The Accidental Motherhood of ‘Gloria’

Every woman is a mother? Yeah, no thanks. If Gloria is a “mother” to Phil then she’s also a lifetime member to the Bad Moms Club. In the beginning, Jeri, Phil’s real mom, calls on Gloria to take her kids. She tells Gloria that their family is “marked” by the mob. A gangster even waits in the lobby. Jeri begs her to protect her kids to which Gloria bluntly responds: “I hate kids, especially yours.” Despite her tough-talk, this ex-gun moll, ex-showgirl reluctantly agrees.

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This guest post by Rhianna Shaheen appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


In John Cassavetes’ Gloria (1980), the title character must overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: motherhood. Well, not exactly. When the mob wipes out a Bronx family, their neighbor Gloria (Gena Rowlands) suddenly becomes responsible for their 7-year old, Phil (John Adames). It’s more like forced guardianship, but the film constantly hints at her symbolic motherhood to the boy. Even when she’s pleading for Phil’s life, her gangster ex-boyfriend undermines her argument with the inevitable mother-son formula:

“I understand. You are a woman. He is a little boy. You fall in love. Every woman is a mother. You love him.”

Every woman is a mother? Yeah, no thanks. If Gloria is a “mother” to Phil then she’s also a lifetime member to the Bad Moms Club. In the beginning, Jeri, Phil’s real mom, calls on Gloria to take her kids. She tells Gloria that their family is “marked” by the mob. A gangster even waits in the lobby. Jeri begs her to protect her kids to which Gloria bluntly responds: “I hate kids, especially yours.” Despite her tough-talk, this ex-gun moll, ex-showgirl reluctantly agrees.

In her apartment, before the impending hit on his family, Gloria has difficulty relating to Phil. He’s aware that his family is in trouble, but she neither comforts nor coddles this soon-to-be orphan: “You want to play 20 questions? How about watching the TV for a while?” She doesn’t know how to talk to kids.

Neither of these characters wants to be in the same room together.
Neither of these characters wants to be in the same room together.

 

After a loud explosion, signifying the murder of his family, Phil is in shock: “I want my father! Papi! I hate you, you stupid person!” Gloria, shaken, now understands the gravity of the situation but still lacks the sensitivity to support him:

“I don’t know what to do with you, kid. My poor cat. What do I do with you? You know, you’re not my family or anything. You’re just the neighbor’s kid right?”

It’s both shocking and humorous. His entire family was just murdered, but she can only think of herself and her cat? To her defense, she didn’t sign up for this. She isn’t Daddy Warbucks. She’s a childless, single lady by choice.

Gloria loves her life. She loves her friends. She loves her cat. She saved all of her life so she could have some money. In one moment, she’s expected to just give all that away. She doesn’t want to die for this kid. Does that make her an unnatural woman? Or a rather flawed human being?

“Me, I’m not a mother. I’m one of those sensations. I was always a broad. Can’t stand the sight of milk.”

Not only does she lack so-called maternal instincts but also basic cooking skills. When she attempts to make eggs for Phil she inevitably becomes frustrated and burns them. This scene echoes a similar breakfast disaster in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) in which newly single father Dustin Hoffman attempts to make breakfast for his son. However, Gloria is a woman, and thus belongs to generation and socioeconomic background that would demand woman to know how to cook. Thus she is even further stigmatized as a bad mother.

Gloria’s first attempt at performing “motherly” duties.
Gloria’s first attempt at performing “motherly” duties.

 

Gloria also shifts between wanting to abandon and wanting to protect the child when things gets tough. At one point she tells him to run home: “Run as fast as you can.” She walks a few steps with him, and then turns around, telling him to go. Although her attempt at abandonment is awful we understand her frustration. She cannot turn him into the police, because she’s been arrested. She also cannot turn on the mob, because they’re old friends of hers.

Regardless, Phil continues to follow her. He sees her as a substitute mother even if she’s a lousy one. Then when a group of gangsters confronts them on the street, Gloria must finally make a choice. It’s an opportunity to walk away, but instead she shoots the men, forever sealing her fate with Phil’s.

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It’s a heroic act that speaks more to her humanity than to her ability to be a mother. While her feelings for him are at times ambivalent, Gloria ultimately commits herself to the boy’s survival. She empties her safety deposit box, changes hotels each night, and pistol-whips gangsters all for Phil. Together on the run, Gloria acts more like a partner-in-crime than a mother. Despite his efforts to be “the man” in this pairing Phil lets go of his hyper-masculine anxieties once he witnesses the toughness of this badass woman. She teaches him how to survive in this unfathomable New York environment.

Although there seems a desire to fulfill the mother-son mythos, the film does not explore their relationship in such clichéd terms as its 1999 remake. It lacks the sentimentality but has all the heart and truth to it.

As Cassavetes himself puts it:

“[…] these characters go on the basis that there are certain emotions and rules that go beyond words and assurances. They just know. […] Even when they’re thrown together, they don’t pretend to care about each other, it’s because of their personal trust and regard.” (from Cassavetes on Cassavetes)

“It was about a woman who beyond her control stood up for a kid whom she wanted nothing to do with […]”

However, in his discussion of the film, Cassavetes also evokes the same mythos and stereotypes that Gloria attempts to refute:

“I wanted to tell women that they don’t have to like children – but there’s still something deep in them that relates to children, and this separates them from men in a good way. This inner understanding of kids is something very deep in them that relates to children, and this separates them from men in a good way.”

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Despite this backpedal into maternal instinct bullshit, I think Cassavetes has good intentions. In the end, Gloria is not defined by her ability to mother or understand this child (whatever that means) but by her heroism and humanity (not that those are mutually exclusive). Her desire to protect this helpless child is rather mistaken for motherhood.

Let’s consider Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional (1994). A New York hitman shelters a 12-year old girl after her family is murdered by corrupt DEA agents. It’s almost an exact replica of Gloria except with the gender roles reversed and the cult film status. Instead of a father/daughter relationship, this unlikely pair acts as teacher/protégée. In fact, there is no mention of fatherhood at any time. Some pedophiliac undertones? Maybe. But no paternal transition.

Despite these double standards, Gloria represents an important cultural touchstone that is often overlooked. Released at the end of Second-Wave Feminism, the political relevance of this film is undeniable. It not only exposes the absurdities of gender norms but also captures the nuanced relationship women have with this idea of “motherhood.”

 


Rhianna Shaheen is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Fine Arts and Minor in Film Studies and Art History. Check her out on twitter!

‘The Killing’ and the Misogyny of Hating Bad Mothers

Vilifying mothers is a national pastime. Absent mothers, celebrity mothers, helicopter mothers, working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, mothers with too many children, mothers with too few children, women who don’t want to be or can’t be mothers–for women, there’s no clear way to do it right.

The Killing promotional still.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


Vilifying mothers is a national pastime. Absent mothers, celebrity mothers, helicopter mothers, working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, mothers with too many children, mothers with too few children, women who don’t want to be or can’t be mothers–for women, there’s no clear way to do it right.
In AMC’s The Killing, “bad” mothers have been woven throughout all three seasons.
It would be easy to see this as a failing on the show’s part; instead, I think we can see it as a realistic depiction of how we treat mothers in our culture represented in both in the fictional world of the show and in critics’ responses to the series.
In the first two seasons of The Killing, the plot centers around the murder of Rosie Larsen, a 17-year-old girl. Her grieving parents–Mitch and Stan–have a difficult time (understandably) in the aftermath of her death and in the investigation. Mitch (Michelle Forbes), in the midst of a breakdown, leaves her two sons with Stan and her sister as she hits the road to try to heal or find something to ease the pain.
Mitch Larsen: bad mother.
In last year’s “The 10 Worst Moms on TV” on Yahoo TV, Mitch Larsen was featured as one of the worst. The critic wrote:

“Her daughter may or may not have been a prostitute or involved in some illegal doings at a casino. And she ended up dead seemingly because of it. But instead of hunkering down and paying more attention to her remaining children, Mitch left her sons to be raised by a depressed father and their hooker aunt while she went off to live in a motel and act creepy around wayward runaway girls.”

