Baba – Dook – Dook – Dook!

One way to read the Babadook is that it’s about a mother and son and it particularly focuses on the mother’s plight of dealing with grief, the Babadook basically showing up from the repression of that grief and associated trauma. We see Emelia as a caretaker, a mother, and a sister, and we’re meant to empathize with her lonely plight as her son continues to take up more and more of her time. She’s taken away from work because her son brings weapon to school, and instead of acknowledging that, she decides to take Sam out of school and transfer him. Instead of going to a therapist or talking to her neighbor or sister, she ignores Sam’s plights and shuts them down. The Babadook can be a representation of this grief very easily. It appears as children’s book that can’t be ignored, he takes the shape of Emilia’s dead husband, and only when the Babadook is subdued do we see Emelia forgive her son for bringing up his father, letting Sam have a birthday party on the day of alongside her husband’s death. She still feeds the Babadook worms, she never forgets, but she keeps it in check. But that’s only one way to think about the movie, and because movie experience are in a nutshell, subjective, the possibility for other experiences is very possible.

For one, I think there are many ways to be map the Babadook into Barbara Creed’s “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” and her ideas of the abject: something that disrupts barriers. The Babadook can be seen as a struggle for Emelia to stay between a good mother, and a harmful one, and throughout the movie the barrier between the two dissolves and twists around. The same can be said for Sam, who seems to oscillate between and sweet and caring kid and almost monstrous. The struggle opposes a any created dichotomy and makes us renegotiate the disrupted barriers.

The first half of the movie we feel for Emelia, while her son quite plainly acts horrendous. He’s definitely not an ideal kid, and the movie questions what we think is normal for a kid. First by showing us some of the worst parts of Sam, attempted to get us to also believe he is a bit monstrous (when he screams in the car after Emelia picks him up is a poignant example), before not only justifying his actions, but masking them as crucial for his survival against the Babadook. He builds weapons, he consistently talks about his dad dead often in very inappropriate settings, and he requires so much attention all the time. Young children have and will never been a fan favorite of mine, and this movie pushes that nail in the coffin. The movie does a good job at feeling restless with Emelia always having to jump place to place because of her son. The one day she gets off early is a day where her sister can no longer handle Sam. We slowly understand her exhaustion; when she gets to finally lay down, Sam is there, when she’s at work, Sam’s gone and shot off a weapon in school. There are no breaks and no relief, Emelia barely even has time to think for herself.

Again, it’s here that I think Samuel appears to play with this border of acceptable child behavior. He continues to say things like, ‘I need to protect you Mom,’ things that sound extra serious and if they we’re coming from most children (and not in a horror film) would likely seem cute. But then he makes a crossbow type weapon that can do harm, like, real, non-childish, damage. Sam is an abject child by crossing these borders and such. However, as mentioned earlier, the narrative switches later on. As Emilia starts to dance on and across a border of acceptable mothership (we’ll get back to it) and grow more desperate in ways to deal with Sam, and yes, deal with, not work with, not figure out her parent style or anything, she is desperate to find ways to deal with him, and it starts to border on unacceptable. She ends up drugging Sam to sleep. Which, sure, the Doctor buys, it’s a struggling mother. The neighbor sees how Emelia descends and acts, but doesn’t do anything to change anything other than offer help, and so on. When Emelia starts to act in way most would view as unacceptable, we truly encounter the uncanny, that creeping unsettling feeling that stays in someone’s bones. What once was familiar to us becomes the antagonist and the most extreme.

Creed also conflates the corpse as abject, while Freud relates a corpse to the uncanny, and I think the Babadook can also almost be seen as some type, of a corpse. It’d a mangled human, sickly pale skin and black eyes and lips similar to a cold blue on a corpse. It doesn’t move right and it’s voice screeching “BaBa dook – dook – dook doesn’t quite feel human enough. Although this is small and the costume and makeup may have been chosen on a whim, it adds to the possibilities in the text.

I think a quote from Creed speaks to what I’ve been trying to get at, that “...purification of the abject through a ‘descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct.’ In this way, the horror film brings about a confrontation with the abject … in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between human and non-human.” (53) In the Babadook, Emelia descends into grief and a version of motherhood which I’m sure most would agree to be ‘too far’ and monstrous almost, and this descent into what is a mother and what a mother should do, before confronting the Babadook, the thing that really catalyzes their descent and thus progress. I think this further relates to Creed’s idea of the archaic mother as well. The archaic mother, paraphrased, is this all-encompassing, oceanic thing, she gives birth all by herself and acts as the original, primordial parent. As the sole parent and life support, the archaic mother can exert total control. Occasionally, the archaic mother can even signify a monstrous obliteration of the self. Emelia exerts this total control over Sam from very early on, telling him what he can and can’t say, what he can and can’t do, and she expects that control to be followed. It goes deeper, she is so self reliant, so against even thinking about her dead husband, that total control is easier to exert and truly places her as the sole mother.

But what does it mean that through the destruction of Emelia that we know at the beginning, the archaic mother comes out so strongly? A debate to be had is who has agency over Emelia’s fall. Yes, the Babadook can easily stand in as a metaphor for the grief Emelia’s repressed, but what if the Babadook represents something else, say, like the embodiment of the archaic mother or represents a fear of penetration, something unavoidable and not in Emelia’s control until she descends so close to the bottom?

If a male’s strongest fear is castration, and it comes out in all these weird sometimes abstract forms, I want to argue that in the Babadook’s case, the fear to be confronted is penetration. There’s this type of life/death thing going on, Sam’s born on the day Emelia’s husband dies in the car crash. And Emelia herself suffers from exhaustion and basically being as close to death as she can possibly be while still alive and functional. Only after Emelia is penetrated by the Babadook in the middle of her masturbation does Emelia start to become more like Creed’s archaic mother. And it’s worth mentioning that kids oftentimes believe that impregnation occurs at the mouth, from eating something special or whatnot. The consequence of Emelia having something enter her, is the destruction of herself. With Sam being brought into the world, she loses all of her free time and herself in the process, and when the Babadook flies into her mouth there’s even less of the Emelia we see at the beginning.

Whatever the case, the Babadook certainly provides a lot to talk about.