Babies all the way down…
On natal ambivalence
Maura Delpero’s VERMIGLIO
Magnus von Horn’s THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE
Kaveh Daneshmand’s ENDLESS SUMMER SYNDROME
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?: ON AMBIVALENCE AND CHOICE
Weighing the pros and cons of having kids, Merle Bombardieri, the psychotherapist author of The Baby Decision, addresses fence sitters on the matter: “The default should be child-free.” From there, Bombardieri sets out to bust myths, making a case for the one and done family because, in her view, expectant mothers don’t know if they’ll take to being a mother, or if they’ll even like their own child. Two recent, notably un-American films, Vermiglio and The Girl with the Needle, give us female protagonists who fail to connect with their newborns. The stories get darker than postpartum depression, with the heroines sliding into a “get this thing away from me” mode of postpartum abjection-rejection.
Both films are set in the past in dire, impoverished situations where there are simply too many infant mouths to feed. Needle takes place in dreary post-WWI Copenhagen, while Vermiglio plays out, largely, in a deceptively charming remote village in the Italian Alps as WWII lurches to a close. Needle presents itself from the get-go as a suggestively nasty yet artful horror film, showing distorted predatory faces that grin and morph within dark black-and-white frames. The atmosphere conjures Béla Tarr’s dreary dampness — and we can assume Diane Arbus and Eugène Atget made it into the film’s pre-production mood boards.
Vermiglio’s rural family portrait opens with a vast wintry landscape before entering a country classroom, observing cute children at varying ages, three of whom belong to a family of ten, and of which Lucia, our enchanting, watchful center of interest, is one of the eldest. Lucia is instantly drawn to a new boy in town: a handsome Sicilian deserter who, though all but mute, soon proposes marriage and impregnates her (not necessarily in that order), but meets an ill fate before Lucia gives birth. The posthumous scandal he inflicts on the family prompts Lucia's younger sisters to insist on lives of chastity, after their aunt describes her pregnant niece as a “ruined” woman. “Who is going to want her now?” the aunt harshly quips.
In Needle, Karoline, a beleaguered factory worker, is seduced by the factory’s aristocratic manager, who knocks her up after an improbable midday tryst in a filthy alleyway. The man retracts his marriage offer when confronted with his mother’s inevitable disapproval, and Karoline winds up unemployed and destitute in the midst of a reunion with her missing husband, a returned soldier whose masked face has been horrifically mangled in the war. After aggressively casting him out from her shabby apartment, Karoline’s desperate attempt at a self-administered abortion (applying the steel needle of the film’s title, in case you’re wondering) leads to an encounter with a seemingly benevolent woman named Dagmar, who says she can find a home for the baby once it comes — at a price, naturally.
Karoline goes into labor in the midst of a new job hauling potatoes. She blacks out but wakes with a restless baby, and hightails it to Dagmar’s candy shop — a front for her underground adoption agency. Dagmar takes Karoline under her wing, and an uneasy camaraderie develops as more babies are brought to the shop for delivery to other families, with Karoline putting her untapped baby milk to use. We gradually learn (spoiler alert) that the adoption racket is a front for Dagmar’s serial baby murders (she smothers them, in case you’re wondering). When the killer is eventually put on trial for her crimes, she declares herself a savior for helpless women in dire need, courageous enough to dispose of these unwanted, unsustainable new lives.
Dagmar’s monstrous pragmatism floats just beneath the surface of the film, which adheres to Karoline’s unknowing but slowly-dawning point of view. Karoline’s motherly instincts begin to flow like the milk in her breasts, despite her abjection, her failure to love her own child. In the final scene, she’s drawn to an orphanage full of sleeping babies and unwanted children. Within this bleak prison-like setting, the filmmaker stages a stark yet tender fairy-tale ending.
Where Needle presents a story framed and ruled by insidious matriarchy, in which even the children reveal themselves to be nastily needy little beasts, Vermiglio is set in a world that is fundamentally patriarchal, though not without tension. Lucia’s father elects only one child from his charming brood to continue schooling (since he can afford to send only one). Both films depict palpably cruel societal orders and track their protagonists arcs from a raw aversion to motherhood to an eventual submission that feels like a straining leap from doom. The transformation is perhaps inevitable — Rosemary’s Baby remains the most concise role model here — though the path to motherly acceptance is helped along by sheer practicality. Karoline cleans up her act, apparently, despite druggy withdrawal symptoms (from opioids) and decides to join the circus, reuniting with her husband, the star freak in a traveling circus. Lucia, in the relative warmth of rural Italy, experiences some measure of luck — giving birth in a barn to a healthy child and not dying in the bargain. To dwell in postpartum depression is a luxury these women can’t afford as they come to terms with their degradation, finding a singular connection in a world brimming with orphans.
