toni-collette-in-hereditary

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/hereditary-horror-movie-mothers-cant-run-home/"></div>One of the most unnerving incidents in Hereditary, Ari Aster’s deeply unnerving new horror movie, doesn’t happen onscreen. It only comes close to happening at all.
The almost-cataclysm involves Toni Collette’s character, Annie, our main portal into Aster’s meticulously crafted nightmare world. In a scene about halfway through the movie, Annie discusses her sleepwalking — a nightmarish habit in and of itself — with a friend. Through Collette’s devastated, endlessly watchable features, Annie describes the night that forever changed her relationship with her daughter and son: she awoke standing over their bunk bed, having apparently sleepwalked into their room, drenched in paint thinner. The children were covered in it, too — and she was gripping a box of matches.
That she woke up — or woke herself up — just before committing a horrific act of unconscious violence might have been due to the strength of her waking motherly instinct, or it might have been a stroke of luck. While Annie usually acts with motherly protectiveness, and insists that what she did in sleep is unfathomable to her, we’re left guessing, uneasy, lacking clarity about her motivations. Annie’s mixed signals in this moment, and throughout the film, make her psychology and subjectivity central to Hereditary, a genre rarity. Horror has long leaned on mothers as oversimplified manifestations of good or evil, symbolic placeholders for grander concepts but not full human beings in their own right. By situating Annie’s nuanced experience at the center of its narrative, Hereditary is a horror movie not only plagued by a mother, but actually about one.
Motherhood is so regularly investigated in horror that it is often considered its own subgenre; because we perceive maternal responsibility as universally high-stakes, and because we understand maternal actions to engender far-reaching, intergenerational consequences, motherhood is a subject ripe for horror exploration and exploitation. An onscreen inversion of the typically maternal, destruction or dysfunction where we anticipate nurturance, is really scary. It taps into trepidation about where and with whom we can assume unconditional safety, which makes the “bad” mother an easy, effectively freaky horror trope. Women who mother poorly — negligently, excessively, selfishly, recklessly — are the stuff of collective cultural nightmares, so they recur onscreen incredibly often. Much of the precedent was set early on, with bad moms like Psycho’s Norma Bates and Carrie’s Margaret White. Their harmful mothering practices — overabundance and harsh restriction, respectively — had clear, violent aftereffects. Jason Vorhees’s mom — whose fault, admittedly, was loving him too much — followed, slashing her way through one film and inspiring the violence that drove a gratuitous number of Friday the 13th sequels.
The dysfunctional mother is a boring trope. A flat-line threat, a regular movie monster in Ann Taylor slacks. When horror mothers are “good,” they’re rarely more interesting: think of The Shining’s protective and terrified Wendy Torrance, flying across those sprawling hotel grounds to keep her child from Jack Nicholson’s determined axe. Good and bad horror moms alike largely suffer from existing in relation to more central characters: despite the genre’s infatuation with them, mothers rarely get the chance to do more than produce fears or alleviate them. In almost none of these classic cases do we see a mother as a fleshed-out psychological being, which is pretty unfathomable; the layered emotional lives and anxieties of mothers themselves should be fundamental to horror stories that orbit motherhood. Too long were mothers’ actions, rather than their interiorities, mulled over with dread.
An early exception is Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which in 1968 comprehensively explored the mother as intricate horror subject. The film famously follows Mia Farrow’s Rosemary through a nightmare pregnancy: as she carries the baby to term, she grows sick, has terrifying visions, withers away. She loses total bodily integrity, and her insistence that something is deeply wrong with either the pregnancy or the fetus falls on deaf ears (a horror movie with feminist underpinnings if there ever was one, ironic as that is considering Polanski’s track record with girls and women). Although she remains committed throughout most of the film to resolving the discord, she never wants to sacrifice herself, Christ-like, for the baby’s sake either; her sense of present evil, her uncertainty of its origins or its antidote, infuses the film with a maternal ambiguity surprisingly ahead of its time. The horror at the center of Rosemary’s Baby is complicated — it concerns the compulsory maternal responsibility to never choose yourself over your child, and the prospect of losing your body and your independence as you become a mother. And because the film involves tension of unclear origin between this mother and her child, echoing from inside the walls of her pregnant body, questions about fault, hesitant fears about whether the baby would be better off not arriving, plague Rosemary and us, too. The script’s ambivalent layers all issue directly from the mother herself.
There wasn’t a mother as thoughtfully constructed as Rosemary for a very long time. Horror has gained significant critical traction in recent years (clever, artsy, and giddily bizarre signs of genre renaissance like It Follows and The Witch continue to creep into our box offices) and is expanding to include more female voices than ever before; Julia Ducournau and Alice Lowe, for example, both emerged as horror writer-directors to critical acclaim in 2017. Considering such a boom in seriousness and in femaleness, it makes sense that motherhood — a longtime genre staple — is beginning to be reimagined, renegotiated, and treated with more nuance. It’s refreshing, too, that mothers are beginning to be centered within their own horror narratives. But only just.