Mitch’s interaction with the runaway girl was a direct response to her feelings of inadequacy about her failings as a mother to Rosie. She was attempting to heal and grow. She mothered the runaway girl the best she knew how and was still abandoned and hurt. Mothering is difficult and complex–it’s not a simple equation of just being there all of the time.
In season 3, the victim pool has grown substantially–a number of teenage girls are found murdered, and the suspect appears to be a youth pastor at a homeless shelter.
One of the missing girls who is still unaccounted for, Kallie Leeds, has a terrible no-good single mother, Danette Leeds (Amy Seimetz), who seems to prioritize cigarettes, beer and getting laid over her difficult relationship with her daughter. Her neglect and indifference are seen as central to Kallie’s victimization.

Danette: bad mother.

 

As Danette and another mother of a missing girl sit next to each other at the police station, Danette notices that the other mother has a binder full of photographs and composite photos. She seems uncomfortable, as if she’s understanding the depth of her neglect. She recognizes that Kallie’s life trajectory closely mirrors her own, and the weight of that is pushing down on her. She was being the kind of parent she knew how to be, and she didn’t know how to be June Cleaver. Most mothers don’t.While these supporting characters’ relationships with their daughters are troubled, and it would be easy for the audience to “blame” the victimization of the daughters on their mothers, it wouldn’t be correct. We are so used to complex, fallible male characters that we are also conditioned to see them as complex and fallible, not good or evil. When we’re presented with women with the same depth of characterization–especially mothers–we don’t know what to do except what we’ve been conditioned to do: criticize them and blame them.

This is blatantly obvious when we consider the show’s protagonist, detective Sarah Linden (played by the amazing Mireille Enos).

Linden has consistently been portrayed as a terrible mother in critics’ reviews of the series. She is a realistic female lead character–she is good at her job, works tirelessly and struggles with her failings in her personal life and professional life. Complex female characters are a good thing, and The Killing consistently delivers them (it can’t hurt that the show’s producer and many of the writers are women).
In the first two seasons, Linden had custody of her young teenage son, Jack. Her work means long hours away from him and dinner from vending machines. Linden herself was a foster child and has difficulty negotiating her upbringing and being the kind of mother that she’s supposed to be, but cannot.  In the third season, Jack has moved to Chicago to live full-time with his father–he’s thriving, and living with his father. That’s good, right? No, Sarah Linden is evidently still a piece of shit mother.

Sarah Linden: bad mother.

 

In reviews of The Killing, writers often take an acerbic tone when mentioning her as a mother.
For example, this reviewer seems to think taking a jog makes her a bad mother:

“We all struggle with the work-life balance thing, and detective Sarah Linden is hardly an exception. Finding time to mother her son, for instance, seems to be a challenge. Jogging, however, she manages to squeeze in. And it’s a good thing, too. Because Linden (finally) got a major break in the case this week, and it’s all thanks to the fact that she prioritizes cardio over sleep, parenthood, marriage, friendship, or updating a sweater collection that appears to have been sourced from Dress Barn circa 1997.”

This reviewer fails to make the connection that she’s preoccupied by an intense case, so she needs to stay in Seattle (or maybe the fact that she’s putting her career first figures into this assessment):

“But she’s still the World’s Worst Mother — her son lives in Chicago and she won’t visit because, well, he’s the only person she knows there. Wow, Linden. Just, wow.”

In a Salon review from last year (which, remarkably, denounces The Killing for not being “fun” enough), the reviewer slips in, “Yes, it’s still raining, and Linden’s still a bad mother…”

Even the New York Times, in a review from the first season, comes to the conclusion that the “scariest aspect” of the show is the theme of absent motherhood. Crooked politicians, murders, prostitution… those don’t hold a candle to bad mothers.

“Sarah Linden refuses to accept that her inattentiveness is gravely affecting her son until she is forced to reckon with her absence around him. And in Mitch Larsen (Michelle Forbes) we bear witness to a character who is present in her daughter’s life and yet still positioned at a significant remove from the darkest secrets of her adolescence. In the end, of course, this is the scariest aspect of all.”

And in the aforementioned Yahoo TV list, Linden gets first place. The manifesto against her begins: “She’s not actively trying to kill her son, but she may end up doing so anyway.”
OK then.
I’m not going to try to defend Sarah Linden’s parenting. That would be ludicrous–she doesn’t need defending. She’s a complex, realistic character with real issues. 

At Bitch Flicks, Megan Kearns posted in the first season how it was “refreshing” to see this kind of character trying to navigate her different roles, and that “the lead character is an accomplished single mom striving to keep her son out of trouble all while maintaining her demanding career.” She manages to do that by the third season, but it’s still not good enough.

Instead, audiences and critics alike focus much too closely on the female protagonist’s failings as a mother. We do not do that with male protagonists. (OK, six seasons in, after an episode highlighting parenting, Jezebel posted about how Don Draper was a “shitty dad.”)

Is Dexter a good father? What about Rick Grimes? Walter White?

Certainly there are lists of “bad dads” in TV/film, but the tone is different, more tongue-in-cheek. And a focus on these characters’ fathering abilities doesn’t run throughout conversations about the show, especially not with the same venom we see about Linden. When there’s a bad father in the mix, it’s just a poignant piece of a Joseph Campbell hero’s journey. Bad mothers, however, deserve to be burned at the proverbial stake.

There is a dearth of female antiheroes in film and television. The response to Sarah Linden shows why this is. When audiences see female characters, they think primarily in critical terms, especially about their roles as mothers and wives. (Of course this extends past fictional characters; there’s consistent and persistent hand-wringing about real-life women working too much and not being good enough mothers.) Women aren’t perfect (especially within the narrow confines of perfection that our society has put in place). Female characters shouldn’t be perfect.

My son is doing fine and my sweaters are warm and comfortable, assholes.

Linden’s role as a parent, girlfriend and ex-wife is just one small part of the grand scheme of the show. Her partner, Stephen Holder, has a girlfriend this season. He forgets Valentine’s Day and is never home. He is not painted as a villain, because he’s out getting shit done. He’s doing his job. That is what is important in The Killing. So when critics focus (in depth, or just in passing) on how terrible a mother Linden is, that further erodes what should be good about having strong, complex female characters.

Sarah Linden may not be a full-time mother. But she’s a bad-ass mother, and that is what should matter the most.



Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Gambling for Love and Power

These two characters’ inability to see each other as anything other than personal property emerges as the compelling dramatic engine of unfolding events involving far more sinister agents, who eventually exploit the fissure in the mother-daughter bond.

The poster illustrates the triangle Renée, Maurice, Agnès.
The poster illustrates the triangle Renée, Maurice, Agnès.

 


This guest post by Erin Blackwell appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


L’affaire Le Roux, or more vulgarly, the Leroux Affair, is a real court case involving a young heiress on the French Riviera, whose body never turned up, whose inheritance was absorbed by her lawyer-lover who didn’t love her, whose mother ran a sumptuous casino the Mafia plucked from her grasp with the aid of said lawyer-lover, a case that is still working its way through the courts today, 38 years after the young heiress vanished. Whatever else this affair might signify, say, to legal minds and the involved parties, it has served to inspire a movie that is very fabulous for the first 90 minutes of its 116 total run time.

In the Name of My Daughter premiered at Cannes 2014 out of competition, one month after Maurice Angelet was convicted for the second time to 20 years in prison. That same day, he launched another appeal. Frankly, I can’t keep up with this case, which keeps insinuating itself into my thoughts about the film, which is now in certain U.S. cities still able to sustain an art house. In the Name of My Daughter, directed by André Techiné, is an intimate melodrama wrought from sensational facts, starring Catherine Deneuve as a platinum blonde grande dame and Adèle Haenel as her wide-eyed and wild-hearted daughter. These two characters’ inability to see each other as anything other than personal property emerges as the compelling dramatic engine of unfolding events involving far more sinister agents, who eventually exploit the fissure in the mother-daughter bond.

