Here is the good news: you can keep the popcorn in the cupboards and avoid empty calories if you don’t watch the Korean and Dutch movies I’ll introduce today. However, both cinematic explorations under review have brain power and pretty amazing visuals. If you are a fan of disaster movies, science fiction films or mysteries, as I am, you’ll be riveted.

Here is the bad news: you will need a lot of buttered popcorn to erase a bad aftertaste left by watching the movies under discussion. Both delve deeply into psychological issues using women as projection screens of stereotypical, often misogynistic concepts, centered on versions of manipulative women and bad mothers. Sufficiently warned?

Alice Neel Mother and Child (1982)

SPOILER ALERT! I will reveal plots.

I turned to The Great Flood on Netflix without any prior knowledge, simply because I saw it was a Korean film; they are known for excellent apocalyptic movies. I find disaster porn to be the perfect distraction from real life affairs since they remind me that things could be worse, and usually have a happy ending for a select few. We can dream of being the lucky ones!

The story unfolds in the predictable manner; some catastrophic weather event (asteroid melts arctic – buy that!), sets all of Seoul under water; heroine plus child live in a 30 stories apartment building, stratified along class lines, inhabitants now jamming the stairways to get to safety. A male figure appears, half threat, half protector, to guide her and child to a helicopter waiting for them on the roof. It turns out she is the remaining lead researcher in a secret UN project. They are trying to develop AI programs intent on preserving humanity’s emotional tool bag for whatever comes after humanity gets wiped out. Without her being rescued the program is doomed. Along the way she encounters massive challenges, physically and morally, revealing herself to be a tough cookie and originally not particularly attached mother.

Suddenly the film switches gears, and it turns out (for all I could decipher, since there are enough plot holes to drive a truck through,) that she volunteered to be a subject in the data extraction of human emotions for her research project. Looks like it to me, though, that the extracting powers are not interested in human emotions per se, but the shaping of emotions deemed appropriate for a good mother. She finds herself in a time loop, going through thousands of simulations of the same disaster scenario, (conveniently indicated by the changing numbers on her t-shirt for the dull viewer), finding “better” ways to handle ethical dilemmas in order to reach the goal state: a reunion with and rescue of her child lost along the way. Who turns out not to be a child at all, but a preprogrammed AI creature. With some sort of diabetes, no less, making us wonder if they had bad programmers or this was another ruse to instill extra “nursing” tendencies in a woman who had not given birth.

Kaethe Kollwitz Mütter (1911)

Across all these re-iterations of her flight we see her develop from an emotionally distant care taker to someone who is deeply attached to the child. She is ever more engaged in being there for other people in distress, even if that might harm herself or her goals. Along the way AI is shaping her, by providing adaptive memory clues and selective reinforcers, tweaking algorithms towards a preferred outcome. Just as we, the viewers, are shaped by finding our own stereotypes confirmed – isn’t it comforting to see someone evolve to be nurturing, sensitive, present, attached, servile and self-less? A “good mother”, in other words?

Helene Schjerfbek Mother and Child (1886)

As someone who currently holds two young mothers closely in my heart, mothers who could not possibly do a better job than they are doing already, I was irked that the film regurgitated every single societal demand imposed on mothers, in order to bestow the final award, success of the mission. It overshadowed the larger philosophical – and interesting – question the movie raises, how Artificial Intelligence can shape us all – and theoretically in all directions, towards becoming good, or evil, or accepting evermore incoherent entertainment….when looking at the evolution of this film. In contrast to what I watched next, though, the movie rocked!

***

The Shouwendam 12 runs on Amazon Prime. I love to watch Dutch movies for a number of reasons. They help me keep in touch with the language, provide blissfully normal looking actors (no Hollywood glam here, ever) and offer glimpses into the darker aspects of the human psyche (which I attribute to Holland’s colonial past rather than the darkness of the northern latitudes of Scandi-Noir films.)

At first glance, the series presents the familiar script of whodunits: teenagers disappear from the village 25 years ago, someone with amnesia comes back to figure out if he is one of them, a suspicion shared by some in the village, but not others. Then someone gets murdered and a hastily called detective, with the help of the young village cop, tries to find the culprit, setting her eyes on the amnesic newcomer. So far, so typical.

All of a sudden, the series picks up rocket speed with multiplying subplots involving drug dealing, gay sex, child abuse and the like. People start dropping like flies, each killed in a different fashion, with our guy having alibis for many of them, but not all. The script is clever in the sense that we really don’t learn the full extent of a very complicated narrative until the last (10th!) episode.

Paula Modersohn-Becker Stillende Mutter (1903)

Spoiler: the whole set-up revolves around women who have lost their minds, quite literally, after having or losing a child. In the mildest version, the detective is deemed incompetent because she is still shattered by losing her son to suicide. Two cases of postpartum depression then depict women with murderous impulses, trying to kill their babies or killing someone else. Finally, the main culprit is a woman completely deranged after losing her lover to suicide and their unplanned baby in a subsequent miscarriage. She goes out to revenge those losses, murdering everyone who ever harmed her lover, who was one of the missing village kids ago from all those years ago. She drags her brother – hinted to be incestuously bound to her – along in the psychotic scheme, pretending to be the “returning” amnesiac to rattle the villagers into revealing the secrets tied to the disappearances. She escapes punishment by jumping off the church tower in the end, while he shows some redeeming feature by preventing her from killing yet another innocent victim, before he is sent to prison.

It is beyond infuriating. Women are presumed to be murderous harpies under the influence of hormonal imbalance. One is shown to be suffering the hallmarks of clinical depression before she tries to drown her daughter, others are depicted just as murderously aggressive crazies. Instead of giving the viewer tools to understand postpartum depression and its harrowing burden on new mothers, it simply terrifies us with what these women are capable of with destructive intensity.

Mary Cassat Mother and Child (1880)

No mention of the gradation seen in the real world. Up to 85% of mothers experience postpartum blues, a slight impact on mood with hormonal shifts, which remits spontaneously 2 weeks or so after delivery. Then there is postpartum depression, which is clinically indistinguishable from garden-variety depression, with sadness, anxiety and hopelessness often part of the picture for a longer stretch, infinitely treatable. And then there is postpartum psychosis, appearing directly after birth for maybe 1-2 in a 1000 women (if that – the data vary widely). A rare event, and often coinciding with the emergence of dormant bipolar disease, triggered by the stress of pregnancy and birth.

If movies want to raise larger questions – is AI a dangerous tool or possibly preserving the essence of humanity; are given life events a path to madness under certain circumstance – please find something that does not involve motherhood. Mother bashing has such a long and treacherous history, we should really move beyond that. True not just for movies, but also for books – just look at all the new memoirs about and by mothers, or the endless novels about bad mothers…

True, too, for operas: just think Madame Butterfly willing to give up her child, or Azucena in Verdi’s Il Trovatore with her fragile mental equilibrium, not knowing which baby went into the pyre and which she kept and raised as her own. Or Bellini’s Norma, who spares her child, but that was that for sane actions. The Queen of the Night is an ambivalent mother in Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Cherubini’s Medea is the worst of them all, killing both of her children in an act of revenge.

Enough mother bashing! Could you please leave them alone?

Here is a naughty child instead, for today’s music, in the end (at ca. 39 minutes into the video) crying for Maman, no less. L’enfant et les sortilèges is a beautiful opera by Maurice Ravel.

Pablo Picasso Mother and Child (1902)