Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.
– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)
Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies.
To this end, the pair are having an actual cottage ‘renovated’ (that is, remodelled to genteel tastes) when their cat, quite sensibly, bolts from the scene. Peter seizes the occasion to dictate why they’re out here in the first place:
It’s just what I’ve escaped from: fuss. Constipated Poodles, Scotties with overgrown toenails because they never went outside, and hamsters, and putting down sick old budgies…I’m a real vet now.
It’s clear, however, that this image of rurality – the view that it relieves one’s life and work of inauthenticity – is simply the illusion of city-eyes; as Jo puts it, ‘I just can’t get so excited about it: I was brought up in the country, so it’s just the country.’ Nevertheless, Jo insists that she is, in Peter’s word, ‘committed’ – i.e. devoted to her husband’s dream; he, meanwhile, refuses to be cockblocked by her tepidity and throws himself headlong into the renovations (ignoring, of course, the local workmen who’ve been hired to do it properly).
Bashing away at a wall in the kitchen, Peter quickly discovers an urn bricked up inside it; inside the urn, the eponymous ‘Baby’ – a foetus-like creature, mummified and placed there, Jo gradually discovers, as a curse. For as long as it’s present, nothing on the land (not even Jo, for that matter) will succeed in giving birth.
For Kneale, however, (as for M.R James before him), the cursed object is only the harbinger of greater horror: when Jo gets up one night to investigate noises, she finds the foetus-mummy being suckled by, well, something truly abject (if difficult to make out, exactly) – presumably, its doting, vengeful mother.
This, however, is still not the ultimate horror of ‘Baby’. More nightmarish than the episode’s supernatural mother is the situation forced upon its real-world mother-to-be. As Rob Young writes in The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window:
[Peter’s] new-found enthusiasm for his job, which takes him racing from the cottage in his Land Rover and finds him forging a raucous and boozy friendship with his new boss/colleague, Dick Pummery, paradoxically distances him even more from his heavily pregnant wife’s concerns. Meanwhile, Jo is left to keep house…
And in keeping house, Jo’s primary object is to rid that house of its curse; her husband, however, is fiercely dismissive of her concerns – so much so that for Young, ‘Baby’… is ‘about masculine power, the way the natural authority assumed by patriarchal males effectively silences female viewpoints’.
Of course, there’s no such thing as ‘natural authority’ (power is invested in people via social arrangement); nor, under patriarchy, is there any real opportunity for men to be anything other than ‘patriarchal males’ (‘patriarchal’ describes a totalising hegemony, not a personality-type). Nevertheless, the point, I think, is clear: in her devotion to her husband’s dream – in her agreeing to his idea that proximity to ‘nature’ will yield freedom – what Jo discovers instead is that this very idea – this contingent, and wholly artificial, image of ‘nature’ – serves only to limit her freedom. In trying to prove that she’s ‘committed’ – i.e. dedicated – Jo discovers that she’s ‘committed’ – i.e. detained.
*
In many ways, Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022) is a variation on this story: Harper (Jessie Buckley) is another middle-class urbanite making another escape to another rural enclave – only, she isn’t intending to stay permanently, and she isn’t accompanying a living man but fleeing the memory of a dead one. Back at her Thameside apartment, Harper had attempted to divorce her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu); not only did he refuse her petition, he assaulted her, accused her of making him suicidal, then tumbled to his death from the balcony upstairs.
Whether James jumped deliberately or fell accidently goes unresolved, but it’s also beside the point: Harper isn’t guilty of his death either way. Though Harper knows this full well, she is (understandably) shaken by the experience and ventures to rural ‘Cotson’ in order, as her friend puts it, ‘to heal’. Here, as in ‘Baby’, the country is (problematically) imagined as a form of therapy for city-slickers.