Agnelet (Guillaume Canet) pushes his luck with Renée (Catherine Deneuve).
Agnelet (Guillaume Canet) pushes his luck with Renée (Catherine Deneuve).

 

Money changes everything? Money ruins everything. Especially in families. Especially when one generation does all the work and the next does all the spending. It is, of course, in the nature of a child to receive love, shelter, warmth, food, care, education, advice, protection, but in the presence of wealth, children sometimes prefer to take the money and elude the smothering, or the well-upholstered neglect or abuse. This syndrome is the crux of In the Name, when the daughter demands her small fortune in shares left by her dead dad, the immediate sale of which would compromise her mother’s ability to stay in business.

The father’s name is never spoken, nor his memory invoked. No incidental photos on a gilt rococo side table in the centuries-old Le Roux villa on the hill overlooking the drop-dead view of the Bay of Angels. And yet he reaches beyond the grave to separate the mother from the daughter by establishing the latter’s legal right to her fair share in the family business. This is the stuff of melodrama, and the French invented that genre after the Revolution to cover the sordid money-based family squabbles of the bourgeoisie. There’s no melodrama without a money angle, ever a reliable motive for murder.

The real Maurice Angelet.
The real Maurice Angelet.

 

Deneuve isn’t just Mom, or Maman, she’s the chic proprietress of one of the classiest casinos in Nice, le Palais de la Méditerrannée. All tarted up with heavy eyeliner and lipstick, platinum hair in a French twist, wearing clothes Imelda Marcos would fancy that look like shot-silk Chanel suits on acid, Deneuve is a vision of old, stolid, corrupt, bourgeois, money-grubbing glamour as it can only exist on the Côte d’Azur (Azure Coast), where the sun smiles on the blue Mediterranean, palm trees dance in the breeze, and the Mafia and other lesser-known brands of evil are eager to get in on the game. Not unlike Southern California, birthplace of Noir.

When we look at Deneuve’s face, we’re still looking for the young or younger face. That’s how it is with people we’ve “known” for years, and loved. The mother still sees the child, even as she must deal with the young woman. The daughter still yearns for the mother’s affection and attention, which she used to wallow in, or fail miserably to attract. The mother would like to move past dutiful child-rearing to a relationship in which she, too, is a person to be cherished and supported. So, fighting for the life of her casino and its 350 loyal employees, against an interloping crime syndicate, she asks her daughter to be patient.

Haenel as Agnès gives a performance impossible to imagine in a Hollywood film. She goes for broke. She tests the limits of her own vulnerability and our ability to watch her spiral out-of-control like a weepy drunk at a party. She bares all, as the tabloids like to say, which is why we love tabloids. Being French, what she bares is the soul of a Romantic, an open heart, a trusting nature, and a bottomless pit of emotional chaos. Her mother doesn’t mind her being a bit of a mess, and that’s a catastrophe for the child, should she ever fall prey to a cynic, a non-believer in romance, a soulless opportunist, someone in it for the money. Oops. I gave away the plot.

Haenel dances an African solo sans bra, swims, smokes, and stares with an abandon utterly opposite to the mother’s rigorous, staid, encrusted rituals. And yet, Deneuve’s eyes reveal the sophisticated depth of emotion those in the know count on the French for. Beneath their façades, their aspirations aren’t dissimilar, but Mom, like Mildred Pierce, does have a business to run, and Agnès, like Vita, doesn’t give a shit.

Agnès (Adèle Haenel) trusts Marcel (Guillaume Canet) all the way to the Swiss bank account.
Agnès (Adèle Haenel) trusts Marcel (Guillaume Canet) all the way to the Swiss bank account.

 

The original French title, L’homme qu’on aimait trop, or The Man We Loved Too Much, is a saucy wink towards real-life sleazy lawyer Maurice Agnelet, the third angle in the triangle. Agnelet is played by Guillaume Canet as your typical sociopathic control freak, who sucks up to Madame Le Roux because she is his only paying client, she pays well, and he figures he can parlay the widow’s quasi-maternal fondness for him into the professional jackpot of his dreams: a real job paying a real salary, affording him real power over his life and allowing him unlimited motorcycles, women, and prestige among those very fussy, old-money types who haunt the casino.

The American title, In the Name of My Daughter, refers to the fact that real-life Renée Le Roux dedicated her later years to proving Angelet guilty of her daughter’s murder. Without a body, that’s tricky. And one of his girlfriends gave him an alibi, so he served a year in prison and was released. Years later, that girlfriend changed her mind, said she’d lied, he wasn’t with her in Geneva when Agnès, after a well-documented suicide attempt, disappeared. Agnelet was tried again in 2006 and acquitted. In 2007, he was condemned to 20 years. In 2013, the European Court intervened to overturn the verdict and set him free. Last year, his own son testified against him, he was again given 20 years, a verdict he immediately appealed, a month before the film premiered at Cannes. You can see why Techiné had trouble closing his narrative. Too bad I wasn’t there to persuade him his rendering of the triangle is more compelling as a psychological mystery than any mere legal wrangling.

The American title, In the Name of my Daughter, suggests U.S. distributors hope to sell this mother-daughter-lawyer triangle as “a woman’s picture,” even though that’s a hard sell in this hard country. Variety‘s manly reviewer complained the audience is denied the spectacle of grande dame Renée Le Roux being whacked on the head by a thug, having to settle instead for Deneuve’s restrained account at a swanky press conference in her casino. Why go to the movies, thinks the red-blooded American male, if I can’t see a woman being attacked? All I can say is, thank God for the French.

The first 90 minutes make a splendid neo-noir built on a classic triangle, like something out of Liaisons Dangereuses. The mother and the lawyer both have hard heads, the daughter is the weak link. When the lawyer tries to push Maman around, she shoves him back in his place. Suddenly the daughter’s unresolved Electra complex, her past-due-date adolescent rebellion, makes her vulnerable to the lawyer’s machinations. The intrigue is spellbinding. Then Agnès disappears. No more triangle. Instead of ending the film here, director André Téchiné wanders into the vagaries of a complex legal battle and the camp value of facial prosthetics and wigs. Bad idea.

The real Agnes Le Roux.
The real Agnes Le Roux.

 

In the Name of My Daughter, a terrible title, is based on Renée Le Roux’s memoir, A Woman Against the Mafia, about how her fight to stay in business resulted in the death of her daughter. Techiné, who co-wrote the script, makes not the Mafia, but the daughter’s tragic flaw the heart of the movie. Adèle Haenel plays Agnès as a slapdash, brooding, needy, watery-green-eyed tomboy-siren whose bourgeois bubble has ill-equipped her to deal with an arriviste rat like Agnelet. We watch her swim, like Alice swims in her own tears, while Maurice bides his time on the sand, and never was there a more astute rendering of the battle of the genders, or the Romantic vs. the Mercenary, or the spoiled hippie child vs. the sociopath.

Adèle Haenel’s Agnès reminded me of François Truffaut’s Adèle H., incarnated by Isabel Adjani as a woman shamelessly in love, who similarly loses first her self-respect and then her reason. That 1975 film, also based on real life, came two years before Agnès vanished in 1977. It’s entirely possible the real Agnès Le Roux watched Adèle H. and recognized that doomed Romantic story as her own. Bizarre, bizarre, that an actress named Adèle H. should incarnate Agnès Le Roux.

