In 2023, television demonstrated that motherhood can eat a person alive

The presence of a womb politicizes the body. Your autonomy, health care, and the decision to procreate or not are debated and moralized around the world. 2023 has been a hell of a year for choosing what’s right for your own reproductive organs, with states eliminating abortion rights and politicians pushing only the most prescriptive gender definitions. So it’s no surprise that television is filled with the most desperate depictions of motherhood, demonstrating how it can figuratively (and sometimes literally) eat people alive.

Throughout 2023, television has shown us unflinching portrayals of mothers. In April, Dead bell ringers, inspired by David Cronenberg’s classic body horror, Rachel Weisz took on Jeremy Irons’ dual role as twin gynecologists. Alice Birch’s adaptation had all the avant-garde gynecological instruments and “inner beauty” pageants of the original. But the show hinted at further brutality: close-ups of bodies torn apart during childbirth and, most disturbingly, as is often the case, a black woman not being listened to by her doctor. Her husband is left with the newborn baby while his mother lies dead on sheets stained bright red with her blood.

IN ChangelingLaKeith Stanfield’s Apollo also finds himself left with a baby in his arms after a black woman’s fears are allayed and he convinces his wife Emma (Clark Baco) of it, according to his favorite book. “A child is a dream come true.” But Emma’s dreams don’t come true, and she slips into a painful spiral of postpartum depression and psychosis. She becomes convinced that the child is not hers and, in the end, not a person at all.

Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) took the opposite, albeit no less painful, path in the final season of the series. Servant, where the not-real Jericho, whom the mysterious Leanne was able to imagine as a living child, again became a doll. Dorothy, who lost her son after mistakenly leaving him in a hot car, emerges from her frustration and finally grieves the overwhelming loss of responsibility for her own child’s death.

Getting pregnant and giving birth to something inhuman speaks of a primal fear that arises even with the most desired pregnancies. I’ve had some troubling moments in my life: Doctors told me that if I didn’t get enough calcium, the fetus would simply suck everything it needed right out of my bones. In the second trimester there was a sickening sensation, as if the fetus was spinning, and in the third, elbows and knees were scratching my insides, and tiny feet were visible on my stomach. Children’s blows began to resemble the fate of John Hurt in Strangerwith something fighting to get out by any means necessary.

Watching many television shows this year is a reminder of the anxiety that many feel, which was best captured in Ira Levin’s film. Rosemary’s Baby. If this fall’s show is anything to go by, that feeling hasn’t been assuaged by the age of 3D scans and blood tests that can reveal an unborn child’s DNA like a school report. Lionel Shriver’s 2003 book. We need to talk about Kevin“, superbly adapted for the screen by Lynne Ramsay, is almost as significant a text as Levins’s. According to Shriver, the book was born out of a period of reflection she had when she was about 40 years old and had to make the decision to remain childless. She then tried to imagine the worst that could happen if she took the alternative route, and wrote about the potential birth of a psychopathic mass murderer.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” also asked in the last season American Horror Storyand it turns out that Kim Kardashian is reading this for a reason. Gentle, which reaches its midseason mark on Wednesday night, doesn’t reinvent the wheel, with hints of familiar pregnancy horror stereotypes about demonic offspring, death cults, aliens and how Satan might have an interest in a person’s womb. Pregnant Anna (Emma Roberts) is devastated by what she thinks is a miscarriage, but the alternative turns out to be just as terrifying. Her pregnancy is accompanied by bleeding from the mouth (a real symptom of pregnancy), visions of a belly filled with spiders, and mysterious phone calls warning her: “They did something to your baby.”

On Prime Video Eric Kripke generation V suggests that it is capitalism that needs to be kept out of people’s wombs. The long-awaited spin-off Boys sees the emergence of a younger generation of Soups just as corrupt as the last. Vought International injected a group of infants with Compound V, breeding a new crop of fascist superhumans. These dastardly plans have dire consequences for mother and child. In perhaps the franchise’s most shocking scene, Marie (Jaz Sinclair), unwittingly dosed with a baby, accidentally kills her mother with her own congested menstrual blood.

The sins of the parents, inflicted on the unsuspecting offspring, also resurface throughout the creepy season – Mike Flanagan’s latest Edgar Allen Poe-infused limited series, Fall of the House of Usher, began with a montage of the destruction of an entire family tree. But a worse fate awaits a family member who doesn’t even have Usher blood in his veins. The unsuspecting Morel Usher (Crystal Balint), wife of Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas) and mother of young Lenore (Kylie Curran), is abused, tortured and stripped of everything she holds dear before being reduced to a toy for men to claim. rights. dominance. In a rare act of mercy, the series ultimately turns Morelle’s pain into something positive. Despite suffering untold physical pain and losing her only child, she rejects the patriarchy and turns the Ushers’ ill-gotten gains into a charity that helps millions of people, all in the name of her beloved Lenore.

Even mothers in popular television comedies are not immune to this. Horror-comedy Shining Valley brings back Courteney Cox’s Pat, released from the institution she ended up in after being possessed by a ghost and attempting suicide, in season two. She returns to the (understandably) not-so-loving arms of her children, but is willing to be gaslit. and put aside what she sees with her own eyes in order to take on the role of an ideal mother for her ungrateful offspring. In the same time, Only murders in the building saw women commit or confess to murder to protect their children. Here, protecting your children does not mean shooting a cruel maniac coming at them with a knife. As mothers, otherwise decent citizens may be forced to kill so that people are not intended for their beloved children.

Having survived two pregnancies, two births, and raising two children who have yet to show signs of demonic possession… I understand. Every time someone mistreats my children, violence is on the horizon. And fall television understands this too, depicting the brutality of motherhood in fictional stories and news reports. The womb, birth and everything that comes after is hard enough without the world’s unfeeling intervention. Politicians, supreme courts and patriarchs should heed the warnings of these television shows, leaving mothers free to focus on health, happiness and hope that the father is not Satan.

Leila Latif is the managing editor of Total Film, host of the Truth and Films: Little White Lies podcast, and a regular visitor to Sight and Sound, Indiewire, The Guardian, BBC, and more. Follow her on Twitter @Leila_Latif.