Take it. Deal with it. Eat it. Swallow it.
Life’s full of situations where we feel like we just have to take what’s in front of us, no matter how much it hurts, or how against our values it might be. Most often, it’s a means to an end – the hated job that affords us something is a classic, capitalist example. But really, it’s all down to expectation: the commands of politeness and pleasantries, the choices of wardrobe, the curated behaviours in accordance with one’s surroundings, all in the presence of the ubiquitous phone camera that will immortalise our every move.
Expectations come with rewards of inclusivity, and whether that inclusivity feels good or not is a whole other issue. They are also the results of a pattern. Living a life that “ought to be” a certain way because of tradition, and enforcing its continuity, sets the stage for expectation.
This week’s film looks at how breaking a pattern leads to the reclamation of self-worth.
Swallow (2019)
From the opening shot, Hunter is just part of the background scenery. She is pallid pinks, icy blues, and a perfectly cropped blonde bob. Everything about her distant and controlled. She’s a young woman from a working-class East Coast family who used to work in retail. She shelved her passion for becoming an illustrator and married into a very rich family. Her husband, Richie, and his parents are disinterested in her opinions and moods, and frequently shut her out of conversations or treat her like she’s not there, until she’s needed. She just takes it, although her eyes tell a different story.
She spends every day alone in the house, wearing perfect outfits on her perfect figure, cleaning and organising things that don’t need cleaning or organising. She is dreamily passive, and constantly insists she’s grateful for the “opportunities” her life affords her.
When she becomes pregnant, her mother-in-law brings her a self-help book she says got her through the post-partum. (The insinuation being that the post-partum sent her into its infamous depression.) One of the remedies the book encourages is to try something unexpected every day. And with all the icy control of her daily activities, Hunter picks up a marble, and swallows it. It’s among the first time we see a genuine smile crack her lips.
When the marble comes back out, she sets it on a mirrored tray. A trophy.
So begins the eerily peaceful activity of swallowing increasingly dangerous objects: a Jacks piece, a paperclip, a battery, an especially ornery thumbtack, and so on. It’s not until she has her first sonogram that it’s discovered she has obstructions in her abdomen and must undergo emergency surgery. She’s diagnosed with having pica, a psychological disorder that drives its sufferers to swallow objects.
Instead of support, Richie screams at her as he throws out her tray of frightening trophies. She’s not a wife to worry about, she’s a burden on what is perceived of him. When he and his father take Hunter to a therapist, the father says he wants results. In these therapy sessions, we discover Hunter’s past: she is a child of rape who never met her biological father. She keeps a photo of him, and knows he served time for his crime.
Richie’s family hires a live-in caretaker to watch over Hunter, and when the stress of this drives her to swallow a miniature screwdriver, they commit her to a hospital with the plan to have her released when the baby is born.
Hunter escapes with the help of the hired caretaker. Richie berates her when she calls him from a motel, and begins to eat soil. She later seeks out her biological father, and asks a surprising question – whether she is anything like him. He insists that she isn’t, nor is he ashamed of her.
Dressed in a baggy tree-print sweater and jeans, Hunter sits in a food court and takes an abortion pill. After she has the abortion in the bathroom, she looks at herself in the mirror with true relief on her face.
Hunter knows she doesn’t “belong” where she is, having grown up the way she did. Existing for the reason she does. Children like her are often the definition of unwanted. So, she counts her “blessings”. How fortunate she is to not be abandoned, to not be poor, to not be alone. Hunter doesn’t consciously recognise the price she pays, sometimes in the most emotionally brutal ways for her position. A family who doesn’t love her and a big house devoid of company or meaning are slowly eating away at her. It can be understood that the objects she swallows are symbols of a household that never was and never could be – the innocence of Jacks and marbles – or the literal effort and energy put into a health marriage to make it work – the screwdriver and the battery.
The film is a severe example of the psychological pressure that can be experienced when one “lucks in” to the upper rungs of the social ladder. But it’s the last act of the film that presents the most arresting of meanings, and that is in the ending of pain by breaking a pattern. Hunter and Richie’s baby would be destined for a miserable life in a gilded cage. It can be assumed from the dynamics between Richie and his parents that the lifestyle and expectations they present are tradition, and expected to be continued. There’s always the possibility – for better or worse – that we will become just like our parents. Hunter’s question to her biological father is one that perhaps haunts the minds of many children of rape, incest, and other crimes – will I be like that criminal? While Hunter’s personality isn’t one to harm others, she knows somewhere inside herself that she will be harming that child by bringing it up with Richie and his family.
An interesting thing to note is the shift in what she swallows after she escapes from the hospital. So far it had all been inanimate, dangerous objects. In the motel, far from her prison and anyone who knows her, at last dishevelled and alone, she eats soil. Heaps of it. Later, the abortion pill she takes is reminiscent of a seed. Her sweatshirt, covered in trees, insinuates a rebirth and regrowth of herself in a natural fashion. When she looks in the mirror in the bathroom, she looks like a healthy woman, not the dead-eyed Barbie we met in the beginning. Reinforced by the uneven tiles in the bathroom around her, there’s the understanding that she has broken a pattern around her, and released the need to swallow harmful things.
Swallow is available on most digital platforms.
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Celeste Ramos is a Raindance member and writer of fiction, short film and poetry from New York City. Based in London, she studies symbology and art between watching movies.
