Everyone knows that the best horror movies contain scary things that are metaphors for other scary things. Dawn of the Dead isn't about zombies--it's about mindless consumerism! Hostel isn't just gross torture porn--it's about America's fear of foreigners! Vampire movies are all about fears revolving around sex, disease, and contamination. The Shining is about alcoholism. Ginger Snaps is about menstruation and puberty. This list goes on. The mark of a great horror movie is not how many times it makes you jump out of your seat, but how thoroughly it gets under your skin. Because while ghosts and ghouls, witches and vampires, zombies and serial killers are all scary enough, the real horror is what we experience in the day-to-day. The existential dread of being conscious that someday we, and everyone we love, will be dead. The hazy knowledge of immense human cruelty--and worse, apathy--that lurks in our brains but rarely hits us with the full force of its horror. These are the real terrors. Ghosts are just child's play (although, to be fair, the movie Child's Play scares the shit out of me).
And so it is with The Babadook, a complex, layered, minimalistic Australian horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent. The Babadook uses one of the most fraught institutions we know of to terrify the audience: motherhood. As someone who is most definitely not a mother, I can only guess how scary (and simultaneously beautiful) it must be to grow a living thing inside you, give birth to it with all the pain and blood that birth entails, and then...be terrified for its safety and well-being for the rest of your life. If the definition of courage is not the absence of fear, but to move forward in spite of it, well, to choose to be a mother is truly courageous.
In The Babadook, Amelia is a single mother to 6-year-old Samuel. Her circumstances are incredibly tragic: her husband died in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth. Amelia survives the accident, of course, only to have the memory of her husband's death taint the day of her son's birth so much that she can't bear to celebrate Samuel's birthday on the actual day. Samuel is a piece of work himself. On the one hand, he's full of fears and anxieties, insisting that Amelia check under his bed and read him a soothing bedtime story before he goes to sleep. On the other hand, Sam has a surprising amount of bravery. He climbs to the very top of a swing set (freaking out Amelia in the process). He builds homemade weapons to protect himself and his mother against the monsters and bogeymen he believes lurk somewhere in his house. And, devastatingly, he shoulders the burden of his mother's resentment on his small back, whether he is fully aware of it or not.
One night, Sam finds a mysterious book, titled Mister Babadook, on his shelf. Neither he nor Amelia knows where it came from. The gruesome pop-up book introduces Mr. Babadook, a ghoulish creature in a top hat and cape that hides under children's beds. Soon after the discovery of the book, strange things begin to happen around Sam and Amelia's house. Sam blames the Babadook and is constantly terrified and unable to sleep, which means that Amelia also becomes increasingly sleep-deprived and on edge. Once Amelia begins to see the Babadook herself, the movie takes a turn into that liminal world where you don't know if ghouls are *actually* haunting the character, or if it's all in their head. But either way, Amelia becomes something of a ghoul herself: screaming at Sam, acting erratically, and seeing visions of her dead husband.
The metaphor is pretty obvious here. The Babadook is a personification of the deep well of agony and suffering that Amelia has carried around since the day of Samuel's birth. Amelia has no one to turn to because it's not safe to reveal any negative emotions about your own child. And Samuel is a handful. There's a scene where he (played by an astonishing child actor, Noah Wiseman) "sees" the Babadook and just starts screaming at the top of his lungs. Watching it, I curled into a ball and wanted to cover my ears. A child's scream is both terrifying and--annoying is too mild a word--profoundly disturbing. Just listen to that scream and you'll feel a cascade of sympathy for anyone who has ever raised a child.
There were two things that I really loved about this movie. The first is Mister Babadook himself. In an interview, director Jennifer Kent explained that she wanted to "create a myth in a domestic setting", and indeed, The Babadook goes beyond a typical ghost story into something ferocious and primal. The book featured in the movie is a work of art in itself, starting out innocuously enough, with lines about "making friends with a special one", and moving towards a terrifying conclusion: "when you see what's under the bed/you'll wish that you were dead". Just do a Google Image search for "babadook book" and you'll see what I mean. Or see the movie.
The other thing I loved about The Babadook was how deeply emotional it was without being manipulative. The story is about a mother and her son and their mutual fear of one another. But even in the depths of Amelia's despair, she clings to the love she has--in spite of the circumstances of his birth--for Samuel. And to hear Samuel's little pipsqueak voice say "I'll protect you, Mum"....my ovaries just about exploded.
Here's the thing: I'm an emotional person, just like anyone else. But I want my emotions and feelings to be authentic, both in real life and in art/entertainment. I hate movies that spoon feed you emotions. I hate manipulative movies, just like I hate emotional manipulation in real life. If you're going to make a movie about the parent-child bond, show me something real, right? Don't pretend it's all gumdrops and unicorns and toys that never break. I know parenthood isn't like that. The Babadook has the balls to say that motherhood isn't always a walk in the park. And it even goes beyond that, suggesting that motherhood, in fact, can be a nightmare at times. But although the movie takes the audience to the precipice of the terror of motherhood, it doesn't throw us over the edge. It lets us see that terror, those difficult emotions and moments, and then reels us back in and reminds us that love--love from a mother to a child and a child to a mother--really can save us.
I can't say that The Babadook scared the shit out of me. But it did almost make me cry (an extremely rare event--I almost never cry during movies). And for that, I respect the hell out of it as a unique, creative, and deeply humane piece of cinema.
Grade B
Please note, if you care, that I am switching my grading system from a 1-5 star scale to a A-F grading scale since it seems more nuanced.
No comments:
Post a Comment