The Babadook and Monstrous Mothers
The Babadook is an Australian horror film, focused on the relationship of a widowed mother and her son. Released in 2014, the Babadook set an example of psychological horror focused on monsters. The Babadook as a monster is a type of boogeyman, reliving aspects of childhood monstrosity that comes to life through paranoia.
The Babadook is an interesting monstrous figure, one that explores aspects of culture and self in the quiet and subtle ways it comes to life in the film. The way the Babadook manifests, plays with the expectations of fiction and reality, and comes to possess or alter our main character Amelia, is an example of how monsters can be a powerful force in horror and fiction. So, today, let’s explore the monstrous figure of the Babadook.
Perhaps the best place to start is in the two characters who dominate the entire narrative. Despite there being scenes with other figures, such as their neighbour and their family, the movie almost exclusively consists of our two primary characters: Amelia and her son Sam. Amelia’s husband died in a car crash while driving her to the hospital when she was in labour. The incredibly traumatic experience is obviously still haunting Amelia when the movie starts.
It opens with a dream-like sequence of the moment of death, where Amelia is reliving the moment in her nightmares. It’s Sam that wakes her from this dream, concerned about his own nightmares he’s reliving. This then takes us on a sequence of the typical parental ritual of checking for monsters, though there is a different experience of this in the movie’s rendering. Amelia looks exhausted from the movements; she’s tired and only going through the performance of the act because its what’s expected rather than out of love.
This sequence is the heart of the whole movie, and the birth of the Babadook. Amelia embodies a type of motherhood that is seldom demonstrated in popular culture. Amelia has dispassionate reactions to her son throughout the movie, especially in the beginning segments we see her acting through duty rather than love. She’s mechanical, going through the motions of helping her child with nightmares without the tenderness behind it. She flinches when Sam tries to touch her, she responds to actions with distaste, and shifts between feeling protective and dismissive of her son.
Adrienne Rich wrote of maternal ambivalence, saying:
“My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any expe-rience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guilt-less beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.”
As a monster, this is where the Babadook stands: at the borders of becoming, the possibility that society’s stressors and emphasis on the innate joy of motherhood is sometimes not present.
In fact, this expectation of care and nurturing is put on Amelia in all aspects of her life. For money, she works in a care home, has to take on the role of head of household in domestic work, she has responsibilities as a mother, she cares for the elderly neighbour through acts of labour. Her entire life is built around the idea of caring for others. She has both the internalised pressures of her expectations, but also the external pressures and expectations from those around her, including family and institutions.
The Babadook is a representation of this other form of motherhood, the ambivalent motherhood which hides within it social judgement and the toll motherhood can take on an individual. Writer and director Jennifer Kent talks about the assumptions of motherhood in saying:
“It’s the great unspoken thing. We’re all, as women, educated and conditioned to think that motherhood is an easy thing that just happens. But it’s not always the case. I wanted to show a real woman who was drowning in that environment.”
Her continued actions of her ambivalent motherhood continues to other her, both in the eyes of others and in her own judgement. Her family begins to reject her abilities as mother through the “not normal” actions of her son Samuel. When she turns to a GP for sedatives to help her and her son sleep, he tells her its a choice “most mothers” would not choose.
The Babadook begins to take over Amelia as she continues to give in to the harder parts of motherhood. The Babadook, therefore, is a doppelganger of sourts, an alternate version of Amelia which has become “possessed” by her feelings of distaste for her son. As she continues to give into the feelings of rage that are so often denied to her, she becomes more and more drawn to the monster.
The Babadook is both a source of horror and of emotional release. Although as a monster he stalks Amelia, possesses her, changes her, she also relaxes in the ability to voice the emotions that have been building inside her but that she has refused to let go because of the social expectations on her as mother. The scene where Samuel comes to her, expressing how hungry he is, her release of anger is both troublesome on how it would affect her child, but also a clear release of the stress that has been building up inside her.
In fact, one of the scenes that demonstrates her stress and anxiety is when she has a day off from her job as a careworker because she is supposed to be caring for Samuel. Instead, she has a day to herself, doing very simple acts like eating icecream or walking around a mall. These small actions of self attention are a demonstration of what she feels she has been missing within both grief and motherhood, but we also see the social pressures put on her from the way others look at her as she goes about this day. Her obvious guilt when caught out is not only in being caught in her lie but in her dismissal, even temporarily, of her social responsibilities.
This doppelganger monster is one that is constantly present. As the pseudo-children’s book tells us at the beginning of the film: the more you deny, the stronger I get. As the movie progresses, Amelia is not just denying the existence of the Babadook, but through him her own grief and ambivalent motherhood. As she continues to deny this, the animosity she feels towards her son grows.
In the scene where she shouts at Samuel as he says he’s hungry, her phrasings come to take on the rhythm of the Babadook’s call: Ba-ba-dook-dook-dook. “Why do you keep talk-talk-talking?” The doppleganger/possession of the Babadook is an exploration of her own emotional connections, or, more importantly, disconnections.
You can’t get rid of the Babadook. This is something the book tells us at the very beginning of the film, and is repeated by Samuel at the moment they first think they have completed the exorcisim of the Babadook. The ending of the movie demonstrates how this works in reality, when the monster is not made manifest in a coat and hat but is within ourselves. We cannot rid ourselves of the monster, in the way we cannot rid ourselves of this ambivalent part of motherhood. We must harbour it and bare it, but manage it under proper circumstances, an in a way that does not damage thsoe around us - like our children.
Jeffrey Cohen sketched out his seven thesis of monsters in Monster Studies, or seven ways that monsters represent our cultural and social fears. Two of them can be used to look at the Babadook. Monsters border the possible. In some aspects, we see this on old maps, where unknown seas where marked with “Here be Dragons”. But the monster can also monitor the borders of social and cultural possibilities. It shows us what we should or shouldn’t be doing. The Babadook borders what is socially expected and possible of mothers. Likewise, the Babadook stands at the threshold of becoming - another one of the monster theses. Here, the Babadook marks the possibilities of monstrous becomings for motherhood. It demonstrates to us that motherhood is not the flowers and pleasantries that society likes to paint it as. It’s hard work. It’s pain and suffering, but also moments of joy. But we are expected to hide those other bits away, pretend that everything is fine. The Babadook demonstrates the place where these moments consume the mother, and mark her as a social monster.
These feelings we have are always wanted to be let in, wrapping at our door to the rhythm of ba-ba-dook-dook-dook. But they can be exorcised. They cannot be completely let go. We should not deny it, but also should not allow it to consume us. They must be managed, cared for, and held within the special places of our homes.