“Play with me or I’ll break your arm”: Giant babies, philosophy, and images

Abstract

With the Donald Trump Baby Balloon as a provocation, this work utilizes philosophy as a method and cinema-as/in-philosophy to multi-modally interrogate the particular images of giant babies. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of molarity and molecularity and Bakhtin’s conception of grotesque bodily images are put to work alongside several cinematic portrayals of giant babies and their social material contexts, including the animated fantasy Spirited away, the family comedy Honey, I blew up the kid, the independent short Las Palmas, and the Disney-Pixar superhero franchise Incredibles. Within this constellation of images and texts, the giant baby emerges as a specific entanglement of developmentalism, humanism, and neoliberalism. Furthermore, the ways in which images of giant babies materialize particular notions of monstrosity, consumption, and destruction might disrupt some commonsense notions of time and bodies. This kind of destabilization of concepts furthers the argument for employing a philosophical, cinematic axiology within the realm of childhood studies.