Womb – Bitch Flicks

The Volatility of Motherhood in David Cronenberg’s ‘The Brood’

For Cronenberg, Candy represents the symbolic order and influence of the father, precisely what Nola wishes to eradicate. Candy is supposed to come “home to mommy” and have no fatherly influence. The characters in the film are defined by rigid gender constructs, or alternatively, through their attempts at living up to them.

This guest post by Eli Lewy appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

The association between women and reproductive activities is a common theme in horror films. Female genitals have been perceived as mysterious and uncanny by men during the course of Western history. In Canadian film director David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood, Nola, a wife and mother, is in a psychiatric institution where she uses Dr. Raglan’s methods of psychoplasmics to manifest her emotional and psychological troubles physically. Nola has failed in her role as a nurturing mother to her daughter Candy, and being a loving stable wife to her husband Frank, a leading cause of her psychological fragmentation. Nola’s inner rage and pain causes her to form an external womb-like sac that gives birth to evil children with whom she shares a telepathic bond. Nola’s ability to give birth parthenogenetically[1] is what constructs her as “monstrous.” Her womb, one of the primary symbols of biological womanhood, is constructed as being a volatile space filled with danger.

In The Brood, Frank, Nola’s husband, attempts to act as the protector of his daughter Candy against the evil mother, Nola. For Cronenberg, Candy represents the symbolic order and influence of the father, precisely what Nola wishes to eradicate. Candy is supposed to come “home to mommy” and have no fatherly influence. The characters in the film are defined by rigid gender constructs, or alternatively, through their attempts at living up to them.

Frank, who has recently separated from Nola, is discriminated against in the judicial system even though his wife is far from capable of nurturing Candy. When Frank attempts to take steps against Nola and get full custody of his daughter, his lawyer plainly tells him that he has no legal rights to deny Nola of her mothering responsibilities as “the law believes in motherhood.” The filmmaker suggests that even unfit mothers are preferred over fathers. The criticism of the supposed female dominance over the realm of the family in the film is clear once the audiences realize what kind of a mother Nola really is. The horror occurs when the father is powerless, rendered irrelevant by a “monstrous” mother.

Nola is in desperate need of feeling loved and accepted by Frank, who in turn, is disgusted by her. The Brood broaches the idea of a hereditary female cycle of abuse and evil: Nola’s mother was emotionally and physically abusive toward her which, in turn, caused Nola to be abusive toward her young daughter Candy. The Brood complies with the ancient sexist notion that maternal desire is the source of monstrosity (Creed 46). Most of Dr. Raglan’s patients’ rage manifests itself in boils and lesions, unlike Nola, whose rage comes in the form of an external womb capable of birthing deformed beings. Not only is her body and mental state in shambles, she has incorporated the brood children into the mix who bring harm to others. This conveys a message that Cronenberg returns to frequently: females who dare to be aggressive and expressive destruct others. Nola’s rage is seen as something that the women in her family inherited, but there is no attempt at understanding why this has happened.

During Candy’s stay with her grandmother, she sees a picture of her mother as a child in the hospital. Nola looks a lot like Candy; in fact, she is played by the same young actress. This is the first instance in which Candy shows some sense of presence, interest, and involvement in the film as she is usually catatonic and detached. The traumatic events she has lived through are reflected in her blank stare. Candy is one of the main victims in the film; she witnesses her grandmother’s death, gets viciously beaten by the brood, and is constantly under threat.

Candy could easily be mistaken for one of the brood children with her straight blonde hair and the almost identical red parka. In fact, even her own father mistakes Candy for a brood for a fleeting second. The brood children know that she needs to come with them to the institute; they are the same in some way. However, once Nola commands her brood to attack Candy, their blood ties no longer matter and they intend on killing Candy.

Candy in peril after Nola orders the brood children to kill her

When Frank attempts to save the kidnapped Candy, he comes face to face with Nola for the first time in the film. A primal birthing scene ensues. She is sitting on a platform in a regal manner. Nola questions Frank’s love for her and confidently explains that “what’s been happening to me is too strange, too strange to share with anyone from my old life.” She then proceeds to raise her arms to reveal what lies underneath her white nightgown: her external womb. The whiteness of Nola’s robe is juxtaposed with the “monstrosity” that lies beneath. The camera switches between Nola’s confident, queen-like posing and Frank’s pure and utter disgust for what his eyes are seeing.

