Are You My Mommy?

on infantilizing media

We did it, Joe. The big guy with the given name Late Capitalism is dusting his hands off after centuries of hard work. Original IP is dead, and we are all happily schlepping to the theater to watch the thing that used to be a novel before it was a Broadway musical before it was a movie (the first part, anyway. The film’s second part comes out next year). In this great nation, you can get a Stanley Cup for your Stanley Cup, insurance for your insurance, and a blank look from a homeless person as you complain about how the “commodification of girlhood” is ruining feminism and Substack. Trump’s second term looms over the nation like the Hindenburg, and worst of all, we’re making beauty influencers do politics again.

Recently, I saw Sean Baker’s Anora and flip-flopped for several days between liking it and not liking it. I found it irreverently funny, well-paced, and consistently interesting. I also found it sometimes disappointing and a bit too parable-y for my taste. When people asked if I liked it, I had trouble being brief in my answer. I kicked it around in my mind — discussed it with a few friends, brought it up at dinners, thought about it when my phone died on the subway. In the end, I think I enjoyed my own process of grappling with the movie more than I enjoyed the movie itself. And then I started to worry that I don’t know how to be confused about art anymore, that maybe we’re all stuck in some sort of Freudian loop of cuddly, decades-old themes and encouraging mantras.

Maybe this is simply the way of the mainstream. The line between art and advertisement and propaganda remains occasionally blurry, etc. But it seems to me that a prominent desire — or at the very least, the pre-eminent marketing tactic — of our era is for something to feel comfortable.

Every new development promises to decrease the friction of our existence; get a faster upload speed on your smartphone, skip your lunch break with a drug that decreases your appetite, save time and anguish by getting your Botox preventatively. Influencers wear printed t-shirts that say “I’M A GIRL’S GIRL” like it’s a service animal vest marking them safe. There appears to be a new genre of indie self-help music cropping up, complete with algorithmically friendly choruses about loving yourself and ignoring the haters. I recently bristled at my own impulse to unfollow a food account that posted an American flag emoji after election day (it’s probably fine that I don’t politically align with the person I get chimichurri recipes from?)

We’re obsessed with recommendation lists and gift guides, preferring to spend the effort calculating our probability of enjoyment versus take the risk and testing how we actually feel about something. Can you tell me if that book was worth reading? If it was problematic? If I would like it very, very much? If it would upset me? Can you can cut up this large bite of food for me? Could you feed me with a bottle?

All of this is not to chide The Kids for being obsessed with safe spaces, or whatever. I think there is a reason we want them! I’ve never known life without a cost of living crisis or a war criminal President. The state, in an ideal world, would take care of us. But it doesn’t. And in that absence, I do think that we need to start interrogating our collective, national motherless behavior. Some of you would find great relief in watching some obscure porn and discovering that your inexplicable rage and sadness at all things confusing to you is actually a sublimated sexual kink.

I can put on my Fran Leibowitz shoes and be a little mean, sure, but I’m the stupid baby too. I stopped making fun of Disney adults when I realized that I’m obsessed with short-form product reviews, not because I valued “unbiased feedback,” but because I grew up watching the QVC with my Nana. I sip on my water bottle and scroll through my slop just like the rest of you. But I also know what it’s like to try to cultivate a “safe space” full of “good vibes” on the internet. And I can tell you that hell hath no hatred like the message that begins “yikes bestie…”

I think it’s okay to admit that we all want a mommy. That our real mommies were imperfect and maybe even mean and horrible. That we want revenge and to feel bad and that sometimes, at night, we think about if we’d stayed behind in the kitchen on that one Thanksgiving, when it was just you and her and she was stirring the butter into the brown sugar. She looked more somber than usual, and you thought about asking her what was on her mind. But instead, you grabbed a beer out of the fridge and walked a few blocks away to smoke a bowl. And now, you think, you see a constellation of moments before you in which she was your mother before she was a person — moments that you could have seized, gasps of time that were actually opportunities for connection, an entire history that you took for granted. And maybe now it’s too late — maybe you’re across the country, maybe she’s died. Maybe you know that this kind of love is something you both want, but more than that, you know that cowardice runs through the bloodline and you are sure that neither of you could ever look someone in the eye and admit that.

Also, I realized this whole post is literally just this tweet