Watching either of the two trailers for Tully, the third collaboration between Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a queer love story encased within a heartwarming tale of the pitfalls of early parenthood. Shots of Marlo – the every-mom played by Charlize Theron – in sweatpants, dropping her iPhone onto her sleeping baby, dishing up frozen pizza, expressing milk and knocking it over, are interspersed with the arrival of Mackenzie Davis’s night nanny, Tully – a kind of Manic Pixie Nurture Girl – as the familiar phrase flashes up on the screen: “let someone in”.
Marlo, already a mother of two, begins the film heavily, outrageously pregnant: we learn, in rapid succession, that this third pregnancy was unwanted, that her husband does little of the domestic labour, and that her “shitty” upbringing is the reason she’s so committed to her nuclear family unit. Postnatal depression, never named, haunts the narrative: her wealthy brother offers to pay for a night nanny to avoid, in his words, the advent of another “bad time” like the one that followed the birth of her son, Jonah. When the nanny arrives – described by more than one reviewer as a “millennial Mary Poppins” – the panacea seems to be working. Not only does she look after the baby at night but she also operates as a kind of empathy machine, listening to Marlo’s problems, sharing sangria in the garden, and baking the Minions cupcakes that Marlo herself never has the time to make. The postnatal depression, it seems, disperses; Jonah – who has “emotional problems” – finds a place at a school more suited to his needs, family dinners get increasingly wholesome, and Marlo does a passable Stevie Nicks impression at a child’s birthday party. And then comes the twist: after a bender in Brooklyn with Tully, a sleep-deprived Marlo, drunk at the wheel, drives her car off a bridge and ends up in hospital, and we realise there was nobody else in the car. Her maiden name, we learn, was Tully.
Critical responses to the film have been, for the most part, positive: it is empowering, we are told, to see ‘real’ motherhood portrayed on screen. It’s true that Theron’s performance is outstanding, and the viscerality of the maternal body is refreshingly well done: we watch as Marlo tries to piss in a hospital toilet, as she expresses milk from red-raw nipples and as she takes her top off at the dinner table and exposes her post-birth stomach. The lack of treatment, and indeed diagnosis, of her postnatal depression and psychosis is if anything all-too-realistic, and there are moments of sharp insight in the dialogue: when Marlo’s husband informs the doctor on duty that she left the children ‘alone’ in the house she replies by asking him “weren’t you at home?”
Learn to love your claustrophobia, it tells women. The nuclear family is the only one worth having.
Yet to hail the film as a feminist project is to value the representation of the structural co-option of maternity over its interrogation. Tully’s treatment of social reproduction is dangerously simplistic. Cody has spoken in interviews about how her own, financially easier, experience of parenting in L.A. inspired her to explore a narrative in which economic anxieties are combined with the other hardships of parenthood, yet here class and poverty are only fleeting concerns. The transactional system of care that governs child-rearing under capitalism is done away with via Tully’s otherworldliness. Until the revelation of her non-existence, the viewer, although encouraged to believe in her, is never asked to consider her financial reality, and the fact that the service is paid for by Marlo’s wealthy brother is a narrative convenience that reinforces its fairytale quality. Similarly, Tully’s whiteness allows the racial politics of care to be completely overlooked, and the repeated idea that it’s ‘unnatural’ for hired help to bond with your newborn is taken as a given, rather than seen as an impetus for a consideration of the social conditions that require mothers to make that choice.
The British cultural theorist Angela McRobbie has written at length about the “neoliberal intensification” of motherhood, and the use of popular or corporate feminism as a tool that maintains gendered power relations. In ‘Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times’, McRobbie argues that continuing patriarchal dominance is masked by feminine self-regulation: “The ‘perfect’ emerges as a horizon of expectation, through which young women are persuaded to seek self-definition. Feminism, at the same time, is made compatible with an individualising project and is also made to fit with the idea of competition.”¹ Competitive mothering is an easy laugh – the constant joking at the expense of Marlo’s brother’s wife, Elyse, is a prime example – but Tully endorses the very conditions it pretends to expose. As Tully performs impossible feats of domestic labour under the cover of darkness, the film enacts an erasure of the human cost of social reproduction. Even after the revelation that Marlo has been completing these tasks herself in a frenzy of exhaustion, it can’t be ignored that her children were happier and better fed, that her house was cleaner, that she even looked ‘better’ (as her daughter Sarah notes, “you wear makeup now, mommy.”) In the context of the revelation that she’s a figment of Marlo’s imagination the recuperative power of Tully’s apparently limitless empathy implies that the cure for post-natal depression is a cupcake-driven bastardisation of self-care, not access to treatment and a husband who commits to fully sharing the burden of parenting.
The film’s strength – for its first two thirds – is the relationship between the two women at the heart of the narrative. We learn through a clumsy coincidence at the beginning of the film that Marlo is bisexual; as her intimacy with Tully expands to fill the vacuum of her absentee marriage, it becomes a tender eroticism. This is mediated, always, through other bodies: as Tully cradles the baby who has just finished feeding, she talks about how the ‘molecules’ of the child still exist within the mother; later, in a bar toilet, she gently wets a paper towel and uses it to draw the milk out of Marlo’s swollen breasts. In a pivotal scene, Marlo sits behind Tully and instructs her on what to do to arouse her sleep-befuddled husband. This moment can be read as emblematic of the film’s mistreatment of the queer intimacy it establishes. Coming after a discussion of sexual history and sexual fantasy, Marlo reveals to Tully that she has a waitress’s uniform that she’s never used, bought to surprise her husband. As Tully puts the outfit on, which fits her pre-natal body in a way it wouldn’t Marlo, the moment of sexual possibility between the women is subsumed into heteronormative, ageist fantasy: Tully’s young, and therefore fantasy-appropriate, body is used as bait to ‘recharge’ the masculine battery.
The revelation that Tully is a version of Marlo’s former self removes the possibility of a different life she represented. “I love us,” Marlo’s husband says to her, as she lies in her hospital bed. “I love us too,” she replies. This collective noun is the acceptance of the status quo, just as Tully’s last speech, in which she tells Marlo she should embrace her dull life – “being boring means you’re doing it right” – is an endorsement of the sacrifices society requires of her. The final scene, in which Marlo’s husband helps her make the packed lunches, is bathed in a saccharine glow: learn to love your claustrophobia, it tells women. The nuclear family is the only one worth having.
1 Angela McRobbie, ‘Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times’, Australian Feminist Studies 30 (83):3-20 (April 2015)
Helen Charman is a writer and a PhD student researching nineteenth-century maternity, sacrifice, and political economy. She teaches undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, and primary school children at the Hackney Pirates. Her writing can be found in Datableed, The Germ, King’s Review, Dazed and Confused, the LRB Blog and The Inkling Magazine
