“I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher”: Babygirl

Halina Reijn is the first Dutch filmmaker to have a breakthrough in Hollywood since Paul Verhoeven, who made six feature films in America between 1987 (RoboCop) and 2000 (Hollow Man).¹ Instinct (2019), a Dutch-language film selected for Locarno, was Reijn’s debut feature as a director. She then went overseas and shot the entertaining Gen Z movie horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), her first project for the A24 studio. Employing a relatively young cast, it enjoyed modest success, which would soon be eclipsed by the attention given her third picture, Babygirl (2024). Nicole Kidman won a Golden Lion as Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in the film, which – in a rare achievement for films made by Dutch directors – was selected for the main competition.²

Before becoming a film director, Reijn (b. 1975) had been a well-known actress in Dutch theatre, a key player in Ivo van Hove’s highly prolific ITA (International Theater Amsterdam). The recipient of numerous awards, Reijn has held the Theo Mann-Bouwmeesterring since 2017, an honour bestowed on the actress deemed the finest of her generation in the Netherlands. She can pass this ring on to a chosen successor at a time of her choosing. Around 2018, however, she left the stage; her role as Emilia in ITA’s version of Othello is, for now, her last. 

Her track record as an actress on screen (both cinema and television) is less impressive than her stage achievements. The two best-known films with Reijn in the cast are perhaps Grimm (Alex van Warmerdam, 2003, re-edited in 2019) and Zwartboek (Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, 2006). On the set of this latter movie, she became good friends with the film’s lead Carice van Houten, and in 2015 they co-founded the production company Man Up, devoted to offering more promising roles for actresses. Their collaboration ended in November 2023, and Reijn is now Man Up’s sole director.

In interviews Reijn has repeatedly mentioned that Babygirl was inspired by erotic thrillers from the 1980s and early 1990s. Her third feature film is a thorough exploration of the “dark thoughts” of protagonist Romy Mathis (Kidman), and in this article I will delve into the nature of her obscure desires. To a certain extent, Babygirl – the most debated film this year in the Netherlands – is a present-day successor to the so-called woman’s films from the 1940s; but, rather than expressing a “desire to desire”, the more emancipatory Babygirl comes closer to Slavoj Žižek’s call to “enjoy your symptom!”

Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman behind the scenes of Babygirl

The desire to desire

In The Desire to Desire, Mary Ann Doane coined the term “woman’s film” for a category of films whose popularity peaked in the 1940s. Doane assumes that because the woman’s film deals with a female protagonist whose point of view we frequently share, it is insistently “directed toward a female audience”.³ These films are frequently infused with other genres – melodrama, film noir, the gothic or horror film, even the musical.⁴ Whereas Laura Mulvey argued in her seminal essay that women are positioned as the “object of the look”,⁵ in the woman’s film the female protagonist is endowed with a gaze. Doane argues that despite this apparent advantage, the heroine is never in control of events. The bearer of the gaze, she nonetheless experiences the terrifying feeling that there is something wrong with the way she perceives things. 

In Gaslight (George Cukor, 1943), Paula (Ingrid Bergman) gradually goes mad because she has started to doubt her aural and visual perceptions. Why can’t she find the brooch in her purse? How is it possible that the lights have suddenly dimmed? In this exemplary woman’s film, an outsider (Joseph Cotten) enters the scene and convinces her that she is not paranoid: her husband (Charles Boyer) has in fact taken great pains to manipulate her senses. In other words, her gaze becomes stable only after it has been mediated by a male gaze of “sanity”.⁶ Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) offers something quite similar. Here a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) helps Charlotte (Bette Davis) break her attachment to her dominant mother. Though the female protagonists in such “medical discourse” films⁷ are endowed with inquisitive looking, they gain self-confidence only because the clinical eyes of a male doctor assist them.

