US Edition
Last night I went to see Nightbitch, the new film starring Amy Adams, directed by Marielle Heller. It was only showing at one cinema near me, and the only time it was showing was 9.20pm, which pretty much encapsulates the choice dilemma of early motherhood. Get the kids down and try and recapture a sliver of your old life by heading out for some culture? Or crawl exhausted into bed, choosing sleep over brain titillation? I can’t help but wonder if the Everyman programmers were trying to be a bit clever.
Nightbitch is a film about what happens when a woman who is one thing (in this case an artist) has a baby and becomes another (stay-at-home-mother), and whether she can resolve these two competing parts of her without going crazy. Or, in Adams’s case, sprouting a tail, growing two extra sets of nipples and turning into a large, fluffy, red-haired Husky that likes to kill small animals (but only at night, and possibly only in her own imagination, although it’s hard to tell.)
We first meet Adams (looking refreshingly like a real mother of a small child i.e knackered, not stick thin, unwashed, makeup-free and sprouting random facial hair) in a montage of repeats: making the same breakfast over and over, sitting at the same small table playing with her small son, walking slowly up the road holding his hand as he chatters, attending inane sessions of baby book time at the library.
The scenes will be painfully familiar to anyone who has ground through those early years of childhood: the relentless, endless tedium of a life that has shrunk to the same four or five activities day in, day out, conducted with someone who is charming, but has yet to develop reason. Adams is a good mother – she loves her child; she is patient with him; she showers him with hugs and kisses; she is engaged and present – but she is frustrated with her (chosen) lot.
“I would love to be content but I feel as if I’m stuck in a prison of my own making” she says in an imagined riposte to a former colleague she meets in the supermarket. I took a pal with me who has just had her second baby and is knee-deep in the toddler tantrum/ incomprehensible screaming stage and we both laughed like drains. “I feel so seen,” she said.
Nevertheless, this part of the film annoyed me intensely. Why did Adams (her character is simply ‘Mother’) not get some mates round to dispel the tedium/chaos of kids’ tea once in a while? Get some childcare and go back to work/do something for herself? Have another baby for goodness’ sake – really the only way a lot of us get through those early years is to basically pop out another one and be so overwhelmed with chaos that you don’t really have time to think about how small your life has become until suddenly one day everyone sleeps through the night and you get a bit of time to strategise (on which note, she also needed to sleep train her child).
I mean, it’s not that bad (especially if your child is basically, like hers, pretty dreamy). Stop complaining, Mother! I wanted to shout. Make some art! Go for a run! Stop trying to make one small child meet all your adult needs! Instead she ends up turning into a dog, exploding at her husband and demanding a separation (to which he very calmly acquiesces, going off and getting a nice tidy rental apartment and having his kid over on weekends and not losing his sh-t when the kid throws spaghetti all over the floor – like this would happen in real life).
But this is where it gets interesting. First because what is actually most compelling about this film is the dynamic between husband and wife when a baby comes along. “What happened to my wife?” asks this basically quite useless man, who spends half his time working away from home, in a face-off. “She died in childbirth” is her deadpan answer.
Nightbitch is very good on the intensely isolating, internalising experience of motherhood, no matter how great your support network; on how it makes you strong but weak; on how it pushes out all desire for another person except as someone who can facilitate your own alone time. On how gross it all is – her getting her period in the shower was met with an audible groan of disgust from the one male audience member (get over it pal, how do you think babies are made?). One of the yuckiest scenes of the film is when she develops an enormous, pus-filled boil on her bum that, when pierced, erupts with pus and a long, stringy, ingrown-hair-on-steroids sort of tail. Even I had to cover my eyes for that one.
But – spoiler alert – it turns out that Mother worked all that out for herself, eventually. That yes, she did need pals, and some fulfilling work, and to go for a run once in a while. That it’s ok to demand some space for yourself (I can’t have been the only one thinking that packing your husband off for a temporary separation is extreme, but seriously tempting). And that actually, once you do this stuff, the thought of a second child isn’t quite so intensely terrible.
Motherhood does change women. It does change marriages. It’s not glamorous and it’s bloody hard work. And yes, sometimes you do feel like howling at the moon and tearing up something with your teeth in frustration. But it also doesn’t have to become our sole defining purpose in life. It’s more interesting, and complex than that. Now that my kids are no longer small children and are growing up terrifyingly fast, I can confirm that the tedium really doesn’t last forever and it is possible to both retain something of yourself while laughing at the ridiculousness of the narratives we allow ourselves to slip into. So suck it up, bitches – and hang on in there.
Was it really fair for Hollywood to show a mother turning into a dog?
Amy Adams’s new film depicts motherhood as a terrifying ‘prison of her own making’. But for many women it doesn’t have to be this way