Carey Price, Mental Wellness and THE BABADOOK
eOneThe following attempts to avoid spoilers, but The Babadook is a rich, layered movie, and some elements will inevitably be revealed.
Montreal Canadiens’ star goaltender, Carey Price, who just three months ago led his bottom-seeded NHL squad to a surprise Stanley Cup Finals berth, recently took a leave from the hockey club to participate in the NHL’s player assistance program for unspecified reasons except, according to family, to “put his mental health first.” For an elite, face-of-the-franchise athlete to signal the importance of mental and emotional self-care by modelling the ability to recognise needing help and the behaviour of asking for it has been met in North America and the sporting community with an avalanche of both support for Price and gratitude for his courage to ‘put it out there’. Star athletes just don’t ask for help to manage their mental health. It’s one of those actions that turns into a news story that brings forward an important conversation for the larger community.
Maybe part of it is simply that it’s better timing now for Price’s bravery to be celebrated as the “Suck it up, Buttercup” mentality is slowly being wrung out of pro hockey. The importance of self-care and asking for help in the arena of mental health crises is vital, and thankfully being increasingly normalised in the social discourse in a large parts of the world. However, in 2014 Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s debut feature film The Babadook rapped on the door, offering up this discussion as well, but it didn’t really take. The Babadook may have been a bit ahead of its time for influencing political agendas or public opinion. MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Truth and Reconciliation efforts, and Covid pandemic pressures have since brought to center-stage countless relatable stories of trauma, alienation, hopelessness, and insurmountable mental health challenges. Even despite divisive politics and polarising issues, in some ways it would seem we live in a golden age of empathy. So, maybe The Babadook arrived before people were ready to discuss mental health. Or perhaps viewers just missed the poignant messaging around self-care because they were too scared of Kent’s horror – The Babadook, after all, is one of the scariest films of the decade. Regardless, it represents an important discussion on modern-day wellness, and very few films have so richly shown mental illness and how it impacts daily life while also advocating for the destigmatisation of asking for help.
Much has been made about the monster in The Babadook representing grief. Yes. And brilliantly, so. But decidedly less has been said about the portrait of the struggling little family unit. Essie Davis plays Amelia, mother to six-year-old Sam, played by Noah Wiseman. That’s it, just the two of them. Amelia’s late husband died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to have Sam. The absence of a father figure and parenting partner looms profoundly over this household as single-parent Amelia slowly loses her grip on control. Where many films may settle into a clichéd display of a character merely losing her mind, The Babadook does not. Amelia’s loss of control is nuanced, natural, and viciously realistic. It emulates the very real fear that many parents have, particularly parents given to anxiety, and particularly parents raising their firstborns.
Through Amelia’s eyes, the audience lives her fears. The Babadook may be a horror film with some supernatural stuff going on, but the opening 40 minutes is an upsetting showcase of parental fears. The fear that your kid will be bullied. The fear that your kid will be the bully. The fear that school system won’t help. The fear that lacking a support network will cause you to lose employment. The fear that your kid’s tantrums aren’t normal. The fear that your kid will be labeled weird or won’t fit in. he fear that your kid’s fascination with weapons will lead him to become a serial killer. And finally – and this is one that doesn’t go away – the fear of being judged for any and all of it. The Babadook hits all of these parenting headgame challenges.
There are no greater heroes in modern society than single parents who manage to do well at parenting. Positive parenting doesn’t come easily to the vast majority, so the single moms and dads who figure it out, parent with love, and hold down a job are absolute rock stars. At the outset, Amelia seems to be doing OK. However, Jennifer Kent’s astute, layered script starts picking away at Amelia’s level of control. Yes, Sam’s behaviour is off-the-charts difficult and annoying. Is he on the spectrum? Maybe. One of the film’s common complaints is that Sam is irritating. It’s not a fair complaint, honestly. He’s a hard-on-the head character, sure, but Kent always has Sam behave within the realm of age-appropriateness. For starters, he’s hitting a bit of a transition age where kids start identifying with a peer groups and social politics begin. It’s a hard time for a lot of kids – and parents. The way that Sam’s yelling and tantrums are written into the script is entirely realistic, and the way that Kent works with her young actor effectively facilitates Amelia’s descent. When he screams, Kent is firstly helping to direct a scream that works for a horror movie, yes, but some kids do that. It’s very natural, too, and it’s gut-wrenching for a mom or a dad to deal with. The script is acutely tuned in to the limits of actual developmental behaviours. Even as Kent coaches young Noah Wiseman to push the annoy-o-meter to 11, Sam is grounded in reality.
