Works featuring "eugenics" (3)

The Strenuous Life, Or, Anti-Race Suicide

A satirical answer to President Teddy Roosevelt's call for Anglo-Saxon women to keep up with the birth rate of ethnic minorities, or risk 'race suicide'. Mike Judge's 2006 'Idiocracy' essentially makes the same call, and is considered a 'cult classic'. Maybe Teddy's call was ridiculed just because it was ahead of its time.

Where Are My Children?

“All intelligent people know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest. Newspapers, magazines and books have treated different phases of this question. Can a subject thus dealt with on the printed page be denied careful dramatization on the motion picture screen?...In producing this picture the intention is to place a serious drama before adult audiences...”

This somber introduction is immediately followed by:

“Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.”

And on it goes like this, shifting between pretense of weighty social drama and wallowing in cabbage-patch airy-fairy fantasy, linked by hackneyed melodrama and annoying overuse of cross-cutting, while hammering its messages - abortion is murder, humanity's salvation is birth control (for the poor), becoming a submissive baby factory is the duty of every woman (if she's wealthy) - only approaching realism in its wonderfully dark and depressing ending. Movie in a nutshell: Living with a pompous, self-righteous, hypocritical Dickless Attorney leaves wife with no desire to breed more of his kind. There - 65 minutes saved.

Alraune/A Daughter of Destiny/Unholy Love

Her name says it all: Alraune gots that old hoochie-cooch root in her. Plus, her Mama used to slang poontang like it ain't no thang, and her “Papa” sports a mean right eyebrow that just don't quit. So with that DNA and upbringing you'd expect Alraune to be the ultimate femme fatale. But instead she's merely a cock-teaser, not cock-slayer, with no apparent nefarious intent other than vanity - leaving us to wonder who wussed out: novel or film?

To be fair, the film is incomplete, and the subtitles are often confusing. Still, knowingly or not, the story flies in the face of the eugenics movement, which was enthroned just a year before with US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's infamous decision supporting forced sterilization, that argued that “unfit” only breeds more of its kind and therefore should be prevented from reproducing:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”.

And a few years later, the Nazis came to power in Germany and took this thinking to the next level. But in this story, the offspring of “unfit” is incapable of murder, while the highly respected scientist was ready to slash that white trash in a flash - suggesting who is the real “degenerate”.