Who is prepared for what confronts them, we’re all creatures of the improvisational lag when an event (a perturbance in the atmosphere that destabilizes our sense of control over some part of our continuity) happens, no? Helplessness and hopelessness, as I’m always saying (so afraid of my own repetition here) are structures, emotions, and affects. There’s an empirical and intuitive sense of their truth value, their projection as fear, and the need to defend against too much drive to hope and agency, since having an impact that lasts is so rare and requires so much tending. What strikes me so much about the end of that film is the “caring” (as opposed to the “cared for”) protagonist’s desire to break the toxic circuit of obligation/bribing/false contractuality by delegating what we’ve just seen to the dustbin of history, that which cannot be recycled for future claims on bonds of intimacy or obligation. She wants to make it a situation they got through, rather than an event they are living. She wants to dedramatize it between them, because she can’t experience it when she’s in service to the obligation. She hasn’t had her moment yet, apart from the brief vomiting.

All I can tell myself, while I fight feelings of anxiety and disgust that turn into sadness and then become fear, is that it is not really about picking a winner from the list above, but of seeing how they are related. How the sheer fact that women have bodies that can be fucked and in the process feel pleasure as well as become pregnant complicates their quality of agents. How they are turned not into objects, because objects cannot choose and their world cannot spin out of control as they wonder how they ended up in an impossible situation, and not into subjects, for subjects have real choices to make, and they may even hope to create their own world, but into something completely different, maybe helpless, hopeless spectators to their being turned into something they have not been prepared for, and do not even have words for. And how they can become heroes in the process.
That where a powerful state (or is it a state that makes everybody believe it is powerful?) makes both abortion and contraception very costly, women, especially young and poor, are so vulnerable as to make unimaginable choices. That under vicious regimes people do create allegiances, but that’s of little help to the most vulnerable, who have only each other to help? Or to choose between non-choices together?
That someone can want nothing more but to forget her own heroism, which overcomes nothing and brings no hope.