Ma
Ma (2019) — dir. by Tate Taylor
Ma is a slow-building, visceral psychological horror film, garish but not quite self-aware enough to be considered camp. The film stars Octavia Spencer as the eponymous Ma, a socially pariahed, strange middle-aged woman, violently lonely and forceful in her desire to be seen, loved, befriended, living in a small, grey town somewhere in midwestern America. We view Ma through the lens of the film's protagonist—the quiet, conventionally feminine, and intelligent new kid in town, Maggie. Maggie and her new friends, a tightknit group of nearly all-white, reckless teenagers, meet Ma in the parking lot of a liquor store. The kids convince Ma to purchase alcohol for them, offering her money, and she does so with a sense of false solidarity. Eventually they venture to Ma's isolated, huge house in the woods, where she catches them and offers the use of her basement for their partying, under a few conditions, one being never to enter the main house. Ma develops an unhealthy and controlling relationship with the kids and the friends they bring over, going so far as to provide alcohol and party with them, attempting to ingratiate herself into the cool crowd. Maggie's sense of unease about Ma increases throughout the film, while many of her friends blindly continue to exploit Ma's desperation, considering her harmless, simply lonely. One night, Ma witnesses Maggie kissing one of the boys, Andy, with whom Ma has an unnerving obsession, and so she drugs Maggie, stealing her earrings and bruising her up. One night, Maggie goes upstairs into the house and finds Genie, a classmate of hers with a severe disability, wheelchair-bound, trapped in her room, and it is revealed that Genie is Ma's daughter whom she ensnares and verbally abuses. Similar occurrences accumulate, until eventually Ma traps the kids in her basement and reveals her plan to maim and torture them. Her core resentment lives in her own experience as a high school student, bullied mercilessly and cruelly by everyone, especially Andy's father, who she was in love with. Her resentment has festered and grown into a poisonous, unhinged animal, and she traps his father, drugs and tortures him, and attempts to murder him and the teenagers, setting the house aflame. She succeeds in killing the father, but the teens all make it out alive just barely, and Ma ultimately returns to her bed, cuddling the dad's corpse, while the house burns.
The film is rough around the edges, with mediocre writing, but Ma's character is interesting enough as a specific incarnation of the monstrous-feminine to warrant an analysis. The white and male gaze, however, complicates the potency of this depiction of the monstrous-feminine. In considering the cultural resurgence of female monstrosity, it is necessary to interrogate the curator of such imagery, namely their positionality and what effect certain social experiences impose upon the film. The death of the author, in relationship to the contemporary monstrous-feminine, is rife with theoretical tangles. Is this resurgence truly radical, truly rewriting the monstrous and pushing its envelope, if the directors of its appearance still reside in hegemonic positionings, if they themselves have never inhabited the forced role of cultural monster themselves?
Birthplace(s) of Monstrosity
Contemporary portrayals of the monstrous-feminine, particularly in horror films, are still predominantly glazed in whiteness. The intersections of Blackness, desire, and gender in Ma swerve and challenge the viewer, offering a vital expansion of Creed's concept that cannot simply be uniformly applied to any woman. The specific interactions of gender, race, and class in Ma produce a certain realm of monstrosity that focuses mainly on trauma and visibility. For Ma, trauma presents as the most abrasive and indelible birthplace of monstrosity. In Alvin Frank's 1969 essay, "The Unremarkable and the Unforgettable: Passive Primal Repression," he writes that "trauma is a symptom of the Real, it is not a simply past event, it is "the experience you are awaiting." Thus, monstrosity congeals into being when that trauma is envisioned as ceaseless, recurring, beckoning always. The monstrous can be defined as an awakening here, to one's own abjection. Trauma is at once abject and still unremovable. It is inhabited and felt in the body, sensory and immediate. Trauma becomes gendered and maternal, the source of the abject—trauma as "archaic mother," the fantasy through which the traumatized seeks to constantly pass and heal, to make right yet again. Ma's highly strategized, highly stylized violence seems to represent the desire to unhinge time itself, and thus time too becomes a monster in its unresolvability.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
The routine, everyday, systemic violence enacted upon Black women in the United States works as an ungraspable but pernicious monstrosity, engineering new monstrosities in order to keep its power structures alive. If monsters are borders drawn against Creed's "repulsive Other," and, if, also, monsters are our interactions with the abject, which, as Kristeva puts it, are spaces where borders collapse, what reactions are possible? What do encounters with these borders and their internal collapsings resemble in a state that seeks to displace and discredit one's humanness, relegating their very identities to the imagined abject? Kristeva describes these encounters like so: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects" (Kristeva 1). Abjection is also potentiality, and in Ma's case, hegemonic societal, political ritual defines Black womanhood itself as abject, her as abject, and ritualizes violence in order to fetishize, spectate at, and traumatize her. She, particularly her body and its sexuality, is perceived as unassimilable, and so her desire, for visibility, for affection, for respect, is not offered a safe space to live. Her unhingedness, however unjustifiable, actually begins to seem like an understandable reaction to such an experience. Justifiable does not matter, in Ma, in terms of monstrosity. The fact that monstrosity does not belong solely to those in power is still a difficult concept in pop culture. Ma's desire has always been perceived as inherently monstrous, and so this hyperbolized, violent performance of it functions as a rebellion and a horror. What has been ejected from the "thinkable" glowers through the cracks, and the teenagers are made to look it straight in the face. "Non-normative" femininity, and the refusal of its constrictions, is put on display.
Female rage, in Ma's character, is weaponized and reconstructed, her anger wielded as an art form. The cultural policing of Black women's anger, and the enforced archetype of the "aggressor' upon American constructions of Blackness breaks open, and Ma refuses to defer to the racist conception of monstrosity that these stereotypes perpetuate. However, Ma fails, in a way, to truly reckon with the intersections of race and gender that exist in such a heated, loaded exchange with hegemonic, colonialist definitions of monstrosity still evident in the immeasurable, systemic violence enacted upon Black Americans. The monstrousness of carelessness, of portraying these borders without detail or experience, infect the film, directed, written, and produced by white men. In modern authorship, there seethes a site of potential monstrosity, never without consequence or the threat of inhabiting and attempting to convey narratives that do not belong to the creators.
In the scene above, Ma tortures and deforms each teenager in a customized, specific, artful way. Strikingly, she paints the face of the singular Black teen amongst the friend group with white paint, muttering that there's "only room for one of us." The negotiation of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal society does indeed ensure this strand of thinking, and to so blatantly, so deliberately reveal this logic, to mask another as an act of self-preservation, as a garish, visual placement of monstrosity is particularly jarring. Ma is a rebel and an enabler of monstrosity, proliferating violence and trauma in order to salve her own. Yet no one can be surprised by Ma's actions—to borrow from Jeffrey Cohen's "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)," "Monsters are our children." They can be pushed away, but they always return. Maggie and her friends' willingness to exploit Ma's loneliness and desperation is, in a way, another mode of monstrosity. The non-sight that whiteness, and otherwise positional privilege, ensures; the incapacity, or unwillingness, to see the grains and movements of culture, country, power, as the monstrosity it can be. Perhaps such non-sight allows the true monsters, their origins and reproductions, to be concealed from view.
