THE BABADOOK: You Can't Get Rid of the Babadook

Director: Jennifer Kent
Writer: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
Runtime: 93 mins.
2014

Welcome to the very special 50th post of Post-Credit Coda! Numbers are accidents, but it just so happens that we have a very special movie review to go along with the milestone. Earlier this month I wrote up It Follows, which is part of an exclusive new club of excellent high concept horror films that don't rely on cheap jump scares, retrogressive morality, and victims who aren't turning lights on for no reason. I would like to think this club was founded by The Cabin in the Woods, a metafictional horror masterpiece from a few years back that laid the smackdown on contemporary horror and all its infantile malarkey. Perhaps the club's only other member is our current topic of discussion: The Babadook. Even with only two or three movies in the club, folks are eager to herald these films as the sign of a high quality horror resurgence, the likes of which we haven't seen since Scream torpedoed the slasher genre, as I wrote about long long ago.

In many ways, It Follows and The Babadook are of a piece, but one major thing keeps them distinct in my experience. It Follows is easy. The Babadook is not.

After seeing It Follows with a friend, it was immediately clear that we had the exact same visceral, unsettling, enjoyable experience, for all the same reasons. The merits of that film are clear. But I've seen The Babadook with three different people at this point, and none of us had a remotely similar viewing experience. In fact, The Babadook has led to some of the more in-depth and difficult movie discussions I've ever had.

I say the movie is brilliant, beautiful, terrifying, feminist, singular, and thematically resonant. My friends say the movie is decent, too revelatory, a wee bit sexist, and unresolved. Who's right?

I'm right, of course.

The Cool Girl: Women in Film 2014

I want you to watch something for me.

You've seen some of these movies before. You're all familiar with this plot beat. The woman, almost always a love interest, has been captured by the villain, and the hero has to brawl or bargain to save her. There's nothing inherently sexist about the situation, just as the use of such a plot device doesn't automatically make a movie sexist. But that's beside the point. This supercut puts a lot of unpleasant Hollywood trends in stark relief.

For starters, notice how in most of these clips the woman doesn't even speak. She's a prop. The only important dynamic in the scene is that between the (generally) male hero and the (generally) male villain. Their relationship is the important one, the real one, the dramatically resonant one. The men have all the dialogue, all the power, all the agency, all the charisma, all the audience's rooting interests--everything. Meanwhile, the women just have weakness and manufactured tears. They are little more than poker chips in these scenes, an observation driven home when the heroes start offering money to trade for her: "I'll give up the gold," "I gave you the money," "I'll open the safe." Then, as if it wasn't apparent enough, we have the litany of scenes that make the utter unimportance of the woman explicit: "This is between you and me," "She's not important," "She doesn't belong here."

If she's really so unimportant to the central conflict, why is she even in the movie? The answer is even sorrier than the question: She exists in these films as nothing more than a pawn, a plot device, and an eventual reward for the man to take home and mount on his mantle. Figuratively speaking.