As far as The Bell Jar moments go in terms of applying to housewives forcing themselves to be resigned to watching any other potential they might have had go down the drain along with errant crumbs from the dish of casserole they recently made, Betty Draper has long been a benchmark. Between shooting pigeons to channel repressed rage and fornicating with her washing machine, this is a character who has easily upheld the trope of the bored, therefore depressed trophy wife. That is, until now, and in a context not set within the 1960s–when such a phenomenon was even more common. Of course, women being told to shut their mouths (which is precisely why the lead character in Swallow must find a more subversive way to open hers) and play nice has not gone away, least of all within the context of wealthy family structures. The wealthy family that serves as an almost mythic villain out of a fairy tale, and Swallow is nothing if not a fucked up one, starting with the lamb led to the slaughter imagery and symbolism that commences the first scene of the movie.
After a number of shorts and co-directing the documentary The Swell Season, it seems as though writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis has been waiting all his life to show the cinematic world what he can do. Evident in the meticulous set designs–all stark and pristine–and color schemes–always eerily coordinated between the decor and a character’s sartorial choice. And, as simple of a story as Swallow may be, there is little if nothing else to compare it to. Maybe it has to do with our blasé heroine, Hunter (The Girl on the Train’s Haley Bennett), suffering from a condition called pica, which flares up after learning that she’s pregnant with her husband Richie’s (Austin Stowell) child. Indeed, everything about her pica condition is a to the letter case–including the fact that it is most common among pregnant women and often evokes a “craving” for ice, sharp objects, metal or soil (the gamut of which Hunter’s appetite covers by the time we reach the end of the story). Yet rather than titling the movie Pica, Swallow, is a more appropriate choice for its dual meaning in Hunter’s case–as well as the type of woman she represents. One told from the start that she was not worth much. That she ought just be grateful someone like Richie would even consider “taking her on.” His parents, Katherine (Elizabeth Marvel) and Michael (David Rasche), certainly can’t seem to understand why he would, apart from her, up until now, patent docility.
At one point, Katherine tries to draw her out by asking what she did before she met Richie. She admits, “Mostly retail.” In particular selling toiletries at one of those boutique places that purvey little soaps. The kind of boutiques that attract bourgeois like Richie all the time. Maybe that’s even where they met, though it’s never specifically stated. And as Hunter, with a very similar muted yet awkward and bumbling Betty Draper quality, tries her best to connect with Katherine, she states how grateful she is to Richie and his parents for everything. As though they’ve done her a favor by turning her into a caged bird. Even if the cage is gilded. Still, Katherine demands, after giving her the advice to fake it till she makes it, “Are you happy or just pretending to be happy?” Hunter pretends, “I’m happy.” Just as all women of her “privilege” should be. What have they got to complain about, after all? Too many shoes? Deciding what motif to decorate their living room in? Obviously, these are the same issues that befell Betty throughout the course of Mad Men, particularly during her marriage to Don (Jon Hamm), also a perpetually absent husband expecting to be tended to whenever he did decide to be present.
But Hunter takes it one step further in terms of macabre coping mechanisms. Starting with consuming a marble after reading a passage from a pregnancy book tailored to help with potential postpartum depression (given to her by Katherine) that instructs her to do something different every day. Well, this is what she can do: consume a different object each day. And, at the very least, it gives her some sense of control. Some sense of agency over her body, now surrendered over to the spawn of Richie, as well as his parents monitoring it for the sake of the company’s “future CEO.”
Her body, in fact, has never really had a choice, as we soon come to find after she is put into the care of a psychiatrist (this after a sonogram shows the doctors that there’s a lot more in her stomach than just a fetus) who earns enough of her trust to inveigle her to confess that her conception was the product of a rape. And since her mother is devoutly Catholic, abortion was not an option. “So here I am,” she concludes. Nope, Betty Draper officially has nothing on her at all. Nor was she ever monitored 24/7 by a Syrian ex-soldier named Luay (Laith Nakli), oddly the most compassionate person in her life despite telling her, in the old school male tone of non-understanding, that she wouldn’t be permitted the luxury of having mental health issues if she had more to focus on (like being shot at in a war).
Yet, like so many women whose surface is never probed beyond the skin deep, there is so much more to Hunter–and so much more she could be–had she not felt initially obliged to be relegated to this ornamental role. One that finds her whiling her days away playing cell phone games in between vacuuming and cooking (yes, it’s very much a modern re-envisioning of what Betty’s day-to-day would look like). To boot, later on, her regular therapy sessions reveal a plot point right out of the Don Draper playbook when Hunter overhears a conversation between Richie and her doctor during which Richie irritatedly reminds that he’s paying her to tell him everything his wife says. The spiral is almost complete as she unearths this breach of trust.
As her fervor for swallowing objects escalates–especially once it’s something now controlled and forbidden by her husband and his family–her road to redemption starts to pave itself, leading to the one person who can absolve her for what she has long believed are her sins. In this way, there is something of a reversion to her younger self as a means to start anew, with the final scenes featuring her sitting in a mall eating fries like a wayward teenager, unsure of what the next phase of her life holds. Whatever it is, it will no longer involve subjugation and submission. Leave that shit to Betty D.