The fabled Côte d’Azur is a different country from the rest of France, a stone’s throw from Monaco, where the high-rollers have their empty apartments, and a short hop by motorbike to a Swiss bank, as the film splendidly demonstrates. It’s a real place and this was a real news story before it became a film. Apart from suffering narrative decline at minute 91, Techiné’s film is a riveting portrait of an homme fatal, a creature we don’t see enough of onscreen. Deneuve’s beauty isn’t right for the character, and it’s a distraction, but a fascinating one so who cares, and it does work to establish the daughter’s hatred of the mother, who is visibly everything she is not. I was regretting the fillers in her cheeks and rooting for her muscles’ ability to still deliver recognizable human expressions. The muscles do pretty well. The eyes are where it’s happening, however. Lively and liquid, Deneuve’s orbs register the pains of a heart that has gambled on a daughter and lost.

 


Erin Blackwell is a consulting astrologer who was raised to regard movies as a form of worship. She blogs at venus11house.

 

‘Mommy’: Her Not Him

I went into ‘Mommy,’ the magnificent film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 26 and this feature is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character, was being touted in some awards circles as a possible nominee for “Best Actress” in 2014 (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I saw)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film (which won the Jury Prize at Cannes) kept surpassing my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son, Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

mommy_cover


This slightly modified repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


The misunderstood, screwed-up manboy/hero is such a persistent trope in films that audiences are often tricked into empathizing with characters whose actions are more deserving of our scorn. At the end of Blue Valentine, when Ryan Gosling’s character separates from his wife, Michelle Williams’ character, and leaves the daughter they’ve raised together, I heard someone nearby say aloud, “Poor guy.” But Gosling had, just a scene before, shown up drunk at Williams’ workplace to terrorize and humiliate her (and ends up assaulting her boss, which results in her losing her job). The director and co-writer, Derek Cianfrance, could barely manage to see these actions from the point of view of Williams’ character: the one with whom our empathy would more naturally lie.

I went into Mommy, the magnificent film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 26 and this feature is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character, was being touted in some awards circles as a possible 2014 nominee for “Best Actress”  (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I saw)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film (which won the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes) kept surpassing my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son, Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

We first meet Dorval’s character, Die (short for Diane), after we see, from a distance, a car crash into hers at a good speed. She staggers out after opening the jammed door, her head bleeding as she curses out the other driver. In the next scene we see her walking in extremely high heels along a hallway filled with several inches of water to meet with the director of the “youth facility” (one small step from a detention facility) where her son has been staying. The resigned bureaucrat behind the desk is more like real-life people who work in social services than the young idealists and abusive villains we usually see in movies. She explains that Steve has set a fire (the reason for the watery hallway) that injured another student, so he’s being expelled into Die’s care. Die objects, but the director tells her she has no choice–unless Die wants to commit him. Die astutely points out that doing so would put him in the pipeline to prison, which she doesn’t want. The director tells her, “We save some, we lose some,” and “Loving people doesn’t save them,” but no one, certainly not Die, can be as philosophical about their own child.

“Skeptics will be proven wrong,” Die retorts. Besides having a sexy wardrobe of high heels, tight jeans, sheer shirts and short skirts (a contrast to how unwilling most films are to acknowledge mothers as sexual beings) we see she also signs her name like a 12-year-old girl–complete with hearts.

MommySon
Mother and son

 

Steve has some psychiatric diagnoses and no impulse control, so even though he has a loving, teasing, quasi-inappropriate relationship with his good-looking, tart-tongued, probably alcoholic mother, their lives together are measured in the moments between his abuse and violence, some directed toward her, some directed to others. In one of the only scenes in the film that fall flat he makes racist remarks to a Black cab driver, the only person of color we see onscreen. Young, aimless white guys have targeted their anger at Black and brown people through the ages, but filmmakers, especially young ones like Dolan, should understand that audiences need to see POC characters as more than anonymous victims–and more than one in a film that is over two hours.

At one point Steve goes to the mall and in a beautifully stylized sequence (the expert cinematography is by André Turpin) we see him shouting and whirling around with a shopping cart. He shows joy and energy along with the intermittent charm we’ve already witnessed. But when he goes home and shows Die the goods he’s brought with him, including a necklace for her that spells out, “Mommy,” she tells him he has to return this stolen merchandise. He then starts shouting and smashing things, chasing Die, and at one point strangling her until she hits him in the head with a glass-covered picture frame and he retreats. As Die cowers in a locked closet, pleading with Steve through the door to take his medication, she hears him talking calmly to someone and when she ventures out she sees the neighbor from across the street (to whom she has never spoken) dressing the leg wound Steve suffered in the confrontation. Kyla (Suzanne Clément, every bit as great as her co-stars) is about Die’s age and the two have similar features but their personalities and circumstances differ. Kyla has a form of aphasia that seems to be the result of a breakdown. She is “on sabbatical” from her job as a high school teacher and, as we have seen in previous scenes she spends a lot of time facing away from the husband and daughter she lives with, observing Steve and Die through her home’s front window.

 

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Mother, son, and friend/tutor

 

The three have a convivial dinner together and while Steve is out of the room, Kyla and Die down shots while Die explains that she can’t ever call the police or alert hospitals after an incident like the one that afternoon because the authorities might then take her son away from her. Die states, “Life with Steve is a roll of the dice,” and, “When he loses it, you best scram because it gets ugly.” When Steve returns he encourages them all to dance and sing along with one of his favorite songs.

Kyla, who feels superfluous in her own household, accepts Die’s request to tutor her son while Die goes to a job interview. We see Steve testing Kyla by acting up with her the way he does everyone else, even touching her breasts, but when he pulls a necklace from around her throat and refuses to give it back, Kyla shows the reserves of rage quiet people often have, pushing Steve flat onto the floor. In a lesser movie this scene would be the prelude to a sexual encounter, but Dolan instead makes us see, as Kyla does, that in spite of his bravado and violence Steve is just a screwed-up kid.

What follows is a chronicle of three misfits who, for a time, find what they need in one another. Kyla is Die’s confidante, the only person who really understands her and the situation with her son. Steve likes having Kyla as his tutor and is on his best behavior (which is by no means perfect) in her presence. And Kyla has fun and feels like she has a purpose when she is with Die and Steve. In a bravura moment, the square frame of the film is seemingly stretched by Steve’s own hands into widescreen as Oasis’s “Wonderwall” plays on the soundtrack.

We see, when Die is interrupted as she prepares dinner with the others, that the idyll can’t last (and the screen shrinks back to a square). The classmate at the facility whom Steve injured with fire is suing. The knock at the front door was to serve a subpoena. Still, Die scrambles to “save” her son and in another widescreen sequence imagines a parallel life for him, graduating from high school, going to college, getting married, becoming a parent–and growing tall.

At one point Steve wonders what will happen when his mother doesn’t love him anymore, but she explains to him that he is much more likely to stop loving her than the other way around. In the end we see that no matter the circumstances their bond will continue. But the two women who had been such close friends (friendship between two 40-something women is an unusual enough focus for a film that one would think it rarely occurs offscreen) can hardly face each other anymore. The other’s presence reminds each of what she would most like to forget.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7rtSqI0ZeA” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Babadook’ and the Horrors of Motherhood

Amelia didn’t need to be possessed to have feelings of vitriol towards her son; they were already there, lurking inside her at the beginning. Rarely, if ever, is a mother depicted in film this way. Mothers are expected to be completely accepting and loving towards their child 24/7, despite any hardships or challenges their child presents to them.

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This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


The Australian horror film The Babadook is a chilling story that takes you on an insanely thrilling and mentally stimulating ride, shot in striking gothic charcoal hues. The best part of The Babadook is its contribution to telling an honest and complex female story. The Babadook subverts common horror tropes in electrifying ways. While The Babadook has many themes, such as the monster being a metaphor for depression and grief, but one it particularly touches on is motherhood. Director/writer Jennifer Kent uses The Babadook to question the meaning of what it means to be a mother. “I’m not saying we all want to go and kill our kids, but a lot of women struggle. And it is a very taboo subject, to say that motherhood is anything but a perfect experience for women,” she said in an interview.

