On the Feral Creativity of Motherhood and the Defanging of Nightbitch

The central criticism of Marielle Heller’s movie Nightbitch (in which mother turns into dog, in case you haven’t already heard the chatter) is that it has defanged its source material, Rachel Yoder’s glorious novel about motherhood and artmonsterhood.

Some of the disconnect between the two works of course also derives from the different containers of literature and cinema, the divergent ways these media work in terms of tone, timing, visual and verbal registers. The movie version is always going to be different from the book because they are different creatures.

But does the disconnect also derive from some degree of fang removed from the source material? My verdict? Yes, there have been some teeth taken out, especially when you compare the endings. Book: feral art installation featuring the mother herself killing a rabbit and handing it to her delighted son; movie: tame art show, reunion with husband, cuddling in the forest, birth of second child. Even in my short summary, you can see the contrast.

What’s worrisome is that the movie’s ending tames both the culminating art project and the mother herself.

In the film, she may emit a feral cry while pushing out her daughter, but the movie makes sure to show that the mom (never given a name in book or movie) will continue to fulfill her marital and reproductive duties: she will stay married and she will continue to make babies, even though the whole book was about how very amazing but also how very annihilating of identity and art motherhood can be.

While I’m no fan of a work of art being defanged in the interest of a sanitized Hollywood ending, particularly where issues of women’s creative ferocity are concerned, I have to say I still enjoyed the movie–but only when I let myself think of it not as an adaptation of the book but as its own work. Full disclosure: for one thing, I’m prone to like any movie that explores art monster concepts, given that I’ve written a book on my obsession with this subject matter.

Another critique I came across faulted the movie for being like an essay film, a criticism I discredit for two reasons: 1) I effing love essay films AND 2) the review’s author has not read the novel. Reasons one and two are connected, though. This reviewer hasn’t read the book, but if he had he’d know that it would adapt to cinema in the form of an…essay film. Yoder’s novel isn’t exactly plot-centric in the sense of a Marvel movie, let’s say; instead, it unfurls in a series of impressions, images, intensely wrought internal and external experiences.

Another simple reason I liked the movie: it made me laugh throughout. Although, is humor—especially dark, surreal, humor that also functions as cultural criticism—ever really simple? No, no it’s not. In books and movies, humor often functions as the spoon full of sugar that allows the societal critique to go down. And, though it sanitizes the ending, this movie does not shy away from this critique altogether by any means.

Nor does it avoid exploring a crucial territory that doesn’t get much airtime in motherhood movies: the feral creativity you share with your children.

In the book, Yoder refers to the mom’s parenting approach as being “willing to embrace a certain doglike playfulness, a whimsical approach to her motherhood, you could say.” As with womanhood (and personhood), there’s a kind of motherhood that happens in private and another that happens in public. The private experience of being with (especially young) kids involves mess, play, bodily fluids, constant forms of invention and transformation; it’s often funny, disobedient, filthy, and a lot of fun—but you wouldn’t know this from most movies.

In the film, we see the mother setting up an art day for her son, where creativity and getting dirty together is the point. Here, she encourages him to be free and escape the rules for once. It starts out daintily, and then he goes wild: painting on her face and the walls, squirting paint down the back of his diaper. She tries to rein it back in, but it’s too late because she has unleashed his inner doggie.

It’s the act of slipping on the paint and falling on her lower back that seems to catalyze the growth of the pustule from which she pulls her new tail. So, the freedom of the art day seems to have invited a certain monstrous brand of canine creativity into the lives of both mother and son. Soon after, she starts looking at clippings from her old art life and, most importantly, making her own art again.

Because parents are tasked with socializing their children, the moments we see in the movie where the mom plays doggie with her child are precious. Let’s anatomize one of the film’s scenes. The mom takes her son out to eat; when the fork breaks, she shows him how to eat like a doggie straight from the plate; they are happily wolfing down their food and barking at each other until a dirty look almost breaks the spell; luckily Mother has gone far enough into her creative canine transformation by this point to keep going anyway. A second dirty look, this time from a mother (and being judged by another mother is even more powerful of an interdiction), but luckily the librarian who has gifted Mother the book on magical women happens to show up and tell her she used to play doggie with her kids (thereby approving the behavior and undoing the earlier judgment).

This continuing in the face of judgment is something the mom would never have been able to do at the beginning of the movie when she shoots a dirty look at another mother at the store for wrestling a sugary cereal box out of her kids’ hands. This apparatus of approval/disapproval keeps moms in line when they apply it to others and themselves.

But the judgment has to stop for any creativity in art or parenting to occur, and this book and movie consider parenting as a potential locus of creativity, which is, indeed, revolutionary.

The movie (like the book) taps into the undomesticated elements of your interaction with your young child that never gets properly explored because there’s a shame attached to it (the same shame that may cause you to apologize to people about your messy home when they visit, for instance) and a need to socialize the child and sanitize these types of experiences for the outside world. This is what makes the sanitization of the movie’s ending particularly painful for the mother who has been nodding along to the more undomesticated earlier sequences she so desperately needs to set herself free and create.