There is a review of this films Tim Teeman on December 19, 2014, in The Daily Beast ("Grief: The Rea Monster in the Babadook") that says some things about this film very similar to what I am about to say. I came up with my reading on my own and in dialog with my brother, but I take the fact that I/we hit on the same things independently as did Teeman as further support for saying they are clearly what is going on. I'll note where things that I discuss are also discussed by Teeman. The Wikipedia page on the film lists, among other resources, an interview with the screenwriter and director, Jennifer Kent: Ryan Lamble, "Jennifer Kent Interview: Directing The Babadook," Den of Geek (Dennis Publishing Limited), October 13, 2014.
I'll start by saying that Essie Davis does an amazing job with a really tough role. I can't imagine the psychological gruel that acting this role must have been.
The next thing I will say is concerning the place of this film within my interests in some kinds of horror. And here is where I put the *SPOILER ALERT* tag. I'm interested in the film in part because it is the clearest instance I have seen of distinctly psychological horror. The babadook is not objectively an external entity, but it is external to her in a sense. It is an element of her psychological experience that has concretized beyond her control. It acts as an external protagonist (it has to enter her from the outside at a particular point in the film, when she is laying in bed and it attacks from the top, entering mostly by the mouth, as it exits by the mouth in vomiting in the climactic scene), but it comes from her psychological experience.
Main Analysis:
I'll begin the main analysis by noting my theory on the origin of the name. I've not read the interview with Kent, so I haven't had any confirmation of my theory, but I will note that the theory is my own in that, even if it has been put forward by others elsewhere, I did not get it from them. It came to me on my own. The "baba" in the name definitely has voodoo type vibes, butressed by the presentation of the babdook (especially the hat, but also the big bulky cloak, reminds me of specters in graveyards with New Orleans funeral parade horns in the background and not far off from the oogie boogies of the Louisiana swamps). But my theory is that the most core source of the name is sounding like the word "dybbuk." A dybbuk is a name in Jewish folklore for a spirit that has departed but not gone on to any better place, instead hanging around the edges of this world disgruntled and growing malignant. In its malignancy, it looks for a way back in, usually through possessing somebody. There is a 2012 horror film called The Possession with Jeffrey Dean Morgan that centers on a "dybbuk box" as a container of a dybbuk that, after the box is bought at a yard sale, possesses his daughter. I don't recommend the movie; it's not really that good in my opinion. Rather, I mention it here because it was from 2012, just two years before Babadook, and so dybbuks were floating around in the horror world as a theme. There was also a 2009 film called The Unborn (which I also don't really recommend) with Gary Oldman in it that specifically involved a dybbuk.
But The Babadook is not about an actual dybbuk. As I said, it is a psychological "entity." But it does at a couple of points take on the physical form of the only departed person involved, her husband who died in the car wreck on the way to the hospital for their son to be born. And so this element of departed that would be an allusion if I am correct about the source of the mane (to be reminiscent of "dybbuk" sound-wise) fits with the film.
The real thing about the departed is the grief at the loss, which is what the babadook concretizes, and as I said, at a couple points in the form of her husband, and during the rest of the film as the big bogey man. (Teeman definitely identifies it as the grief, but I'm not sure if he adds the element of it concretizing around the persona of her husband ... we both say it's grief at the loss of the husband, but I forget if he says it is actually the babadook taking form as her husband; of course, it would seem fitting if he did, since the husband form is doing things only the babadook would do.) So that is the biggest thing, the identification of the babadook as the concretization of her grief.
To this should be added that Kent has definitely said that the film is a woman's film, a film on women's issues. The grief involved is not simply more general grief of losing somebody, but the grief of a woman losing her husband young and now a struggling single mother. I think that the film holds meaning for grief of loss of a loved one in general, but it is also true that it goes into this in a very particular way.
It can also be a film about feminine issues beyond the specific instance of grief on which it focuses. Being a mother is something that, as a male, I will never understand experientially, and it is significant here that the film was made by a woman. Even as a man, I know from listening to others that there can be a tension between the attachment of the mother relationship and other relationships. It's simply a fact of life, and one that it seems like Kent purposefully explores in the film. Especially even a single mother who had not lost a husband in this way would have these tensions.
But she did lose her husband in this way, and that happened on the way to have her son, and so that yields the next major point: the babadook sees the son as an antagonist. The book specifically states the killing of the son as a key part of the babadook's project, but the theme is probably seen most clearly in the fact that, when the babadook takes the form of her husband, the thing that it consistently and persistently asks is to bring the son to him.
