Nightbitch, a film about a frustrated housewife who starts turning into a were-dog, actually resonated a lot with me as a trans woman... until it defanged itself and got weirdly domesticated.
Sometimes I feel like the only way I know how to be a woman is to be hysterical.
Winter in Seattle. Each drizzly day the cloud cover sinks down and twilight descends somewhere around 3:30 in the afternoon. My mood sinks with it. I'm in the kitchen making a veritable cauldron of split pea soup (which I don't particularly love but which produces a lot of leftovers) mulling over this last week, in which each day sank, uniformly, into the tar pit of evening, nothing accomplished. My throat is sore--winter renders my respiratory system frail. I consider all that must be made ready for Christmas and New Years and want to reach for a fainting couch. I feel myself at the head of a long lineage of harried and overwhelmed housewives. On her brilliant new album Everybody Scream, Florence Welch remarks she "did my best, tried to impress, my childhood dream made flesh/And my dresses and my flowering sadness, so like a woman to profit from her madness". Of course I'm a real woman. Don't I need a sedative just like one?
Nightbitch is about a housewife who gets so stressed out that she turns into a weredog. Don't get too excited, it's not that good a film, but it's a film whose spirit I do get--hence all the, hah, bitching in the prior paragraph. I think, in fact, that the film has broader demographic resonance than its creators might have anticipated. Certainly our entire chat full of queers and furries hooted and hollered when the extra nipples showed up on lead character M-
wait.
no surely that can't be right.
"Mother"? I'm looking at the wikipedia page in disbelief, surely it was just my own shaky-at-best memory and this woman has a fucking name-
"Mother" is stifled in her role taking care of a son ("Son") while her husband ("Husband") goes on lengthy business trips. She feels alienated from other mothers, regrets her abandoned art career, anxiously watches her identity dissolve into endless homemaking tasks. And, eventually, she starts turning into a dog. The film is... actually pretty fun during these early moments? It feels a little unfair to foreground the fact that the main characters are all named so archetypally, because it's not something I think any of us picked up on just watching the film. We were too busy watching a grown woman eating out of a dog bowl and dressing her kid up with a collar! I'm not kidding when I say we were hooting and hollering for some of this. While I'd never call the writing great, clearly something about this narrative of a woman deciding to go a bit feral in the face of a profoundly unfulfilling social order resonated with something of our own experiences. Why else would we be here, who we are, if we couldn't put an arm around a given housewife and say, hey, it's a rough gig ain't it?
I don't quite know what to do with this juxtaposition of the cloyingly mundane--the tropisms of cishet women's writing that I'm only struggling to come up with another term for because I worry "chick lit" is misogynist--with the downright odd--the insistence on this not being a werewolf story but a weredog story. Apart from the ever present most terrible of horrors (second hand embarrassment) it's gleeful to watch a woman get to go sicko mode, and goodness knows she earns the right. Is this really what cishet men in monogamous relationships are like? Cause wow! Glad I opted out of that!
And even the more chick-lit qualities of the text do resonate with me, particularly in moments when the Second Shift threatens to drown me. My problems are not "Mother's" problems, to be clear. I haven't got a child nor am I capable of bearing one (we can hash out the ups and downs of that some other time). I also don't have an absentee husband, I have a couple of girlfriends who care for me quite a lot. I just also have a compulsion to demonstrate my usefulness and proper gender performance via household tasks that I eschew help with, in circumstances where I have limited physical energy and mental focus, resulting in a vicious cycle of expending all my time and attention on these traditionally female-coded tasks and feeling like I've ceded all chance at proving myself in some external artistic career.
There's a politically incorrect satisfaction to such gendered self sacrifice, though. It's a gnarly thing to admit given I'm in a relationship with two other trans women, that I get some affirmation out of casting myself in the role of suffering housewife who slaughters her own career on the altar of supporting others. Even within our lesbian triad, it's perversely validating to be "the woman in the relationship". What an ugly thing to say! I feel like a real sick puppy.