2014’s The Babadook, an Australian indie written and directed by first-timer Jennifer Kent, was my first inkling of a seismic shift in horror motherhood. Protagonist mom Amelia lost her husband on the night she gave birth to their child (he crashed the car on the way to the hospital, killing only himself). When we catch up with Amelia and her son a few years later, it is clear they are still suffocating under the weight of that evening. Sam is a difficult child, with erratic behavior that upsets and disturbs Amelia; he has inherited some of her sadness, and continues to serve as a too-painful reminder of what is gone. Perhaps she blames him, perhaps she wishes she could be discharged of her duty caring for him on her own, but she loves him, too — it’s complicated. Eventually their house becomes haunted by the titular storybook demon, as horror houses are wont to do. But by the time that action unfolds, it’s abundantly clear that the visitor is born of maternal anguish. Of mother-child friction, begrudging responsibility, turmoil where there should be domestic tranquility. There is welcome complexity in such an apparition; because the Babadook emerges from the darkest folds of Amelia’s psyche, she must protect her child from what is, ultimately, a slice of herself.
Toni Collette’s Annie really does pick up where Amelia left us, both because her emotionality is centralized in Hereditary and because she’s a nuanced, troubled mother who troubles in turn. Annie’s misfortunes come, as signposted, through her genealogy, through the maternal line. Hereditary thus explores the horror of maternal legacy — how, and by whose hand, we’re infecting the next generation  — in a concrete sense. The death of Annie’s own mother, Ellen, sets the plot in motion.
Although Ellen is never onscreen alive — when the film starts, it’s the day of her open-casket funeral, our only glimpse of her — she maintains an insistent presence through the whole grim sequence of events. “She was a private person, with private rituals,” Annie says in her opening scene eulogy, and admits that it feels strange to be talking about Ellen at all. We learn, later, that Ellen likely had dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personalities. And that there was familial tension for many years: enough so that Ellen was banned from seeing her eldest grandchild, Peter, after he was born. When Annie had Charlie, her daughter, Ellen worked her way back in. “She sunk her hooks in her,” Annie says, an eerie metaphor. Charlie certainly seems to be the family member most affected by Ellen’s death — they were close. In yet another scene, it is implied that they were very close — that Ellen undertook (perhaps successfully?) breastfeeding Charlie. Something is deeply unsettling about this sort of motherhood-by-proxy, particularly when we perceive dysfunction in the (grand)mother figure.
How this family is being plagued remains unclear for protracted stretches — there might be something supernatural going on, or perhaps something more psychological is at the center of their domestic strife. Mental health issues run deep in this film, DNA-deep: Ellen’s DID, Annie’s fixations — her subconscious running amok at night, while she sleepwalks the halls of her house. Charlie gives us strange vibes, too: she is isolated from people her age, seems not-so-well-adjusted, makes cut-and-paste art projects with household items and bits of dead animals. Aster has woven a thickly melodramatic film atmosphere, dreamy and dreary like the best horror is.
In one sense, a hereditary menace is totally beyond Annie’s control, like an inherited house ghost that can’t be exorcised. But in another, much more interesting sense, a threat that originates with Ellen also lives in Annie. She is its carrier, and holds part of the responsibility for its effects on her children. Annie’s inconsistency further complicates matters: she swears to protect the kids against their inheritance with persuasive sincerity, but with eerie recollections like that of the near-immolation, the boundary between Annie and the Ellen-instigated “true” threat sometimes feels thin. Or maybe Annie just wants to give up fighting genealogy. In another crucial scene — which is mercifully revealed to take place in Annie’s dream — she tells Peter she didn’t want to have him. “I tried to have a miscarriage,” she says, and then claps a hand over her mouth like she can’t believe what she just admitted. We’re left stewing in impenetrable questions about her motivations: was trying to miscarry preventive protection, getting the children out of the picture before they could experience ghastly harm? Or is Annie actually the kind of horror movie mother we fear most — one who doesn’t want to be a mother at all?
