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
The
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.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
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