Dr. SJ and I watched Roma on Netflix because, as she explained to me, it was going to be an Oscar contender and we should watch Oscar-contending movies. We were about fifteen minutes into the film when she turned to me and said, “I don’t think it gets any better. I don’t think there’s any plot, any story at all.” It took us about a week to watch the movie, in small chunks, because we were bored.

As an aside in her Times op-ed against quota-izing our world to assure that the right number of genitalia are omnipresent, Reason Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Katherine Mangu-Ward, describes the movie.

But consider “Roma.” If there is any justice in this world, it will win the Academy Award for best director on Sunday. This wrenching, beautiful film is set almost entirely in the world of women; it delicately engages class and race, stares unflinchingly at the darkness and light of motherhood, and yet it shows up on the wrong side of the gender ledgers: The director is Alfonso Cuarón, a man.

She apparently likes the movie, and that’s swell. She notes the gender of the director to make her point, that a movie about the misery in which women live to wallow would violate the gender rules that must be obeyed. At least Cuarón must be one of the “good” men, since he made a “good” movie as it was all about the sadness of women.

In the movie, a Mexican domestic worker named Cleo sacrificed her world, her dreams, for the sake of a wealthy family abandoned by an evil man, leaving it to the women to survive. The point of the movie was to awaken the viewer to Cleo’s strength and martyrdom, almost sacrificing her life to save the children from drowning.

The upper class wife, variously concerned or self-obsessed, but always on the edge of collapse, couldn’t survive without her. The men in the movie were evil, one leaving his wife and children for his own pleasure, and the other rejecting Cleo after he manipulated her emotions for sex and impregnated her.

This wasn’t about entertainment, despite Mangu-Ward’s description as a “wrenching, beautiful film.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it’s not that she’s wrong, but that she’s only right for herself and anyone who agrees with her. That it was “wrenching” seems to be the flip-side of a boring trope of social justice. It’s not that a movie needs a car chase or gun fight to be interesting, but a plot might be nice.

Then again, this wasn’t really a movie. This was a training film, designed to indoctrinate its viewers into the world of the woke, where virtue resides exclusively in the poor, downtrodden woman of color. And on a different page, the Times couldn’t resist capitalizing on its re-education film. A “video op-ed” by Jacqui Orie is entitled:

What America Can Learn From ‘Roma’
We’ve been excluded from basic labor protections for too long. This is our moment.

Except Roma wasn’t a documentary. It was a movie designed to appeal to the sagging hearts of the sort of people who watched Real Housewives to pretend their dysfunctions weren’t all that bad. But like Stalinist art, to not serve the cause would have been wasteful.

In the Video Op-Ed above, a domestic worker calls on Congress to pass the first National Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. While labor protections exist for factory workers, truck drivers, teachers, they do not exist for domestic and care workers. This bill would end their exclusion.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance has written an open letter dedicated to the women of the Oscar-nominated film “Roma”: Liboria Rodriguez, the director Alfonso Cuaron’s childhood nanny and inspiration for Cleo; and Yalitza Aparicio, whose portrayal of Cleo brought her to life with humanity and dignity. You can read their letter here.

There is a sound argument for the protection of domestic workers, who have largely been ignored by our labor laws. But this isn’t a legal argument, or an economic argument which might have recognized that what it will mostly accomplish is the eradication of domestic work by pricing it out of market. This is an appeal to emotion masquerading as entertainment.

All too often, domestic workers in film and pop culture are turned into stereotypes, and our work is caricatured. We’re pushed to the margins, hidden behind the scenes, or forced to be silent and invisible. But this film–Roma–was different.

But Cleo wasn’t a caricature, except as heroine engaged in picking up soiled clothing from the floor when she wasn’t risking her own life to save those of her charges?

While set in a specific time and place, Cleo’s life represents that of more than two million domestic workers across the United States. Our work supports the economy, and makes it possible for millions of working parents to go to work. We’re the future of work- we’re one of the fastest growing industries in America. As care workers, we ensure that our aging loved ones and family members living with disabilities are cared for in a way that upholds their dignity and independence. We make order out of chaos when we clean homes across America. We say goodbye to our own children in the mornings, so we can love and care for the children of other families.

There is much in here worthy of consideration, and much left out as well. But the prefatory phrase, “while set in a specific time and place” is what turns this movie into propaganda. This was fiction designed to move us with its “wrenching beauty.” If you want your law to be influenced by wrenching beauty, then whoever has their hands on the camera will dictate what caricature you see, what fantasies shape your feelings.

And then calls for changes to the law to save Cleo follow, not because of rational reasons but because she was the heroine of a film designed to make the rest of us wallow in her misery and be willing to go to work every day to earn enough money to pay the woman who cleans the house what she deserves.