From the moment that Harper arrives at her weekend digs (no mere cottage, mind, but an entire manor house to herself), it’s apparent that she isn’t very far removed from James’ bullshit. When Harper picks an apple from the garden, her host, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), makes an attempt at humour: ‘Scrumpin’, eh? No, no, no. Mustn’t do that. Forbidden fruit…I’m joking. Have as many as you like.’ Of course, the joke doesn’t land, not just because it’s cheesy but also because bears the weight of normality – the tiresome gravitas of Everyday Sexism.
By alluding, even offhandedly, to the Garden of Eden and to Original Sin, Geoffrey invokes the idea of women as Eve-like temptresses responsible, somehow, for men’s transgressions – an idea that would be laughable were it not so persistent (did it not recall, for example, James’ blaming Harper for his self-destructive behaviour, and did it not foreshadow, for example, the local priest’s blaming her for his attempt to rape her, or the local teenager’s blaming her for the injuries which he incurs when she attempts to defend herself from him while he is breaking into the house). Even when Harper attempts a union with the countryside as innocuous as consuming its surplus fruit, patriarchy insists on mapping out the place to which it has ‘committed’ her.
Accordingly, it becomes clear that Harper won’t be free to lose herself – that is, to subsume her trauma – within this landscape. Whilst being shown around the property, Harper is warned by Geoffrey: ‘Ladies, watch what you flush’. We can, of course, deduce his literal meaning here– something along the lines of, ‘Don’t put tampons down the dunny because they’ll wreck the septic tank’. But Geoffrey’s phrasing is suspect: not all ‘ladies’ use tampons and not all tampon-users are ‘ladies’; nor are tampons the only things capable of wrecking a septic tank – chewing gum, condoms, napkins, cooking oil, bleach-based cleaning products (even, for that matter, a turd of sufficient size) will all do the job. The latent warning, I think, is this: only ‘Men’ have the privilege of discarding what they please out here; only ‘Men’ are entitled to use the natural landscape as an emotional sewer.
Harper, however, ignores (or else, is deaf to) this subtext – and to good effect: she slowly begins, it seems, to transcend her trauma with a little help from the Outstanding Natural Beauty of the Great British Countryside – which ‘Men’ captures in such exquisite definition that it cannot help but recall Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ (only, there isn’t a dead woman in sight – a deficiency which the local population will shortly attempt to remedy). The resulting feeling is that which Sigmund Freud (after Romain Rolland) called ‘Oceanic’: the sense ‘of being one with the external world as a whole,’ or, in this case, with ‘Mother Nature’. And just in case we haven’t got the message, Lesley Duncan is playing throughout (admittedly, it’s ‘Love Song’ – perhaps ‘Earth Mother’ would have been too blatant).
Of course, Harper’s attempt to discard her past is ultimately unsuccessful; her effort to ‘heal’ is interrupted when she is spotted, pursued, then grabbed (through the letterbox), by a naked, male figure (also Rory Kinnear) – an incarnation, it transpires, of the foliate head carved into the congregation-facing side of the baptismal font in the local church. To phrase this more succinctly: where Harper sought to (re)unite with ‘Mother Nature’, she is instead chased down by The Green Man. The implication, I think, is subtle, but significant: Harper doesn’t get to experience ‘Oceanic’ oneness with the country – she’s expected, instead, to provide it; she isn’t allowed to ‘flush’ her trauma – she is, instead, the access point to the sewer.
To illustrate the point, Geoffrey later calls Harper a ‘damsel in distress’ before marching, histrionically, about the property as though he were her protector (stalking the lawn, checking the bushes for intruders, etc.). Why the awkward LARPing? Geoffrey, we learn, has long been harbouring the hurt of his father’s telling him, ‘You have the qualities of a failed military man’. Here, the expectation on Harper is to bear redemptive witness, and thus to legitimise Geoffrey’s place on the land by relieving him of the trauma which threatens to bar him from it. In coming to the country ‘to heal’ (intransitive), Harper discovers that she’s here ‘to heal’ (transitive).
