A Suburban Horror Nightmare: Re-imagining White Motherhood

My partner and I, while sharing the grueling global experience of quarantining, spent most of our time indoors consuming media. I won't get into the nitty-gritty details of surviving quarantine, COVID-19, navigating unemployment during all of this and staying afloat within a white-national-patriarchal-capitalistic-empire (a redundant synonymous mess, maybe?) albeit, it has been a terrifying ordeal.

But alas, a silver lining: some great media has been consumed! We recently watched Vivarium, a film directed by Lorcan Finnegan starring none other than the witty-slash-condescending, Jesse Eisenberg and the beguiling Imogen Poots. The film opens following a seemingly young couple, Tom (portrayed by Eisenberg) and Gemma (portrayed by Poots) searching for an ideal home to settle down in but not to particularly raise children in--an important detail. Hoping to find it in a suburban development called, "Yonder," in which all the homes look identical. They find themselves stuck inside the labyrinth-like development, where every road leads them back to where they started: house number 9. Quickly, Tom and Gemma find themselves hooked in the talons of a nightmare.

Now, this isn't a film synopsis, and to avoid any further spoilers I am going to refrain from detailing the entire film. You can find the trailer here.

Ryan Lattanzio, a writer for IndieWire wrote a beautifully quirky and raw review of the movie that you can find here, which I would suggest reading before returning to this blog post as it will provide you with a lot of details.

Thematically, I keep seeing the same trends appear in the horror genre. After watching Vivarium, I couldn't help but be reminded of Darren Aranofsky's 2017 film, Mother! and Ari Aster's 2018 masterpiece, Hereditary. All these films share the same themes of re-imagining white motherhood in a suspenseful and horror context. All have male directors (obviously).. but still a really gripping and unnerving watching experience. Of course, something can be said about all these male directors birthing and nursing their white motherly figures in distress and then killing them off.

There is a fascination with creating sense and meaning of life and creation and transferring that existentialism and fear into a horror movie. And like always, it is women that fall victim to all the biblical allegories and existential dread. Paved over with a calmness and a beauty, it is the white female body that encompasses this genre and meets her untimely and gruesome demise. Not only do we witness the brutal murder of America's nurturer (white mothers), it gets met with the later glorification or even rebirth (new chance) of her white counterpart. (Think Javier Bardem in Mother!).

Vivarium does this so well. It blends the fear of domesticity and uses it as a vehicle to further fuel the innately driven idea of women as the nurturer and as the victim.

But there is something else: the women in these movies are given freedom and choice. Much more than their adjacent movie genre, black bodies in white suburbia. While the movies aforementioned tug on the fear of meaning and fear of domesticity, there has been an absolute influx of films portraying the flip-side. While I believe white viewers will be horror-stricken while watching movies like Hereditary, viewers of color will be transported to their first viewing of movies like Get Out, where the dangers and fears of white suburbia and it's occupants were (in some cases first) showcased to the public eye.