The Babadook

Film poster

The Babadook (2014) - Jennifer Kent

Both the most modern and most authentically "horror" film examined so far, Kent's The Babadook is an excellent horror film based around a woman's struggles with motherhood, love and death. Atmospheric, highly stylized and psychologically penetrating, the film is deeply unnerving and manages to be scary with minimal gore, no jump scares, and a monster brought to life using intentionally low-budget methods. Much like Eraserhead, The Babadook manages to create a world with a universal sense of strangeness that pervades the entire film universe and further emphasizes the titular monster's inescapability and power over the characters. 

The monstrous ideology

Ideology gives structure to our deepest fears, our emotional insecurities, our latent desires. It sculpts the nebulous and formless into concrete entities. Ideology personifies and projects. It not only structures our reality, but structures the way see reality itself. 

Ideology therefore functions much like a metaphorical "monster under the bed." The parent knows that there is nothing actually under the bed, yet goes along with the child and "clears the area" so the child knows they are safe. This is the primary functioning of ideology today. We know that there is no monster, but it is more distressing to have to admit there isn't anything is under the bed, because then the monster really is just inside your head. Instead of being a comfort, this is angst inducing and absolutely terrifying. 

This is a thematic element frequently experimented with by the film. The physicality of the monster is de-emphasized and minimal compared to the mental havoc wreaked by the being's presence. The Babdook's power as antagonist lies primarily in its ability to manipulate its victims into destroying themselves instead of physically harming them. This is not a wholly unique concept for a horror movie, yet The Babdook makes the story of the family and the monster be extremely personal and specifically relate to the life experiences of the protagonist. 

The monster: real or symbolic?

The proper hermeneutic approach to examining this film rests primarily on what the monster itself is supposed to be. There are two primary perspectives: the monster is something just as real as the boy and his mother, while the other perspective is that the monster is a construction, a manifestation of the mother's own feelings of loss toward her dead husband. I think the second perspective has much more resonance and impact, as the former reduces evil to being necessarily physical, while the second creates a more coherent narrative in relation to the film as a whole. 

The monster can be viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective as the mother's latent id, especially in regards to her feelings toward her son. The feelings of anger about the death of her husband and the built up resentment that resulted from raising her son as a single mother causes the mother to be trapped, static and unable to cope with the issues related to her son's delinquency. She "let's in" the Babadook, which then contorts and twists her, amplifying her anger and making her into the monster she fears. Instead of the Babadook being the greatest threat to her safety, she becomes psychotic and impulsive, wholly driven by suppressed anger boiling over and reaching the surface. This is why it is clear that the Babadook is not just some monster, but something intricately tied to the woman's own life and psyche. Maybe it can be read as a dark, shadowy id gone unchecked or maybe a latent masculinism reacting against motherhood, but regardless the connection is clearly mental in nature. 

Killing the monster and the aftermath of an event

This film culminates with a confrontation between the mother and the Babadook, showing that she is finally being introspective instead of looking at problems as intrinsically intruding into her life. She realizes that reality is a reality on conflict and contradictions, and we carry the weight of contradiction as we struggle through life. The situation with her and her child was not made unstable, but was itself unstable and this instability was only revealed by the event of the Babadook. 

The Babadook is very much an event that creates its own chain of causality. Although it initially seems as if it is a directionless entity geared toward antagonism, it soon becomes clear that its identity is a reaction to the past, but this can only be realized after it came into existence as an event in itself. The Babadook thus cannot be truly slain, but controlled. It clearly has the potential for reemergence, yet for the time being, things are "under control," but never truly perfectly normal. Things really cannot be as they were before and this becomes even more clear, but this realization is one that provides comfort and an even greater sense of normalcy. This "normality emergent from strife" is actually even more normal than life prior to the event, making the Babadook's moral implications even more ambiguous. The labels of pure evilness, destructive neutrality or even obfuscated good fall apart when dealing with something that does not clearly exist in of itself, but exists primarily in relation to others. Therefore, possibly the best approach about whether or not the woman should have "let the Babadook in" may be to deny that it could've happened in any other way: the Babadook is almost a force of nature and to oppose it would be like opposing gravity.

The liberation of the psyche thus is not accidental nor is it subject to willpower, but is a honing, refining process. Like the forging of a sword, the Babadook torments and punishes until the authentic self is shaped out of the rough-hewn steel of trauma.