Room – Bitch Flicks

Attachment Mothering in ‘Room’

While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, ‘Room’ can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque…fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of rape, and sexual assault]

I remember a friend telling me that she fantasized about being in prison for a year as it was the only way she would have time to complete all her projects uninterrupted.

This anecdote immediately came to mind at a panel discussion after a screening of Room. The female audience member who asked the question recalled a book club talking point scribbled in the back of her copy of the 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue wondering if the author (who also adapted her book for the screen, and was nominated for an Oscar) idealizes the solitude of imprisonment. While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, Room can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque — later parts of the book, particularly Ma’s post-escape prime-time interview, politicize things like breastfeeding, the prison industrial complex and abortion — fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

When I reached out to panel member and Melbourne Writers Festival program manager Jo Case to expand further on her thoughts about Room, she said that the story “explores that mythical ideal of motherhood: all-encompassing, fully present, hyper-attentive. Completely child-focused. It’s our culture’s impossible (and usually untenable) ideal.”

Further to this, I found Room to be a pretty obvious metaphor for attachment parenting. Jack is still being breastfed at age five — though with a lax diet born out of captivity, breastfeeding makes sense. Ma is always there with Jack, relentlessly threading eggshells onto Egg Snake, fashioning Labyrinth out of toilet rolls, and encouraging Jack to use his imagination because what else is there to do in a 10 x 10 soundproofed shed. Attachment parenting can induce in parents the loss of their sense of self if and when the child goes off to school — or in Room’s case, Outside — and makes a life for themselves independent of the close knit parent/child union. Despite Ma’s relish at re-entering the world and thus, finding a semblance of her former self separate from Jack, their intense bond noticeably loosens the moment they arrive at the clinic (more so in the book than the film). Jack is then the one to look back at Room through rose-colored glasses and in the way the story is told post-escape, with the added impetus of being from Jack’s perspective, who can blame him: “Ma was always in Room” while he is often left to fend for himself “in the world” while Ma tries to make sense of her resentment (“Do you know what happened [to my high school friends]? Nothing. Nothing happened to them.”), depression and PTSD.

All we have to do is look at Jack’s heightened intelligence and his being placed on a pedestal in “saving” Ma to understand that he could be viewed as the ultimate fantasy for all those parents (all parents?) who claim their child is “special,” “gifted,” and “advanced for their age.” You know the ones.

I certainly do: my day job is at a cultural institution where I often hear from parents who insist that their children experience things aimed at kids twice their age and, in some cases, even at adults. Jack is familiar with stories well above his age level, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, told to him by Ma. His memory is impeccable and his literacy skills are strengthened by rereading the few books permitted in Room by Ma’s tormenter, Old Nick, and playing “Parrot,” a game that consists of repeating what Jack hears on talk shows and soap operas. In a society that often foists iPads and smartphones into its children’s hands, Jack’s upbringing is romanticized, especially in the early stages of the story when he is blissfully unaware that anything exists outside of Room and the make-believe world of TV (though Jack is permitted half an hour or so of screen-time, Ma is reluctant to grant more as “TV turns your brain to mush”) is real.

Donoghue is quick to deny this, though, telling Katherine Wyrick of BookPage:

“Nobody wants to idealize imprisonment, but many of us have such complicated lives, and we try to fit parenting in alongside work and socializing… We try and have so many lives at once, and we run ourselves ragged.

“Today parenting is so self-conscious and worried, so I wanted to ask the question, how minimally could you do it? … [Ma] really civilizes and humanizes Jack. … She passes along her cultural knowledge to him, from religion to tooth-brushing to rules.”

Room may be a very successful literary and filmic thought experiment for Donoghue. But it’s also a fantasy in which one of the biggest luxuries for parents — time — reigns supreme. In a recent parenting column on Jezebel, Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes:

“Time is one of the most valuable commodities in post-industrial capitalism. It’s valuable because it’s scarce; we run around acting so busy all the time, partly because our jobs are squeezing us for it, and partly because there are so many competing entities constantly vying for our time and attention. […]

“Spending the first 10 months at home with each of my kids was enormously empowering. By the time I returned to work, I was ready for the company of adults again; work even seemed easy compared to caring for a nonverbal person all day. The time we’d spent together absolved me of a lot of the guilt that many people feel when they first put their kids in the care of others. It also gave me the privilege of feeling confident — even a little cavalier! — about my parenting choices.”

