When I first watched The Babadook (2014), I did so through semi-closed fingers. I always disliked horror; I jump at most loud noises and my friends know I shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of a haunted house. However, Jennifer Kent introduced me to a genre that experiments with emotions and experiences in ways others simply cannot. I’ve since delved into horror scholarship and I proudly declare “I study scary movies!” when people ask what I do. However, as I started writing on The Babadook, I struggled with most of the material on it, which frequently claimed that the film is really “about” one concept, or that there is some secret interpretation to be discovered.
I admit it’s tempting to read The Babadook through a traditional Freudian lens, and most of the existing scholarship does so. We’ve got a perversion of the primal scene (Sam interrupts his mother masturbating), the mourning/melancholia binary, and images that beg to be read as symbols (the monster itself, dental issues, and that vaginal crack in the wall overflowing with cockroaches). My question is: what does this reading give us? When we conclude our thoughts with “x represents y,” what kind of creative experimentation are we left with? In Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique After Representation, horror scholar Marco Abel even argues that representative readings are inherently violent because “critical practice ends up, in one form or another, laying claim to what they believe to be a well-founded position of judgment.”¹ I agree that this judgment can be unethical, especially in regards to violent images. When we assume that violence or madness is symbolic, we critique away the violent and mad complexity of the real world. An analysis stating that “the Babadook is symbolic of Amelia’s grief” can quickly become “the Babadook is a symptom,” one that Amelia needs to eliminate in order for the film to reach its expected conclusion. However, Amelia, and Jennifer Kent, refuse to kill the monster.
Amelia and Sam celebrate his birthday – and feed the monster worms
Instead, the last scene shows Amelia celebrating Sam’s birthday with him, on the actual day, for the first time. Right before the party, the camera adopts the Babadook’s point of view as Amelia feeds it a bowl of worms. It greets her with its iconic chittering noise and creeps back into the darkness. Sam is aware of this dynamic, and she informs him that it is “quiet today,” implying that such an interaction is a daily occurrence. Amelia finds peace, or at least something close to it, by allowing her monster to dwell nearby. I understand this narrative gesture as challenging traditional responses to grief, and perhaps traditional responses to horror films as well.
For both of these possibilities, I turn to Mad Studies, a theoretical field that examines madness from a consumer/survivor/ex-patient perspective, as opposed to a medical or psychiatric lens. In “‘Breaking Open the Bone’: Storying, Sanism, and Mad Grief,” Jennifer Poole and Jennifer Ward provide a history of what “good grief” is, specifically Kubler-Ross’s canonical five stages. Poole and Ward argue that good grief is “gendered, staged, linear, white, bound by privilege and reason.”² One moves from one stage to the next in a very prescribed manner, and a description of grief turns into a prescription of how a “good” bereaved person behaves. Poole and Ward offer the alternative of “mad grief,” which they define as “a resistance practice that allows, speaks, names, affords, welcomes, and stories the subjugated sense of loss that comes to us all.”
Instead of analyzing and interpreting grief as something that needs to fit a certain paradigm, they’re offering an anarchistic grief, arguing that while the traditional model may be helpful for some to understand their own progress, it is not necessarily universal. The horror film can act as a form of documentation of unusual grief processes, as it allows for the fantastic, for the monstrous, for the pain that surpasses what we have language to describe. Amelia does not simply move on from her trauma, and we do not side with her condescending sister. She finds peace by allowing her pain to stick with her, albeit on her terms, as she daily collects worms to feed it. In line with mad grief, Amelia speaks her pain, welcomes its strange presence, and creates alternative solutions.
Another form of grief we can explore in The Babadook is queer grief. As you probably know, the character has gained a strange queer reputation, mostly due to it being accidentally sorted as an “LGBT film” on Netflix in 2017. Online LGBT communities ran with it, and soon our favorite top hat-wearing monster was at pride marches across the country. Fortunately, I’ve been thinking about queer readings of the film for years with no real prompting (there are no queer characters or references), and this strange phenomenon validates my gut instinct.
The Queering of the Babadook
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed also gives an overview of what we understand to be acceptable or unacceptable (queer) forms of grief. She challenges the idea that “letting go” is better than holding the loss close to oneself.³ The refusal to let go can be an ethical response and is not necessarily something we should pathologize; perhaps the individual should be allowed to decide what “coping” looks like for them. Ahmed refers to Silverman and Klass, who write “the purpose of grief is not to let go, but lies in negotiating and renegotiating the meaning of loss over time.” This renegotiation may mean keeping the loss in proximity, not compartmentalizing but rather experiencing the pain in its totality. For Amelia, this means literally making room for the monster, bringing it food, quite literally sustaining and nourishing it. While I am at risk of making a judgment, I think Amelia’s new approach is more functional than what we see in the beginning, when Amelia pretends she is “over it” as her and her son’s relationship deteriorates.
Horror films like The Babadook have showed me how prioritizing fear can bring out unseen dimensions of other emotions as well. While I agree that Kent has created a meaningful movie about motherhood, depression, and loss, she gives us more questions than answers. When we leave behind strict analytical paradigms, we can experiment with the text, entering Amelia’s world as one possible emotional reality.
You can stream The Babadook on Amazon:
Related: Check out this post suggesting a quite different view of grief in The Babadook motherhood and grief and a post on in Hereditary.
NOTES
- Abel, Marco. Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
- Poole, Jennifer M., and Jennifer Ward. “‘Breaking Open the Bone’: Storying, Sanism, and Mad Grief.” Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, edited by Brenda A. Lefrancois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume, 2013.
- Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.
Ashley Barry is a first year PhD student in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. They are interested in horror films, feminist/queer theory, and Madness studies. Barry wants their academic research to weave together their own personal background with all the -ologies (phenomenology and epistemology especially). Follow them on Twitter @ashmariewriter.
