Motherhood and Matriarchies in Hereditary

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Motherhood and Matriarchies in Hereditary

[disclaimer about microphone quality]

Hello all, this is just going be a mini-series where I'm breaking down and an essay I wrote at University looking at women and their relationships are family and power in horror films. Specifically post horror and folk horror. Today I'm talking about Hereditary (2018), and I guess the official title which I'm going to be using is Hereditary: Exploring Maternity and The Monstrous Feminine so I'm just going to be looking at the familial relationships and the kind of matriarch relationship in Hereditary.

Many theorists and filmmakers believe that horror, as a genre, is made for today's youth, uncovering forbidden topics and taboo subjects, and helping them understand the path to adulthood. James Twitchwell stated that 'horror myths establish social patterns not of escape but entry' allowing youths and adolescents to understand and learn the nuances of adulthood and coming of age in a controlled environment, much like oral folk tales and fairy tales of old. He followed this suggestion with this idea that stories 'are seen as a socialisation for young women in a patriarchal system' (Twitchwell 1985 cited in Short 2006:8). Troubled mother/ child relationships were often used in folklore to help prepare children for maturity when they would leave their mothers and be separated from their childhood comforts.

Hereditary has some toxic representations of familial relationships and bonds that create complex mothers for the audience to puzzle over. They force the audience to confront this question; can you ever hate your own child, and if so why? Forcefully pulling a thought no mother would ever willingly confront into the limelight. This is perhaps a far more personal expression of female power than expected, for who is a mother scarier to, if not her own children.

Ari Asters directing debut Hereditary follows the narrative of a family losing the youngest member and the tension between the parent and the other child involved. This dynamic is interesting to see as we watch a mother, who loves all her children, try, and reconcile with the idea that one is directly involved with the others death.

This inner turmoil examples Barbara Creed’s argument from her book The Monstrous Feminine that ‘the level of horror a woman brings can be linked to her ability as a mother’ (Creed 1993:73) which is something we see Annie struggling with through Hereditary. The narrative follows a family of four after their grandmother's death and its impact on their dynamic, especially as her secretive past and life seem to have plans for them and their youngest daughter, Charlie.

A tragic accident takes Charlie's life in the first half of the film.

After making Peter take his sister to a party, the younger girl had an allergic reaction to some cake; panicking, Peter drives home under the influence, and Charlie was decapitated as she stuck her head out the window to get more air. Peter carries on home, leaving the body in the car for his mother to find.

The following events see the mother, Annie, and son's (Peter) grief and alienation, which later culminates as Ellen's (the grandmother) cult-like coven of witches manipulate the family to raise the demon Paimon.

In the first act, after her own mother’s death, we discover that Annie had never wanted to be a mother herself, in a scene that is undisclosed as a dream or reality she tells Peter, her eldest, that she tried to miscarry him. Further explaining that she once sleepwalked into his and Charlies room, doused them all with paint thinner and woke as she was about to strike a match.

This had caused a rift between mother and son from a young age, which only deteriorated after Charlies' death. The film follows a dance between the two family members as Annie is seen having an internalised deathmatch with herself. The expectation to love one child when he is directly responsible for her anguish of losing another.

The leftover guilt and resentment from the sleepwalking accident holding a certain weight to their unspoken conflict, which comes to a head in a now-infamous dinner scene. 'Constructing monstrosities source as a failure of parental order to ensure the separation of mother and child,' (Creed 1993:38) Aster manages to wedge a chisel in the hairline fractures he formulated.

The scene is typically domestic for a family layout, they are sat together eating and it looks painfully normal, yet the scene is uncomfortable to watch. The viewer feels like and outsider, the tension is at breaking point, and Annie’s break does nothing to dispel this. She lashes out saying ‘All I do is worry and slave and defend you… I know you’re in pain and I wish I could take that away from you. I WISH I could shield you from the knowledge that you did what you did, but your sister is dead!’