While Karoline and Lucia each bring themselves to a motherly turning point, sublimating one form of romance for another, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to embrace the non-choice of their depleted wartime existence. In interviews, the director of Needle Magnus von Horn emphasizes the political parallels between the world of his movie and the current situation in Poland, where he lives, a country of highly restrictive abortion laws. Eastern Europe’s conservative pro-natal agenda has tightened its grip, consolidating the forces of nationalism and Catholicism, in similar fashion to America’s evangelical politics.
Of course, these weren’t the only two films to come out this year about the maternal spiral. The most anti-natal film I’ve seen this year is reliably French: Kaveh Daneshmand’s perverse mystery whodunnit Endless Summer Syndrome, wherein a picture-parfait famille — a successful lawyer mom, her too-hot-to-handle husband, and their adopted kids — goes up in flames following a scene of (frankly titillating) explicit carnality with dad. Confronted by his transgressive lust, the wife plays a little game of roulette with her family’s fate, sprinkling poison into a summer cocktail — a fittingly deranged move that spells her own demise.
But who needs incest to tip you into anti-natalism? Facing the world at large —a world of suffering, unrelenting war, environmental instability, precarious economies, uncaring healthcare systems, etc., etc. — provides one with more than enough good reasons to take on this stance, as humorless and doomy as it may be. And pronatalists like Elon Musk, hellbent on self-propagation, collecting variable mothers on a secluded compound, hardly make baby-making any more enticing. In a significant scene in Vermiglio, weathered local men express scorn for deserters who have settled in the village, waiting out the war. One of them counters: “If all men were cowards, we wouldn’t have any wars.” If all liberal leftists were cowards when it came to having children, then what? Enter Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book providing a distinctly pro-natalist slant in What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice. Writing from left of center, Berg and Wiseman attempt to diagnose a distinctly modern tendency to link decisions against having children to political failures in public policy. While they’re at it, they aggregate contemporary literature’s tendency to consider children in terms of unsettling metaphors: ticking bombs (Rachel Cusk), opiates or black magic (Rivka Galchen), or unrecognizable desire (Sheila Heti).
In Bookforum, Moira Donegan concludes a review of the book suggesting that women with children are perhaps, however latently, envious of women without children, of course the inverse can be true — the cope goes both ways. The real failure of the book, which Donegan articulates, is in the fragments of survey responses in which participants present endorsements of mothering, such as a retired diplomat who describes enjoyment of every stage of her children’s development. The accounts woven into the book come in at random points amid discussions of literature, making for a jarring reading experience.
The authors recognize an element of the hard sell in their account, which they bookend with a chapter from Berg revealing her own experiences before and after the birth of her daughter — punctuated by a return home from the hospital and a question to her husband: “What have we done? Our life was good.” And while her husband reasons with her in that moment, Berg describes motherhood as an exercise in the management of an intermittently psychopathic infant whose fate is merged with her own, transcending death. Lifting from Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing” as a marker of goodness, Berg has made a lifetime commitment that an increasing number of fearful people are shying away from, though it’s hard to imagine many readers closing this volume feeling transformed by her transformation. The book contains a degree of willful ignorance, neglecting to assess the impact each new-born individual has on the planet’s resources, lending credibility to Bombardieri’s persuasive argument for the benefits of the one-and-done family unit. (Bombardieri is absent from the book, though her work is geared to Berg and Wiseman’s fence-sitting readership.)
Throughout I was reminded of this commonplace disavowal: I know very well, but all the same… The authors are aware of our societal ills and political pitfalls, maternal morbidity, and all the risks and uncertainties ahead, but they prefer to promote the notion of good liberals having children nevertheless. Berg and Wiseman tap pop-culture reference points, from Girls to House of Cards to anti-kid commentary from Miley Cyrus and Seth Rogen. Rogen claims that having kids would ruin all the fun in his life, which is a refreshingly matter of fact response to counter the sillier ones, such as saying you don’t want to have kids because of David Benatar-style “life is misery therefore not worth living” bunk philosophy, or because of “hyperobjects” (Timothy Morton’s baroque terminology for climate change and black holes and other vast deep time abstractions beyond our purview), ideas easily enough dispelled. As far as the pop references stretch, it’s curious they don’t discuss Idiocracy, perhaps the strongest case the liberal left can make for having children, if you’re unafraid to say the condescending part out loud: Don’t let the assertively stupid masses overrun the planet and take it down.