In Mulvey’s notion of “narrative cinema”, the man’s dilemma is whether or not he should pursue a goal: he just has to discover what his desire entails. Over the course of Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Jeff (James Stewart) realizes that he wants to marry Lisa (Grace Kelly) after all. By contrast, a “love story” in a woman’s film exposes structural obstacles. In Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), the wealthy arts patron Helen (Joan Crawford) has a love affair with Paul (John Garfield), a talented young violinist. Helen is married, but she fixes Paul “with her gaze”, watching him while he performs at a concert.⁸ But this film is a battle of the gazes, for Paul’s mother (Ruth Nelson) immediately recognizes that Helen poses a danger to her son. Preferring a conventional girl-next-door type as her daughter-in-law, she strongly disapproves of Helen’s sexual interest in Paul and ultimately wins the battle of the gazes, acting on behalf of society’s dominant norms and values. The myopic Helen has to wear glasses, which indicates that her vision is distorted, whereas Paul’s mother’s gaze possesses “a certain epistemological solidity”: “She sees, she knows”, and thus Helen’s desire is obstructed.⁹ 

If the woman’s film cannot properly represent female desire, then, Doane claims, “the supplementary expenditure of a musical score” is required. “Music takes up where the image leaves off”, pointing out “what is in excess of the rational”.¹⁰ Music functions as a vehicle for an “excessive emotionalism”. On the one hand, it can provoke (female) desire, as in Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948), when the young Lisa (Joan Fontaine) is mesmerized by Stefan’s piano playing. She longs for him (Louis Jourdan), but unrequitedly: she cannot make an enduring impression on him. Even when she is willing to sacrifice almost everything for him (her marriage, her child), he can only talk to her in the standard phrases he reserves for all his mistresses. On the other hand, many male leads in the woman’s films are musicians, which hints that these men might have a certain sensitivity (an “ear”) to channel or even contain female desire – though most of the time, they are too self-obsessed to do so, and at the end of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Stefan is wracked with guilt that he has failed to acknowledge Lisa.

Doane’s concept of “the desire to desire” ultimately boils down to non-fulfilment: either a woman does not know what she desires, because the options in a patriarchal society are too restricted and unappealing, or she meets fierce resistance in realizing her wishes, since key figures in society prevent her from satisfying such desires. There is no room for her to articulate her desire: either it lacks a clearly marked object, or the object is unattainable because of social demands that are impossible to overcome.

The outcome in both Humoresque and Letter from an Unknown Woman is tragic: both female protagonists take their own lives.¹¹ A less gloomy end befalls women in late 20th-century “sexual melodramas”, which Linda Ruth Williams has characterized as a more modern version of the woman’s film.¹² Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks (1987) in particular was a major influence on Babygirl. The recently divorced Elizabeth (Kim Basinger) is encouraged by her friend Molly (Margaret Whitton) to place a personal ad describing herself as a “beautiful statuesque blonde”. Elizabeth crosses paths, however, with a stranger who initially does not speak to her and surprises her with a lavish gift, a French shawl that she herself had found too expensive to buy for herself. This John (Mickey Rourke), who successfully “buys and sells money” for a living, is enigmatic throughout the film. He gives her expensive gifts such as a luxury watch, but never without sounding slightly ominous: “Do you know they used to hypnotize people with the sound of ticking?” In every scene, John takes the initiative, as we see in a montage of various encounters. Elizabeth confides to Molly that she cannot figure this guy out: at times generous and polite, he also expects her to comply with his non-negotiable requests. The moments of bliss turn sour and she decides to leave him: “You knew it would be over when one of us said ‘stop’”.

Elizabeth’s only independent decision is to bid John farewell. Their weeks together showed him to be dominant and overbearing, a womanizer who flattered Elizabeth and showered her with gifts only in order to seduce her. Though he presents himself as a charming man, he also tells her, on her very first visit to his place, that he might be a dangerous pervert. “You really don’t know me; there’s no neighbors around; no taxicab waiting on the curb; no phone booth outside; no one to hear you if you called”. She is tempted to leave immediately, but he reassures her, telling her he was “just kidding”. 

In Babygirl, the relationship between the man and the woman is entirely different. Romy, the CEO of a robotic process automation company, gets entangled in an affair with intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), so in social terms she is his superior. Samuel has selected her as his mentor at the firm, a role she grudgingly accepts. It would seem unlikely to find the self-assured (at work) Romy playing a submissive role in a relationship with the shy, polite Samuel, but that is what happens. Babygirl ticks a typical thematic obsession in Reijn’s films so far: the deceptiveness of appearances.