Donoghue discusses similar ideas in an interview for The Independent upon the release of the book:

“It may sound outrageous, but every parent I know has had moments of feeling as if they’ve been locked in a room with their toddler for years on end. Even 20 minutes of building towers of blocks can feel like a lifetime. I’m not saying that Ma’s experience is every mother’s experience, not at all. … But there’s a psychological core that’s the same: the child needs you so much that you don’t fully own yourself anymore.”

Utilizing time for things other than child-rearing is often deemed the height of selfishness, for parents and the child-free alike. With Ma’s characterization comes a certain selfishness (or self-preservation) voiced by the post-escape prime-time interviewer who asks Ma whether she ever considered relinquishing Jack to Old Nick to drop off at a hospital in the hopes of giving him a better — freer — life. While I can see where the interviewer is coming from — and maybe in a perfect world, sure, Jack would have grown up under different circumstances — but he’s a five-year-old who challenges his mother’s assertion that there are two sides to everything (“Not an octagon. An octagon has eight sides.”) and can spell feces, for crying out loud! How many “gifted” children of a similar age but very different circumstances can we say the same of?

Ma may conceive of the great escape in order to get Jack out of Room but, as the Nova panel discussed, she’s also hoping he’ll be savvy enough to lead his rescuers back to her. Again, putting so much faith in a five-year-old could be considered delusional, but that speaks to the trauma of an abductee who’s been raped almost every day for the past seven years; a trauma that I couldn’t even begin to imagine and is for another article.

Conversely, when I watched Room for the third time with my own mother, she found Ma’s “gone days,” her forcefulness in preparing Jack to escape Room, and her depression and disengagement from her son upon release to “not be how a mother should act.” Brie Larson’s Ma is far more assertive and fleshed out in the film, whereas on the page she’s ineffectual, agreeing with Jack when he calls her “dumbo” when things don’t go to plan. As an intimate partner violence survivor herself, I was expecting from Mum more empathy towards Ma. But that’s the beauty and curse of storytelling, particularly in a narrative as controversial and emotional as Room — everyone responds to it differently.

I think Room can best be summed up by Case’s description:

“It’s a horror story not just because of the awful circumstances of [Ma’s] imprisonment — rape and kidnapping — but because it dramatizes one of the hardest aspects of motherhood: feeling trapped by routine and the demands of everyday parenting [and] feeling separated from the outside world in your own mother-child universe.”

In the case of Room, though, “this kind of motherhood saves the mother from her prison rather than trapping her in a domestic [one].”

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

‘Room’ for Being More Than “Ma”

Because the kidnapped-but-survived ending is the happier one, even though a real-life victim has suffered through an ordeal, we want her to answer our questions. How did you survive? Why didn’t you escape before? What are you going to do now? The new film ‘Room’ directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Brie Larson as the abducted woman we know in the first part of the film only as “Ma” attempts to give us some possible answers.

Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault

The American public’s morbid fascination with women and girls held captive by their rapists, in some cases for years, stems in part from the many missing girls, presumed dead, we’ve all read and heard about. Because the kidnapped-but-survived ending is the happier one, even though a real-life victim has suffered through an ordeal, we want her to answer our questions. How did you survive? Why didn’t you escape before? What are you going to do now? The new film Room directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Brie Larson as the abducted woman we know in the first part of the film only as “Ma” attempts to give us some possible answers.

Ma lives with her five-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in the place they call “room,” a converted garden shed with a bed, table, tub, sink, skylight, kitchenette and heat and electricity. They are kept there by the man who abducted Ma seven years before, when she was 17. We see Jack and Ma’s daily routine, waking up in the same bed, Jack saying, “Good morning,” to the pieces of furniture, doing exercises together, having meals, watching an old TV and splashing each other in the bath at night. Then Ma puts Jack to bed in a closet (called “wardrobe” even though they are presumably in the US: the out author of the original book who also wrote the screenplay, Emma Donoghue, is originally from Ireland and the production is an Irish/Canadian one) so when their captor punches the security code to open the door and rape her in the bed, as he does every night, Jack won’t see.

Ma has tried to make their lives seem almost normal to Jack, with homemade toy boats floating in the top of the toilet tank and bedtime storybooks. But we see signs of how constricted their lives are: the tops of the knives Ma uses to make dinner are blunted and because she can’t see a dentist or doctor she loses a tooth and has an old wrist injury that pains her. Jack’s hair is so long that we at first mistake him for a little girl–apparently their captor will not let Ma keep scissors in the room. At one point the kidnapper, angry at Ma, cuts off the electricity and heat on a frigid day, which they spend in layers and scarves, eating peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes during a “normal” day they scream at the skylight. After which Ma says, “I guess they still can’t hear us.”