The answers in Hereditary are mixed, as they were in The Babadook. Because we are granted access to Annie’s complex interiority  — those thickly opaque dreamscapes, her rapidly shifting internal monologues and desires — we experience each tense, confused, and ambivalent contour of her emotional state as a narrative turn. When we see distress in her eyes, disturbed recognition of her own culpability, we feel it with her. Which isn’t to say we aren’t distrustful of her — it’s just more complicated than that. This new horror mother, when compared to the unambiguous monster mother of horror history (or, for that matter, the angelic martyr mother), is much more like a woman in peril we might recognize, terrifying sleepwalking habit aside: she’s distressed, equivocal, responding to discord with frantic imperfection. She is scary, and also afraid. To have such nuance permeate repeated tropes is a welcome addition, particularly for women characters, whose subjectivities in a heavily male-dominated genre have been glossed over and flattened again and again. Besides, as a horror fan who appreciates a good scare, I want a domestic situation that hasn’t been written and rewritten to death. Something creepy for its unpredictability. An uncharted script — the truly knotty, unforeseeable stuff — will keep you up at night.
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Hereditary and Horror Movie Mothers You Can’t Run Home To

Hereditary and Horror Movie Mothers You Can’t Run Home To

arrival

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/arrival-circular-storytelling-arriving-anywhere/"></div>Stories arc. We learned this early.
In the eighth grade, our English teachers drew dramatic white parabolas across their boards to demonstrate narrative build-up, climax, and denouement. Up and down again, segmented to identify discrete moments in the plot of A Tale of Two Cities — that chalky curve frowned across every classroom.
In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, playwright Sarah Ruhl cites the arc as the most common narrative shape, dating back to Aristotle at least. She’s writing specifically about theatre here, but her observations are applicable to novels, films, a million modes of narrative art that all tend to default to this comfortable chronological bow. Beginning, middle, end. Ruhl imagines options for breaking the mold: plays that move like wiggly lines, or contain sharp, unexpected drop-offs, without apology. Plays shaped like vases, somehow. She’s sailing along possible narrative slopes, yearning to be surprised.
The quiet Denis Villeneuve-directed Arrival, an alien-encounter movie starring Amy Adams, echoes Ruhl’s musings in unexpected ways. Arrival is a remarkably poetic film, all soft light and wide fields and rippling dreamscapes. It’s about communication on every level: the interpersonal, hopes and fears whispered between plastic folds of a military tarp; the international, translations carefully relayed over secure phone lines; and eventually, nearly impossibly, the intergalactic. And, in its big beating heart, Arrival is fundamentally about stories and structure.
The movie opens on the alien arrival — their ship appears, seemingly overnight, in a field in Montana. The U.S. military plucks Louise, a renowned linguistics specialist played perfectly by Adams, from her cozy university office. She is tasked with learning the alien tongue and asking the creatures what their purpose is on Earth. Whether they have language at all is her first question, although they do emit deep, echoing moans — chilling astral dispatches, revealed first over a flimsy tape recorder.
Louise is a quiet woman in soft clothes. She clenches her jaw while she listens, concentrating. Her breathing is labored when she first enters the alien vessel — an onyx-smooth egg, 1,500 feet high — escorted by a few men with some laughably earthly guns. “HUMAN,” she writes on a dry erase board, holding it up to the visitors. Through the transparent divider that keeps their atmosphere from mixing with ours, they seem to regard her message interestedly, although it’s hard to be sure. They’re squid-like — with seven limbs, an elephant’s rough skin, and without anything we can recognize as eyes. They float to cover distance, suspended in their milky haze. When they’re completely still, they could be ancient, many-rooted trees.
Much to the displeasure of her restless army supervisors, for whom answers can’t come quickly enough, Louise allows the language to unfurl itself slowly, over months. She learns that the creatures — christened “Heptapods,” for their seven legs — communicate meaning not through their eerie vocalizations, but through written language: a series of circular symbols that issue from their limbs like smoke into the air and dissipate, after a moment. Each resembles a coffee ring stain — perfectly, coolly round. Like something absently left on a sleek surface, only to be wiped away.
Human communication, both on the sentence level and at the level of story craft, depends on sequential structure: subject “we,” verb “go,” dependent clause, “to the beach.” Or that forward-moving arc, stretching long through the belly of a Dickins novel. The Heptapod symbols, by contrast, comprise a “non-linear orthography,” which means they have no forward or backward direction. The aliens can use a single circle, with a few peripheral flourishes, to encompass a whole thought or moment — the experience of being at the beach, you and I sharing it. They communicate it all at once, not beginning or ending anywhere, not happening in any particular order or at any particular time.
Part of what’s bugging Sarah Ruhl in her essay about the arc speaks directly to this issue of circles and lines. She’s hoping to shake up the arc, to imagine new story shapes, ones that can accomplish something different. But any human story must begin somewhere and end somewhere else. Everything about the Heptapods, though, is literally or metaphorically round, without end and equally without beginning: their faceless bodies, their elliptical ship, their written ciphers, those spindly ink blots on the air. The creatures seem a suggestion to Ruhl, an answer to a question she only half asked. To be circular is to be unburdened, otherworldly.