Babygirl

Bodies Bodies Bodies and Instinct

The entire point of Bodies Bodies Bodies is to have characters and viewers alike guessing about the person or persons responsible for the five successive deaths among the seven young people. They have gathered in a big mansion for a party while a storm is raging outside. Initially, everyone is participating in the parlour game of “Who is the killer?” but soon the film becomes a true slasher soap opera, because there are actual killings. The “friends” all feign innocence, but some are lying and/or hiding information. This is not unlike a regular whodunnit, except that there is no detective to point out the perpetrator to us. In the end, most things are clear nonetheless: a mobile phone video reveals that the first death, which set all the subsequent events in motion, resulted from a stupid action by the victim, accidently hurting himself.

Likewise, Reijn’s debut Instinct was intended to be ambiguous. The viewers are expected to constantly ask themselves: are we seeing what we think we are seeing? In the opening scene, a struggling Nicoline (Carice van Houten) is roughly grabbed by guards and thrown into a cell. But the scene turns out to be just a training session for the staff of the institution, with Nicoline in the role of guinea pig. She has just been transferred there as a new therapist, assigned to supervise the sex offender Idris (Marwan Kenzari).

Nicoline tells her colleagues that Idris is extremely manipulative and that he gives socially desirable answers so that he can go on unsupervised leave. Some clues lead us to believe that she is captivated by him, however. When he tells her he has a son who works at KFC, not mentioned in his file, she goes and buys two buckets of chicken. She is surprised by how big the buckets are: she has obviously never set foot in this fast-food chain before.

Shortly afterwards, Idris says to Nicoline: “Did you know that women have rape fantasies more often than men?” It is brutal to ask such a question out of the blue, but we as viewers are nonetheless inclined to think that she would confirm this. We have already seen that during a brief affair with a male colleague (Pieter Embrechts) she wanted to be taken like a “little rabbit”. He was slightly embarrassed, considering this to be an aberrant preference. During unescorted furlough, Idris puts the rape fantasy into practice at Nicoline’s place. In doing so, he crosses a line. Because even if Nicoline had that fantasy, acting it out can be extremely humiliating for a woman. How does Nicoline react to her patient’s aggression? Back at the institution, she seduces Idris in his cell. He thinks that she is really falling for him, and then she presses the emergency button. Guards rush over and Idris is taken away.

This merciless act of revenge at the end of Instinct raises more questions than it answers. Nicoline’s job interview at the film’s beginning has revealed several contracts at various institutions. Is her modus operandi to ensnare a sex offender and to move on to another workplace after she has trapped the man? If Idris’s entrapment is not just a reaction to the rape but her strategy from the start, is this because of a personal history? In the scenes with her mother (Betty Schuurman), who texts her that she really is a “strong woman”, we see a vulnerable Nicoline looking for protection – perhaps due to trauma in her background. But these loose threads raise a problematic question. It is suggested that Nicoline may have the habit of acting as an “angel of vengeance”, but does she feel no shame in abusing her position of power over her patients?

An unexpected vulnerability

Instinct starts with a fake confinement; Babygirl opens with a fake orgasm. Romy, atop her husband Jacob, pants in apparent ecstasy. Not so: once the sated Jacob has fallen asleep, she gets out of bed and logs onto a website on her computer in which a quite young woman is engaged in rough sex with a dominant “daddy”. This time Romy has a genuine orgasm, kept secret from her husband. Romy, it turns out, is a perfectionist: she wants to be a perfect lover for Jacob, a perfect mother for her two daughters (she writes “love, mum” while preparing their lunch boxes), a perfect CEO. We hear her practicing a speech while doing her makeup: not only should the rendition be fluent, but she is meticulous in selecting the right phrases and buzzwords. She confirms that Jacob has introduced the term “emotional intelligence”, which means that she relies on confidants so as to execute her work properly.

Babygirl

Romy pushes herself to the limit each and every day. Successfully: everyone around her appreciates her, and her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) regards her as a role model. Romy is taken seriously on the basis of her position at the top, but she has been on a strange career path, as we know from her conversation with intern Samuel. After graduating with high honours, she was recruited by an investment firm. She was given an impossible mathematical assignment about ping pong balls, which she could not solve. Another question concerned a company in deep trouble, but since she had no clue how to answer this time as well, she told them they could go fuck themselves. And then, perhaps because of this aggressive reaction, she got the job. Later she started her own company. This backstory suggests she was hired out of school not because of her talents but thanks to her wayward impulse, or possibly because she reacted so obnoxiously for a woman. Esme subtly implies as much when she tells her boss, during an awkward conversation, that “luckily” the days when things were “given” to people are now behind us.

