Apocalypse Baby
This essay for the Spring 2021 issue of Meanjin is about television’s lost and found children, childless and desperate mothers, was first published here.
Blessed be a pandemic accessorised with high-definition television and prestige drama series. All those hours—no weeks, months, really—of vicarious travel. So much spectacular scenery to contemplate. So much mesmerising beauty. And so many—it must be said— brutal murders. Over the past 18 months I’ve watched a moody panning shot of Tasmanian mountains cut to a medium shot of a dead girl’s body at the bottom of a ravine. A bird’s-eye scene of a car weaving through lilting Welsh roads that ended with a dead girl in a marsh. Flyover shots of Scottish isles tracking to a dead girl being unearthed from a shallow grave on a remote croft. Scenes of Italians partying in a villa that cut to a femmina morta in a canal.
Some weeks, it’s as if the unspoken strapline of Premium TV is ‘Beautiful dead girls in breathtaking places’. And like the apotheosis of Laura Mulvey’s critique of the inanimate beautiful woman who animates the drama for everyone else, in these shows the discovery of the dead girls’ bodies sets off a storyline for all the other characters to act out.1 The beautiful girls’ bodies are found in trunks uncovered during archaeological digs on a Western Australian shore. They turn up in Finnish lakes. There seems to be at least one dead girl in every English forest. Every so often the deceased is a boy, on a beach in England, say.
All these corpses have spawned an industry of dramas about the childless mother, and communities fearing for their lost young. It’s a new twist on the motherless-child story that was the plot-generating machine of so many nineteenth-century fairytales and Victorian novels. Of children left alone (and this was not unreasonable when childbirth was often deadly for mothers) to face obstacles and terrors. Often the obstacles and terrors involved threats to their life in a forest—a witch in a gingerbread house, a huntsman who has been tasked with killing a princess. For Austen’s motherless girls and Dickens’ orphaned boys, the stories involve navigating the treacherous jungle of human society.
The stories of motherless children are still with us, from remakes of Anne of Green Gables to the excellent Vida (recently screened on Stan). But I’ve been thinking about all the childless parents, the ones left behind by all the dead girls’ bodies. One of the little-remarked-upon features of the Kate Winslet series Mare of Easttown was the way the show seemed to be almost an elegy for disappearing youth: those who are literally disappearing—missing and murdered girls—as well as the way youth is disappearing as an extended time of life before children enter the adult world.
In Easttown, school-aged children play with guns and create online profiles for escort work. As I wrote in a review of the show, at best they dream of service industry jobs, at worst, their lives are cut short by opiates and bullets (many of the adults, meanwhile, disenfranchised, distracted and depressed, seem unable to grow up). It was an excoriating portrait of a nation enamoured with youth—with images of youth in music and film and popular culture, and youth maintained through surgery—but which is unable to confront the seemingly irrevocably compromised future its young will inherit.
In the West, as the gap between rich and poor grows, so too does the part of the Venn diagram where the poor and the young overlap. We’re told our children’s lives may be if not shorter than their parents’ lives (though quite possibly shorter), then at least bleaker and more brutal. Hotter, harder, more uncertain. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see all these young girls’ lives cut short on premium television as a symbol of the future we’re stealing from an entire generation. In 2021, the story of the mother lost to childbirth or consumption doesn’t hold the power it once did. It’s not children losing parents we fear, its children losing their futures.
In prestige drama series, children are still going into the woods. But where previously the story might have ended when the child—having escaped the wolf’s belly or a poisoned apple—comes home transformed and enriched with new courage or a handsome prince, on premium television they often don’t come home at all. The child’s life can end in the forest, like Mare of Easttown’s Erin. Or the life she knows can be taken from her: in the opening scene of the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a little girl, Hannah, runs for her life in the forest where she is separated from her parents and taken by the wolves of Gilead.