We see her reassuring him of her love but acknowledging her resentment at the same time. Losing composure makes her more human but also shows her beginning to grow unstable. ‘So, now I can’t accept. And I can't forgive’ reminds me startlingly of Medea’s reversal in the old Greek tragedy, Annie’s grief is allowing her to become a completely removed figure from the maternal warm constitution she began with.

This new 'hysteric' version of her is the one that we then begin to lose faith in, the one that begins to separate her from Peter. There is sympathy from the audience, but you are no longer rooting for her. Appearance often marred by tears; the imagery changes to create a monstrous filter on the movie magic that usually surrounds women.

Annie is the connection between the women in Hereditary, the monstrous feminine links them.

The relationship between the women in Hereditary is a very destructive one; Ellen is absent, Annie is revealed to have never wanted children, Charlie's character is unknown and ambiguous having taken the head off a dead pidgeon in the film’s opening. Each character is nuanced and complex but very detached, both subjecting and conforming to these expected characteristics of ‘monstrous women’.

As well as dissecting a close, familiar relationship, Aster also manages to pull back the curtains on a more detached mother figure, Ellen. Exampling a misguided representation of matriarchs, guiding the viewer through discomfort and grief in a surprrisingly adept lead, he introduces Ellen as an oppressive presence in Annie's, life.

As an audience, we know from the first scene that Ellen weighs heavily on Annie and her family. Sitting like a opressive cloud, her presence never leaves them, hovering in the shadows like a bad memory.

This tension is steadily built to come to a breaking point when they find her body above the family home in their attic, decapitated and defaced, covered in blood and surrounded in ritualistic paraphernalia. She is already an antagonistic character when she is revealed to have been the leader of a cult-like coven of witches.

To Annie and the viewer, the matriarch is bad, but Aster manages to juxtapose this opinion to a certain degree. Images of Ellen dressed in white, with a veil over her hair and a confetti of gold coins raining down, are found in her belongings, the cult members smiling and celebratory of their queen.

Ellen is also mentioned to make several knitted doormats; something so typically grandmotherly that it fogs your opinion of the woman we never meet. The joy of the images, and the evident love the coven members have for her only further contrasts the final scene where Paimon, in Peters body, is crowned with wood; dirty and covered in blood, surrounded by his decapitated parents and the cult members kneeling in supplication, nude and ecstatic.

The final act's twist sees Ellen as simply a vassal for Paimon, the demons, wishes. What could have been a matriarchal exploration of women in power and heads of families was stifled by Paimons presence in the film, the cult claiming that they'd 'corrected [his] first female body and give [him] now this healthy male host'. However, there is still contrast between the two images, one full of hope and purity, her outside influence powerful but unsuspectingly warm and the other desolate and lonely, the absence of hope seen in the slow zooming out of the treehouse, finding an abyss of darkness surrounds them.

Paimons introduction disregards what we thought was a matriarchy, conflicting and celebrated as it was, and smothers it with this final composition of patriarchy, the demon having control over the events that transpire. This begs the question as to whether Ellen's disregard and coolness towards her family were linked to the demon, her power only manifesting when she gave herself over to him ultimately, removing herself from her bloodline.

There is this loss of inhibition and human composure after the summoning of Paimon. Ellen's coronation looks like a baptism of sorts; his is full of depravity and submission. A chilling chant of 'Hail Paimon' the last thing the audience hears.

This could be an interesting commentary made by Aster about how, without the mother and matriarchs' presence, we lose all control and discipline is lost. The film comments on this idea of female power, and familial ties, suggesting that mothers have limited tolerance and manoeuvrability.

Feminine power can be gained through shedding familial relationships, proposing the idea that to be powerful, a woman must have no emotional attachments.

Motherhood is perceived as oppressive and bad but contradicts itself as being a bad mother translates to being a bad woman. This only circles back to Sue Short and her theory that ‘authentic power lies within the bad woman’.

References

Zipes, Jack.(1988), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to The Modern World London: Routledge.

Twitchwell, James B. (1985), Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York: Oxford University Press.

Short, S., 2006. Misfit Sisters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Hereditary. 2018. [Film] Directed by Ari Aster. United States: A24.

Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous Feminine. New York: Routledge.