As though the sight of this hideous sac were not enough, Nola proceeds to bend over, bite the sac, and take out her bloodied brood fetus. However, the epitome of Nola’s “freakishness” is yet to come. Nola licks away the blood and amniotic fluid, irrevocably propelling Nola to an abject being completely comfortable with her animalistic maternal instincts, reproductive functions, and disfigurement. We see all this unfold though Frank’s eyes – we are him in this scene, disgusted and disbelieving. Nola changes from human to monster. She was unaware of the fact that the brood children are murderous, but once Frank tells her she does not change her demeanor and smiles maniacally, condoning her progeny’s actions. Rage and psychoplasmics have sucked the humanity out of her. Once Frank tells her the truth, which is that he is there to take their daughter away from her, Nola coldly says, “I’d kill Candice rather than let you take her away from me.” Frank then proceeds to leap and strangle his wife to death. He begs her to make the brood children stop what they are doing to Candy, but Nola is too far gone, her humanity has been stripped away. Nola’s plea to “kill me, kill me” is masochistic; she is letting Frank give into his urge to destroy the maternal (Beard 85). Frank is full of rage while killing Nola, which is the only effective thing he does throughout the picture. However, this does not prevent Candy from being exposed to the disease; he has not saved her. We then see the boil on her arm at the end of the film, implying that Candy will carry on the dubious honor of the clan’s “female legacy.”

Works Cited

Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2006.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. 1993.

Eli Lewy is a third culture kid, burgeoning filmmaker, and Master’s student studying US Studies. She currently resides in Berlin. You can read her film review blog here: www.film-nut.tumblr.com and follow her on twitter at @scopophiliafilm

[1] Reproduction that occurs with the ovum only.

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Female Sexuality is the Real Horror in ‘Womb’

Womb poster

Written by Erin Tatum.

Today, I wanted to talk about a little film called Womb. It’s not very well known – Doctor Who fans will recognize it as one of Matt Smith‘s leading roles before his TARDIS fame. The film presents a fascinating introspective on the ethics of cloning while at the same time highlighting the difficulty of differentiating types of love, putting an oddly poignant spin on the sci-fi genre. Above all else, I enjoy director Benedek Fliegauf’s unabashed aggressiveness in deconstructing everything we romanticize about childhood and then punching us in the throat with our own sentimentality.

The symbolism of this fetus is going to get exponentially creepier.

First of all, the setting and cinematography is breathtakingly gorgeous in the most depressing way possible. The characters are constantly surrounded by haunting, saturated bleakness. This proves to be an effective backdrop for the ensuing emotional turmoil while underscoring the overarching question of morality that plagues the main character, Rebecca. The opening voice over is Rebecca’s exhausted yet serene affirmation that “it’s over now” and that her presumably dead lover has left her with a final parting blessing of pregnancy. If you haven’t looked up an overview of the plot, you are probably thinking that this is going to be a powerful romantic drama that ends in the tragedy of death mixed with the hope of the baby’s promise for the future. You’d be about a quarter right. It’s about to get all Freudian up in here.

Savor the wholesomeness while you can.

We begin by watching the blossoming childhood romance between Rebecca and her neighbor, Tommy. They are inseparable, spending all day playing together and developing little rituals unique to their friendship. Everything seems perfect until Rebecca announces that she and her mother are moving to Japan. Tommy awkwardly kisses Rebecca and she runs embarrassed out of the room. It’s genuine and heartfelt enough to make me almost forget my annoyance that we force heterosexuality on children by romanticizing the hell out of every opposite sex friendship, but I’ll let it slide because damn these kids are adorable. Later, he tells her that he has a plan to rescue her in the morning before she leaves. Alas, Tommy fails to show up and Rebecca leaves without saying goodbye.

The one appropriate instance of romantic chemistry in this film.

After completing university, Rebecca returns to her original home in England. Of course, her secret primary motivation is to find Tommy, who just happens to live in the exact same place because apparently childhood defines your entire existence. Tommy dumps his current girlfriend like a sack of hot potatoes the second Rebecca finds him and the two attempt to pick up their relationship where they left off, except now with hormones and stuff. They briefly kiss, but Rebecca puts the brakes on, telling him it feels weird. Oh honey, if only you knew. She insists on accompanying Tommy to protest the opening of a national park filled with cloned animals. While they’re driving, Rebecca suddenly announces that she really has to pee. Tommy pulls the car over so that Rebecca can pee in a bush. He decides to exit the car for some reason and is promptly struck and killed by another car, marking the only time in cinematic history that a full bladder has served as the catalyst for the entirety of a film’s central dramatic plot.

