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It's a canininomenon

In 'Babygirl' and 'Nightbitch,' women escape their suffocating lives by getting down on all fours and acting like dogs.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Sep 5

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Amy Adams in ‘Nightbitch.’ Image: Searchlight Pictures

Nicole Kidman’s erotic thriller Babygirl premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, bringing a slew of early reviews, many of them extolling her bravery in taking on the role. She plays Romy, a high-powered CEO of a robotics company and a married mother with an unsatisfying sex life, who embarks on a sadomasochistic affair with Samuel, a younger man who interns in her office.

I haven’t seen the film, which hits theaters in December, but one thing stood out across the reviews: Romy first encounters Samuel on the street as he skillfully tames a wild and barking dog that he praises as a “good girl.” She’s intrigued. Once the affair begins, it not-so-subtly echoes their canine meet-cute: Romy gets down on all fours for him and drinks from a saucer on the floor. Samuel tells her she’s a “good girl,” just like the dog.

This week also saw the release of the trailer for Amy Adams’ Nightbitch, an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s surreal novel about a postpartum mother who in the midst of sleep deprivation and household inequity turns into a dog, or believes herself to be turning into one. The trailer shows Adams’ character wolfing down food, digging up a lawn, and having doggy-style sex with her husband (about which the novel says, “She wanted to fight and bite, and then she wanted to fuck him hard… and then, afterward, she wanted to be patted on the head”).

It felt a little uncanny, these back-to-back examples of frustrated and pent-up women channeling dog-like behavior. In both Babygirl and Nightbitch, a married mom finds relief and pleasure on all fours—whether it’s in the eroticized submission of lapping from a saucer or the feral thrill of running across suburban lawns at night (and taking a shit in a Republican neighbor’s yard). It is especially interesting that in the midst of the current “divorce memoir” boom we are seeing high-profile narratives of womanhood that rely on the symbol of the dog: a domesticated animal that is, of course, still an animal.

This symbol is as potent as it is versatile. It sounds from reviews like the “taming” of Kidman’s character via this sadomasochistic affair is paradoxically the awakening of her wildness. At home, she easily gets off masturbating to “daddy” porn on her own, but sex with her husband, the actual daddy of their household, lacks passion and (for her, at least) orgasms. Once the affair starts, she finds a man who facilitates her kinky desires; she becomes a “good girl” by going bad. As Babygirl’s director, Halina Reijn put it, “All beings have a beast living inside. For women, we have not gotten a lot of space yet to explore this behavior.”

In Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes of Babygirl’s “obvious but effective” dichotomy: “here is a woman who runs the show at work and at home, but would like to be bossed around in bed.” Needless to say, I’m eager to actually see for myself how the film handles this dichotomy, but it seems certain that Babygirl’s theatrical release will spark one million think pieces, and probably some pretty bad takes on feminism and women’s desire. (Can’t wait!)

The movie is an erotic thriller and this affair doesn’t exactly follow the guidelines of “safe, sane, and consensual.” Samuel is an intern at her company, which raises questions about Romy abusing power; then again, he insists that he has all the power and makes clear that at any point he could call HR and she would lose her job.

Of course, more typically, being collared in a BDSM sense—with checklists, boundaries, and safe words—stands in stark contrast to the extractive, non-consensual, and poorly negotiated ownership of heteronormative marriage. I’m reminded of my recent interview with the sex worker and multi-disciplinary artist Kim Ye, where she talked about meeting her husband as a client while working as a Domme. Together, they went from a woman-led power dynamic in the dungeon, where she engaged in paid “care work,” to a very typical scene of household inequity and unpaid care work. “You become everyone’s bitch,” she said of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity.

In Nightbitch, becoming a literal bitch feels like freedom from being everyone’s metaphorical bitch. It allows the protagonist to “revert to a pure, throbbing state,” like when she gave birth and “screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to.” The protagonist’s husband saw her in that birthing state and he passed out. It isn’t just the husband but also marriage and motherhood, as ideal and institution, that cannot handle her “pure, throbbing state.”

We live in a culture where the insult of “bitch” is tied to female dogs in heat and notions of women’s promiscuity. Well, Nightbitch’s protagonist craves raw meat. She is ravenous for it. She gulps it down, moaning and snuffling. “The mother continued in her fugue, the feel of the meat in her throat filling her,” writes Yoder.

We are definitely not just talking about meat.

At the local library, the protagonist finds The Field Guide to Magical Women, a book about the mythology of womanhood, and it asks: “To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings?” In Babygirl and Nightbitch, we get very different and yet overlapping answers to that question.

I’m reminded of Miranda July’s All Fours about a married mom who runs away from home in hopes of learning “to just be myself.” She feels like a “kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.” But, as I wrote, “Her dilemma is that all those glittering pieces of glass create a sense of fracture and contradiction, as opposed to richness and multiplicity.” She falls into an emotional affair with a younger man and, while she doesn’t become a “good girl” or turn into a dog, she does end up performing a weirdo dance for him that features crawling as its centerpiece.

The protagonist notes that with dance you can “say things that are inconceivable, inexpressible, just by struggling forward on hands and knees, ass prone.”

Maybe something similar is true of the symbolism, metaphors, and poetics of erotic thrillers and surrealist novels—and everyday sex, too. The things being expressed do not always tidily fit inside the this-or-that language of power or weakness, independence or ownership, dominance or submission. Toward the end of All Fours, the protagonist’s artist friend, who has made a sculpture of a headless woman on her hands and knees, tells her: “Everyone thinks doggy-style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

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