The story of The Babadook centers on a woman, Amelia (a powerhouse performance from actress Essie Davis) who is the mother of a little boy, Samuel. Samuel has violent tendencies and frequent temper tantrums. He is constantly getting in trouble in school. Amelia is left utterly exhausted, coming home from a long day at work to a child who is relentlessly difficult. Amelia’s sister has a strong disdain for Samuel and the way Amelia raises him. Samuel also gets in trouble by accidentally hurting his cousin. Trouble follows him everywhere and it seems Amelia can never get a break with him.

Aside from his behavior problems, Samuel’s mere existence comes with a lot of baggage for her. Samuel was born the day his father died–in a car accident on the way to the hospital. Amelia is not over her husband’s death, and this will always darkly shadow her feelings for Samuel. “I can’t stand being around your son,” her sister Claire says to her in one scene. “And you can’t stand being around him yourself.” Amelia does not deny it. There’s a scene where Samuel lingers sadly by the bed asking for food while Amelia screams about needing sleep. Samuel keeps her up every night hiding from monsters. She later corners him growling, “You don’t know how many times I wished it was you, not him, that died.” “I just want you to be happy,” Samuel replies.

The audience’s feelings are constantly being juggled between Amelia and Samuel. We can empathize with Amelia for being frustrated with her challenging child, but at the same time we are offered glimpses that remind us that Samuel is just a child; he can’t help the way he came into the world.

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Often, mothers in horror films are either the saviors of the child or the villain, taking the bad mother trope to a whole other level. We recall the terrified Wendy Torrance scuffling Danny out of the bathroom to stay and face the ax-wielding Johnny in The Shining, or Kathy running from her demon-possessed husband in The Amityville Horror. As for mother villains, we’ve had the famous mother from Stephen King’s Carrie, or Jason’s in Friday the 13th.

The Babadook is unique in making the vessel of evil be the mother, or having the mother be possessed and her child as the victim. But The Babadook subverts this even further for Amelia’s antagonist feelings towards her son have been there in the beginning, before any evil presence or possession. Amelia didn’t need to be possessed to have feelings of vitriol towards her son; they were already there, lurking inside her at the beginning. Rarely, if ever, is a mother depicted in film this way. Mothers are expected to be completely accepting and loving towards their child 24/7, despite any hardships or challenges their child presents to them. A mother’s love for her child must be unwavering; to be acknowledged as anything else is not permitted in society’s eyes. It is refreshing to have a film that depicts motherhood in a way that is rarely seen but is felt by many women everywhere.

The Babadook is unique for it portrays the true (but often overlooked, or afraid to be touched upon notion) that motherhood is not always the greatest. That sometimes loving your child can be difficult. Children are not always perfect and it is not an easy or always enjoyable feat to raise them. The Babadook is a brave and human look at what it means to be a mother, led by a well-crafted and fully fleshed-out female protagonist that is rarely seen in horror, let alone film at all. The fact that her actions cannot entirely be wholly attributed to demonic possession is what makes The Babadook both frightening, thought provoking, and one of the most original and exciting horror films in recent history.

 


Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

 

“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: On ‘The Babadook,’ Mothers, and Mental Illness

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about ‘The Babadook’ concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill.

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This guest post by Elizabeth King appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


I don’t typically like horror movies. I have always been sort of a scaredy-cat when it comes to anything horror-related, and I was completely terrified when I watched The Babadook with my roommates several months ago. To tell the truth, I barely saw the Mr. Babadook creature himself, because I would immediately cover my eyes when I sensed an appearance was pending. For many reasons, the film is truly horrifying.

To summarize (and spoil) the film’s plot: the two main characters are a mother and son, Amelia and Sam. Amelia’s husband and Sam’s father died in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital while she was in labor and about to give birth to Sam. We join mother and son, several years later in the present day, and see that Sam ostensibly has some severe behavioral issues (including self-hard and violence towards others), and that Amelia has not yet recovered and found peace after her husband’s untimely death.

One evening, Sam pulls a book off of his shelf for Amelia to read to him at bedtime. What he brings to her is a book neither of them have seen before, and the contents quickly reveal themselves to be very dark and violent. The title of the book is Mr. Babadook, and Mr. Babadook is a threatening, scary, and sinister monster that foretells of his haunting of homes and ability to provoke violent behavior and terror from others. Naturally this scares the hell out of Sam, and he fixates on this character both as an object of his fears, and the sense of protection he feels for his mother. As Sam’s obsession and fear of the Babadook worsen, Amelia’s nerves fray, and she is emotionally and physically exhausted trying to care for her son and ease his fears. Her exhaustion turns to madness, and she eventually turns on Sam, drugging him and attempting to harm or kill him.

The film resolves in an extremely satisfying way (the best I have ever seen a horror movie end) with the family managing to face their fears after being consumed by them, and saving their own lives as mother and son. So yes: the film is disturbing and exceptionally scary by my standards, but with a message so powerful that it warrants further conversation.

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about The Babadook concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill. Throughout the film, Amelia is very obviously in the deepest darkest depths of a major depressive episode, initiated by her husband’s death, and felt helpless in the face of her maternal responsibilities. I interpreted Mr. Babadook not as the difficulties of motherhood personified, but rather as an excruciating metaphor for depression, and the ways that mental illness can be further complicated and stigmatized when they are present in mothers.

Throughout The Babadook, Amelia is judged and later rejected by her sister when Amelia expresses her desperation regarding Sam’s behavior. Amelia can’t live up to her sister’s expectations of a perfect mother, and is therefore deemed unworthy of support. Sam’s school administrators also stigmatize Amelia’s condition and her parenting abilities, and appear to conspire against her instead of offering support. They all see her as a bad mother, when in fact she is struggling to cope with depression, and needs their help more than ever.

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Amelia is also in denial of her depression, and seems to internalize the “bad mother” judgement, in large part due to her understandably complicated feelings towards her son. She feels resentful and claustrophobic around Sam, as she sees him as the cause of her pain: the death of her husband. Motherhood not only was the birth of her depression (her husband died the day Sam, her only child, was born), but also what exacerbated her depression and ultimately made it unbearable.

What clinches the depression metaphor for me is Amelia’s strong denial and inability to acknowledge the extent of her problems. She repeatedly says she is fine, and never names her depression, which takes shape as the terrifying and destructive Babadook. Denial is never a good thing, particularly when addressing mental illness. As the Babadook says, “The more you deny me, the stronger I’ll get.” This is perhaps the most true threat the Babadook made, and also the best possible way to describe what will happen when depression goes unchecked. Unacknowledged depression like Amelia’s is bound to reach a tragic critical mass unless measures are taken to cope and heal.

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As her depression symptoms intensify (we see repeated scenes of Amelia staying awake all night, not eating, lacking the energy to work, becoming paranoid, etc.), Amelia devolves into the Babadook, and is totally possessed by her illness. As a result she seeks to eliminate the ostensible source of the problem: her son. Instead of being a mother to Sam, the illness warps Amelia into an imminent threat that Sam has to protect himself against. And yet, the one person who doesn’t see Amelia as a bad mother is the subject of her angst and pain: her son.

At the extremely touching and horrifying climax of the film, Sam has his mother bound with ropes on the floor of their basement at the peak of her possession by the Babadook, Sam yells at his mother, “I know you don’t love me! I know the Babadook won’t let you!” I was simultaneously terrified of what was happening, and heartbroken by Sam’s message to his mother. He needed her to understand that it wasn’t her, it was her depression, the unaddressed grief she felt that was destroying their family. She was a good mom and wanted to love her son, but the Babadook’s power over her made it impossible for that to happen.

After Amelia, with Sam’s help, is able to confront her pain and can no longer deny her depression (she screams at Mr. Babadook: “This is my house!” a sign that she is ready to reclaim her life), she and Sam are able to cope and move forward. At the very end of the movie, we see Amelia tending to the Babadook creature, shackled and very tightly locked away in the basement of her home. She tells Sam that they can discuss the creature when he’s older. Not only has Amelia confronted her depression, she also acknowledges that while she will never be able to completely subdue the pain of her husband’s death, she must face it.


