I know I shouldn’t harbor this strange resentment towards Bring Her Back, the critically-acclaimed (though commercially average) horror feature set in the same cinematic universe as Talk To Me. I know I should be moved by the actors’ range of performances — from Sally Hawkins’ expert navigation of the begrieved mother to Billy Barrett’sw incredible performance of the creepy child. I know I should be awed at the film’s careful curation of visual metaphors (water, circles), marvel at its teeth-shattering gore, sympathize with its perfectly broken protagonists.

And yet, the film left me deeply unsatisfied. All the characters rely on recognizable tropes; their personalities, motives, and actions tiptoeing the line of caricature: Piper, her visual-impairment the reason she can’t make friends at school, but isn’t defined by her disability and is always feisty and playful. Andy, her elder step-brother, silently suffers abuse as he lies to protect his sister from the world he deems too cruel. Laura, their new and strange adoptive mother, whose grief over her dead daughter (also visually-impaired) is so all-consuming that she is wiling to do anything to bring her back.

Since the critical success of The Babadook in 2016, closely followed by an even more successful Hereditary in 2018, writers and directors have realized that they could utilize the genre’s in-built mechanisms of fear, gore, and death to express the psychology and physiological realism of motherhood.

I remember when I first watched The Babadook, and, like the general public, was completely swept up in this new promise of the genre. The film was the first in the mainstream to take on the complex psychology and terrifying psychosis of motherhood. In 2018, A24 released Hereditary, a film with such lasting influence that it’s become the benchmark and reference point for the term “elevated horror” (as well as a cliched answer to, "what’s your favorite horror movie?). As a horror enthusiast, I proudly wear the badge of having watched Hereditary more times than I can count.

Following the commercial success of Babadook and Hereditary, the film industry expectedly tried to replicate it. That is, there was a sudden influx of “psychology-driven horror/elevated horror”, ones where the marketing can invoke some semblance of a hip and edgy feminism: Bring Her Back pushes the grief of a mother into a manic obsession with a cultish rituals. Hueserra’s bone-shattering body horror as a metaphor for the pain of childbirth (the film says more; but this is enough for now). And where even to start with Hereditary, the refreshing insanity of which warrants a few paragraphs. The list goes on: the unforgettable birth scene in A Silent Place, the stolen baby to a childless couple in Lamb, the Oedipal complex in Beau is Afraid, Munchausen’s syndrome in Run, and more, and more.

In fact, the enveloping of motherhood in horror have become so prevalent (and increasingly uninventive) that NYT critic Amanda Hess writes, “There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show… By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point.”

Hereditary, though not without its flaws, articulates a specific horror related to motherhood that I don’t find in other films. Though the story is ripe with gore and character psychologies pushed to the limit of grief, trauma, and fear, the most taboo and unforgivable act is when Annie admits to attempting a miscarriage, to none other than the son who was never supposed to have been born. Already heavy is Peter’s burden on the blame he carries for his sister’s death. Already has he woke up to his mother dousing them both in gas while holding a lighted match. This was the child that she didn’t want, the child that she almost killed.

In this scene, Hereditary depicts a mother who is capable, though perhaps unconsciously, of harming and killing her children. The ensemble of Peter’s childlike wailing (“You tried to kill me”) with Annie’s muffled protests (“I love you”) is chilling, and continue until the two are engulfed in flames, the end that almost occurred if Annie had succeeded in her subconscious suicide attempt. For me, the actors’ performances of this scene trump Hereditary’s most famous dinner table scene.

However, despite it all, the film itself doesn’t doubt that Annie loves her children. Instead, it seeks to find both "rational” and “supernatural” explanations for her increasingly manic and potentially child-killing behavior: that Annie, like her mother, like her brother, is severely mentally ill, or that the whole family have been involuntarily casted into a cult headed by Annie’s mother to bring a demon king back to life. It isn’t Annie then, the film seeks to explain, who would willingly harm her children. It’s her illness, it’s demonic possession, both rationales creating this idea of a mother, if unburdened, would love her children to the best of her ability. So as the horrifying image of Annie clinging to the walls of Peter’s bedroom, like a creepy spiderman burns itself into my brain forever, she ultimately isn’t held responsible, isn’t to blame, for the disasters that befall her family.

