Kinds of Kindness
SPOILER ALERT! Incarnations of Burned Children! Mother! Kinds of Kindness! TRIGGER WARNING! Injured babies!
A few years ago I taught a semester at a university in Liverpool, in a former nunnery. I taught one class on intro to craft and I really liked my students, one of whom was a middle aged woman who had taken the course after sending off her children to university. After class I ran tutorials, in which students could come and talk to me ostensibly about the class, though in actuality talked to me about anything but, and she hung back to chat. She wanted me to read a short story she’d just come across: David Foster Wallace’s Incarnations of Burned Children. It’s a very short story, around 1000 words, about a mother who spills a pot of boiling water onto her baby. Her and the father rush the baby to the sink, run him under the cold tap, thinking they have prevented the worst of the damage, before realising they did not remove his nappy, which is still filled with boiling water. The baby dies, cooking in his own nappy. It is a horrific story. After reading this story, I felt like it was the main thing happening in my life. People would ask me how I was, and I would answer well, I have been thinking about this David Foster Wallace short story. I wanted to show it to other people, almost compulsively insisting other people read it, to share the burden of carrying this awful idea around with me. I once told a friend the premise of it. Neither of us were yet mothers, but we both hoped to be, and now I am, and she will be soon. We sat in her living room. I think I would remember to take off the nappy, I repeated. Yes you would, she reassured. Me too. I think I would remember to take off the nappy too. Since becoming a mother I cannot read the story; would rather cut off my own arm than read the story. Just now, I glossed over it, making sure I got the basic facts of it right. I understand my student, hanging back, wanting me to read it. David Foster Wallace didn’t have children, she told me. So how did he know? She asked me that question many times. How did he know that was what it was like, to have a child, to fear for your child, to love a child. How did he know?
Around the same time, I went to see Mother! with the friend I described earlier, and it was a similarly traumatic experience. We watched the film at a cinema in Copenhagen, where she lives, and spent much of it holding hands, crying, with a half-eaten box of flodeboller at our feet. The film is by Darren Aronofsky, about a pregnant woman and her poet husband, living in a big house which she is redecorating. A stranger turns up, asking to stay, and it escalates into a Sarah Kane-esque hell in which hundreds of people turn up at the house, and the house becomes simultaneously a party, a warzone and the site of a cult. The woman gives birth, and the father takes the baby from her, and it is passed around the group until its spine breaks. It is then eaten. As it reached its climax, we whispered to each other. Shall we leave? Let’s just leave. I think we should leave. I hated it at the time; wanted to beg people waiting in the atrium for the next screening, not to see it. Go do anything else! We went to a bar to drink wine, sitting in silence, sitting outside, though it was freezing, shivering beneath blankets and the overhead heaters. We went back to her flat, ate a Kraft Dinner, and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm. I remember feeling how I felt the first time I took magic mushrooms: I will never feel the same again. I was obsessed with one scene, in which the woman (Jennifer Lawrence) asks two people to stop sitting on her sink, while some random guy hits on her. She’s negotiating these two dynamics: trying to (politely) get these strangers to get off her sink, trying to (politely) manage this man’s feelings. The man calls her an arrogant cunt and the strangers break her sink, which comes off the wall gushing water everywhere. There was something peculiarly empathic about it: about being a woman! - the accumulative nature of what happens; of how she instinctively assumes responsibility for everyone; of how ineffectively she is able to assert her boundaries. I found myself thinking about Darren Aronofsky: How did he know?
I had a similar experience watching Yorgos Lathimos’ Kinds of Kindness last week. In the middle story (the film is a triptych of stories) a husband asks his wife to cut out her liver for him to eat. Yes! I thought. Men will literally have you cut out your own liver and serve it to them for their own fortification! Lanthimos has said this story (written in collaboration with his co-writer Efthimis Filippou) is about forgetting, or not recognising, the people that you love. That the wife is “offering parts of herself to someone to show her love”. Hmmm. Interestingly, the story ends with the death of the wife and the arrival of a new (identical) wife, which is also sort of how Mother! ends. And as I come to the end of writing this Substack (!) (in the form of a triptych!) (like Kinds of Kindness!!!) I realise I’m not entirely sure what I am getting at, but I know it has something to do with my student, staying back after class and insisting I look up this story on my phone; that I read it right there in front of her. The question: How did he know? - which feels bigger the more that I think about it