There’s a scene in Jennifer Lawrence’s new film Die My Love, about a new mom descending into postpartum depression and psychosis, that reveals a lot about the viewer depending on your reaction to it.
Lawrence’s character, Grace, has been slowly unraveling since the birth of her son, her behavior becoming more and more extreme as she struggles to understand what is happening to her emotionally. Reaching a breaking point, Grace locks herself into the dated, messy bathroom of the home she shares with her partner, Jackson, and goes wild. She sweeps the products off the counters, begins smashing things at random, and pours soap all over the floor. By the time she emerges, her hands are bloody from the effort, perhaps because she ended her rampage by dragging her nails violently against the wall.
Watching the scene, I had to laugh. “Yep,” I thought to myself. “It does feel like that sometimes.”
Perhaps the more normal response would be to be horrified, as Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is when he opens the door to find the scene. However, to me, Grace’s meltdown (one of many in the film) felt cathartic. Lawrence’s character was lashing out because she simply couldn’t handle what was happening to her any longer, albeit in an extreme way, and I have to say, as a mom, I get it. I mean, how good would it feel to destroy a bathroom sometimes, am I right?
It’s no secret that American moms are going through it. Of course, postpartum mood disorders and patriarchal struggles have always made motherhood a fraught experience for many in history, but it’s an especially salient cultural moment right now.
Not only do moms in the US get little to no government support, deal with rising childcare costs, and have had their reproductive rights stripped away across the country, this generation of mothers are also much more willing to call out the inequalities that make having a child much more difficult than it should be. And while many women are increasingly open about their struggles with postpartum mood disorders, the condition is heavily stigmatized, with an estimated 50% of all those who develop them eschewing treatment, leading many to suffer in silence.
In the midst of this moment, an interesting genre of film and television has appeared in Hollywood: the tale of the mom meltdown. Die My Love, which comes to theaters November 7 after making a splash at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, comes shortly on the heels of another critically acclaimed film about a mom on the brink, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which was released October 10 after a similarly buzzy launch at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival, differs from Die My Love in several ways but shares a fair amount of commonalities. Its mother about to melt down is Linda, played by Rose Byrne, who is solo parenting her medically fragile daughter as her husband, a sailor, is on an extended work trip.
As if taking care of her daughter, who has an undisclosed problem with eating and must use a feeding tube, solo wasn’t hard enough, Linda’s world begins to quickly unravel. A water leak causes a giant hole in her apartment ceiling, meaning she and her daughter must move temporarily into a run-down motel. Her daughter’s treatment isn’t going well, and she faces judgment from the doctors who imply Linda isn’t doing enough to ensure she gets well. And her job as a therapist and the patients she sees, including a young mother with a postpartum mood disorder of her own, layers on additional stress.
Though the two films are different in many ways, Linda and Grace’s experiences hit similar notes that are resonant to many of the challenges many women face as mothers today. For one, their partners suck. I know, not all men and all that, but it’s the way that both Jackson and Linda’s husband, Charles (Christian Slater), both fail to show up that is particularly poignant.
Both Jackson and Charles are not evil men by any means. They just don’t get it. As their partners unravel under severe stress and mental health issues, both men are frustrated as to why, exactly, the woman in their lives can’t be normal, and seem oblivious to the actual crises unfolding until it is almost too late.
Jackson, who moved with Grace into his uncle’s old home in Montana from New York City to raise their baby, vacillates between confusion as to why she is increasingly acting out in scary and unpredictable ways, and anger and self-pity over how hard his experience of dealing with Grace has become. The fact that Grace is clearly losing her grip on reality seems lost on him, and he focuses more on why, when he’s away at work all day, he comes home to a dirty house and a partner who isn’t herself.
In one of his most unforgivable moments, Jackson shows up one day with a dog (yep). Any woman who has raised an infant alone all day can imagine the fury if your partner just decided on a whim to add a puppy to your list of caretaking duties, but Jackson is flummoxed as to why she is mad or what exactly he has done wrong.
Again, Jackson isn’t a horrible person, he’s just not equipped for the reality of Grace’s postpartum experience, a troubling reality when Grace is clearly spinning out of control.
Charles, on the other hand, is not just emotionally absent, but physically so. For the majority of the film, he is only heard not seen, a continuously exasperated voice on the phone judging Linda for her inability to handle everything on her plate. When he finally arrives home, he is shocked by her declined mental state, judging her flaws and getting almost to the point of calling her a bad mother, the ultimate insult.
The idea of the “bad mother” is one of the themes at the center of both films that also strikes a chord. Both Grace and Linda are judged for their inability to handle the situations they are in, with most of the characters they interact with failing to see how much they are drowning. Rather than empathy, they are mostly met with scorn, with a few notable exceptions.
It’s a common experience—rather than anyone investigating why these moms have ended up on the brink, they are instead judged for their inability to handle an impossible situation. And this is resonant for many mothers today. Even if they aren’t destroying a bathroom, many moms feel they are being placed in a losing game by the sociological pressures placed on them, but face little empathy when they break.
Even media that isn’t just about the motherhood experience is reflecting this reality. The Peacock thriller series All Her Fault, which premieres November 6, is ostensibly about a mystery involving a missing child. But it’s also about the experience of and expectations placed on two working mothers at the center of the mystery, Marissa (Sarah Snook) and Jenny (Dakota Fanning).
As is implied by the show’s title, when Marissa’s five-year-old son Milo goes missing, she is primarily the one who is blamed. Both she and Jenny work full time and employ nannies, and Marissa is quickly judged for not doing enough to vet a play date for her son, which turns out to be a ruse to kidnap him (and, probably, not being the one to pick him up from school in the first place). When Jenny’s nanny Carrie becomes the main suspect in Milo’s kidnapping, she is also blamed, as everyone assumes she didn’t do enough due diligence in vetting Carrie before hiring her.
The ironic part is, of course, that neither woman is at fault—men are (I won’t spoil exactly how). But while Marissa’s story takes center stage, Jenny’s arc is quietly the most poignant. Though she and her husband both work, she is the one tasked with hiring Carrie, which comes around to haunt her.
Jenny also struggles with her manchild of a husband, Richie, who refuses to help in any meaningful way with the care of their son, Jacob. As the show progresses, Jenny’s fight to keep her head above water while facing scrutiny for every decision she makes as a working mom begins to lead her to the edge.
In Jenny’s case though, her story ends on a more triumphant note than the moms in the films. After catching Richie watching TikTok on his phone in a parking lot when he told her he was working late and thus couldn’t help her pick up their son, Jenny calmly and firmly asks him for a divorce. In the end, she and Marissa learn that while they can’t rely on so many people in their lives, they can have each other’s backs.
It’s a much happier ending than the fates that befall Grace and Linda, both of whom we don’t get to see have a moment of peace or closure. But in a way, leaving us as they turn into the most extreme version of themselves is poignant as well. No one has come to save moms in the US from the pressures placed on us, at least not yet.