At its core, in all the stories of the exhausted mother, one underlying fact will always remain true: That despite everything, she will love and protect her child at all cost. For the mother in The Babadook, the film ends with a look into the mother and son’s peaceful future, learning to almost live with depression instead of completely eradicating it. In The Silent Place, as we fear for the fates of this family, we are taken into reaffirming familial love, parental love against external threats. In Bring Her Back, Laura only did what she did because she loved her daughter too much, that love ultimately jolting her out of her mania and showing Piper mercy.

All except for one.

Huesera was my first Mexican horror, and incidentally my first horror about a queer woman. I took the first half of this article’s title, “Monstrous Motherhood”, from my Daily review of Huesera when it first came out, where two contradictory sentiments exist: that to be a mother is to be a monster (Bring Her Back & the now mainstream horror of maternity) and to deviate from good motherhood is a monstrous act.

In Huesera, the first strike comes when Val, its mother and protagonist, doesn’t act super excited after finding out that she’s pregnant. Maybe it’s due to shock? Maybe her joy at having performed the miracle life is delayed? But even after her baby’s birth, Val is distant, awkward around her son, constantly pushing him for her husband to hold, tries to ignore him as he screams throughout the night. Strike two, three, and four.

We later learn that before this marriage, Val used to ascribe by a punk aesthetic: her head shaved, she smokes by alleys with her friends and girlfriend. What happened is practically plastered all across this scene. We learn that Val had a choice, when her then girlfriend had asked her to run away with her, Val chose college, grew out her hair, and settled into where the film begins: the promised normality of a heterosexual marriage.

The threads of that promise unravel. Try as she might, Val just doesn’t seem to be suited to be a mother, awkward (and even fearful) around children who are not her own. After her family learns about her pregnancy, they jokingly remind her of the time she accidentally dropped the neighbor’s child down a flight of stairs, causing him to be “a little dumb”. Even Val’s husband joins in with everyone’s laughter, just one of the many consequences for marrying a man.

The film uses webs and weaving as its dominant visual metaphor for motherhood, in all its promises and its entrapment. In one shot, Val peers through the decorative web above her baby’s crib, which visually traps her face in the center. She walks through web-shaped architecture while going to see her ex-girlfriend.

Val’s exorcist summarizes her reckoning with Mexican folklore: “You have the spider. It’s a weaver. This one’s a mother, but also a predator… Here you can see a house, but also a prison.”

Just as I don’t believe there will be any progressive or groundbreaking films about Beauty (The Substance’s proves this), Amanda Hess words the problem with this new exhausted mother perfectly: “Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream.”

Bojack Horseman opens with a fake reality: The titular character, Bojack, acts in his famous 90s sitcom, Horsin’ Around (inspired by the 80s sitcom Full House). We see Bojack with his exaggeratedly comical gestures and Sara Lynn, one of his three adopted children on the show.

The adult comedy’s success lies in its sharp criticism of Hollywood, celebrity culture, delivered through the main cast of characters acting as direct mouthpieces for issues that span culture, entertainment, to social and political (in season 2 episode 7, “Hank After Dark”, Bojack comments on Israel’s occupation of Palestine).

Yesterday, I finished rewatching Bojack for the fourth time. It’s my favorite TV show because of its defiance against traditional feel-good narrative tropes of closure, of its self-conscious critique of the medium it occupies (a comedy), and of its refusal to offer redemption to characters who are again and again redeemed by Hollywood (Uncle Hank, Bojack, Mr. Peanutbutter).

My first time watching the second to last episode of the show, “The View from Halfway Down”, I stared at the end credits scene in disbelief, unable to stop crying. In those few moments where we all thought Bojack was dead, I was stunned, terrified, pained, but also, disgustingly, relieved. Of course, I thought, death was obviously the only way to close out the Bojack story, where he had spent his life performing for other people, for his mother, and for himself. Of course, how did I not see it coming, of course Bojack had to die.

And then, the flatline of the heart monitor became a rhythmic pulse; Bojack wasn’t dead after all. Just as the show had intended, I had fallen into the trap of redemption, of needing a big, grand thing to end Bojack’s story and resolve his actions. For all my consumption of popular media, there seemed to me only to be two possible outcomes: of Bojack dying, or of him somehow becoming good (even though the idea of being good is something that Diane/the show constantly disavows).