For Hannah’s mother, June (Elizabeth Moss), her daughter’s loss is a wound that won’t be healed. It’s an amputation, one much more profound than the finger cut from the hand of Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), the mistress of the house June is assigned in Gilead, and the woman who choreographs June’s rape by her husband, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), so she can have a child. When Gilead was still the United States, Serena was a woman in the Phyllis Schlafly mould, someone who preached conservative values of home and family and the sanctity of motherhood while writing books and touring the country as a working woman.
Now a childless wife, Serena represents the failure—or at least the contradictions— of a conservative or elite liberal feminism. Women who make a living out of preaching a life of abnegating power and public life, yet who want to carve out a concession of power in a patriarchy without changing any of its fundamental power structures. Now, in Gilead, her only chance to be a mother depends on other women’s labour—surrogates like June, whose womb she takes as her own, and housekeepers like her Marthas, who labour as slaves in her home.
If Gilead is an extreme manifestation of a fundamentalist Christian West, a country where fertility is in decline and children are scarce, The Handmaid’s Tale is a metaphor for an America where a conservative Christian majority (often, but not always, white) fear being overrun by heathens and minorities who will soon make up their own majority. Gilead is a religious state that therefore wants to control all the births, all the children. In Creamerie—a New Zealand television series that riffs on and gender flips The Handmaid’s Tale, childbirth is also controlled by a state, albeit a matriarchal one called Wellness. (It feels right to set a show that turns The Handmaid’s Tale’s patriarchy into a matriarchy in New Zealand, a country that led the world in women’s voting, and is on to its third female PM.) The leader of Wellness is Lane, a woman who takes Schlafly’s diabolical political cunning and combines it with the smugly condescending air of a Byron Bay mummy influencer. After a pandemic that targeted men wiped out half the world’s population eight years ago, Lane (all the main characters have androgynous names in a world where the men have died) now controls which of the surviving women will be allocated a load of scarce sperm she has—ahem—husbanded.
In the state of Wellness it is Jaime (played by Chinese-Kiwi actress J.J. Fong) who has the most pressing case of baby hunger. Like Moss’s June, who has lost her daughter, and Winslet’s Mare, who has lost a son to suicide, Jamie has lost a child too—her young son died in the pandemic with all the other males. Traumatised yet determined to find an object of love again, she wants to bring up a baby on the dairy farm she shares with her friend Pip (Perlina Lau) and Alex (Ally Xue).
Pip, the least cynical of the trio, works in the Wellness centre where Lane sells a lifestyle of health, a philosophy of abundance and a vision of social purity delivered by meditation and kale shakes and obedience to a gynocentric order. While Gilead pointed to its rulers’ religious purity to sanction the ceremonial rape that is at the centre of its efforts to populate the state, Wellness offers bodily purity as a path to spiritual purity and reproductive abundance. (And as Lane sits barefoot on her office desks practising her asanas, her notion of purity reminded me of the contradictions at the heart of the philosophy of wellness bloggers and influencers and anti-vaccination supporters—that those who concern themselves most with the purity are often the wealthiest of us, the biggest consumers who are doing the most earth-poisoning.)
The tyranny of Wellness is its insistence on female sameness—one made literal in a menstruation-synchronisation festival where ‘voluntary’ participation is enforced and donations are extorted. Harmonise your flow and follow the leader is the festival’s guiding spirit. In Wellness, where consensus is another word for peer-group pressure, the worst punishment for dissent is to have your anger taken away: Guard Constance (Nikki Si’ulepa) may be having a clandestine affair with Alex, but when Alex calls out Lane’s choreographed baby lottery, Constance shoots her in the back of the neck with bliss balls, a kind of MDMA that redirects Alex’s animus to a harmless and ineffectual euphoria. Jaime’s energies, meanwhile, are directed to weekly self-pleasuring laid down by the state’s gynaecologist. ‘All that time I thought you wanted to change the world, but you just wanted to rebuild the old one with you at the top,’ Pip tells Lane when the penny finally drops that abundance is not meant for everyone.