Elizabeth King is a freelance writer based in Chicago, Ill. She is an ardent feminist and environmentalist, and a huge fan of ice cream. You can find her on Twitter @ekingc, and Instagram @mr.sweatpants.

‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist

‘Splice’ explores gendered body horror at the locus of the womb, reveling in the horror of procreation. It touches on themes of bestiality, incest, and rape. It’s also a movie about being a mom.

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This repost by Mychael Blinde appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

NSFW | Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault
Warning: Spoilers abound!

Splice explores gendered body horror at the locus of the womb, reveling in the horror of procreation. It touches on themes of bestiality, incest, and rape. It’s also a movie about being a mom.
Though it received somewhat lackluster reviews, I encourage anyone interested in feminism and film to give Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi body horror film a try. Splice features female characters who are intelligent, emotionally complex, and in control. They’re not perfect, but they are three-dimensional characters whose decisions drive the story. (One of them morphs into a male, but we’ll get to that.)
Splice asks a lot of questions about the terms and conditions of conception, gestation, birth, and motherhood, all without stabbing the viewer in the eye with reductive answers.
It also features some campy moments. Hipster scientists shout things like “It was the only way!” Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody expresses his frustration by throwing down not just his jacket, but his scarf as well!
If you can stomach the juxtaposition of big thinky concepts and stilted clichéd dialogue, you will find Splice a thoroughly enjoyable mindfuck of a film.
Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Brody), long-term partners in romance and biochemistry, have developed a method to splice the DNA from various animals together to create hybrid creatures.
Viewers are actually birthed into the film from the perspective of Fred, the couple’s latest scientific endeavor, a male companion to their first hybrid, Ginger.
Splice
Splice

Elsa and Clive aspire to splice human DNA to develop cures for genetic diseases, but the pharmaceutical company funding their research puts a halt on all splicing until the duo can synthesize the medicinal protein necessary to create a commercially viable lifestock drug.

Newstead Pharma’s financial interests are represented by Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu), who insists Elsa and Clive begin “Phase Two: The product stage.”
Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice
Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice
Joan doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but her brief appearances are a pleasure to watch. She’s articulate and always in control. It’s awesome to see a woman kicking ass in the role of the money-grubbing corporation, and Joan is a stellar example of how to do it right.
After their splicing research is shut down, Clive suggests they quit, but Elsa convinces Clive to proceed with the human splicing and to generate an embryo.
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice
In both the romantic and the professional relationship between Clive and Elsa (and this is a movie very much interested in the conflation of work and sex), Elsa is in charge.
Over and over, Elsa insists that they take the next step. She is the opposite of what I call the Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend — a  pretty lady bystander who supplements the male protagonist’s story arc.
Elsa and Clive also deviate from the typical representation of long-term monogamous heterosexual partners: it is he, not she, who desires to have a child:

Elsa: “You are talking about having a kid.”
Clive: “Is that so unreasonable?”
Elsa: “Yeah, because I’m the one who has to have it…”
Clive: “Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Elsa: “How about after we crack male pregnancy?”

Meaningfully, this discussion is cut short by an alert sent from the machine housing the hybrid fetus. When they arrive at the lab, the embryo is all grown up and preparing to evacuate the biochemically engineered womb.
Though Elsa doesn’t gestate and birth the baby from her own body, the birth experience is physically traumatizing for her. She becomes trapped in the birth canal and is injected with poisonous serum. In a rare moment of control, Clive saves Elsa. But after the birth, Elsa again takes charge: she refuses to allow Clive to kill the female hybrid and insists that they raise her in the lab.
Weirdly, the couple begins to function less like scientists and more like normal parents: frustrated because the baby won’t eat, stressed out because it won’t stop crying. However, unlike most parents, their baby has a stinging whip tail, and they are forced to relegate their progeny to the laboratory’s basement to keep her existence a secret.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa becomes more and more emotionally attached to the creature, and eventually names her Dren. Clive is worried about their secret being revealed and disturbed by Elsa’s displays of maternal affection. Nevertheless, he resigns himself to raising her, and Dren grows to be a young adult in a matter of months.
One night, Clive and Elsa realize they haven’t boned down lately. Clive doesn’t have any condoms, but Elsa says, “What’s the worst that could happen?” – suggesting that she’s decided she wouldn’t mind gestating a child, maybe? – and they have at. This is the first of three sex scenes in Splice.
Cinematically, their lovemaking is depicted as underwhelming. Neither Elsa nor Clive take off any clothing. Creepily, Dren watches.
Meanwhile, pressure is building at the pharmaceutical company.
Their presentation at the shareholders’ meeting goes disastrously wrong. Unbeknownst to Clive and Elsa, their specimen Ginger has changed into a male, and Ginger and Fred tear each other apart and splash guts and blood all over the audience. Not good PR.
In deep shit with the company, Clive and Elsa are forced to relocate Dren to Elsa’s deceased mother’s farm.
Here we learn the backstory of Elsa’s childhood; themes of feminism, motherhood, and family history come into play.
We learn that Elsa’s mother forbade Barbies and makeup. Elsa explains that “She said makeup debased women.” The word “feminist” is never used in Splice, but Elsa’s mother’s Barbie-banning and makeup-denying seem emblematic of a certain type of feminist parenting.
We also learn that Elsa’s mother raised her in substandard living conditions, relegating her to a ramshackle, barely furnished bedroom.
Initially I viewed this as a problematic conflation of being a feminist with being a neglectful person and bad mother. But it’s far more complicated than that.
Elsa expresses her love for Dren by giving her the very things her mother denied her.
Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
But the Barbie and the makeover don’t make Dren happy; in fact, the Barbie explicitly makes Dren sad. Looking into a mirror, she holds the doll’s long blonde tresses against her bald head and becomes upset.
Over the course of the film, Elsa locks Dren up in a lab, then a basement, and eventually her mother’s barn, and Dren resents her for it. Elsa seems unable to break the cycle of her own mother’s physical and emotional neglect.
Perhaps the idea is that makeup is not a substitute for ideal living quarters and engaged parenting. What matters isn’t whether or not you give your daughter a Barbie, but whether or not you lock her in a barn.
And it turns out, Dren really is Elsa’s genetic daughter. To his chagrin, Clive discovers Elsa used her own DNA to create Dren: “Why the fuck did you want to make her in the first place? Huh? For the betterment of mankind? You never wanted a normal child because you were afraid of losing control. But an experiment…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but it seems clear that Elsa is using science as a way to disassociate herself from motherhood while still being able to create and raise a child. Presumably we’re to understand that Elsa’s desire for complete control stems from her tragic upbringing: “Look at your family history,” Clive exhorts.
Elsa tries to convey her genetic connection to Dren by explaining to her: “You’re a part of me, and I’m a part of you. I’m inside you.” She strives to smooth over their mother-daughter animosity, but the two wind up in a physical altercation that results in Elsa knocking Dren unconscious, tying her up, stripping her naked, and removing her tail and stinger. This scene has undertones of both castration and rape. Elsa has become a monstrous mother scientist.
Clive is horrified by Elsa’s actions, but she informs him that she is going to use Dren’s amputated stinger to finally synthesize the protein and heads to the lab, where she succeeds.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice 
She tells off her obnoxious supervisor: “When some real scientists get here, come take a look.”
While Elsa’s away, Dren seduces Clive. If Elsa’s sin is her obsessive need to control, Clive’s sin is his inclination to relinquish control.
This is the film’s second sex scene. Cinematically it is sensual, queer in a fantasy-mythical-creature sort of way, strange but beautiful. Ominously, Dren grows back her tail stinger. Then Clive notices Elsa has come back and is watching them. She storms out and he chases her. Back at their apartment, Clive and Elsa decide that they finally have to kill Dren.
But when they return to the barn, it turns out Dren is already dying. After she dies, Clive’s brother (who also works in the lab) and their supervisor show up. He announces he knows their secret and demands to see the human-spliced creature. Elsa informs him that Dren is dead, throws a shovel at him and says, “See for yourself.”
Except Dren is no longer buried behind the barn. Like Ginger, she has morphed into a male, and in the film’s climax, he kills everybody but Elsa.
Dren as male in Splice
Dren as male in Splice
A note on the gender transition: I am uncomfortable with the representation of Dren’s metamorphosis from female to male. It is predicated on the idea that transitioning from a female body to a male body is horrific, and it exploits trans individuals by sensationalizing the transitioning body as evil and freakish. It’s not trans positive. I understand that Splice’s story necessitates this metamorphosis and that Dren isn’t exactly a human, but let’s call out problematic shit when we see it.
Chasing women through the woods at night is a staple of slasher flicks, but this movie isn’t about slashing – it’s about splicing. Dren chases Elsa through the woods, but instead of slaughtering Elsa, Dren rapes her.
This is Splice‘s third sex scene. Cinematically it is gut-wrenchingly horrifying, as any rape depicted onscreen needs to be in order to convey the awfulness that is sexual violation. Dren’s rape of Elsa is as disgusting and awful as Dren’s sex with Clive is beautiful and sensual.
When Elsa screams, “What do you want?” Dren replies: “Inside…of…you.”
Clive stabs Dren with a branch (wielding the metaphorical phallus) as Dren orgasms, but Dren is not killed, and attacks Clive. Elsa pulls her pants back on and bashes Dren in the head with a big rock. This critically injures Dren, who takes a moment to survey the situation – then stabs Clive with his tail. Elsa bashes Dren in the head again, killing Dren once and for all.
Elsa is the character who cut off Dren’s stinger and the one who deals Dren the death blow. And yet in his final moments, Dren chooses to kill Clive. Why?
Because inside of Elsa is a womb, the growing space for a new creature. And sure enough, in the film’s resolution we discover that Elsa is pregnant. Of the three sexual encounters that take place in this movie, the reproductively viable encounter is the rape. Elsa lives to be the final girl not because she wields a chainsaw, but because she wields womb. (And a big rock.)
Unlike Veronica of The Fly (“I want an abortion!”) or, more recently, Elizabeth of Prometheus (“Get it out of me!”), Elsa decides to gestate her monster progeny to term.
I appreciate both The Fly and Prometheus because each asks its audience to empathize with a woman who desperately needs an abortion. I also appreciate Splice for asking its viewers to honor Elsa’s decision not to abort. Joan makes it clear that Elsa has a choice: “Nobody would blame you if you didn’t do this. You could just put an end to it and walk away.” (Would that this were the standard response to women experiencing unwanted pregnancies!)
But Elsa does not to put an end to it. Why does she decide to bring it to term?
Sure, the company’s giving her a shitload of money for gestating Dren’s offspring. But throughout the film, Elsa has insisted on moving forward with human splicing experiments. Perhaps she sees this as a necessary extension of that research.
Or maybe this is another chance for Elsa to use science to mediate motherhood. Is the pregnancy Elsa’s punishment, or her redemption? We’ll never know. All she says is, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The film closes with a shot of the two women, the film’s only surviving characters, looking out a window.
Splice

