficiently stable emotionally to provide Ania a good home. He tries to convince Majka to return home, offering to get a friend to give her a ride. She plays along, but when he goes to get the friend, she flees with the child.
Wojtek and her parents hunt the pair around suburban Warsaw, eventually finding them huddled in a train station, awaiting the first train. At the sight of Ewa, Ania runs to her “mother.” Majka, convinced she’s lost everything, jumps aboard a passing train to exit all their lives.
“Can you steal what’s yours?” asks Majka when Wojtek suggests she return because she really hasn’t yet committed any crime. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I guess not.”
In previous films, we explored a person’s relation to things: a bicycle, an ox. Kieślowski explores a person’s relation to a person.
It’s interesting that Kieślowski chose to treat this story under “Thou shalt not steal” rather than “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” a place it could obviously fit. And yet Kieślowski’s choice makes it extraordinarily timely thirty-four years after the film was produced.
The family fiction hides a lot of wrongs and hurts: a young girl abused by a teacher; a young woman told to suppress her maternal instincts; an older woman vicariously living her lost chances at maternity through her grandchild. And all these identities are masked behind a façade of lies supposedly put in place for the “good” of all concerned.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
A child is not one’s property. The relation of a person to another person is not that of a relation of a person to a thing. That would be slavery.
But neither is a child just another isolated individual vis-à-vis parents. The parent-child relationship is unique and sacred. It is natural: it arises prior to and exists independently of the state. It ought to be inviolable. It is under significant threat in today’s world.
There is great pressure afoot, in the name of “family equality,” to denigrate the distinctiveness of the natural parent-child relationship by pretending “all families, regardless of how they come into being, are equal.” Those might be pretty words, but they embody a position toxic to the family as we have hitherto known it.
The parent-child relationship has been understood as one of intentionality, a state of mind. It has also been understood as one of blood. Biological relationship has not been deemed an “optional extra” to parenthood. It had been regarded as constitutive of it.
Yes, you say, but people adopt children. They do, and they deserve applause. But we have never understood adoption as “just another way” of having a child. Indeed, adoption has always been tinged with a touch of sorrow because we instinctively recognize that a child should have a mother and a father and that the absence of them is something bad, depriving the child of what the child has a right to. Adoption is noble because it elevates a child in law to what he should have by the natural run of things.
Adoption—the intentional acceptance of a child—is not the natural model of a parent-child relationship, of which every other way of becoming a child, including being born as “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,” is just another variation on a theme. This was the case in ancient Rome, where the patria potestas in fact made all parent-child relationships adoptive, inasmuch as a child was not part of a family until a father accepted the child. If he did not—as was the case with handicapped newborns or excess daughters—the child could be discarded because it was not a legal child.
America has a matria potestas, where a child can be discarded as not a legal child because of the “right to choose.” But we are moving rapidly toward other ways of stealing parenthood. Reproductive technologies employed for whatever reasons—pathological infertility or the infertility of sexual non-differentiation—necessarily slice and dice parenthood into genetic, gestational, and social pieces, with elite opinion again deciding that only the third really deserves the Mother’s or Father’s Day card. Imputations of parenthood in various states have turned birth certificates into lies ungrounded in biological science. Divorce and subsequent “blended,” “melded,” “fused,” and other families reek of identity confusion. When a young person today sits down at three different “family” tables at which she knows she is related to A, unrelated to B, and doesn’t know (and should she ask?) about being related to C, all the while pretending that the relational titles ascribed to those people are in many cases fictions, is there any wonder people are confused about their identities and don’t trust marriage or families?
The building blocks of identity—how we figure out who we are as children, through our teen years, and into young adulthood—come primarily from the family. Is your mother your mother? Is your father your father? Who are your siblings? Do the ancestors on your grandparents’ walls belong to your history? Identity is handed to us, and we do with it what we will. But what if nothing is handed to us? Not only no family Christmas traditions, but no sense of a family name or a family culture. . . . You’ve had a taste of how an entire generation-plus feels.
In that sense, just a dozen years out of the gate after Louise Brown, the first in vitro baby; a decade after the apex of American “no-fault” divorce; and three and a half decades before the latest variants on sexual ethics, Kieślowski recognized a unique, if particularly diabolical form of theft, when it involves human biological relationships.
All views expressed are the author’s own.