DIE MY LOVE and the existential horror of womanhood
I didn’t like horror films. I’d say I found the jump scares cheap but in reality, I was just too anxious to handle any extra fear in my life. It’s the term “extra” here which is vital. I saw the supernatural as the defining element of horror. Through big leaps of imagination, we watched ideas, things and realms that at the very least sit outside of our conscious perception, and at the most, don’t exist. For many people finding new things to be scared of for two hours, outside our own muddy reality, is an entertaining escape. Unfortunately, I, a teenager with what can only be described as a wimpy temperament, saw The Woman in Black at my window for years after watching it and swore off the genre until the anxiety of adolescence finally started to pass. Still, with the rise of “elevated” horror providing us with a new sense of realism or at least a comment on real, contemporary socio-politics, I became aware that I was watching horror films now, not because I was less anxious overall, but because they validated my already very present, tangible anxieties about existing in the world. It was like long form doomscrolling and I couldn’t help but watch.
Die My Love is not strictly a horror film, but it was in my post-credits daze where I realised that films directed by women are becoming my own version of watching horror. Lynne Ramsay does a great job of making us feel trapped with a postpartum Alice as she’s weighed down by domesticity and driven to mental illness. This is what makes it so fundamentally horrifying. To me, this is the purest form of the “female gaze” as we see it in relation to the “male”. Not as it’s opposite, overtly objectifying men as some sort of reaction or revenge for the history of how our image has been portrayed on screen, instead an attempt at a true depiction of viewing the world through a women’s eyes. Rather than voyeurism, we are stuck in this world with her, and I can’t look away. Not when it feels like it’s my image projected on the screen. In this era of female-led representation in an arena still dominated by men, Women onscreen are impossibly tasked with representing us all. Sat in the cinema on a Monday evening, I’m not offered an escape but a step closer to reality.
The words Die My Love evoke the image of putting down a suffering pet. It’s simultaneously loving, gentle and violent – even more so because we can never truly know what our pets think and how they feel. We watch the light fade from their eyes and when we go home, trying to catch the tears that keep forming, we tell ourselves it’s for the best. We couldn’t stand to see them suffer for a moment more. Ramsay completely encapsulates this feeling, as Jennifer Lawrence (Grace) repeatedly throws her head against surfaces with Robert Pattison’s character Jackson becoming a bemused spectator. I feel myself relating to their sick dog whimpering all night on the kitchen floor. Funnily enough, it’s Grace out of the couple who thinks the humane thing to do is to put it out of its misery and she doesn’t waste time making it known. Perhaps from the title and this review, although I won’t spoil anything, if you haven’t seen the film yet, you can see where this all might be heading.
Stuck with this feeling of wanting to be put down for two hours, conjured by a narrative that at times felt messy, illogical and repetitive, I became acutely aware of myself as an audience member. Every time Grace hurt herself, I wanted to scream alongside her actions, “don’t you get it yet?”. Paradoxically, I found myself ready to engage in the directly opposite, unempathetic reaction finding myself ready to disconnect within the unending, repetitive madness. I want to label this the “male reaction”, but I know that’s far too reductive to claim #notallmen. Clearly, with no ability to connect with Grace’s experience through shared experience or identity, it’s easy to become annoyed by the noise, wanting it to stop without doing the work to discover what’s causing it. It’s an alarm keeps going off at your neighbour’s – you don’t know why, but you wish it would stop so you can think for a second. In this way, men and women find themselves in two very different worlds, split by identity and difficult to bridge with shared humanity. Both places are painful, both can see the gap that needs addressing but won’t approach it. The issue is, in her own way Grace is trying to get to Jackson, but her message can’t be heard. When your partner casts your complaints and neurosis as white noise – unimportant, annoying, constant – you’re well and truly fucked. Especially when they forget that they’re the ones that unilaterally cast you in this inescapable role in the first place. Once again, we are greeted by the Madonna-whore complex. Now a Madonna, Jackson can’t see Grace outside the boundaries of this identity. But it’s in the switch from placing you in one box to another that tragically reveals our partner’s one-dimensional perception of us. It reveals the prison bars that have been there all along. We have to grieve what we thought we had but never did. Like Grace, when women have to go to such lengths to express their lethal, existential imprisonment and are met by a vast nothing, it’s inevitable that we might completely lose ourselves in the process. Our only solution is to make you feel a fraction of the weight we feel by pinning you down with our madness. A ball and chain shaped by necessity.
The essence of a woman struggling is being trapped. Trapped in our social roles, bodies and relationships. And now we can finally see her on film, she’s trapped there too, in a medium founded in men’s rules and ideas. Even the camera can’t get her out. The audience helplessly perform emotion for each other but do nothing, forced to look at the woman with blood on her still supple skin, tears on her cheeks, screaming at the world in vain to release her. Or at the very least, put her down. She’s already grieved her life while living it. It’s pure horror. For me, horror reveals what is. It makes us anxious. It forces us to question the world. It makes us grieve. It doesn’t make us run away. It doesn’t give us a simple monster to destroy. It weighs on us and makes us think.