ellauri112.html on line 675: Tully’s like a hip millennial Marry Poppins. It all seems too good to be true. Their deepening connection hints at something that’s either eerie or profoundly healing. Are they dykes?
ellauri112.html on line 681: Yet to hail the film as a feminist project is to value the representation of the structural co-option of maternity over its interrogation. Tully’s treatment of social reproduction is dangerously simplistic. Cody has spoken in interviews about how her own, financially easier, experience of parenting in L.A. inspired her to explore a narrative in which economic anxieties are combined with the other hardships of parenthood, yet here class and poverty are only fleeting concerns. The transactional system of care that governs child-rearing under capitalism is done away with via Tully’s otherworldliness. Until the revelation of her non-existence, the viewer, although encouraged to believe in her, is never asked to consider her financial reality, and the fact that the service is paid for by Marlo’s wealthy brother is a narrative convenience that reinforces its fairytale quality. Similarly, Tully’s whiteness allows the racial politics of care to be completely overlooked, and the repeated idea that it’s ‘unnatural’ for hired help to bond with your newborn is taken as a given, rather than seen as an impetus for a consideration of the social conditions that require mothers to make that choice.
ellauri112.html on line 727: The film’s strength – for its first two thirds – is the relationship between the two women at the heart of the narrative. We learn through a clumsy coincidence at the beginning of the film that Marlo is bisexual; as her intimacy with Tully expands to fill the vacuum of her absentee marriage, it becomes a tender eroticism. This is mediated, always, through other bodies: as Tully cradles the baby who has just finished feeding, she talks about how the ‘molecules’ of the child still exist within the mother; later, in a bar toilet, she gently wets a paper towel and uses it to draw the milk out of Marlo’s swollen breasts. In a pivotal scene, Marlo sits behind Tully and instructs her on what to do to arouse her sleep-befuddled husband. This moment can be read as emblematic of the film’s mistreatment of the queer intimacy it establishes. Coming after a discussion of sexual history and sexual fantasy, Marlo reveals to Tully that she has a waitress’s uniform that she’s never used, bought to surprise her husband. As Tully puts the outfit on, which fits her pre-natal body in a way it wouldn’t Marlo, the moment of sexual possibility between the women is subsumed into heteronormative, ageist fantasy: Tully’s young, and therefore fantasy-appropriate, body is used as bait to ‘recharge’ the masculine battery.
ellauri112.html on line 729: The revelation that Tully is a version of Marlo’s former self removes the possibility of a different life she represented. “I love us,” Marlo’s husband says to her, as she lies in her hospital bed. “I love us too,” she replies. This collective noun is the acceptance of the status quo, just as Tully’s last speech, in which she tells Marlo she should embrace her dull life – “being boring means you’re doing it right” – is an endorsement of the sacrifices society requires of her. The final scene, in which Marlo’s husband helps her make the packed lunches, is bathed in a saccharine glow: learn to love your claustrophobia, it tells women. The nuclear family is the only one worth having.
4