Mychael Blinde is not a scientist, but she is afraid to give birth. She is interested in representations of gender in popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.

‘Viy’: Incestuous Mother as Horror Monster

For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse.

'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film
Viy was the USSR’s first horror film

 


Trigger Warning: Discussion of maternal incest, paternal incest and the rape of men.


Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol disassociated himself from his 1835 story Viy by framing it as an unaltered “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) folk tale, but it is actually a strikingly original, vividly visual and deeply felt Gothic horror that bears only slight resemblance to folklore. Though Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday is officially based on Viy, the most faithful adaptation is a 1967 Soviet production with effects by stop-motion legend Aleksandr Ptushko. I’m analyzing this classic, not the recent remake.

Trainee monk Khoma Brut “never knew his mother,” while the story’s vampiric witch (she drinks baby’s blood) is introduced in a maternal, housewife role. As Katherine Murray discusses on Bitch Flicks, “the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents.” Gogol’s major source is Zhukovsky’s translation of Robert Southey’s “A Ballad, Shewing How An Old Woman Rode Double, And Who Rode Before Her,” where a monk reads prayers over his cursed mother’s corpse, while demons lay siege to the church. Though not literally mother, Viy‘s vivid witch is the archetype of horror’s monstrous mothers. In 1893’s The Death of Halpin Frayser, the hero blunders into the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!” While struggling with his undead mother in a haunted forest, Halpin dissociates and views events “as a spectator” before dying horribly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 horror classic, Vampyr, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s alluringly lesboerotic Carmilla is reimagined as a menacing, maternal vampire-hag, while in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” (Season 7) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike vamps his mother and she accuses him of sexually desiring her, forcing him to stake her. The event is so traumatic that Spike can be controlled by it, until he defuses his trigger by facing the memory (contrast the show’s dismissive treatment of Faith’s attempted rape/murder of Xander in Season 3’s “Consequences” and Buffy’s violation of Spike’s stated sexual boundaries in Season 6’s “Gone”).

In her discussion of the female Gothic, “The Madwoman’s Journey From The Attic Into The Television,” Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia notes, “while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues. I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other.” Just as Godzilla‘s semi-goofy lizard embodied Japan’s nuclear trauma, so Gogol’s fantasy creations are not necessarily trivial, as unreal displacements of real anxiety. Viy parallels the female Gothic’s allegorical approach to rape, contrasting sharply with unreal yet realist rape fantasies like Murmur of the Heart (flippant maternal incest for shock value), White Palace (Susan Sarandon’s rape of an unconscious James Spader, who refused consent before passing out, as romantic liberation), and Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn’s rape by Isla Fisher as hilarious).

Nikolai Kutuzov's witch transfixes Khoma
Nikolai Kutuzov’s witch transfixes Khoma

 

The boisterous tone of Viy‘s opening fades rapidly, as three seminary students, lost in the dead of night, draw up to a housewife’s misty gates and are allowed to stay on condition that they sleep separated. Leonid Kuravlyov’s robust and jolly Khoma beds down alone in a stable. His placid chewing is paralleled with the stable’s cow, reducing him metaphorically to livestock. Initially, Khoma views the looming witch as a joke: “It’s getting late, Granny, and I wouldn’t corrupt myself for a thousand in gold. *laughs* You’ve gotten old, Granny.” Gogol’s prose: “the sophomore [lit: ‘philosopher’] shrank back; but she still approached, as though she wished to lay hold of him. A terrible fright seized him, for he saw the old hag’s eyes glitter in an extraordinary way.” Filming the witch’s stare in uncomfortable close-up, the Soviet adaptation achieves a viscerally uncanny effect, intensified for hetero-male audiences by male actor Nikolai Kutuzov’s playing the witch, until the stumbling Khoma knocks the cow’s yoke symbolically onto his own neck. Khoma appears stunned. In Gogol’s prose, his reaction is more clearly tonic immobility, or freeze response: “the sophomore tried to push her away with his hands, but to his astonishment he found that he could neither lift his hands nor move his legs, nor utter an audible word.”

Finally, the witch grasps him and forces herself onto his back. After a dizzying aerial ride, Khoma drives the witch to earth by invoking Christ and beats her with savage anger, until she transforms into a weeping damsel-in-distress, who dies as he staggers away. The sexual dimension of the riding is clearer in Gogol’s prose: “his legs… lifted against his will… a wearying, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling… a demonically sweet feeling… suddenly he felt some kind of refreshment; he felt that his step began to grow more lazy… her wild cries… became weaker, more pleasant, purer.” Gogol uses supernatural paralysis and running motion to allegorically express concepts as crucial to understanding male rape as they are widely disbelieved: firstly, the effectiveness of sexual threat in inducing an involuntary freeze response and, secondly, the possible coexistence of “demonically sweet” arousal with traumatic mental repulsion and violation.

