Olivia Landry’s new book explores motherhood through the lens of modern film

By Sian Wilkerson

Every mother is different - and so are their stories.

In her new book, "Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema," Olivia Landry explores 21st-century films that put into focus the challenging reality of mothering.

"Mothers have historically been - and to some extent, still are - represented through the superficial and pathological tropes of 'good mother' and 'bad mother,'" said Landry, Ph.D., an associate professor of German and chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies in Virginia Commonwealth University's College of Humanities and Sciences.

But more recent films - among them, "We Need to Talk About Kevin," "The Babadook" and "The Lost Daughter" - "cast off these oversimplified and often detrimental classifications to present mothers as agents with independent thoughts and feelings," Landry said, "unapologetically showing the challenges of being a mother and the negative feelings this role can produce."

VCU News spoke with Landry about her new book and the inspiration behind it.

Where did the idea for "Cinema of Crushing Motherhood" come from?

In the early 2020s, I became fascinated by the number of representations of motherhood in films and series. I was also struck by how many of these portrayed mothers as burdened by this role and its expectations. These representations coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which reminded the world how much women and mothers still perform the greater share of housework, child care and care work more generally.

As a scholar of German studies, I was also interested in how these films implicitly speak to the discourse of regretting motherhood, which had a tremendous influence in German media during the mid- to late-2010s, and present a more radical attitude toward motherhood than, say, ambivalence.

The word "crushing" has significance, doesn't it?

I adopted the notion of "crushing" from Maggie Gyllenhaal's film, "The Lost Daughter." Broadly, I appreciate the double meaning it evokes: These films are about the crushing experience of motherhood, but they also crush motherhood.

For me, "crushing" expresses the overwhelming and physically draining responsibility of mothering, which the films portray. At the same time, these films also crush motherhood, insofar as they offer portraits that devastate the image of the perfect, self-sacrificial, devoted and happy mother.

What is notable about the 21st-century films being contributed to the motherhood canon?

Many of the filmmakers contributing to this new turn are women, and in a number of cases, these are their first films. They are fearlessly reshaping the narrative of motherhood in all of its complexity. Their collective work presents a feminist approach in subject matter, method and practice. These films are powerful and well worth our attention.