So this likewise brings us to the "raciest" part of the film, which is also the clearest exposition of what is the specific grief for Amelia, which is the loss of physical intimacy with her husband. We are not talking about a widow who lost her husband, say, in her late 50s, after menopause, when their sexual relations would have taken on different manners. We're talking about a woman in her 20s, young, on her first child. It's not some gratuitous idea that, at that age, they were hot young things going at it like rabbits. It's that her life as a whole, what she would see herself as doing in life, which is having a husband and starting on a family, has sex as not just a regularly recurring activity, but as a primary way of relating to her partner in this endeavor of her life. It's a regular part of her way of living and processing that life. The way it is ripped away is on the same level as if you took away her voice and her ability to talk with her husband about what is going on for her in her day-to-day life.
The scene puts me in the mind of two scenes from other stories, one a film and the other a book. The film scene is from The Brave One, in which Jodie Foster's husband is killed in a mugging in Central Park. At one point she has a sort of vision/memory scene in which she sees his reflection playing guitar in the glass of a door, and she says to him, "you left a hole inside of me." The book scene is from Chaim Potok's Davita's Harp. Davita is the little girl who is the first-person narrator, and her father, a feisty liberal journalist, dies in the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish civil war in 1937 (the Picaso painting surfaces a couple times as a motif, as does the name of Picaso himself in Potok's two Asher Lev novels, or at least the second, The Gift of Asher Lev). At one point in the novel, Davita sees her mother through the bedroom door that has accidentally been left ajar, standing naked in front of a full length mirror. The action is not conclusive, but that is mainly not to be gratuitous. And adult knows what she is doing as Davita hears her whisper her father's name, especially if an adult reader takes into account that this is a woman who, like Amelia in The Babadook, lost her husband young, at an age when full physical intimacy would be a central and regular aspect of their relationship.
And so we come to that "racy" scene, which really isn't that racy actually. It's definitely not done with a gratuitous level of nudity: the covers are pulled all the way up to her neck. You see something get chucked out the side at the start, but it's too quickly even to tell the style; and you see her grab something, and it doesn't look to be an anatomically mimetic one of those, and again, the shot is so brief that that is about all you can get. The main thing that relays any "action" is the facial expressions.
The real core of this scene is how it ends ... the son comes bursting in before completion, I think complaining something about the babadook. Just as the birth of the son interrupted her physical life with her husband (and here, this could be extrapolated to some degree or another to a mother even in the regular run of things not losing her husband or being single: One friend's wife joked once, not disgruntled, just joking around, but still ..., that "you think you're gonna get your body back after the birth, but, nope, then there's nursing"), now the son himself interrupts what for her is probably not just "stress release" for the normal stress of life, but a coping mechanism for her grief at this very particular loss.
Now, in connection with or explanation of the denouement/resolution, we come to a literary element and the significance of the line "you can't get rid of the babadook." The setting of the story is coming up to the son's seventh birthday, which has never been celebrated on the actual day because it is also the anniversary of her husband's death. Seven is a significant number. It is especially significant if I am right about the Jewish source of the name, but even if not, the use of seven as significant is too well-attested to deny: Tom Riddles asks, "isn't seven the most powerfully magical number," in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince; Samara always kills in seven days in The Ring because it took her seven days to die; Kevin Spacey "preaches" on the seven deadly sins in Seven; and the list goes on and on. In the Jewish background especially, seven is the number of completion. And that is the real question of the film: will they make it through the completion of the grieving process; will they make it through anniversary/birthday number seven? Or will her grief consume them first (the babadook indicates in the book that it knows full well that killing the son will not assuage the grief ... the final sacrifice will be herself). And they do make it ... and the son's seventh birthday is the first that they celebrated actually on the day.
But having made it through the grieving process does not mean that the grief goes away, or even that it loses all of its terror and becomes all some warm nostalgia. You can't get rid of the babadook. And so it lives in the basement. And they collect slimy and grubby things from the dirt in the garden and she goes down and presents them to the babadook. And she does not sit down and have a nice conversation now with the babadook. It roars in her face, and she looks terrified. And then she tells it that it is ok, and it retreats into its dark unseen corner, and she and her son go on with life. But you can never fully get rid of the babadook. There will always be the hauntings ... in a word or in a look. There will always be things in her son that catch her off guard by reminding her of his father.
It's in a word
It's in a look
You can't get rid of the babadook.
(Teeman also hits on this "living with it" aspect.)