Her account indicates that she owes her career success to something beyond her professional capabilities. For an obvious and ostentatious control freak, someone who does not give the impression that she is a bluffer by nature, perhaps she feels like an impostor: Who am I to hold this position of authority? Beneath her steely appearance lurks the fear that she will be exposed as a charlatan, and apparently Samuel is the first to see through her masquerade.¹³

During their ten-minute introductory conversation, in which an intern can ask the mentor questions, Romy thinks that he is implying that she is hungry for power. Stammering a bit, he replies: “No, the opposite … I think that you like to be told what to do”, the script adding “Samuel blushes, shocked at his own words”.¹⁴ In an earlier scene, when Samuel jokingly offered her a dog cookie, the script mentions that he has seen “an unexpected vulnerability in her eyes”.¹⁵ Much later, well into his affair with Romy in which she adopts a submissive role, Samuel asks her whether he is a “bad person”, because he sometimes scares himself. She replies: “You’re a lovely person. You sense things, you know things – what people want, what they need”. This key conversation suggests that Romy is not as autonomous as the people around her think she is, and only Samuel has the intuition to acknowledge this: she is in a position to command her employees, and though she behaves like the boss, the intern has correctly guessed that she (also) likes to be told what to do.

Babygirl

Samuel senses Romy’s uncertainty well, an uncertainty underscored by the camerawork. It is predominantly nervous, with a camera that often has to focus while moving restlessly among the characters. It is striking that the camerawork is tightest when it can zoom in calmly from above from a top shot, for example when Romy is a tiny figure walking to the house upstate with her family. From afar, she seems at ease, but the camera records her insecurity from a close distance – and, as such, the camera sides with Samuel, who senses that she is not a pillar of stability. In the few Manhattan street scenes, we can note her skittish demeanour, not unlike the behaviour of Rosemary (Mia Farrow) outside her apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Over the course of the film’s developments, Romy’s restlessness is aggravated by the fact that she has put her powerful position at stake. As Samuel mentions casually: “One call and you lose everything, right?”

Samuel tends to downplay their affair: “In my mind, we’re like two children, playing”. Later he also compares himself to “cuckoo chicks” who “basically grow up in the wrong nest and create chaos”. By contrast, for Romy it is serious business, because the sensitive intern can allow her to cope with the “revolting thoughts” that had been “planted in my brain”, either during her unorthodox upbringing in communes or since her very birth. Whatever the case, she has never been able to work through these fantasies, and every form of therapy has failed. Yet Samuel’s intuition has awakened “some sort of animal” in her: he knows “how to be fearless around me”.

In 9½ Weeks, the relationship was in a one-way direction: John was the dominant figure over Elizabeth. In Babygirl, the trajectory is different and is quite circular. After Samuel has correctly guessed that Romy wants to be told what to do, the intern becomes her object-instrument – who also puts his own sex appeal on display, as in his erotic dancing to George Michael’s 1987 song “Father Figure”, with the lyrics “I will be your preacher teacher…” Samuel is prepared to play the role of master and commander, but he does not give orders for his own sake – like John does – but strictly for her sake. In fact, he does so for therapeutic purposes; she has to trust that his capricious demands will cater to her neurotic fantasies.¹⁶ In other words, she has to “enjoy her symptom”¹⁷ – in secret, because no one is supposed to know about her pact with Samuel. Only by acting out these fantasies can she be released from the self-imposed obligation of being “a strong, smart woman, who is in control of things, who knows what she’s doing – who is loving and caring and responsible” – her own self-description in the confession she ultimately makes to her husband about the affair. Whereas her husband angrily takes her stealthy adventures to be “pathetic, banal sexual fantasies”, she counters by claiming that the experience of her dark fantasies in real life have worked “like an exorcism”. Romy’s confession not only drives Jacob mad but will also subject him to an ethical crucible, which can be seen in relation to Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut (1999), at the time of its release advertised as a vehicle for the then-famous celebrity couple of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.