Death for Bojack would be easy. After all the horrific things he had done, there seemed to not be punishment enough that will “make up” for them (even though this idea of making up for horrible things you’ve done is also disavowed by the show). Killing Bojack seems to be the ultimate sentence. It follows along with stories we’re familiar with, ODing from a relapse, and somehow, killing Bojack would actually redeem him. It’s an easy solution, but Bojack is not an easy show.

The show’s actual ending is his sentence to live on. In Bojack’s death-induced fake ending, he calls a fictitious Diane conjured by his dying brain and we enjoy a moment of peace between the two, after the extreme anxiety and paranoia of the entire episode. In the real ending, however, Diane doesn’t fix things for Bojack. The pair return to the rooftop, the space that had seen their moments of connection and of dispute. Diane implies that this is the last time she will see Bojack. I, like him, understood her reasoning, but was left heartbroken.

Bojack tries to sum up the easy narrative that he almost fulfilled:

“Life’s a bitch and then you die, right?”

Diane corrects Bojack:

“Maybe life’s a bitch and then you keep living.”

Then you keep living.

Time’s arrow marches forward.

One scene in Bojack particularly stuck with me in this rewatch. Bojack is reconnected with Sarah Lynn after years of not speaking to each other, and the two spend a day at the park (enforced by Bojack), reenacting the typical Hollywood montage of “happiness”. At the end of this oh-so-happy day, Bojack and Sarah Lynn sit on a bench, watching the sunset. Then he does something bizarre. He starts humming the Horsin’ Around theme song, and says out loud, “credits roll”. The screen then leaves us with an empty space, behind the two’s silhouette, to imagine where the credits would’ve rolled.

As Sarah Lynn’s TV-dad, Bojack fails her in real life, bringing the vodka that got her drunk as a child, sleeping with her as an adult, ruining her sobriety because of his inability to handle the horrible things that he’s done in his life. Season one Bojack still believes that you can save things and relationships with one good, heart-felt speech or apology, performs this perfect day according to all his internalized structures from Horsin’ Around of how to act like a father.

“Why can’t life be like a sitcom,” Bojack bemoans, “where in twenty heartfelt and hilarious minutes, everything is resolved.”

And it isn’t just Bojack that subscribes to this Hollywood dream. When we’re young, we’re saturated with stories of gender norms, of success, of who we should love and how. Stories that come in the form of feel-good sitcoms like Horsin’ Around and Full House, stories that reward what we think is goodness, stories that punish what we think is evil.

In my freshman year, I read a classmate’s personal essay about feeling this pressure to find her soulmate in college, the clock to her marriage and familial duties ticking. As a recent grad with boring part-time jobs, I told myself to do the most interesting (though potentially dangerous thing), simply to experience what I think I should experience in my 20s. Call it by multiple names, this indoctrination of meaning, of structure, this sanitation of what we should feel.

This essay’s title comes from a MARINA lyric:

“TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal.”

This line feels particularly relevant to Bojack, where every time he spirals, he starts binge watching Horsin’ Around. And this has felt particularly relevant to me, perhaps for all my life, but noticeably in recent years as I start to think in narrative frameworks, as I start to think of myself as a “writer”. I rewatched Bojack for the fourth time because I didn’t know what else to do.

In these confusing past few months, I’ve been employed, unemployed, semi-employed, I’ve worried about my immigration status, wanted to ditch 9 years of life in the States to return to China for good, wanted to move to New York, decided to travel around the world for the foreseeable future, ended a relationship and let myself be dragged into it again.

I start acting out moments of my life as if it were a movie, making decisions based on what would be an interesting watch, talking and trying to communicate and resolve things, seeing myself in the third person, trying again and again to find closure in all my separate problems, to rationalize and psychologize and explain the narrative of my life as it is.

And maybe this is why Bojack is my favorite show. Not because of the critically-acclaimed reasons of its sharp social and cultural critique, but because I relate to Bojack’s (and Diane, but that’s another Substack article) inability to process events in real life without resorting to familiar and easy structures of resolution, of comedy, of an ending that’s not simply to just keep living.