“Bring Your Dick”: Lean In Philosophy in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018)
It was hard not to take it personally when the Academy Awards failed to nominate Toni Collette for her role in Hereditary (2018). Maybe because I’m a woman, maybe because my career is notoriously underpaid and under-respected, or maybe just because I’d already committed to a crop top that reads “the oscar goes to toni collette for hereditary.” But it hurt on a deeper level than your typical cinematic disappointment.
And yes, insert commentary here about how these awards mean nothing and will never treat horror movies with the respect so many of them deserve, but that’s beside my point.
In the groundbreaking Ari Aster film, Toni Collette plays Annie Graham, a fierce mother of two teenagers, drowning in unrelenting grief. Critics praised her performance regardless of how divisive that wackadoo last 15 minutes is (I love it, for the record), noting that much of the movie is simply a catalog of Collette’s face emoting a sense of horror. And that she does: Collette is the Jim Carrey of horror and Hereditary is her Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Just like Collette, Annie Graham does all the heavy lifting. She may not be in the running for mother of the year, but she is the nucleus of her family and she is doing the best she can in an impossible situation. Her most problematic actions connect her to the reluctant mother trope: she almost kills her children while sleepwalking, in her grief she confirms a belief that her daughter’s death is in fact her son’s fault, she confesses to a lack of agency in the upbringing of her youngest child and never even wanting her oldest. These confessions are released in the crucible of her grief; we can’t exactly excuse them, but we can’t reasonably expect her to do much better, either.
A lot of ritual and cult activity later, we discover that Annie’s mother, Leigh, was an active member of a cult seeking to bring the eighth king of hell, Paimon, into the world. Leigh had tried this with Annie’s father and brother and failed. She is estranged from Annie as Annie raises her son, but they rebuild their relationship when Annie’s daughter is born. Paimon has been allowed to inhabit the daughter’s body until her death, when he is eventually transferred to the son by way of Annie.
It’s all very complicated but the emerging picture is this: a network of women has, through various doings, brought King Paimon into an earthly incarnation, into his preferred male body. The initial viewing did my feminist heart good: a brilliant, daring, and deeply affecting new horror film directed by an exciting newcomer, helmed by an actor who happens to be a woman giving the performance of a lifetime. My second viewing brought this home: these women — Annie, Leigh, Charlie, and Leigh’s right hand Joan — wield the ability to bring about Paimon, despite even his preference for a “male body.”
It was only in my third viewing that the cynical part of my brain took over, and I realized with great despair the implications of this power structure. All I could think is that Sheryl Sandberg would approve.
Stay with me: among other accolades spanning the noteworthy to the notorious (Facebook anyone?), Sheryl Sandberg is the author of the very trendy book-turned-problematic philosophy Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013). (As though will were all it took.) Heralded as the “pompom girl” for feminism by The New York Times in 2013, Sandberg established a program for small groups of women seeking to “lean in” themselves by accessing education modules meant to help them participate fully in pre-existing patriarchal systems. According to Maureen Dowd, the assignments begin with instructions on how to “speak and sit” in order to “command more authority” in the male-dominated workplace.
It was clear to many people even before the last couple of years how problematic a philosophy is when it “encourages us to internalize our own discrimination” (Goldstein, 2018). But the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought this into newly sharp and troubling focus. (See Duffy, 2021; Goodwin, 2021; Martin, 2021.) The experts agree: when women are stretched thin, everyone suffers.
Even Sheryl Sandberg is leaning hard on leaning in to rectify the situation. Among cited statistics in Forbes magazine, Naz Beheshti (2020) claims that Sandberg has always wanted men and their institutions to step up. But I don’t know how seriously I can take a person who writes:
Women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. (Sandberg 2013)
Annie leaned in. So did Leigh. Charlie did, though maybe not by choice.
The Graham women did the heavy lifting to summon Paimon and all three paid the price; the lone male heir, however, did not. We may assume he only prospers as the literal incarnation of Paimon, a position that promises to include enormous wealth and power. The women who brought Peter to this point are used and discarded, exploited for patriarchal gain, whether or not they were willing or even knowing participants. Regardless, the women played a game that was tipped in men’s favor from the very beginning, and not one of them reaped the rewards that were promised.
Hence my great disappointment.
I suppose it’s only fitting that Toni Collette didn’t so much as garner a nod from the Academy for her performance as Annie. After all, it is a powerful patriarchal institution that promises fortune and fame at a price, and a particularly steep one for too many women: a moment of life imitating art imitating life. While I will always view Hereditary and its reception as a painful reminder of the toxic Lean In movement, I will continue to view it nonetheless. In my Toni Collette Oscar crop top.
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Beheshti, N., 2020. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Says Employers Must ‘Lean In’ To Protect Women’s Workforce Gains. [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2020/10/06/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-says-employers-must-lean-in-to-protect-womens-workforce-gains/?sh=d9a0dd261e3f [Accessed 23 Jan. 2022].
Dowd, M., 2013. Pompom Girl for Feminism. [online] The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/dowd-pompom-girl-for-feminism.html?_r=1&auth=linked-google [Accessed 22 Jan. 2022].
Duffy, J., 2021. Moms are burned-out: What can we do to ease the burden? [online] CNN. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/health/moms-are-burned-out-what-to-do-wellness/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29 [Accessed 23 Jan. 2022].
Goldstein, K., 2018. I was a Sheryl Sandberg superfan. Then her “Lean In” advice failed me. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/6/18128838/michelle-obama-lean-in-sheryl-sandberg [Accessed 23 Jan. 2022].
Goodwin, J., 2021. Women lost $800 billion in income last year. That’s more than the combined GDP of 98 countries. [online] CNN. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/28/success/women-economic-impact-coronavirus/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29 [Accessed 22 Jan. 2022].
Hereditary. (2018). [DVD] Directed by A. Aster. Utah: A24.
Martin, M., 2021. Getting Women Back To Work Is Key To A Strong Recovery, Labor Secretary Says. [online] NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/05/08/995065486/getting-women-back-to-work-is-key-to-a-strong-recovery-labor-secretary-says [Accessed 23 Jan. 2022].
Sandberg, S., (2013). Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