Postscript: The LGBT issue
I hesitate to write on this, but basically it's an instance of hijacking, and I am sorry to be so negative, but also an instance of how unthinking humanity is and how easy it is to eisogete ... and to bully (see tumblr exchanges like this recorded by Huffpost). I'm sorry, but this is a bit like the flipside of the confederacy idiots thinking they are actually saying something because they are using big words like "tradition" and "heritage." You start with a preconception of some broad general lines into which you could fit various things and then fabricate connections.Babadook as LGBT is a phenomenon very similar to the "Dumbledore is gay" thing. First, I argue, JKR's statement morphed from honest to political in the actual statement itself: I think that "I always thought of him as gay" was an honest "hmmm, how to answer this because this asker obviously thinks of him as would have pursued girls and I based his personality on people I knew or knew of who were gay, so how do I answer this," which does not necessarily entail a definitive "DD was gay" (I kind of despair of talking about this because trying to make any headway on that issue with somebody already decided to see him as gay is like trying to get a Trump supporter to have even the faintest sliver of recognition of the so-evident-that-it's-almost-self-evident fact that Rush Limbaugh is a slimy pig), but "If would have known that would be the response, I would have said so sooner" is the point at which I think it turned to "I can make some political capital from this" (the capital in this case being positive reputation as having contributed to the specific issue of gay rights), and from there it went (in a later twitter exchange with a fan) to basically, between the lines, accusing a teenage fan who seemed to be honestly asking of homophobia (which, in this day and age, is tantamount to calling somebody a rapist), WHEN IN FACT, basically the very position taken by the teen fan was stated by an actual gay rights activist in Time magazine the week after JKR made the famous Radio City Music Hall statement: John Cloud basically said, thank you, we'll take all the support we can get, but it would have been better if you actually wrote him gay. (http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675622,00.html: you have to have an account to login and read it all, but it ends with something akin to "makes one wonder if you might as well have just left the old girl in the closet").
Other things revealed in Cloud's reading, though, I think bear out the reason why treating works solely for one issue robs the work. He asks if it would have been so much to ask, say, to have the obviously gay styled Blaze Zabini ask the aptly named Justin Finch-fletchly to the Yule Ball. Asking this completely misses and then obscures one instance of the prejudice issue that JKR has going on and that is a part of the whole ensemble of Slytherin bigotry characteristics: to Slytherins (Zabini's house) Hufflepuffs (Flinch-Fletchly's house) are utterly contemptable, and a Slytherin would not be caught dead asking a Hufflepuff out in any context, straight or gay. I can hear the fan boys and fan girls firing up at my saying that and marshaling a battery of scoff at my complete cluelessness on the series, because everybody knows that it is Gryffindor who is the sworn enemy of Sltyherin. True, to Slytherins, Gryffindors are worthy of violent hate ... but Hufflepuffs aren't worthy of even that. To those who seek self glory, like Slytherins, those who anonymously work hard, like Hufflepuffs, are disgusting. The evidence for this, and for the idea that it is an important issue for her, comes in the first encounter Harry ever has with Draco, even before the school year starts, in Madam Malkin's robe shop: Draco says "can you imagine if you got put in Hufflepuff? I think I'd leave." His inherited bigotry and pride get displayed in ridiculing Hufflepuff ... not Gryffindor.
Cloud's reading misses things like this, just as explaining DD's gravity toward Grindlewald by a sexual attraction that, as Cloud notes, shows no actual presence on the page, robs the explanation that is there on the page and makes the character compelling: GG had a fire or rashness that appealed to DD after he was imprisoned (he probably feels) in his hometown taking care of siblings because of what some little muggle shits did that sent his dad off in a rage and off to Azkaban and messed up his sister's head such that she accidentally killed her mother ... a fire for glory and for payback.
[SIDENOTE: Just as an example of the laundry list of fallacious evidence for Dumbledore being gay: if, as some have argued you should, you take the evidence that his eyes are always twinkling as a signpost of his orientation, then you have to assume that his father was living a lie as a man in a heterosexual marriage with children, because in the description of his father in the picture in Skeeter's book in Deathly Hallows, Harry thinks that he can see where DD got the twinkle in his eye, from his father. END SIDENOTE]
And all that roundabout on the issue of Dumbledore being gay (in addition to being working in something I had thought to do a dedicated post on that I think I never got around to) is to come back to saying the exact same thing about The Babadook. I would argue that, if you turn Babadook into a standard for something that is not even on the page at all, you rob it of the things that Kent actually has accomplished as a piece of psychological horror that explores a very real issue of feminine psychology and more general psychology on the issue of grief. You've basically just hijacked a piece of art, and that's it. All you have done is to prove that gay people can steal like anybody else, just as somebody else could come along and demonstrate that gay people can murder like anybody else.
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