Creepy Dolls

Last night Greg and I got totally enthralled in a very weird show. BBC America's My Fake Baby is a documentary about women who buy dolls made to look like real babies. At first, I was thinking that life like dolls were a little creepy in general, but as the documentary revealed this to be a creepier trend then what I could have imagined. The women who buy these dolls often treat them as "real" babies. They buy them clothes, push them through stores and parks in "prams," and transport them in carseats. The dolls can be ordered to custom size and weight and many feature breathing, heartbeat, and "wiggle" mechanisms.

The women who make the dolls consider themselves artists, and I can support that. The majority of the dolls featured look incredibly life like. In many ways these artists are no different than artists who create sculptures or wax figures. That said, their "art" seems to be fueled by consumers (only women in the documentary) who probably would be better off spending the thousands of dollars on addressing the bigger issues in their lives. One woman had an doll made to look like her grandson who had moved to New Zealand with his mother. Throughout the documentary, the grandmother cites her motivation for getting the doll as "no one can take this baby away from me." For most of the documentary, the grandmother talks as though her grandson had died, rather than being alive and well in another country.

More disturbing to me than the woman with attachment issues is the other woman who is featured. This woman cited her love of the dolls as a replacement for her own children because she would be unable to handle the "noise" of a real baby. This woman flew from London to Washington DC for the "delivery" of her 4th baby. Besides the very weird notion that bringing home the doll is equivalent to giving birth, this woman spends two days in the hotel room "bonding" with her baby before she discovers a defect in the doll and then declares that the doll has to be returned because she can't have a "baby who isn't perfect." Okay, so maybe it's not a bad thing that this this woman doesn't have a real baby. I'm still not comfortable with her attachment to the doll, but the more I saw of this woman, the more I was glad that she wasn't rejecting an actual baby.

While all of the women featured in the documentary were British, according to this Today's Show report, the trend is now becoming popular in the US. I'm seriously thinking of teaching a "living doll" book in 170 next semester, just so I can talk about this show.