Not yolo? Oh no.

Rebecca feels responsible for Tommy’s death and tells his grieving parents that they can totally bring him back because Rebecca plans to impregnate herself with his clone! Tommy’s mom is rightfully appalled, but Tommy’s dad is just like “Whatever, you do you.” This is the part where this film starts making your skin crawl. It’s really sweet and noble and you know Rebecca is willing to put herself through the inevitable confusion out of love for Tommy. However, it’s shortsighted and selfish and adds a whole new stratosphere to the definition of pedophilia, because it’s obvious that on some level, Rebecca chooses to bring Tommy back out of regret that they never consummated their relationship. Carrying a fetus with the subconscious intention of having sex with that future person somewhere down the line is a part of the id that I never want to think about. That said, this decision marks an important shift in how Rebecca’s sexuality is perceived. She declares herself to be a literal vehicle of perversion. From here on out, her desires are marked as obsessive, predatory, and unnatural, which is a striking contrast to when her innocence and devotion to Tommy was celebrated within the sanctity of revived childhood romance just a few weeks ago.

Just casually huffing my son’s preteen pheromones nbd.

Tommy’s parents decide that watching the clone version of Tommy grow up would be too painful and move away, leaving Rebecca to raise him on her own. She decides to tell her son that his father is the original Tommy, who died in a car accident before he was born. We jump forward to where cloned Tommy is the same age as the original Tommy was when he and Rebecca first met. Rebecca’s affections toward him are thus a bit too intimate – stroking his face a little too long, deeply inhaling the scent of his skin, sitting naked with him in the bathtub even though Tommy is clearly too old to need assistance. Eva Green, the actress who plays older Rebecca, does a great job of representing the bizarre fusion of the butterflies from your first crush with more physical adult desires. These scenes just left me wondering how on earth they explained this dynamic to the child actor. “Okay, you’re going to be in love with a girl your age and then come back later as a cloned version of your character, only now you don’t know that your former girlfriend is actually your mom. She still has a wildly inappropriate crush on you, but just act oblivious until it becomes relevant to the plot again.” I know that sometimes a film crew won’t explain darker themes to child actors to protect them, but surely they had to give him a heads up about this. I would be concerned if I were 11 and the 20-something actress playing my mom was sensuously smelling my neck.

Mother and child reunion…bow chicka wow wow.

My confusion was rather explicitly cleared up soon enough, when a playful mother-son wrestling match quickly progresses into a steamy moment of sexually charged flirting. Tommy pins Rebecca to the ground, forcefully straddling her. With an impish grin on his face, he breathlessly declares, “I could do whatever I want with you,” and there’s a little too much pleasure and excitement in his triumphant tone. The cataclysm of taboos makes this scene the most significant of the film in terms of social commentary on sexuality. For all of the times we want to pathologize Rebecca’s desires as the source of the problem, this exchange very much implicates Tommy in that deviance. The binary between childhood innocence and adult depravity is not as polarized as we’d like to think. Children can be sexual too, a cringe-inducing reality that society desperately tries to bury by creating strict scripts of innocence and chastity for childhood romance, immortalized by Hallmark cards and Hummel figurines.

Beyond making a case for the existence of children’s sexuality, Tommy’s actions also indicate that his desires may be a bit sadistic, only further shattering the haven of pre-pubescence. He clearly enjoys dominating Rebecca, tauntingly putting his face inches from hers knowing full well, even if only subconsciously, that they’re both in the heat of the moment and teetering on some level of sexual release. Again, we’re talking about 11-year-old Tommy. I also think that this is one of those moments that’s supposed to minimize the incest factor by implying that cloned Tommy has some sort of unconscious ESP link to the memories and feelings of original Tommy, but that small scrap of comfort is totally obliterated by the fact that you’re witnessing a completely consensual erotic moment between an adult and a child. Rebecca gasps, “Go ahead,” but the two are interrupted by Tommy’s friend calling his name. Tommy deliberately lets his face hover above Rebecca’s for a few more seconds, seemingly relishing her helplessness and obvious desperation. If you don’t think Tommy is now complicit in whatever freaky dynamic is going on here, you’re delusional. I found myself wishing that he would kiss her just to break the tension and then immediately wanted to drink myself to death for even letting the thought cross my mind. He reluctantly stands up and walks over to his friend, leaving Rebecca sprawled out in the sand and looking uncomfortably close to orgasm.

Genetic engineering: a proven birthday ruiner.