I’m not interested in whether these shows are good or bad (although that is a discussion that could be had), it’s that I find these shows interesting to think with (even as I first come to them, in an evening, as screens to stop thinking with. Or in the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, something to be camp with, joking with friends during the first COVID lockdown that Morrison’s meet-to-walk-with-just-one-friend rule was a kind of Handmaid’s cosplay). I don’t think it matters at all that The Handmaid’s Tale—including Atwood’s original text—presents Gilead as a state with an incoherent philosophy, as some critics have complained (as if any coherence could be expected from a story that Atwood wrote from West Berlin, in a city divided and encircled by another state, and which included elements from political regimes and cultures at different times and places. As if there was any internal coherence to a Trump or a Morrison government—or a Trudeau government for that matter, or, on a bad day, even an Ardern government.
As I watched these shows of failed states (Mare of Easttown) and dystopian and fascist states (the other two), I thought about another fictional television world about babies and birth, albeit one loosely based on historical reality. Call the Midwife first aired in 2012, but for the first five or six seasons the series passed me by when the show’s first outing coincided with a time in my life when I was deeply immersed in caring for the result of my own two labours. But it was hugely popular, a scholar of maternity and breastfeeding told me. While the show often verges on a parodic parade of rough and often hard to like working-class East Londoners testing the patience of the saintly nuns and middle class, it’s a story of a bigger birth, that of the National Health System, the state-spawned body that—at its best and on its front line—operated to empower and support women. Midwives and medicos (all white, until the late arrival of midwife Lucille [Leonie Elliot]), are often shown as angels, flying about on bikes to help mothers to have births at home, advocating for teenage girls to keep babies they would otherwise have been forced to relinquish, keeping new mothers who are single, widowed or abused afloat and safe.
In these new shows, Mare of Easttown, The Handmaid’s Tale and Creamerie, the state’s nurturing role has either turned sinister and manipulative or it has been completely transferred onto women. In Creamerie, a ‘baby safe’ inspection by a blond-haired and white-suited Wellness representative recalls the home visits the midwives in Call the Midwife make before a mother gives birth. But these visits are all part of a controlling state process that begins with the rigged lottery that determines who will be given the right to conceive in the first place. In Mare of Easttown, the caring state has disappeared, and mothers fight for children who need medical care, they work to save children lost to the opioid crisis and to find children who are literally lost. Mare’s job as a detective extends to ensuring the most disenfranchised members of her town have heating and a roof over their heads.
In The Handmaid’s Tale the elite state’s projection of (free) caring labour onto mothers and lower-class women is so literal that the elite have enslaved the fertile and otherwise productive women to bear their children and care for their home. The Handmaids and Marthas who produce children and care for children are just extreme versions of the least privileged mothers under neoliberalism, a state that offers so little care that mothers are often confined to their homes, their movements outside limited to their caregiving.
Not long ago I started rewatching an earlier prestige series, Jane Campion’s 2013 Top of the Lake, a show that all these three new series, in different ways, seem to call back to. Moss also starred in Top of the Lake, playing another childless mother, Robin Griffin, a detective and a woman who gave up a child for adoption after she was raped as a teenager. Like Winslet’s Mare—another detective who has lost her child—and like Moss’s character June in The Handmaid’s Tale, Robin is trying to rescue a missing girl. In Top of the Lake, the girl she is trying to save is Tui (Jacqueline Joe), a pregnant 12-year-old who has run off to hide in the woods—a place that is now not a site of danger for a child, but of refuge and safety. It’s also a place in which Robin seeks to heal, living in her late father’s remote bush cabin.
Like Creamerie, Top of the Lake is set in New Zealand. And it too features a community of women who’ve been traumatised—not by men they have loved but who have all died, but by the men in their lives who have abused them. They are led by Holly Hunter’s GJ, a charismatic leader who speaks in epigrams as minimalist as the shipping container homes the women live in—a setting like a Jeffrey Smart painting made three-dimensional. (The community of traumatised women led by a charismatic woman has another cinematic antecedent in the home Glenn Close’s nurse, Jenny Fields, opens in The World According to Garp, a friend recently reminded me.)
