Movie Review: DIE, MY LOVE

When my first kid was a few weeks old, I was sobbing on the couch and my husband was arguing with me instead of helping me, so I stood up with the baby to get some tissue from the bathroom and pulled the bathroom door completely off with one hand. Now, the bathroom had been hastily added on by the previous owners and the door was made of plywood and moonshine, but still, I aped the door out of its frame while holding an infant. It both amused and freaked us the fuck out. No one but the door was hurt, and although it was unhinged to unhinge a door, I remember being extremely clear that I wasn't going to let anyone- including myself- hurt the baby. My husband? Him I woulda happily stabbed in the eyeball.

When I watched DIE, MY LOVE (starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and LaKeith Stanfield, and directed by Lynne Ramsay (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN), who also wrote it with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, based on a French novel by Ariana Harwicz), I felt seen. I wondered why we don't all have door-destroying stories of early motherhood.

The mom in this story is like the mom in NIGHTBITCH (Amy Addams, directed/written by Marielle Heller and Rachel Yoder- from whose novel it was adapted) in that they're exceptionally funny, weird, dynamic people before having kids. They were both artists of some sort and prior to moving a kid-friendly place, they had careers/prospects of careers in cities in art. And then they were alone in a big house in the suburbs/farm country, responsible for a baby mostly by themselves 24 hrs a day month after month after month.

In this case, the J. Lawrence character was a writer from New York, a sexually dynamic, fun, silly, super physical and slightly chaotric arist of a human. Her boyfriend loved her for all of that, and convinced her to move to Nowhere, Montana, to live for presumably free in a family house where his uncle had graphically died. They have a baby and he drinks and sleeps and travels for work and she is there, doing the mundane and lonely tasks of motherhood until all of her color fades. She finds this confusing and irritating, boring, stressful, and also adores and is acutely present for her kid. But she misses sex. She misses creativity and passion and she misses herself. She tries in fits to integrate the self she knew to the self she now has to be, but mostly just floats to the bottom and stays there, in a postpartum fugue funk having probable hallucinations, irritable exchanges with her bf, and violently hurting herself.

I think the message with both these characters is that the more you FEEL as a person, the more there is to miss when you're not allowed to be a full person anymore. It's a harder, further fall, maybe, if you're vivid before the mundanity of caregiving takes over. By the end, this mom has concluded she's able to both caregive and be herself. It's too much trying to person or create art when it's all just hard and drab and same, same, same. Day and night, season to season, the same black hole reaches to keep her.

And...yeah. I get that. All of it. In both these depressing, angst-filled films, I found myself laughing with glee. "THAT'S FUCKING IT RIGHT THERE!" I hissed, scaring the other movie theater patrons.

And then the men in the films get really nervous about the women's bizarre behavior. Afterall, women are the mandated energy curators of the marriage and the family and so when we're miserable and struggling, the people around us lose the usual bump of good feelings and miss our executive functioning. They wonder what's wrong with us- how are we broken, why are we failing at this natural task of nurturing? Don't we understand the rules?

And doesn't she know how good she has it!? A stay-at-home-mom is considered lucky, beyond privileged, and in some ways it is, but also, after kids, it's not like staying home in any home she knew. It's not like she gets to rest and be merry in her sanctuary. None of this home is about her. It's all about the other people in the house and she's the guardian and host, the live-in staff. She IS the home but unless she finds the time, energy, and focus to manage both the house and the her, no one else is doing it and both will fall to disrepair.

In this film, when things get really dire for her, the husband half-heartedly acknowledges that he could help more. He also brings home a dog that does nothing but howl and bark all the time and gets angry with her when she notices and complains. When the self-harm is too much to ignore, he finally gets her professional help.

And there's relief in that. There's introspection, healing, sleep, some creativity starts to emerge again...but when she's released to her life, the beast that's taken over for the woman, that makes it possible for her to parent but not to EXIST, returns and she has to choose her kid getting cared for or herself. I'll let you watch it to see what you think she chooses.

This movie is fascinating. You really can't look away from Jennifer Lawrence. She's SO embodied and strange and she continues her very cool tradition of only doing nude scenes that are profoundly unsexy (like in No Hard Feelings where she beats up some guy on the beach while buck-ass neked). The music is bananas. The colors and sparkles and the way we follow people around by their feet is wild. Characters and plot points may or may not have happened (affairs, horses, lip wounds) and the time frame is all left to impression- it's dreamy and tense and gives you a sense of the eternity of a hot day of nothing.

I suppose these types of movies could be seen as bummers but I see them as fresh air. It means I'm not the only one. More than just me can't believe this is really what I have to do to be a mom and sometimes I do just wants to throw myself through a glass door or burn it all to the ground, just to feel something, just to watch it burn.

Also, as someone who's trying to get books published about women dealing with the reality of being women, I find it very encouraging that movies/ books like these are marketable. Huzz-ah. Will there be social change from acknowedging our truths? Maybe by the time my grandkids' robots have babies there will be. This is a start, anyway.