All of Mine
On The Boss Baby and invisible love from guest writer Sarah Teresa Cook
‘Tis the season to be subjected to family gatherings, sometimes jolly, sometimes excruciating. Or perhaps, like me, you do your utmost to avoid all family obligations except for cosying up on the sofa with your significant other and fur babies to watch movies, eat chocolate and avoid thinking about the absences that can feel all too sharp at this time of year.
On the subject of all things family, I’m delighted to share a guest post from the wonderful
on the 2017 animated comedy The Boss Baby. I’m so grateful to Sarah for not only putting this movie on my radar but sharing her thoughts on the nature of families, the desire for perfection and love as a (in)finite resource!The Boss Baby is a 2017 animated comedy film, loosely based on the 2010 picture book of the same name by Marla Frazee, and directed by Tom McGrath. When a suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying baby appears at the Templeton residence as the ‘new baby brother’, seven year old Tim (Miles Bakshi) is bemused and then suspicious. However, when Tim discovers that Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin) is there to investigate the declining love for babies due to puppies, the brothers team up to stop the dastardly plot of the CEO of Puppy Co.
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All of Mine
By
Tim, I may look like a baby, but I was born all grown up! - Boss Baby
The first time I watched The Boss Baby, I was bowled over by its examination of the corporatization of family, in all its terrifying and beautifully animated ways. Company success, in the world of the movie, hinges on the production of a “Forever Puppy,” a dog that never dies, that never even ages. The puppy goes on being a puppy for weeks, months, years—lives well beyond, the implication whispers, your own discrete life.
And though the superficial appeal is obvious, the film quickly undoes one’s sense of desire by showing a baby turning into a boy turning into an adult, an old man, his gravestone...all while the puppy’s tongue hangs clumsily out of its cute small puppy mouth. The discrepancy is terrifying.
Through such exaggeration, The Boss Baby sets up human connection in direct opposition to corporate culture, capitalism, and productivity.
In other words: Happiness, or success?
When I was a young girl, a similar question manifested as a private bedtime ritual: If I were a famous singer, would I rather be talented but ugly, or beautiful and with a mediocre voice? I’d lay in bed obsessing over the idea that to produce a certain kind of art you might need to look strange, that effort must be invited to show up plainly on one’s trying, contorted face. (Looking back, I see a deeply tender, undiagnosed neurodivergent girl, desperate to validate her own non-negotiable strangenesses.)
I don’t need to confess which one I chose night after night, as I spent those teenage years buried in toxic analogies. I had ingested one too many television shows and magazine covers and middle school conversations, dominated by boys who hadn’t learned any better and maybe never would. I knew the quickest way to earn value was through heterosexual romance. I saw how my father looked at other women.
When corporate success and human connection are so opposed, things like love and intimacy sit in direct contrast to perpetual youth and immortality, a dichotomy summarized and symbolized by a pet that can live forever. Except the stuff that makes a bond between any two people a good one is, by its very nature, tender, mortal stuff, susceptible to change and influence and, even at its strongest, far from permanent. To want anything otherwise would be to exile yourself from your own human circumstances. “I wasn’t born. I was hired,” says the eponymous baby, collapsing the space between existence and work, between family values and company protocol. Each time I watch the movie, I am reminded that what leads to financial success is not what cultivates sustainable growth, nor what nourishes community and friends and family, whether chosen or assigned.
In fact, it’s that sense of choice that The Boss Baby highlights so well. An off-camera explanation of where babies “really” come from is framed as a silly joke, but rather than stigmatizing the body’s natural processes, it contributes to the understanding that families are chosen as often as they are produced by blood. Families are like ecosystems: They benefit from biodiversity, from the gathering of different purposes and desires, different motivations and origins all residing in the same place. Miraculously, the movie holds space for this.
“You can’t miss what you never had,” says Boss Baby to his kid brother, Tim. In the film, it’s spoken as poorly disguised grief, precursor to a toxic male defense. But you also can’t have what you don’t see. Like so many afab girls, I learned early on that part of being a woman is keeping yourself desired and sought after by becoming an object that others can miss, which is how presence can come to be dictated by absence. No wonder, as I drifted off to fitful sleep each night, I always chose beauty over talent: I wanted pure value that didn’t rely on ability. And I wanted, more than anything else, to be missed and thought of and worried about, to hum in the minds of men when I wasn’t around them.
Not to be held: To be reached for. Pursued.
When your personhood lives at the nexus of your absence and your appearance, it’s easy to be confused about where you exist in the first place. Or to misunderstand invisibility as really quite appealing.
The film’s best turn is initiated when Boss Baby’s brother, Tim, discovers that love is not, in fact, finite—that sharing is not a neighbor of lack. Though we attribute such qualities to monetary wealth, it is love, not money, that grows without restriction, that sustains and is sustained by investments that don’t have a cap.
Love, which climbs without limits no matter its point of origin, because there is simply always room for more.
The corporate machine, with mechanical arms that read and interpret each newborn, doesn’t recognize Boss Baby’s “tickle zones”—a metaphor for basic human need disguised as armpits, tummies, and ticklish feet—and sends him off to management instead of infancy. Don’t many of us live some version of this story? Some of us have unrecognizable desires, or bodies that do not act the way society expects them to, or brains that diverge from neurotypical procedure, or personalities that try too hard or not hard enough. Mis-recognition leads to assumptions about limited abilities and inaccurate expectations, rendering certain purposes—and certain bodies—obsolete.
The Boss Baby challenges such mis-recognitions, while attempting to disentangle the old knot made of capitalism, gender troubles, and the nuclear family unit.
“If there isn’t enough love for the two of us then I wanna give you all of mine,” says Tim, right as the movie crescendos.
He’s talking about the ungendering of love, boys and men giving everything they have, an amount too big for numbers.
And he’s talking about the multifaceted beating heart: Full of mass though you can’t weigh it; how it’s right there in front of you, visible and saying hello. How you want it so much.
Sarah Cook is a writing fanatic, autistic human, and trauma-informed creative mentor. She lives in Oregon, where she watches scary movies and talks to bugs. Learn more about the gift of creative mentorship at sarahteresacook.com.
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’s writing at !Tune in next time for the antics of an Elf who was booted off the shelf!
In the meantime why not tell us about your favourite (dys)functional families who have graced the big screen?
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"a “Forever Puppy,” a dog that never dies, that never even ages. The puppy goes on being a puppy for weeks, months, years—lives well beyond, the implication whispers, your own discrete life."
I write about a superhero puppy like that- but she's flesh and blood and not a machine.