“Brood”-ing on Fatherhood
David Cronenberg’s most personal film dissects the price of male privilege.
I sat down to watch The Brood as a David Cronenberg fan. As horror’s favorite body horror progenitor, the man excels at taking a genre known for repulsing audiences and elevating it to an art form. Blood and guts need not be the only mark of a “true” horror film, a term that really bugs me with its intended snobbery. Even people who renounce Ari Aster’s films for their artistry can and do appreciate a good Cronenberg flick.
This is not the case in The Brood. Fans of Cronenberg’s later works should probably skip this one and rewatch The Fly.
I myself found the horror aspect lacking a bit, but the film was just bonkers enough to keep my interest. Based off of the director’s divorce and subsequent custody battle over his daughter, this “A Marriage Story” gone wrong is instead a slow burning, horror-drama hybrid.
The Brood focuses on a couple fighting over custody of their young daughter, Candy (Cindy Hinds). Mom Nola (Samantha Eggar) is in an intensive and experimental therapy program where Dr. Raglan (Oliver Reed) encourages his clients to unleash their inner rage. For most clients, this rage manifests as bumps, sores, and tumors.
Unfortunately for everyone else, Nola’s rage manifests as three-foot-tall deformed children who, unbeknownst to her, kill everyone that angers her. When her ex-husband, Frank (Art Hindle), stops bringing Candy to visit her on the weekends, all hell breaks loose.
The Brood brought two of my adult anxieties hurtling to the surface: my relationship with my mother and my fear of being a mother myself.
I like being around kids, but ultimately admit that I need to better my existing relationships before I can be a good role model for one. I’m also only in my mid-twenties. Throw in some unresolved issues with my mother and you have a woman who has no current interest in spawning.
So watching a woman who was abused by her mother as a child in turn give birth children that kill for her? It didn’t sit well with me. But there was something cathartic about seeing it. I was uneasy, but excited.
It’s important to note that these rage children never go after Frank. Despite his claims that she “married [him] for [his] sanity, hoping it would rub off,” she seems to harbor no ill feelings toward him. In fact, she’s actively working through her childhood trauma to be a better mother.
Frank, on the other hand, isn’t doing so well as a single parent. At best, he’s inattentive and distant. At worst, it’s suggested that his emotional negligence is partially responsible for the horrible events that unfold around him.
Adrift in a part of life society has reserved for women, Frank is not equipped with the emotional vulnerability necessary to “mother” her [his daughter].
But is it really his fault?
Western society isn’t exactly known for letting men express themselves in a healthy way. This is made clear when the film starts with an open therapy session. Dr. Raglan, pretending to be a client’s abusive father, tells him that if he had been born a girl, he “wouldn’t be so ashamed of him”.
“Weakness is more acceptable in a girl,” he says.
Anger is the ultimate alpha male emotion. Happiness? Sure, guys, you can have a little. Just don’t go feeling sensitive or sad or talking about your feelings: that’s for ladies only.
Of course, this line of thinking is bullshit. Modern patriarchy is failing as people are starting to realize that gender roles — and the boxes they confine men and women to — are also bullshit.
Unfortunately for Frank, he’s in a David Cronenberg movie, and they’re not really known for their character epiphanies and happy endings.
So Frank digs his heels into what is familiar: anger and silence. He ignores a counselor’s suggestion to talk with his daughter about finding her murdered grandmother’s body. He frequently refers to her as “the kid” and can’t pick her up from school on time.
In fact, he spends most of the movie pawning Candy off to every woman he interacts with so he can go talk to the police or yell at his wife’s therapist.
And in this genre, in this story, he won’t and doesn’t really win that way. The Brood may be named for Nola’s gaggle of rage children, but the word holds a second apt definition as well. It’s when one obsessively thinks about something that makes one unhappy.
It’s no doubt that Frank has these thoughts. He’s recently divorced. His kid is covered in mysterious cuts and bruises. Her mother, in his eyes, is insane. Masculinity has put him in a position where he’s unable to voice how this stress affects him. He also subsequently denies Candy that right by not addressing any of these issues.
“Candy needs mothering, and she isn’t getting it,” her kindergarten teacher tells him.
Yes, she does, but not from a new mother figure. What she needs is her father to step into that role. Adrift in a part of life society has reserved for women, Frank is not equipped with the emotional vulnerability necessary to “mother” her. It would require him to be weak, to be a “girl.”
Worse still, his inability to yield goes poorly in a film with body horror elements. He’s an audience stand-in, gawking and shrinking away from the tumors, sores, and deformed children. The Brood deals with themes of motherhood and mother-daughter trauma that only exist in the liminal space of womanhood. Like a male gynecologist, it’s impossible for Frank to really understand what’s going on in this space. Unlike one, however, he doesn’t even make an effort to.
When the film’s most infamous moment of body horror finally arrives, he is disgusted by it, much to Nola’s rage.
Sure, anyone would be grossed out by a giant external womb sac resting in a woman’s lap. I myself was disturbed as I watched Nola clean her recently birthed rage baby with her frickin’ tongue. But to her, and in the context of the body horror genre, it’s all natural. It’s also really awesome.
It is Frank’s inability to traverse this world that is not.
In the end, he does escape relatively unscathed, masculinity intact. He strangles his wife to death, picks up their daughter, and drives home. Nola’s rage children die with her. To him, this exercise of violence was a victory. His daughter is “safe” and he has proven himself as a capable father.
Yet the film ends with a focus on Candy. She’s grown a few bumps on her arm, not unlike the bumps of Dr. Raglan’s patients. The cycle of trauma, it seems, will never truly be broken.
