In Babygirl the politics are edgier than the sex
A Dutch director in American cinemas
Everyone is talking about the sex in Babygirl, the new film from Dutch director Halina Reijn, but the film pushes political and narrative boundaries in even more progressive ways. Moreover it is a distinctly European film, despite being formally American, produced by A24, a US production company, and set in New York.
In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the powerful CEO of an Amazon-like company, who starts a dangerous affair with Samuel, a much younger male intern, played by Harris Dickinson.
The film is a clear rebuke of a certain American millennial feminist ethos—Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and “girlboss feminism.” Babygirl illustrates the central fallacy of this kind of feminism—female leaders cannot change the structural issues for women in the workplace under capitalism by simply... being female. Busy with her affair, Romy “leans out” and Esme, a younger female employee played by Sophie Wilde, takes the opportunity to “lean in,” but none of it matters. Female progress at the company is empty, and all for show.
No matter how high you climb there’s always some old-ass creep slithering his way into your office and hitting on you, and more to the point is that women will screw each other over to climb the corporate ladder the same way that men do. That’s how power works in corporations, no matter what gender you are. That’s a particularly European understanding of power dynamics.
Power dynamics are also what turn Romy on. As the old saying goes, “everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” She might be a CEO, but she still wants to be sexually dominated, and part of Romy’s draw to Samuel is that he does have power over her. Some of it comes from his attitude and some of it is real—he tells her that he can make one phone call and ruin her life, and she likes it.
This is edgy stuff, especially for a mainstream film. There are a number of scenes that play with consent—no means yes—where Romy says yes with her actions, or palpable desire, but not with her words. There might be room for this in American bedrooms, but post-Me Too, post-“cancel culture,” and mid-the absolutely repressive force of social media, American culture has become chaste, afraid, and repressed.
And so have American movies. Most of the directors of recent mainstream Hollywood movies that deal explicitly with sex come from non-Americans. Challengers (2024) was directed by Luca Guadagnino (Italian), Saltburn (2023) by Emerald Fennell (English), and Poor Things (2023) by Yorgos Lanthimos (Greek). I’m excluding Nosferatu (2024), directed by the American Robert Eggers, because it primarily deals with vampire sex and doesn’t count. And vampires can’t be edgy. They’re quite conservative by definition. Notoriously stuck in their ways!
Babygirl not only pushes the boundaries of sex, it pushes narrative and cinematic boundaries about sex. There are very few movies in which women explore unconventional sex lives and aren’t punished for it. My go-to example of this is Y Tu Mama Tambien (2021). Two boys on a road trip meet an older woman and have a threesome with her, among other types of free-spirited fun, and at the end (spoiler alert) it’s revealed that she was dying of cancer the whole time. Y Tu Mama Tambien is one of my favorite films, but this is annoying and ridiculous. Can’t a girl have a threesome without literally dying of cancer to narratively justify her “crazy” behavior?
I won’t say much about the ending of Babygirl, but I will say that Romy more or less gets away with what she’s done. It’s a bit of a simple ending, maybe because, and I’m speculating here, that despite its European DNA, Babygirl’s American producers demanded a “Hollywood ending.”
Dutch audiences are loving Babygirl. Last week, the film surpassed the critical 100,000-ticket milestone in the Netherlands, and was the 4th largest film at the Dutch box office.
American audiences aren’t loving Babygirl quite as much. It has a 50% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not great, and so far it’s only made $20 million and might not even reach its $50 million break-even point. It will depend on how the film does in the awards season, which just started.
My interpretation of this viewer response is that a more mainstream European audience gets it, and finds more to see in the story of a painful female journey to sexual liberation.
America was founded by puritans, don’t forget. And Americans, unlike Europeans, as I wrote in my analysis of the Speak No Evil horror movies, want happy endings. Unless the movie involves a sexually liberated woman. Then they want her to die.
🔥 Hot Linkjes
Society
The Netherlands is the “heartland” of panopticon prisons—circular structures designed to make inmates feel like they’re being watched all the time. Three of these prisons, in Haarlem, Breda and Arnhem, have been repurposed as arts centers. The Guardian.
A database with the names of 425,000 Dutch people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis in WWII has been digitized. EuroNews.
Noah was the most popular boys name in the Netherlands in 2024 for the sixth (!) year in a row. Dutch Review.
Business
The Dutch are in talks with Nvidia and AMD to open an AI supercomputer facility. Reuters.
This report from Marketplace dives into how the Port of Rotterdam has been experimenting with automation.
Arts & Books & Design
Dutch museums avoided a VAT increase, but many fear for the future under the current far-right government. The Art Newspaper.
Tech & Health
Crime
An apparent serial killer who shot three men dead in Rotterdam was arrested. NL Times.
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
In Europe the name Kevin has become a “marker of low status, showing that one’s parents were shaped by American pop culture. Germans have a word for this: ‘Kevinismus.’” @RichardHanania
📺 Kijk/Lees/Luister List
Not necessarily Dutch stuff I enjoyed watching, reading, and listening to this week.
TV / Movies
I watched a lot of movies over the holidays. My favorite experience was with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), an epic and sprawling story of loosely connected people on one day in Los Angeles. I last watched as a teenager and really didn’t get it. It’s very much for adults. If you’re old enough to understand that life is constant suffering (lol), you’ll get it. It’s a feat of screenwriting and filmmaking.
Music / Podcasts
Obsessed with this playlist.
This post has has a ton of lists of excellent but obscure (well, obscure to me) albums, singles, and more from 2024.
Articles / Books
I absolutely loved Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s latest novel. It’s full of keen psychological insights into the difficulties of love and desire. And it’s written in a fresh and distinctive prose style.
“Meta surrenders to the right on speech,” by Casey Newton in Platformer.
“A younger, more capable Zuckerberg once worked to improve those systems: to build better machine-learning classifiers and reduce the error rates. Today he has chosen to largely throw those systems out, because they have become a political liability.”
Also very satisfying on Zuckerberg: “Look at this loser” in
“I just want to reflect on how pathetic this all is. We have a 40-year-old worth $213 billion trying to look like a 22-year-old TikToker while throwing bribe after bribe Donald Trump’s way in the hopes that Trump won’t be mean to him or his business interests.”
*all typos in this post are on purpose
Another great post.
Side question: Is there a particular significance to the title of your blog, “Dutch Deadline”?
I’m trying to navigate Dutch culture and am coming up against ridiculous deadlines that are being pronounced.
Is that a thing? Or just a coincidence?
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