The author’s emphasis is rather that life doesn’t depend on a better or improved world to come, yet does depend on collective moral courage and sacrifice: “the ability to recognize the goodness of human life in the future depends on our ability to recognize those things that render our life good at present: our capacity to pursue ends that do not merely gratify our interest, needs, and desires, but those that we recognize to be unconditionally pursuit-worthy.” Passages like these clarify to some extent who their book is primarily for: not for people who really (no, really) can’t afford to raise as much as one child, but the DINKs TikTok-types (dual income no kids) who can afford kids but would rather go to Costco and/or Disneyland without them, and feel a need to brag about their self-serving choices rather than keeping mum about it.
And while on the topic of not keeping mum, former Gagosian gallery director Sarah Hoover’s “radical” memoir The Motherload demonstrates that even with all the hired help you could possibly need, childbirth is still “scary and sad and abusive.” While I initially chafed at the idea of another ultra wealthy white woman telling us about her postpartum depression, if it’s that bad for her, it’s not looking optimistic for the rest of us, is it? Sure, money doesn’t solve all your problems, though it helps if you can outsource everything from housekeeping to meal preparation to “dog systems” and beyond (in case you forgot, Hoover is the wife of artist Tom Sachs, and together they were responsible for the worst job listing for a personal assistant ever posted).
In an excerpt published in Marie Clare, Hoover recounts texting each of her “five best friends” real-time updates as she goes into labor (you glean a lot already from someone who writes “my five best friends” in a sentence). Hoover writes: “Worse than pregnancy and labor and its aftermath, as well as the strange rage toward my husband that lingered in the interstices of my mind like a low-grade fever, was feeling pressured to fall in love with this stranger-baby, who I thought looked not much different than a malnourished frog. All I saw in him were my flaws, the things I’d hated most about myself since childhood. And I’d felt the pain of my homely face so many times in my life; I knew the way it correlated to my value as a person. So when I looked at him—when I looked at this creature I had somehow birthed from my own loins, this being that supposedly was my whole raison d’être—I saw my hideous nose, my weak chin, all the insults from boys on playgrounds written all over him, and I felt like I’d lost my entire life and identity to this ugly baby in one day.” This self-deprecating narcissism is accompanied by a photo of Hoover moments after giving birth, looking sulky yet undeniably pretty. That poor doomed froggy kid… At another point, Hoover explains that motherhood made her grow up and realize what a brat she had been to her own mother. I’m not convinced everyone needs to go through raising children themselves to realize how difficult mothering is. As Sarah Manguso once memorably wrote: “You’ll never know what your mother went through.”
For richer or for poorer, the memoir form remains our best means to discern what it means to become a parent. Given the strength of the last first person chapter by Berg compared to chapters prior, the book might have been better constructed as a series of first person case studies rather than a collection of soundbites from authors and “career women” alike, something closer to the structure of Meghan Daum’s anthology, knowingly titled Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids — a collection of pieces by men and (mostly) women who have consciously decided not to have kids yet can write with a great deal more humor and self-awareness. The common thread being that they’re all writers, a vocation that seldom comes with a stable income, who find alternative modes of parenting — some insisting (a little needlessly) that they still love kids, though others such as Geoff Dyer, have no qualms admitting their general distaste and even resentment towards kids, especially the ultra privileged ones in their milieu, along with their preference for dogs and sleeping in. These are people beyond regret, if they ever had it, and oftentimes acutely aware of their own broken upbringing that they’d rather not replicate. Where these collectively compelling mini-memoirs regarding the decision not to do justice to the issue, by comparison Berg and Wiseman leave us with an assemblage of glimpses rather than comprehensible chapters of lives.
Where Berg and Wiseman use Freud and Klein as definitional points of departure (they don’t seem terribly interested in psychoanalytic insight beyond Klein’s depressive position), some readers might be left wanting more contemplation on the nature of ambivalence itself. Lynne Tillman’s early short story “Absence Makes the Heart,” is one distillation of it among the innumerable, yet a satisfying pour-over nonetheless: “Contradictions make life finer. Ambivalence is just another word for love… You can accept the irrational over and over, you can renounce your feelings every day, but you’re still a baby. An infant outside of reason, speaking reasonably about the unreasonable.”
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