RANT AND RAVE

Artist's Date #38: Babygirl

I had a lot to say about Babygirl before I went to go see it. I expected it to be a watered down version of Secretary, with an age gap gender flip and hot scenes that promised to be psychologically interesting. Which they were. But I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a celebratory story about the landscape of female pleasure at all (except for the meta aspects of Hollywood and the topic of ageism). In fact, I saw it closer to a slow moving horror movie, carefully reflecting the bind that women find themselves in. In a world where women are virgins or sluts, we can’t find a place in which we can safely feel whole. Only in a very tiny private place can we find a way to be fully realized.

As we all know, the actress known as Nicole Kidman plays a high-powered woman who has an affair with a younger male intern. Their sex is based on him dominating her, specifically him getting her to follow his instructions. He goes between being a newbie at this dynamic, stumbling when he asks her to get on her knees, to being borderline cruel in his delivery. Nonetheless, this is foreplay for this couple who have what seems like vanilla sex otherwise and just basically seem hot and heavy for each other. Unfortunately for Romy, Nicole Kidman’s character, she is married, has children, and is the CEO of the company where they both work. So he, as he calls out, has nothing to lose and she everything—which is why he is the one who holds all of the power.

On his first day, he comes into her office with the rest of the group and asks a question during the rhetorical period in which people are asked whether they have any questions and they are supposed to say no. Instead, he blurts out a challenge about whether she believes her own press lies, which is so idiotic in all senses that the whole group gets ushered out of her office. In doing so, he signals to her that he’s available to be “real,” which is one of the more toxic things a potential lover can do. This is like some Twilight shit that she falls for because she’s been so deeply unsatisfied by the good mother box her husband has kept her in for his own level of virtue. She longs to let someone into the secret she’s kept about herself—that a lot of her life is built on things she does not believe.

The best moment in their pre-sex banter is when she asks him about how he calmed down a dog that was racing toward her in the street and he says, “I gave him a cookie.” This is why I’m writing about this movie in a space usually reserved for stories about art and stories about mothering. We have been so trained to do things on command for others that when someone simply calls that out for what it is, it’s enough to create some intrigue. Mothers, I think, are especially prone to looking for this kind of validation—not just the cookie for doing a good job, or for coming back home, but for being everything to everyone and then begging for crumbs. “Why, do you want one?” he asks, and she says the best “no.” But they are already dancing.

One of the more shocking lines is at the beginning of the movie when Romy takes the flirtations and tensions from work into the bedroom at home. She breaks the silence between her and her husband about her need to detach from his idealized view of her in order to get off. She has a specific request, and her husband says that he can’t do it, though he says it gently, because it makes HIM feel like a villain. The scene then goes on to imply that they then have sex in their usual way, which she’s just basically said does not meet her needs. It’s a brilliant moment of dialogue that shows just how pervasive men’s view of sex dominates women’s desires. The content of her fantasy may make him feel like a bad guy, but it’s astounding that he doesn’t see that years of sex with his wife in which he’s never known what she wants makes him much worse.

So here we have the conflict. Romy is a woman who has achieved everything a strong woman is supposed to achieve: a marriage with a man who “respects” her and has his own career (in the arts!), a huge career herself that shows no sign of slowing, a beautiful house with a pool, and two children who (as teenagers?) still get their lunches packed with handwritten notes. But every single box she’s been shown is worth checking off has further compartmentalized the parts of herself that she needs. Here I want to note that there is a danger in making sex another box that one needs to check when the trouble is that we have so many boxes.