“I remember seeing the movie for the first time and thinking, This is so inherently self-contradictory in ways that offer no hope of resolution,” McCaffrey told me over the phone the week after the event.
The symposium snowballed organically after McCaffrey and Levander experienced The Boss Baby in theaters during undergrad. And yet, at the heart of it all, the film tells the story of an ordinary boy learning to live with a new baby brother … who happens to be the titular Boss Baby. He is designing a “Forever Puppy” to siphon all of the love in the world away from babies, and he is driven by a thirst for revenge once upon a time, he was also a Boss Baby, but tragically began aging after developing lactose intolerance. Imagine a world where babies are produced on an assembly line in a supernatural office building called “Baby Corp,” guzzle magic baby formula that endows them with the brains of C-suite adults, and face off with the evil CEO of Puppy Co. The Boss Baby has captured the popular imagination in the form of parade balloons and surreal meet-and-greet footage, but the original film is almost unspeakably crazy. It’s a catchy one-liner, but McCaffrey has a point. In McCaffrey’s opening remarks, she quipped that the film’s singular vision is “thematically richer than the Bible and more confusing than Ulysses.”
students, Jaime McCaffrey of the University of Kentucky and Tore Levander of Fordham University, who described the movie as an “interpretive nightmare” to the A.V. The symposium was co-organized by two philosophy Ph.D. For nearly five hours on the afternoon of January 3, 12 panelists and 75 spectators gathered over Zoom for a day of reckoning with the meme-friendly children’s movie. This was the unique magic of the first annual Boss Baby symposium. “Winnicott says that we can’t have any understanding of the point of view of the baby, but I’m looking at it from the point of view of the baby.” “I was nervous about bringing in Winnicott because he really complicates my argument,” Poole replied warmly, then ventured that his thesis - a deep medical dive into the Boss Baby’s psychotic orientation to the world - still held true. During the Q&A, another resident, Rennie Burke of San Mateo County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, wanted to know if Poole had factored in Donald Winnicott’s field-defining research into developmental psychology. Joshua Poole of UC Riverside, a psychiatry resident, had just wrapped up a 15-minute presentation on The Boss Baby, the 2017 DreamWorks film about a baby blessed with the mind, voice, and corporate fashion sense of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.
“I guess my question is … can we even talk about the Boss Baby and the other employees of Baby Corp as babies?”
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