This is what it is to be a parent: forever taxed, pressed, and tormented by the heightened level and ill-timing of a child’s negative behaviour. For stretches when everything seems to go wrong, parenting can feel like a crass form of torture: loss of freedom, sleep-deprivation, uncontrollable yelling, and bodily fluids everywhere. And as a single-parent there is never a partner with whom to ‘tag in’ for the purpose of taking a break. It should not be difficult in this world for Amelia to ask for help, yet it is. Amelia’s lack of support network – family, neighborhood, or workplace – is her developing hell in The Babadook, and her nerves fray away to nothing. The depth of the screenplay is in how Amelia’s tough parental armour slowly erodes until she finally reaches her own exasperated limits. Sam often sleeps in Amelia’s bed with her, but she slides to the very edge of the mattress to escape the sleepy hug of her son, a subtle communication of Amelia’s desperate plea for some space for herself.
There’s more at play than merely the sorrow of Amelia losing her husband. The creature of Mister Babadook is so much more than grief itself. He’s the very darkness that comes from feeling hopeless, being overwhelmed, or experiencing depression. Amelia and Sam are mysteriously warned “don’t let him in”, referring to the creature. Grief is already in their household and in Amelia’s heart. The Mister Babadook monster is some negative quality bigger than that, and he gets ‘let in’ when Amelia surpasses the outer limits of her coping skills and when all her positive parenting is stripped away. When the stress of managing the consequences Sam’s volatility becomes too much, Amelia ‘lets the Babadook in’, and what follows is a portrait of a mother who’s given up.
When Amelia lets that darkness in, the supernatural horrors come fast and furious. She doesn’t know how to ask for help. In the real world, people become overwhelmed and fall into their own darkness all the time. They feel there’s no one in their orbit to help, or if they do seek help, they’ll be pitied or stigmatised: the barrier of pride. But meanwhile, in The Babadook, a curious but very intentional thing happens. The script legitimises the act of asking for help in the face of overwhelming struggles. Even though Amelia can’t bring herself to get help, she is afforded a lifeline by two people who lovingly and authentically extend a helping hand. Firstly, her elderly neighbour, in a genuinely touching moment, comes to the door in midst of all kinds of supernatural chaos to offer what help as she knows that Amelia is having a tough time. In other horror films, such sweet throwaway moments typically portend an upcoming victim, but in The Babadook, this act of care bravely proclaims that in the midst of darkness, there is someone out there willing to help, so long as the person suffering is brave enough to ask for it. Secondly, after Amelia becomes haunted by Mister Babadook, her son Sam’s bad behaviours fizzle away. Gone are the tantrums, screaming, and wildness. As his mom falls out of control, he finds control and rises to relentlessly defend her. He still sees things through the eyes of a child, but his actions stake a claim for the strength of his family unit. He and his mom are a team. His love for her is abundantly clear. Sam’s actions are sometimes hard to decode throughout the film because his behaviours are so intense, but his love for his mom is undeniably heartfelt here. It’s a powerful moment, sort of analogous to a non-verbal child suddenly starting to speak with his first words “I love you,” directed to his mother. Amid the symphony of terrifying images and sounds in the final act, Jennifer Kent in her script and in her direction offers significant emotional payoff in the relationship of this boy and his mom, and it sounds out clearly that plenty of normal people need mental health supports. If Amelia’s work had an employment assistance program to help her navigate her stresses, her family would never have fallen into danger.
One never knows what someone else is going through. Everyone has his or her story, and when people lose the capacity to cope, especially when families hang in the balance, life can be dark. People need supports, and society is slowly cluing into this. The public conversation about mental health certainly isn’t all the way where it should in terms of empathy and care yet. However, there’s a conversation out there now. The fact that the NHL – a league whose in-game resolutions have historically involved fighting and goon-squad retaliation – even has a player assistance program is great because it acknowledges a value in mental health support for its members. The fact that a superstar player has walked away from the start of a new hockey season to work on his mental health and has the overwhelming support of the league – regardless of financial fallout him not dressing for games – signals a potential change in how simply asking for help can be normalized rather than stigmatized. In 2014, The Babadook and its poignant metaphors for desperation and overwhelmed parenting were a bit ahead of its time as a discussion starter. Sports news stories and films may come and go from headlines and trending Twitter feeds, but what is important, and it’s begun, is that the conversation of care and the validation of mental wellness have begun to resonate at least in small part by movies like The Babadook and brave actions like those by Carey Price.