Rumors about Tommy being a clone isolate him from his friends because their mothers don’t want them to be associated with a “copy.” No one shows up for Tommy’s birthday party. The whole idea of clones as a metaphor for any oppressed minority that experiences overt discrimination might be more effective if the main character hadn’t gestated her boyfriend’s clone with the primary purpose of acting out her repressed childhood sexual urges, but at least it’s a valiant attempt. Tommy’s bewilderment at his sudden outcast status does pull at your heartstrings. Conveniently, Tommy’s new lack of social life means that Rebecca will be his only support system growing up. I’m sure that will only make their relationship healthier! Ah, there’s nothing like an incestuous dystopia to carry you through those troubled teen years.

This is awkward enough without the Freudian possessiveness.

Just in case you weren’t horrified enough yet, the unresolved sexual tension between Tommy and Rebecca is about to skyrocket off the Richter scale. Like his mother, Tommy returns to his childhood home, now the same age as when the original Tommy died. Unhappily for Rebecca, he arrives with his girlfriend, Monica, in tow. Rebecca mopes around the house, taking every opportunity to be jealous and pouty. She seems particularly disillusioned when she goes to wake Tommy, only to discover Monica in bed with him and connect the dots that they probably had sex the night before. The implication is that Rebecca has been single and celibate ever since the original Tommy died. On one hand, our sympathy leans toward her because she has sacrificed everything for Tommy and it’s a sad juxtaposition to watch her plateau in loneliness while Tommy’s life is filled with friends and opportunities.

Rebecca sulking over Monica’s failed olive branch pastries.

Still, here Rebecca’s motives start to acquire a distinctly vindictive, bitter undertone that erodes her original justification of everlasting love and devotion. She’s pissed that her relationship with clone Tommy hasn’t magically replicated into her romance with original Tommy, but she forgets that they’re different people and Tommy has no obligation to simply pick up the life of his original where it left off. Plus, her warped nostalgia creates impossibly high expectations on several counts, considering she never told him the truth and she should have anticipated that Tommy isn’t supposed to want to have sex with his own mother. Womb has a weird tendency to humanize incest in ways that make you feel dirty for even contemplating the scenario enough to formulate an opinion.

Giving new meaning to the phrase “sexy fishnets.”

Rebecca’s hostility toward Monica creates tension in Tommy’s relationship with Monica. Monica senses the growing distance between them and tries to keep their relationship alive with lots of flirting and sex, much to Rebecca’s chagrin. Despite Monica’s best efforts, everything falls apart when yet another play fight derails into not-so-subtle passion, culminating in Tommy shoving his head under Rebecca’s shirt. Monica has been watching them and realizes that they both look a little too aroused for family fun, prompting her to storm off. Tommy once again lets his face linger near Rebecca’s before chasing after Monica, giving her a particularly intense Stare of Rediscovered Lust with Inevitably Dramatic Consequences. That Tommy sure knows how to leave a lady wanting more. It’s a shame he only seems to be at the top of this game when he’s fighting off oedipal sexual urges.

This moment is too sad for a witty caption.

The last screw of Rebecca’s fantasy comes loose when Tommy runs into the original Tommy’s mother, feeling an eerie familiarity with her. He can no longer stand Rebecca’s silence and demands concrete answers about his genealogy. Rebecca caves and shows him old footage of the original Tommy protesting. He berates Rebecca for lying to him his whole life. It’s all quite heartbreaking and raw and I had to crank down my sound because Matt Smith’s anguish is so visceral it’s terrifying. The subtext that was once relegated to awkward pauses and unspoken taboos rapidly shifts to fear. Tommy rapes Rebecca and it’s brutally carnal, especially when compared to his naively bewildered romantic interactions as the Doctor (skip to the 2:15 mark and marvel at the sheer volume of flailing). The experience is filled with tears and anger and is so very obviously the opposite of everything Rebecca has been dreaming of for the past two decades.

I’m sure he’s off to more dismal horizons.

Tommy departs quietly and alone soon after the incident. The viewer knows that he impregnated Rebecca. The ultimate consensus of the film seems to be Rebecca making peace with the pain that both Tommys have caused her because now she will have Tommy’s child, which is implied to be the fulfillment she was searching for all along. This bittersweet romanticism appears to gloss over the fact that clone Tommy is a rapist, but I guess that puts us back at sum zero in terms of morality judgments. Rebecca was punished throughout the film for allowing her sexuality to transcend even the laws of mortality. Womb might be insinuating that female desire is the root of all evil, but then again, no one else walks away squeaky clean either.