It’s fair to wonder what the Heptapods gain by liberating themselves from beginning-middle-end structure — is this really so much better than our human modes of communication? It’s not long into Arrival before we get an answer, through a shadow-explanation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics: the Heptapods’ minds work the way their sentences do. Their linguistic circularity reflects their non-linear understanding of time and their hyper-sensitivity to the universe. They are able to perceive events well beyond their own immediate purview and outside what we conceive of as the present moment. It’s the largest logical leap the movie asks us to make — from spherical symbols and soft bodies to rounded mental capacity — but it’s wonderful to go along for the ride. Perhaps these seven-legged creatures, these dreamy voyagers in their hovering black egg, have rectified some basic Earthly problems. I love to imagine them chuckling, not unkindly, at our crude little buildings, our sharp, breakable bones. Our unbending perception of things, and of ourselves.
“Structure implies subtraction or repression,” Ruhl writes in her essay, suggesting that some experiences just can’t fit along the line of a story or a sentence. Perhaps our most experiential, inexpressible, structure-less moments need to be flattened or amputated in order to be clearly conveyed — the instance of ballooning anticipation, say, that meets you at the water’s edge, or the way your legs carry you differently after a loss. How, exactly and completely, can we translate these amorphous experiences into neat white arcs?
In her brilliant memoir The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson asserts that when we place any lived experience into the structured confines of language or storytelling, “all that is unnamable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.” Naming things, of course, requires delineation and categorization: Nelson describes a great human tension between the “evolutionary need to put everything into categories” (what is clearly dangerous? What is definitely food?) and “the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we all actually live.” Humans crave organization, taxonomy, a neat rhythm to our chaotic existence. But once we successfully separate the edible from the poisonous, subdividing and labeling everything comes into conflict with the messy wholeness of our real lives. Nelson’s gender nonbinary partner embodies this by rejecting gendered categories, refusing the term “trans” — instead repeating, to each nosy inquirer, “I’m not on my way anywhere.” We must wonder, thinking about Nelson and her partner, what gets lost when each person is expected to fit neatly into a male or a female box? What disappears when we try to cram an experience into a sentence, or a narrative? If every story must contain a clearly delineated beginning, middle, and end, what happens to its shades of in-between?
Arrival’s alien communication doesn’t subtract from experience, or place things overly-neatly into categories, or delete the unnamable, or “ride roughshod over specificity” (Nelson, again), because it is round in shape and content. It is not subdivided or chronologized; it can contain endless shades, immeasurable nuance. The Heptapods can conceive of and communicate infinite stories, broad and nebulous and boundless as galaxies.
We can’t achieve their perfect roundness — we have forward-facing bodies and are shackled to our linearity, the endless march of the clock on the kitchen wall — but we can settle for the next best things. “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and not able to express),” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, a linguist and philosopher who heavily influenced Nelson, “is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.” He was not, of course, writing in Heptapod, but he was attempting nonetheless to broaden his horizons.
“I remember moments in the middle,” Louise says in voiceover. When she says this, she’s reflecting perhaps on her months with the creatures, or perhaps on her whole life — and we know, in the terrific dark of the theater, that her elevated moments have emerged from Nelson’s inexpressible, unnamable soup. Because she has come in contact with the creatures, Louise has learned to embrace the rounded blur. She’s leaning away from the poles. She’s de-emphasizing restrictive edges and extremes.
Perhaps we, too, can elevate the middle — we can stop plotting only sharp, discrete events on a timeline. We can relax our subdividing and labeling, accept instead that some things cannot or should not be classified. Not everything needs a place within a structure, including us; perhaps we can become more comfortable with not always belonging, not always being on our way somewhere. We can take a more holistic approach to the universe — even though we travel through it not in eggs, but in cars — and maybe the stories we tell can look less like arcs, and more like coffee rings.
Arrival isn’t flashy or loud the way another alien-encounter movie might be; the spaceship doesn’t beep or thunder, and the aliens drift like ghosts, or like somethings from the soundless deep. The human characters learn to temper their desires to act rashly, move too jarringly, or fire weapons off like comets in the night. This is the stuff of moderation, communication, and translation. This, too, is the in-between. I tend to think it’s better there.
The aliens are, interestingly, mortal. It’s tempting to think otherwise, given how separate they are from our sense of time and endings, but they have distinct expiration dates as we do. Late in the movie, once our characters are quite comfortable shifting between the alien language and English, one of the creatures uses a symbol that Louise translates not to mean “dead,” but “in death process.” That’s a linguistic subtlety emblematic of the whole matter: they conceive of the end not as an end at all, but as a perpetuation of the life process, more of the same. A continuing story. A closed circle.
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On Arrival, Circular Storytelling, and Not Arriving Anywhere

On Arrival, Circular Storytelling, and Not Arriving Anywhere

Amanda Feinman is completing her Master's in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU Journalism. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.