What I'm given to understand, from cis women describing their own experiences, is this affirmation through constriction is by no means exclusive to transsexuals. A rigid system might feel imprisoning but it also offers a scaffold to lean your weight on in the face of an uncertain world. I guess this is where I break with the film, which ultimately decides to reconstruct adult human femalehood as a solid bastion against the world. My housewife self-construction is deliberately a bit camp and something I do with discomfort, mindful of what I surrender in the process, and what it imposes on my lovers. (Even an identity built around being submissive is not "safe", free from things it imposes on the self and others.) I identify with the archetype of the frustrated housewife but I don't want to identify as the frustrated housewife. I don't want to reify it as the Thing I Am. This film wants to reify it so hard. It wants to reify it so much it may as well have a tank full of Reified clones all waiting to be used as the Evangelion dummy pilot system.
Which is weird for a film about a woman turning into a dog because heterosexuality sucks so much! The film has a way out, and it doesn't really need to be a moral or realistic one, because it's a horror comedy film. It can just indulge in the fantasy of totally upending society, and if its creators or its audience are squeamish, well, it's just a film in the end, right? Except... it's not really a horror comedy film. It's been billed as body horror, but for Cronenberg fans there's just not an awful lot here... aside from one gruesome scene where a tail emerges from a pus filled boil on "Mother's" tailbone. That was pretty good. But the actual dog transformations mostly sit firmly in the realm of wish fulfillment. Fair enough; if vampires get to sex it up so should werew- er, weredogs. Tonally speaking, most dramatic horror is reserved for the period late in the film where things just sort of drag to a breaking point and "Mother" finally threatens divorce (my god what is "Husband" without "Marriage?!"). But the horror film trappings basically fall away entirely by the final quarter, where the film pivots back to being a feel good film about women getting in touch with themselves and each other (🛑 NOT HOMOEROTICALLY THO).
In the latter part of the film, "Mother" ships "Son" off to stay with "Husband" for a while--he is cartoonishly incompetent at raising a kid, we're talking hapless idiot at the start of an infomercial levels of incompetent, Home Improvement Tim Allen incompetent--so she can get back in touch with her Art Practice, which seems to be... just about every art practice from found object sculpture to taxidermy to painting. This liberatory period rebalances their marriage and "Husband" is able to understand that being a mother (a "Mother") is just, so fucking amazing, that mothers... are wild fucking animals and being a suburbanite is fucking savage. (A lot of the dialogue in the film sounds basically like this.) Everything gets put back comfortably where it belongs with no casualties.
Well, none that matter, anyway.
See, all the wish fulfillment stuff is fine, but it feels discordant when she murders the family cat. I mean, look, the film does play this bit of savagery for horror at first. It's, textually, a sign she's "not doing well". Only, there's an entire scene, later, of the assorted mothers in the film giggling over their diverse executions of family and childhood pets--"benign neglect" of fish because one "didn't want to clean the fucking tank", and a parakeet who was deliberately turned loose. Having had significant experience with the joy and grief of all of these types of animal, and ample understanding of how vulnerable and dependent they are on the grace of us humans, I find the giggly "oh you're so bad" tone of the scene stomach turning! The message seems to be: oh you know how you feel fucked up about murdering a pet you don't like and feel burdened by? Well we all do that, honey, welcome to being a woman. Yikes!
What disturbs me isn't so much the content, but my anxious sense that the film has no understanding of how disturbing the scene should be. In a theater I'd be looking around nervously to see if any middle aged women are responding a bit too enthusiastically, and I don't know, I just don't feel concerned in that way when watching a character like Alexia in Titane mow her way through a house full of totally blameless victims. I feel empowered to enjoy horror kills with peers precisely because of the distance of fantasy: no one thinks Alexia is a good person even if there are elements of her we might find relatable. I have a whole list now of female-focused horror films that often lean towards the empowerment side of the spectrum (Lisa Frankenstein and The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster stand out) and none of them are quite so... frivolous with their violence as this scene.