The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witchThe eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witch
The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley’s undead witch

 

Once dead, the witch can become youthfully beautiful, revealing her aged ugliness as a device to emphasize the unwanted and repulsive nature of the pseudosexual encounter. Khoma is forced to read prayers over the dead witch, as her dying request. Gogol’s witch is as pitiful as she is aggressive, crying a tear of blood and inducing Khoma’s guilt for killing her – “he felt as though those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood” –  before demonically rising to violate him again. Khoma is told of Mikita, a huntsman whose infatuation with the witch “completely sissified him” before he allowed her to ride him; he was “burned completely out,” leaving only ashes, proving the fatal seriousness of the riding Khoma has survived. The film’s church scenes are masterpieces of brooding Orthodox iconography, steadily ratcheted tension and jolting jump scares. As the witch rises from her grave, Khoma desperately draws a chalk circle around himself, bolstering its charmed impenetrability by fervent prayer as demons fumble for him.

The frail boundary of chalk serves as a powerful imaginary line of bodily autonomy that the hero desperately defends, and our anxiety over its penetration drives the film’s second half. Khoma is forced to return on the third night by threats and the promise of a thousand in gold (for which he earlier refused to “corrupt himself”), being caught as he tries to flee. After dancing in wild abandon, his macho bravado drives him to return to the scene of horrors, intoxicated, to prove that “Cossacks aren’t afraid.” Khoma thus strives for some sense of control by proactively inviting a seemingly unavoidable threat. This is a common response to chronic abuse. On the final night, gigantic grasping hands grope for Khoma, while a wild assortment of nightmare ghouls crawl out of the church’s woodwork. The witch orders them to bring the Viy, a stumbling grotesque with dangling eyelids, from under the earth. Ghouls raise the Viy’s eyelids, unveiling his glittering stare. Khoma swears he will not look, but cannot resist turning as the Viy’s heavy footfalls approach. The Viy immediately stabs his finger at him, ghouls descend and Khoma dies of fright beneath their grasping hands. In a coda, his friend declares, “If he had not feared her, the witch could have done nothing to him.” As with Spike’s vampire-mother, it is Khoma’s fatal fear of facing the buried monster that is his doom, not the supernatural itself.

A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands
A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands

 

Gogol’s earlier 1832 horror, Terrible Vengeance, shares deep parallels with Viy. Like Viy‘s beautiful witch, its sorcerer is superficially attractive, amusing crowds until a religious icon exposes his monstrous true face. The heroine, Katerina, fears the sorcerer and is ambivalently detached from her father, suffering horrifying dreams that he incestuously desires to marry her. Her husband, Danilo, eventually discovers that the father and the evil sorcerer are one, and are conjuring Katerina’s spirit from her body by night. That spirit’s statement that Katerina “does not know a lot of what her soul knows” remarkably suggests repressed memory and dissociation. Like Khoma’s pity for the weeping witch, Katerina feels bound to liberate her father even after realizing his true nature, yet simultaneously self-loathing for her inability to separate from him. Terrible Vengeance portrays a nightmare vision of intergenerational abuse, where ancestors feed forever on each other’s corpses in a deep abyss. The original sinner gnaws his own flesh and shakes the earth in his efforts to rise, eternally growing and distorting into a buried grotesque like the fearful Viy. In Mikhail Titov’s 1987 animated adaptation, Katerina, maddened by the loss of her husband and child, dances in wild, defiant intoxication, as Khoma does after his night terrors, even drawing a circle of fire to ward off her father, like Khoma’s of chalk. Such profound parallels between the quasi-maternal incest of Viy and the explicitly paternal incest of Terrible Vengeance send a clear message: it’s not about gender. Though Gogol’s sexually monstrous mother-figure has captured male imaginations and spawned imitations in a way that his sexually monstrous father has not, because of the overwhelming male authorship of our culture, yet both images are rooted in a potentially interchangeable empathy for survivors of sexual abuse.


[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEenjdEp8h4″]

Titov’s Terrible Vengeance. Triggery allegory


For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse. When Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction spooked male audiences, we could have pointed out that her behavior is stalking, experienced by one in six women in the USA, and her attempt to force Dan’s paternity is reproductive coercion, experienced by 16 percent of pregnant women. Instead, Susan Faludi’s Backlash read Alex as representing the demonization of feminism. Yet, Alex is an abuser. As Stephanie Brown points out for Bitch Flicks, you may meet Alex as you progress through life. Society does not technically favor men over women in intimate relationships. It favors abusers over victims, and codes abusive behaviors as masculine. As for bad mothers, Freud’s Oedipal “seduction theory” was created under intense pressure from the psychiatric establishment, as an alternative to his earlier exposure of parental incest’s links to PTSD in “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” So, why do feminists apply Oedipal interpretations, that evolved by mirror logic from rape apologism, to dismiss texts like Viy? Ultimately, whatever nightmares they fuel, bad mothers are neither monsters nor demonically unnatural women. They are flawed humans. By resisting the gendering of abuse, can we evolve human understanding?

Misogyny?
Misogyny?

 

The paranoid repulsion towards female sexual aggression that pervades the work of Nikolai Gogol has seen him uncritically labeled a misogynist, by virtually all modern commentators. Yet, renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol formed intense friendships with women like Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, corresponding on philosophical topics with rare respect for her intellectual equality, and addressing her as “drug” (“buddy”). Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol wrote the 19th century’s most psychologically insightful and empathetic portrait of a female experience of paternal incest.  Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol understood abuse far better than mainstream feminism. Time to stop dismissing and listen to the boys. Time to face Viy without flinching.

 


See also at Bitch Flicks:Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever


 

Brigit McCone freely admits to being a Gogol groupie, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and social justice warring.

Call For Writers: Bad Mothers

Few human beings are quite so stigmatized as bad mothers. Despite the fact that motherhood is demanded of women as an intrinsic part of the female experience, women who struggle with motherhood are seen and depicted as the worst kind of scum. No failure, it seems, is as great as that of a woman who is bad at being a mom…or, worse yet, who decides after having children that she no longer wants to be a mother.

Call-for-Writers-e13859437405011

Our theme week for May 2015 will be Bad Mothers.

Few human beings are quite so stigmatized as bad mothers. Despite the fact that motherhood is demanded of women as an intrinsic part of the female experience, women who struggle with motherhood are seen and depicted as the worst kind of scum. No failure, it seems, is as great as that of a woman who is bad at being a mom…or, worse yet, who decides after having children that she no longer wants to be a mother.

Despite the fact that it’s commonplace and borderline acceptable for a father to abandon his children, all manner of blame and shame are heaped at the feet of the smothering, neglectful, or the abandoning mother. The cultural narrative would have us believe that she is the cause of serial killers (Dexter, Psycho), all forms of misogyny, wars, and even the collapse of the heteronormative nuclear family. While woman are defined by motherhood and shoulder intense, unrealistic burdens, there is little appreciation or acknowledgement for the role itself and the women who inhabit it.

Not only that, but the trope of the “wicked stepmother” is one of the worst kinds of stereotypes for motherhood. The stepmother is villainized as an unnatural simulation of a mother who can’t be trusted because she isn’t the real thing. Disney has proliferated this damaging trope, insisting that giving birth to a person is the only way to truly claim motherhood.

Though few and far between, there are some nuanced and even sympathetic representations of women who struggle with the ceaseless demands of motherhood. The Babadook is a fantastic example, and The Hours…tries.

Help us illuminate the stories of women who are bad mothers. Let’s dissect this cultural narrative that scoffs at and punishes women for their transgressions against the seemingly sacred institution of motherhood.

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, May 22 by midnight.

The Killing

The Babadook

Precious

Carrie

American Horror Story

Beloved

Dexter

Psycho

The Grifters

Bates Motel

The Graduate

Cinderella

Ever After

Game of Thrones

The Shipping News

Once

Throw Mama From the Train

Revenge

The Darjeeling Express

The Hours

Snow White

Grey’s Anatomy