Fantastic article I was reading on the way to the exhibition: “Woman on a verge of a nervous breakdown. Mary Bronstein reimagines the american horror story” by Hillary Kelly based on a true story of the director hiding in the hotel bathroom while her daughter was ill and was being treated in a nearby hospital.
“She’d fantasize, she says, about how far she could roam.” (Kelly, Mother Tongue, pg. 22)
To me this resonates so much, I truly believe most creative mums had a thought like that one time or another. That feeling of loosing freedom in the name of love and care, feeling trapped by them and wanting to desperately get the freedom back but deep down knowing it will never be possible. Once you become a mother, you become the person who cares, and you know you will be this person forever.
“The film moves between that hilarity and a kind of mania. “This isn’t supposed to be what it’s like! This isn’t it, this can’t be it!” Linda crows during a highly emotional exchange with her therapist. The line captures a powerful but rarely seen maternal moment: when exasperation turns into disbelief. But empowerment is not, thankfully, all that’s on offer here. Legs doesn’t make the impossible, and ultimately condescending, argument that women should find balance or that they are mere victims of circumstance. The film is what Bron-stein calls “pure expression from a woman” which is her modus operandi. The point is not to cajole viewers into understanding, but to be perilously honest.
Bronstein has an honest energy about her, like she wants to get things out in the open as much as Legs does. Throughout our morning together, she and I discuss the things we know some women are afraid to air out (the anatomical cruelties of childbirth and meno-pause, for example, and then we discuss how women don’t discuss them. But what I don’t tell Bronstein is that a week before we met at the Chelsea, my own ceiling opened up like Linda’s. An air conditioning leak spread like a spider’s web across my kitchen ceiling – water poured down and rendered the room unusable.
This came at a moment when my mental health was already fragile and the needs of my own two children had reached a fever pitch. So when I watched Linda pant and cackle and scream her way through calamity, I knew what a hole in the ceiling might do to a woman already on the edge: It could open up a lot more than anyone might expect.”