Babygirl

Eyes Wide Shut

In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice (Kidman) asks her husband Bill (Cruise) after a party whether he would have wanted to screw two gorgeous models who were there. No, he replies, most men would have taken the opportunity, but not him, for as a married man he does not want to hurt his wife’s feelings. Alice reacts sceptically to his suggestion that he would refuse out of consideration for her. She then relates her fantasy about a naval officer whose sight had stirred her deeply. Though Bill was at that moment dearer to her than ever, she was also “ready to give up you, the child, my whole future”. Her fantasy remained unfulfilled, because the officer suddenly disappeared. But Alice’s confession deeply confuses Bill.

On an adventurous night out, Bill goes “on a kind of window-shopping trip for fantasies” and is completely overwhelmed by them, as Slavoj Žižek mentions in his reading of Eyes Wide Shut. Bill is confronted with a “spectral netherworld of fantasies”¹⁸ but ends up frustrated because he cannot fathom the background of Alice’s fantasy. Bill is so disoriented that Alice offers a most practical solution to rescue him from the fantasies that continue to bombard him. Her remedy to make him return to the actual world is her proposal that they will “fuck” (the movie’s final word). Getting laid is the best answer for Bill to stay awake and to keep an uncontrollable stream of fantasies at bay.

If we compare Eyes Wide Shut with Babygirl, it is striking that Alice’s confession of her fantasy about the naval officer is an eloquent account offered without her raising her voice. And because it is worded so articulately, it baffles Bill: he wants to understand the rationale of her fantasy, but he cannot. By contrast, Romy has difficulty expressing herself during the confession to Jacob. The script mentions that she has “a hard time saying the words out loud” and that she “opens her mouth, (n)othing comes out”¹⁹ and interrupts her own sentences. Jacob time and again asks her variants of “What are you trying to say? What do you mean?” Romy wants to verbalize her “deepest secrets”²⁰ but, having traversed her neurotic fantasies, she has come close to undergoing what Jacques Lacan would call a “subjective destitution”: if one approximates one’s dark fantasies too closely, one encounters self-erasure, and this affects (the clarity of) one’s speech. Her experiences defy symbolic articulation because she has lived them in an illicit affair. Her confession to the man with whom she has a legal and symbolic bond is her way of regaining support in the social circuit. Samuel has “freed” her – but freedom is, as Žižek has asserted in his Enjoy Your Symptom!, “unbearably suffocating” when it lacks such a support, for strictly speaking a guy like Samuel is an “unlawful” Master (she could be fired for the affair, as she indicates). Romy had better make the transition from “freedom” to “liberation”, to paraphrase Žižek, for as he claims, “nothing liberates as well as a good Master, since ‘liberation’ consists precisely in our shifting the burden onto the Other/Master”.²¹ It is now up to Jacob to pardon her, and hence to “liberate” her, but he cannot, for he is going through some furious fits.

Babygirl

After he has sent his wife away, Jacob will meet Romy again in their house upstate, but to his surprise Samuel is there as well. A fight ensues and they both end up with bruises. Jacob suffers a panic attack, but since he does not want help from Romy, Samuel comforts him. The young man apologizes and walks away – and that’s the last they see of him, for Samuel will go to work for Kawasaki in Tokyo. Romy stays alone in the house upstate until her 16-year-old daughter Isabel asks her to come home. “Dad needs you. He refuses to leave the theatre, he doesn’t eat, he is reading the bible. He’ll forgive you”.

Upon her return, Jacob adopts a dominant role during sex. Mediated by his wife’s affair with Samuel, he has succeeded in jumping over his own shadow and has passed through the crucible, and can now accept the young rival as a model. This time, Romy actually has an orgasm – “for real, it’s intense and raw”²² – but this apparently happy ending nonetheless comes with a proviso. The sex scene is crosscut with shots of Samuel in the cheap hotel room with the red walls where the CEO and the intern had their first sexual encounter. Samuel has the ferocious female dog with him that obeys him perfectly, just like in the street scene when Romy first set eyes on him. Even though the script mentions that she looks into the camera, “liberated”,²³ the final scene illustrates the Lacanian wisdom that there is no sexual relationship. A woman and a man are never alone during sex, for there is always an “intruder”, a third element that functions as a phantasmatic supplement.²⁴ Jacob is physically present, but Romy’s orgasm is elicited by the virtual presence of Samuel in an imaginary scene of him taming the female dog. Romy can continue her marriage on the condition that her husband perform actions that trigger her to fantasize about the intern and his dog.

Babygirl

Endnotes