Film Daze Cinema Club #5 (March, 2023)
This month's cinema club is all about the divine feminine and mothers under the influence.
THE DIVINE FEMININE BY VERONICA PHILLIPS
To be a woman is to be constantly judged, and to be an aesthetically feminine woman is to attempt to accept and play by impossible rules — no matter how hard you try, you are always going to fall short on some front. The women of these films realize this truth, but hold tight to their cat eyes and high heels regardless, opting to wreak havoc from within the bounds of womanhood. If you can’t beat ‘em, fuck with ‘em.
POLYESTER (1981)
In John Waters’ satire of a family melodrama, the one-and-only Divine — filthy, delightful drag queen and Waters’ longtime muse — plays an earnest housewife with a bleeding heart and an ultra-powerful nose. Somewhere within Divine’s coiffed hair and tasteful white nightgowns, there’s something genuinely endearing about Polyester’s specific brand of womanly camp. The way in which Divine’s Francine Fishpaw is swept up into the cunning seductions of 1960s Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter’s Todd Tomorrow feels like the most ridiculous iteration of a very real expression of repressed housewife female desire.
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)
Wigs upon wigs upon wigs, glittery eyeshadow reaching up to the brow, and the voices of the divas before her — these are the things rock star Hedwig holds dear, the things she is forever singing about. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is beautiful, messy gender fuckery; a clinging to extreme femininity as a buoy to make sense of every aspect of life — from sex to art to grief.
DAISIES (1966)
Věra Chytilová’s ditzy female protagonists see their womanhood as a vehicle for embracing excess. If the old men of the world are going to lech after them, then these girls are going to accept their invitations to lunch and gorge themselves on some creep’s dime. Life is one long play date — browning in the sun and eating eggs and pickles in bed until you’re sick and laughing in the bathroom together while some pathetic man simply waiting to be finessed sits at the table.
PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)
To not bookend a selection titled “The Divine Feminine” with anyone but the Divine is an act of foolishness. In John Waters’ most iconic work, Divine plays Divine: The Filthiest Woman Alive, who wreaks havoc and encourages anarchy in the most fabulous cheap animal print and mermaid dresses ever to grace the screen. Something about Divine’s cheap glamor makes the filth around her all the more beautiful — Divine does everything with performative intention, and if you don’t get it, maybe you’re just not all that fun. It’s not easy work being so fabulous and so grotesque in the very same breath.
MOTHERS UNDER THE INFLUENCE BY ALISHA MUGHAL
What does it look like to be a mother and a person with mental illness? Not mental illness borne of motherhood, that unique pre- and postpartum dynamic explored by films like The Other Woman (2009) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But rather, what does it look like to balance these two aspects of an identity, the friction and frisson and fission created when motherhood is introduced to a site where madness has long abided? What effect does the role of motherhood have on one’s mental illness? What effect does mental illness have on child rearing? How do others perceive a woman doing her best to survive in spite of or perhaps uncaring of her whirling mind and raise a child? Is it possible to be successful as a mother if one is mentally ill?
I’m curious about this dynamic because, culturally, both madness and motherhood come laden thick with notions of ought, which determine or dictate that a person should not be one and the other simultaneously, that either the abiding madness be cured or the children taken away. The following movies examine or experiment with what it looks like to be a mother under the influence of madness.
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974)
This film is what sparked my recommendations for this month. Gena Rowlands is Mabel, a lonely and hardworking housewife craving her husband’s attention and affection. She loves her kids desperately and is a good, attentive mother who keeps everyone fed and happy. She doesn’t think anything is direly the matter with her, mentally. But when her already strange behavior becomes more and more erratic, that is, when others outside of her family are impacted by her quirky habits, Mabel’s husband and mother-in-law institutionalize her, sending her to a sanitarium that administers electric shock therapy. Mabel returns a bracketed, bland, and sanitized version of her vibrant and uninhibited herself, nervous and terrified of disappointing her family, acutely aware that society thinks there is something wrong with her. This film breaks my heart because Rowlands’ striking performance vibrates with so much love and desperation, she achingly paints a woman crying out to be seen. The film heartbreakingly demonstrates how irreparably fractured a person becomes when conformity to the stable and muted status quo (what motherhood and being a wife ought to look like) is brutally forced.
DARK WATER (2005)
A lot of the time, mental illness is hereditary, like an inescapable curse. This film, a remake of the 2002 Japanese film of the same name, looks at a mother trying her best to be better than her own mother. Jennifer Connelly plays Dahlia and delivers perhaps a career-best performance as a woman living with PTSD and the kind of depression that hammers like a toothache. Interrogating societal ideas of motherhood by poking through what the state and laws believe to be mental fitness in raising a child (showing systems of legal and communal culpability in cases of parental negligence colliding with a patriarchal overprotectiveness in cases where a parent is effective despite their mental illness), the film ultimately in an incendiary way shows that goodness, good mothering, is not determined by one’s mental health or lack thereof. This film is not only a successful horror, it’s also one of the most affecting depictions of the labor it takes to make it through everyday with mental illness I have ever seen.
UMMA (2022)
Like Dark Water, this Sandra Oh-starring horror reckons with generational trauma, looking at how and whether a woman can be a good mother despite or with PTSD. What I love about Umma is it looks at forgiveness in such a nuanced way it will take your breath away. Showing that it is possible to forgive our parents without excusing their abuse, this film depicts without judgment the good and bad of parenting under the influence of mental illness, nudging its protagonist to the realization of the need to perform the labor of healing her inner child, to reckon with the fullness of her past and identity, before she can mother to the best of her abilities and desires.
LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE (2020)
This is an indie Canadian film that homes in on that moment in A Woman Under the Influence when Mabel returns from the sanitarium, fleshing it out in heartbreaking detail. Sarah Sutherland plays protagonist Dara, a shade of Mabel, who hopes to rekindle a relationship with her infant daughter after two years away, spent on her own healing, spent determining whether she can or wants to be a mother. This film, like the others on this list, shows that a woman’s desire to be a good mother is not mutually exclusive from mental illness, demonstrate what it looks like to be a good mother and be mentally ill, despite patriarchal society’s nefarious beliefs that a person be a certain way before she has the right to motherhood. Like a House on Fire, like the other films on this list, challenges and provokes our preconceived notions, and shows that motherhood is as unique and nuanced as we are, as our traumas, as our madnesses.