The US box-office hit Bad Moms is the latest movie about women who rebel against the ideal of motherhood
There is a moment in new US comedy Bad Moms where Mila Kuniss Amy finally decides shes had enough. After a day spent running from school to work, from vets appointments to childrens hobbies, she reaches the end of her tether at a PTA meeting from hell in which she is asked to join the bakery police. No, thats it, Im done, she says, heading to a bar instead. If that makes me a bad mom then thats fine. Its a scene many of us can relate to.
Amy, with her desire to cut free in a fast car, down the odd drink and stop making her childrens breakfast every morning, is not alone. In addition to Bad Moms, which pulled in $23m at the US box office last weekend, holding its own against spy juggernaut Jason Bourne, theres Netflixs latest movie, Tallulah, in which Ellen Pages free spirit steals a toddler from a hotel room when the childs mother passes out in a drunken coma after a bad date.
On television, the hit US comedy Mom, now in its fourth season, follows Allison Janneys character as she attempts to make amends after years of bad motherhood, while the cult hit Odd Mom Out turns a gimlet eye on the terrible and terrifying mothers of Manhattans Upper East Side as they try to put the fun into fundraisers.
Crime fiction, meanwhile, is saturated with imperfect mothers, from the heroine of Gilly Macmillans debut Burnt Paper Sky, who loses her son on a walk in the park, to Alex Marwoods The Darkest Secret, in which none of the mothers featured, good, bad, or apparently indifferent, is quite as she initially seems.
The Mare, the hugely anticipated third novel from Mary Gaitskill, her first in more than a decade, also takes motherhood as its starting point. Drawing inspiration from Enid Bagnolds National Velvet, Gaitskill tells the story of privileged white woman Ginger, Velvet the Dominican teenager she supports for a time and Silvia, the girls furious mother. It is both an emotional coming-of-age tale and a raw meditation on motherhood.
Back in the 1990s I used to feel criticised by women for not having children, like there must be something wrong with me, Gaitskill told New York Magazine on the books US publication. People would say I dont see how a woman could be happy without children. It was almost like a dogma. [Now thats changed] people got a good look and realised that it is really hard and its not always lovable and rosy and everything working out. Maybe reality set in.
<
div class=”u-responsive-ratio”> 
Is it this new understanding of the grimy reality lurking behind the rose-tinted vision thats driving us to embrace mums behaving badly? I think partially what has happened is that the generation gap has narrowed, says Jill Kargman, creator of Odd Mom Out. We dont age the way we used to, and pop culture reflects that it tackles the fact that were faking it being adults and often dont know what the hell were doing. Its also the case that, 20 years ago, women were absent from leadership positions within the industry; now we have a voice.
Novelist Ayelet Waldman, who tackled this subject in 2009 with a series of essays titled Bad Mother, agrees that there has been a shift towards female-centric projects within the entertainment industry, but sounds a note of caution. Theres definitely been a resurgence of interest in movies by or about women, which started when Bridesmaids knocked it out of the financial park, but if you look at Bad Moms, youll see that its written and directed by men [Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who made their names with Las Vegas-set lad fest The Hangover], and I think thats telling. Female writers would probably present a less hackneyed, more complete version of what it means to be a mother.
Certainly its true that Tallulah, which is written and directed by a woman, Sian Heder, who also writes for female-centric prison drama Orange Is The New Black, presents a far more complicated picture of bad motherhood than the enjoyable but shallow Bad Moms, which for all the involvement of female producer Suzanne Todd is essentially a watered-down The Hangover for women complete with slow-mo walking scenes and funky soundtrack.
By contrast, Tallulahs bad mother, the neurotic, narcissistic Carolyn, is initially presented as a caricature of bad motherhood. Caked in makeup and squeezed into a hot pink dress, she barely registers her baby girl, doesnt appear to know how to change a nappy and has whats best described as a cavalier approach to childcare, at one point dismissing her daughters progress towards an open window with the words she has to learn. Yet as the film progresses, our opinion of Carolyn changes and, if not entirely supporting her actions, we at least come to understand the self-loathing from which they spring.
After the premiere I became this weird priest hearing these bad-mummy confessions and I realised all mums feel like failures, Heder told the Los Angeles Times. Theres a disconnect between the role of the mother as its presented in the movies and what it actually feels like to be a mum, the amount of guilt and shame you put on yourself.
Its this disconnect that films such as Bad Moms and shows such as Odd Mom Out tap into. The best scenes in Bad Moms are those in which our heroines, time-harried Amy (Kunis), raunchy Carla (Kathryn Hahn) and mousey Kiki (Kristen Bell) cut loose, laughing hysterically as they leave the stresses of modern motherhood behind, while Odd Mom Out works so well because Kargman relishes lifes absurdities. If you didnt see the humour in these sort of situations youd go crazy, she says. Theres so much insecurity surrounding motherhood. The way that people feel better about themselves is basically by putting others down.
<
div class=”embed-video-wrapper” u-responsive-ratio u-responsive-ratio–hd”>