As it turns out, every man in Cotson is an incarnation of the Green Man: Rory Kinnear also plays the local priest, the local policeman, the local bartender, and the local punters at the local pub – plus, his face has been deepfaked onto that of the local, troubled, teenage boy (plus, it also turns out that James is an incarnation of the Green Man). When asked about this, Garland explained to Den of Geek:
So you have one character playing all these roles, and it’s obviously not arbitrary. It’s obviously a decision… So one question might be does Harper see all men as the same? Because neither Harper nor the film ever remark on it, ever. Only the viewer is left to remark on it. So is it that Harper sees all men as the same whilst they are in fact different or is it all men are the same and she does not see that? They’re two questions that sound very similar but have completely different inferences.
But directors are seldom the best interpreters of their own work, and something here is clearly awry.
In one of the film’s most disturbing (yet, familiar) scenes, a policeman outright dismisses Harper’s insistence that she was stalked, suggesting instead that she must be mistaken; in the Den of Geek interview, however, Garland sets us up to repeat the same dismissal. Both of his interpretative possibilities are premised on the assumption that the woman is mistaken – that Harper cannot possibly see things as they actually are. ‘I want’, as Slavoj Žižek memorably put it, ‘a third pill’.
Indeed, there is another possibility available to us: that Harper sees all men as the same whilst they are, in fact, the same. Cotson’s ‘Men’, by this reckoning, are simply purporting to be different; Harper doesn’t ‘ever remark on it’ because she is conscious of the expectation to play along (and of the consequences of failing to fulfil that expectation). That this is indeed the case is suggested (albeit subtly) when Harper is describing Geoffrey to her friend on the phone: ‘He’s a very particular type’, she says – i.e. there’s nothing to distinguish him from others of his kind (perhaps the Cotson-man kind). In conversation with Geoffrey, however, she obliges him by allowing him to play up his idiosyncrasies.
It’s worth noting that this expectation is wholly at odds with the other one on Harper – to provide ‘Oceanic’ oneness. The first requires her to legitimise men’s individuality; the second, to subsume it. This, however, is the genius of the troubled teen’s requesting that she join him in a game of ‘Hide and Seek’ – a version of Freud’s Fort/Da, except one in which the child (in this case, the overgrown child) is the object which is Lost/Found (‘I’ll hide’, he explains). Of course, if the teen is one of many incarnations of ‘all men’, then what the film appears to be suggesting is this: what ‘all men’ want is to be likewise Lost and Found – to be granted both ‘Oceanic’ oneness and ego-individuation. It’s also the genius of James’s final declaration, ‘I only want your love’ – which amounts to the same (impossible) request: ‘Oceanic’ oneness and ego-individuation; I want for you to maintain no distinction between you and me – crucially, between you and uniquely, distinctly, me; I want, in other words, for you to disappear, or to sacrifice yourself, so that I can be ‘whole’ or complete; I want for you to be – as Peter in ‘Baby’ might have phrased it – ‘committed’ so that I can be ‘real’.
As ‘Men’ draws towards a close, The Green Man makes one final appearance – this time, however, he’s equipped with the defining feature of the grotesque carved into the other (i.e. clergy-facing) side of the baptismal font – namely, the open womb of Sheila Na Gig, by means of which he births one of his incarnations, who births another, who births another, and so on. How are we to read this monster?
The Green Man Na Gig, I think, is best understood as a man (or as a series of men) who has got exactly what James (and every other man, for that matter) wanted: both ‘Oceanic’ oneness and ego-individuation. Each of his incarnations is, at once, recognisably unique (we can clearly distinguish Geoffrey from the policeman from the pub-goer, etc.), and perfectly ‘one’ with his parent (for if he is born via asexual reproduction, then presumably he has the same genetic makeup as his precursor). He is, in other words, the very model of the sated patriarch, a man whose deepest desire has been fulfilled, and he is every bit as abject as the supernatural mother in ‘Beasts’.
Men is coming to DVD, Blu-ray and Digital on August 9 from Lionsgate.
Oscar Mardell lives in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland where he teaches Art History and Classical Studies. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, and Bright Lights Film Journal. He is the author of two poetry collections: Housing Haunted Housing and Great Works.