I feel nervous leveling this critique because it feels like an inversion of criticism I loathe, the old attacks on video games, pornography, and the corrupting influence on the innocent of the worst of the lot: Comic Books! I can accept the excesses of other media with aplomb... do I balk here simply because of internalized misogyny, discomfort at seeing strong women talking about their powerful wombs?
Yet, as a queer person I'm keenly aware of how the structure of the american family encourages adults--fathers AND mothers--to treat pets and children alike as dumb objects for their satisfaction and fulfillment. Reactionary attacks on children's autonomy, the duty of the state to provide an education, and broadly on artistic self expression of all sorts employ the archetypal figure of the "Mother" protecting her young from corruption as the thin edge of their wedge.
I have to remind myself, too, that I'm not a thoughtless and inattentive viewer. Like I'm not making a mistake interpreting the ending, where the family (the "Family") is depicted in a tent in the woods (which metaphorically represents their nice house they own in the suburbs) and "Mother's" voice over, thick with emotion and profundity, states that we have and will always be animals huddled together in a cave for warmth, becoming one being. It just straightforwardly is what it is: she got enough space to make some art, so actually there's no problems with the family as structure, and in fact motherhood is a transcendental and divine state of affairs that stretches back into time immemorial and will stretch into the future for all duration.
Then we get a brief scene of her doing home birth. Can you blame me for worrying a little bit about what that might culturally signify? I was going to call this "free birth" but I gather that's a more specific and pernicious cult variant, but given the dialogue about "you've done this, your mother's done this," it feels certainly of a piece with the contemporary RFK Jr, Make America Healthy Again spread of pseudoscience and quackery in the guise of returning to "natural solutions."
If you've been here for a while, all of this might sound familiar. I wrote a similarly excoriating review of the miniseries Nine Perfect Strangers, which ends with the seeming villain-protagonist Masha just being... completely vindicated in her methods of nonconsensually drugging people with psychedelics to force them to reckon with traumatic experiences. That series had a similarly unsettling attitude towards medicine, positioning even something as innocuous as asthma medication as capable of single-handedly driving a teen to suicide, but "natural" psychedelics as the key to solving all of humanity's mental problems. I described feeling unsettled by the way the show's ultimately glowy hallmark original feel-good qualities made for a bright and appealing packaging of reactionary anti-science ideologies. If anything, given the absolute lunacy we're being subjected to now at the highest levels of the federal government, I feel I was a little soft on the show. Inevitably I view Nightbitch's conviction about cis women's sacred and mysterious birth giving abilities through the lens of the health hokum that has proliferated as the already dysfunctional capitalist healthcare system has ground closer and closer to collapse.
Inextricably linked to this MAHA read of the film's subtext is my identity as a trans woman, living with other trans people, many of whom no longer speak to their parents. In this sappy finale "Mother" also states that she is so completely linked to "Son" that at times it's impossible to tell where she ends and he begins. A nice sentiment I suppose, but not one that provides much autonomy to the child, does it? What happens if or when "Son" turns out to actually be "Daughter" and goes off to "Seattle" to "Fuck" other "Daughters" in a nontraditional household configuration? Would that still be acceptable, or... would "Mother" start asking what chemicals, or what gender ideologies, or what corrupting gay child predators, separated her from "Son" who--by nothing less than Natural Law itself--BELONGS to her? This film and its conception of womanhood love domesticity, and it's hard to imagine, as a queer woman, engaging in shared struggle with it, not when defenses of domesticity can get explicitly so savage. I want to reach out a comforting hand to these women, pat them on the shoulder, but I'm afraid of that hand of friendship getting bitten off.
This Has Been
Reject The Nuclear Family And Return To Puppy
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