recognito | brief movie detour

I find it hard to forgive a badly done ending in a movie, even though there are plenty of books where I go, "Well, the last hundred pages were bad, but I liked the first five hundred a lot!" or even, "the first 80 pages were good and probably what got this author an agent… too bad about the remaining 270 pages of this.” A bad movie ending makes me soooo much angrier and less generous towards the film, even though a film may have sooo many more technical accomplishments.

I just finished Nightbitch the movie and lol, classic case of me going in knowing I wouldn't love it and finding even more things to not like once I was there. I find it SO funny how this movie is like, “the city artists are GAY and can’t understand the REAL pain of being stifled by a bad marriage and motherhood AND having to live in the suburbs…” It’s important for Amy Adams to be a mother and an artist, and not just a mother but a mother who loves being a mother and who feels Solidarity with other moms (take that!) AND she’s an artist who’s pushing boundaries of Art… I guess that last element is important because it’s an easy way of showing that she’s successful and that LADIES, mothers, WOMEN all over the world, you CAN have it all… I walked away from this thinking to myself, "Well, this is the power fantasy of the mediocre, I guess," and then felt bad for thinking it.

The loop of motherhood narratives right now is, “It’s hard now but you’ll fix it, you’ll solve your problems, your family will be stronger than ever AND you’ll be a real artist,” and I feel like we’ve missed a trick somewhere. What is an artist? It’s not just someone who makes good art: it’s someone who’s regarded as being a serious and real artist by others, not just other artists within the genre, but the artist's family. The dilemma of these fictions is a problem of recognition: why can’t a woman be known as a great artist in the home and a great mother to the outside? But I can't help but think of the lesson we all learned from Grey's Anatomy: it is actually very bad for your mother to be the famous Dr. Ellis Grey if she can't stop being famous Dr. Ellis Grey even in the house. So within the domestic sphere, it's important to be known as an artist to avoid being subsumed by the patriarchal demands of being nothing more than the mother or the wife.

Isn’t the problem of life that you’re always looking for the one thing that will redeem all the time you’ve wasted? All the time you could have spent doing the one perfect thing that you could have done, assuming you’ve ever conceived yourself of being able to do that one perfect thing; perhaps you will have excuses for why you could never achieve it, that one perfect thing–isn’t the problem of motherhood that the one perfect thing cannot be the child or the children (disappointing turnips who don’t know a THING about art!) or the marriage or the family, which are all built on your own subjugation, and the problem of the artist that, for art to be what redeems your life, your friendships and families and all the comforts of your social sphere are just things that take you away from making what could be perfect, and that the problem of being a mother and an artist is that the child appears and you immediately realize your chances of catching that perfection have diminished by more than half, yet somehow the ugly turnip who knows nothing about art is, or will be, essential to your happiness? And being an artist lawyer chef doctor surgeon robot scientist makes you no money, your family will hate you. AND you will also never have sex again!

I think I’ve been tired of this genre of novel for a while and the movie is soooo revealing of the fantasy–and I do mean fantasy, not just the frustration–underlying the genre… the incompatibility of these two positions is something I see as a feature, not a bug, and having the consensus on how to resolve it simply be “you CAN do both!” feels dishonest… people will say, “you can have both–you just have to work hard and keep at it” but I think there’s the fear about looking into the art and thinking, "What have I sacrificed to make this happen? Is it worth it? Will it ever be? Even if I sacrifice everything, did I sacrifice enough? My novel still fucking sucks" is the real emotion behind these narratives. The answers in the narrative are often unsatisfying because they want us to understand that these worries are irrational fears, but I can't help but feel like this is a lie....

I don’t know. This strain of novels might hit harder for people who are mothers instead of random men on the internet blogging about movies. Luckily, all my millennial fatherhood media is consumed through video games and I basically hate all of those, too.