Ma fluctuates between depression, some days not wanting to get out of bed, and desperation, as she brainstorms ways that she and Jack can escape. She is always stretched three ways: trying to keep Jack safe and somewhat sheltered from what she’s going through (which means appeasing her captor but also telling Jack when they’re alone, “He’s not our friend”), trying to be a good parent and thinking about how to get the both of them out of “room.”

First she needs her son to understand why they need to leave. She tells him, “Do you remember how Alice wasn’t always in Wonderland? I wasn’t always in Room. I’m like Alice.” With his reluctant help, she devises one plan that fails then, worried that their now unemployed captor will no longer be able to feed them, she comes up with a much darker–and scarier–scheme in which Jack must pretend to be dead and escape while the captor goes to bury him in a secluded spot. Anyone who watches horror movies (or even the trailers for horror movies) will be filled with dread during the moments when first the kidnapper, then Jack seem to be wavering from Ma’s plan, but in spite of the glitches, both Jack and Ma are eventually freed.

Instead of being locked in room, Ma (we find out her name is Joy) and Jack, have an implausibly brief stay in a hospital room, one high above the ground, in a corner with floor-to-ceiling windows and a panoramic cityscape view (like the rest of the film, beautifully shot by cinematographer Danny Cohen) which makes Jack’s question, “Are we on another planet,” seem perfectly reasonable. But after the scenes in the hospital, part two of the film is a lot less compelling, not just because we no longer have a nemesis for the two main characters, but because the imagination and craft that went into the first part of the film seems to desert the screenwriter. Joy and Ma hole up with her mother (Joan Allen) and Leo (Tom McCamus) the man she lives with after her divorce from Joy’s father, in their suburban house. The media stalking Joy outside the door make leaving impossible.

But Joy seems to have very little life of her own outside of being “Ma”: a deficit that cannot be attributed only to the character’s untreated trauma. While Joy looks at an old yearbook photos of her friends, no one from her old life (besides her parents and Leo, who was a friend of the family before he moved in with her mother) seems to have any contact with her, even as her story is gaining national attention. As Joy sits on the floor of her childhood bedroom we see an electric guitar in the background which could easily be exchanged for a Bible or a buzz saw without changing anything we know about Joy–because, except for a brief outburst at her own mother, we never get to know her beyond her role as Ma. She never seems interested in going back to school or doing anything with her life other than caring for Jack. The movie doesn’t seem to care either.

I was able to suspend my disbelief, at least momentarily, in the first part of the film. I still wondered, for example, if the kidnapper raped Joy every night and she did not have any type of birth control why she had only one child. But the screenplay neglects most of a kidnapping’s aftermath, so in the second part I questioned most of what was onscreen. We see Joy and Jack watching a TV report on their case, but we don’t see how Joy would have to shield Jack from hearing all the gory details of her imprisonment, over and over, in the media. The script ignores that her face would be one that many people recognized, and with that recognition she would carry a stigma of being best known as a rape survivor, and her son recognized as the product of that rape, a facet explored only in a brief and unsatisfactory scene with Joy’s father (William H. Macy). Worst of all, Joy and her ordeal would become fodder for the internet with everyone commenting and even joking (remember Joan Rivers saying of the women Ariel Castro held captive in his home that they should have been grateful for the free rent?) on the terrible circumstances she had survived. I thought of how Elizabeth Smart, a real-life, long-term abductee, has turned the notoriety foisted on her around, by becoming a spokeperson on the issues her case highlighted. I despaired that her fictional counterpart was a lot less interesting than she turned out to be.

Brie Larson gives a very strong performance as Joy and actually looks like a woman held captive (and later, one still suffering the after-effects) as opposed to the prettied-up version another film would present to us. But I couldn’t help comparing this performance to the one she gave in Short Term 12, another role of an unglamorous trauma survivor, but one in which, in spite of its disappointing baby-makes-everything-okay ending, the audience was allowed to see the character as more than just a sometimes very troubled mother-figure (which she also played in her job as a counselor to at-risk teens). Jacob Tremblay is also very good as her son, though maybe because of An Open Secret or maybe just because so many talented child actors in the past have become adults without many prospects, I worry about what will happen to this excellent, young actor, more than I worried what would become of his character or of his mother’s, a bad sign for any film.

I realize I’m in the minority, that a lot of audience members and critics (especially women) love this film, but sometimes a “strong woman” at the center of a film, even one played by a talented actress, isn’t enough. We need our women protagonists, even the ones written by women, to be more than just “Ma.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6fZ-fwDws” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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