The horror-comedy Nightbitch, now streaming on Hulu, centers on an unnamed Mother (Amy Adams), who struggles to adapt to her life as a stay-at-home mom two years on. She and her son spend most of their days at home, punctuating their lives with occasional visits to the park and library. This mother has no real friends, no family to speak of, and a husband who travels for work; when he’s home, well, he might as well still be gone.
As a primary source of his wife’s ennui, the Husband (Scoot McNairy) is almost comically inept. When Mother opens up about her struggle embracing her role as a stay-at-home mom (she used to be an artist so successful she had work featured at The Modern), Husband shrugs, “I kinda thought this was what you wanted,” while stuffing a Q-tip into his ear.
After taking over bath time with Baby (the adorable Emmett James Snowden, who truly does deserve an Oscar for his toddler acting chops), the Husband demands items from the other room (toast for Baby, a sippy cup, a warm towel) every half-minute, causing his beleaguered wife to spring up from the couch like the inflatable air dancer at a car dealership. Before leaving on another work trip, he unhelpfully suggests to his wife, “Happiness is a choice.”
The Mother is clearly unhappy, which is why the film starts getting weird. She grows hair on her back, then a tail, then extra nipples, as she gradually transforms into a dog, a sort of werewolf who only at night transforms to escape her home, her tedious responsibilities, and her toddler. It’s left up to us to decide whether she is really turning into a dog or whether it’s all in her mind; the fact that she eventually kills the family cat leaves no other options but the occult or psychosis (or perhaps both).
In the film’s opening scene, Mother delivers a monologue that serves as a sort of thesis for what is about to unfold. “I feel like societal norms and gender expectations and just plain old biology have forced me to become this person that I don’t recognize,” she says, “and I’m just angry all the time.”
There is a real basis for all of this, and it offers a pretty succinct criticism of where modern moms are left when it comes to parenting. The societal norm of a mother staying at home with children while a father works outside of the house may seem traditional, but in reality, it’s anything but.
This norm developed after the Industrial Revolution, as Mary Harrington explains in Feminism Against Progress: “As work became more centralised, more mechanised and less agrarian, the resulting split between ‘work’ and ‘home’ drove women increasingly into a domestic-only role.” While our hunter-gatherer ancestors used to share “work” and childcare responsibilities, our modern stay-at-home moms are stuck in single-unit homes with little reprieve save for story hour at the library.
But what really plagues Mother isn’t her isolation, which we see is partially self-imposed as she initially turns up her nose at the mothers at the library, scoffing, “I think becoming friends with another woman simply because we’re both mothers is pathetic.”
No, the idea of scraping out some sense of autonomy by digging up holes in the yard would certainly never have appeared to Mother had it not been for her feckless husband. It’s not like we’ve never seen a bumbling dad on screen before. But the good news is that for many of today’s moms, he doesn’t exist.
Some, but certainly not enough, ink has been spilled in praise of millennial dads, who are more involved with their kids, more invested in housework, and more proud of their identities as fathers than previous generations. Today’s dads are spending three times as much time with their kids and more than twice as much time on housework compared with their grandfathers. These fathers also embrace their roles wholeheartedly: “Dads are just as likely as moms to say that parenting is extremely important to their identity,” Pew Research Center reports.
I can confirm this personally. Aside from his many other virtues, such as his propensity to do the dishes, change the diapers, and cook dinner, among the two of us, it is only my husband who knows how to install a carseat.
One friend, a stay-at-home mother of two similarly in a millennial-to-millennial marriage, recently told me, “I trust my husband to carry out our bedtime routine more than my own mother.”
When my now-two-year-old son was born, I didn’t change his diaper for probably two weeks after his birth. Another millennial friend told me she had the same experience. Now, while her husband supports her in achieving her Ph.D., she says, he makes dinner and does bedtime for their toddler most evenings and “has had to deal with so many poop messes on his own.”
For the millennial viewer stocked with hard and anecdotal data, all of this makes the family dynamics in Nightbitch a little far-fetched. In the book, Mother is 37, making her solidly millennial (currently the cadre of people aged 28 to 43). At 50, Adams is frankly too old to play the role of this or any first-time mom, who in the United States is 27 on average.
Like its cast, the narrative of Nightbitch is growing too old to be broadly relevant, though that didn’t stop Adams from touting the film’s universality. “There is so much that each person can identify with, no matter whether they have children, whether they’re fathers, whether they’re mothers,” she says. “There’s something in this story that feels so identifiable and universal.”
Nightbitch may be an interesting bit of entertainment, but the only thing universal about it is the agreement among viewers that it gets a big thumbs down.
Madeline Fry Schultz is the contributors editor at the Washington Examiner.
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This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