In Top of the Lake, the crime Robin solves is a paedophile ring led by a senior detective (David Wenham) that prostitutes children to businessmen. In the series’ 2017 sequel, China Girl, Robin searches for her adopted daughter. Along the way she investigates the murder of a sex worker (another body in a suitcase) and uncovers an illegal surrogacy ring. As the Atlantic pointed out in a critical review, the show’s focus on Robin’s story means that the Thai sex worker characters become no more than ‘window dressing’ in her quest to save her daughter, and find herself.
What’s interesting in The Handmaid’s Tale is that now it’s Moss’s character June who has become the baby surrogate and sex slave. She’s still the main character, reminding us that dystopia can be just another name for a world where bad things begin to happen to middle-class white women. This is one of the problems that critics have had with the show: the slavery of a white woman is a dystopian drama, when the slavery of women of colour and working-class women is a daily reality. To be fair, The Handmaid’s Tale has implicitly acknowledged this at times—in flashbacks to a pre-Gilead life where June’s African-American best friend Moira (Samira Wiley) earns money as a surrogate to a childless middle-class white family, and then painfully relinquishes her baby, or in flashbacks to Handmaid Janine’s (Madeline Brewer) grim life as a minimum- wage slave and single mother.
Creamerie cleverly critiques The Handmaid’s Tale’s much-criticised colour-blindness—the show’s stars, along with the writer/director Roseanne Liang, are on record as saying they created the show with Kiwi-Asian lead characters after years of being offered roles as sex workers or ‘dragon ladies’. But it’s a soft critique—perhaps necessarily so. While The Handmaid’s Tale is styled as a horror show, full of dark tones and high production values, Creamerie, at first billed on SBS streaming as a comedy, is filmed in a bright and white 1990s colour palette.
Where the brutality in The Handmaid’s Tale is shown in lurid close-up—the last season’s flashbacks that linger almost per- versely on June’s blank expression as she is raped, for example—Lane’s goading of Pip to rape Bobby, the fugitive man the friends discovered on their property, is played as farce (but a farce that also manages to confront the viewer and demand that we feel nauseated by the women’s ugly violence). Viewers, how- ever, are mostly held at arm’s length from the worst violence in Creamerie: a mountain of dead men’s naked bodies is framed first by a camera then by a window, in a scene that recalls not so much a future dystopia but a Holocaust. There’s a camp, knowing humour to the show: Bobby calls himself a ‘survivor’; while Pip tells him, ‘I don’t want to sex you I just need your sperm.’
Back in Gilead, June’s anger is allowed to rip in the show’s final season. Now in Canada, June has joined a group of freed Handmaids, and roles have been reversed as her former abusers, Fred and Serena Waterford, are now in jail. When June visits the incarcerated Fred, he makes himself a victim: ‘We did what we had to do to survive.’ June affects benign forgiveness, but she’s really seething with hate: she tells Moira she wants Fred to feel hunted, to feel the fear she felt the day Hannah was captured and taken from her. In the season’s final episode, June’s wish is granted.
During a prisoner swap, Fred is left in a no man’s land in the middle of the dark woods. June and other freed Handmaids and Marthas emerge from the trees and chase Fred like the fox that he is, tearing him to pieces. The scene evokes June’s first petrified flight through the forest as she tries to escape Gilead with her family to reach Canada, and the way Handmaids, in training at the Red Centre, were forced to circle and stone to death Gilead’s traitors.
The forest—the place where children are lost, where Hannah is captured, where Erin is killed, where Tui fleas—becomes the place where Moss’s characters seek healing and liberation. Robin’s recovery from her rape begins in the forest, as does June’s, when she emerges the morning after Fred’s annihilation, leading an army of women. But unleashing her anger means that to save her daughter—to save all the other children— she has to go underground.
By season four, June has been imprisoned, raped, tortured, shot at and bombed, but like Christ, or a Marvel comic superhero, she is indestructible. Gilead can’t kill her. To her followers and supporters she has become like a deity and cult figure. Creamerie, in taking aim at the cult of the white woman saviour of mothers and children, and religious devotion of any kind, feels like the prick that is needed to burst June’s balloon.
