MOTHERBOARD

🤰🏻

I’ve been quiet.  Not irl, particularly, but in the land o’ Substack, and I am not entirely sure why.  I have consumed loadsa stuff, but have found myself with little-to-nothing to say about it all.  WEAPONS?  Fucking terrifying.  ‘Nough said, right? (And I have no idea why I went to see it, tbh.  I regretted being in the cinema from the moment it started and had to watch the whole thing through my fingers, sweating bullets and in danger of crapping myself.) BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND?  Cute.  Very cute and very British.  And if very cute, very British films butter your muffin, you should see it.  Otherwise… whatevs. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995 re-release)?  Sublime, obvs.  But I was stupid enough to invite my ex-husband to see it with me, he declined, and I wept and wailed audibly throughout the whole thing, self-pitying, all by myself on a sofa for two, muttering, “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove./O no, it is an ever-fixed mark…”.  AND JUST LIKE THAT (HBO/NowTV)?  Good riddance to abominably bad telly (and let’s thank the streaming gods we don’t have to spend another moment with insincere, self-regarding oaf, Aidan… and nor does Carrie). FINDING ALICE (ITV and now Netflix)?  Literally the stupidest and most pointless show I’ve ever stumbled upon.  NYE at the National Theatre?  Earnest and worthy and pretty dull.  Yes, the NHS is our most valuable public asset and we must treasure and protect it and bend our collective knee to its existence and to that of Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, its Founder, but building a health service is not really the stuff of great drama, is it?  ABSTRACT EROTICA at the Courtauld Gallery?  Abstract.  And erotic, I guess.

After this long run of middling-to-poor cultural fare, I went to the cinema on Saturday afternoon to watch Victoria Mapplebeck’s MOTHERBOARD, a film I had already seen no fewer than three previous times including at the London Film Festival, and a screening I was attending more as a gesture of support and female solidarity than for inspiration or enlightenment, and… waddayaknow?!… I am enlightened.

Victoria’s feature documentary is built on the foundation of a series of previously released short films centred on her relationship with her son, Jim.  One might be tempted to say the films are about Jim’s absent father, but that is, of course, utter nonsense insofar as he is… well, absent.  And, to boot, in his absence there is very little about him that could be considered to be “fatherly”.  Victoria’s films are about the highs and lows of being a very, very present mother.

After four or so dates and presumably a shag or two, news of an unexpected pregnancy comes as a very different sort of surprise for a 38 year old woman and the man who has done the impregnating.  She feels her world shift almost immediately and rolls with it, while he leans heavily into denial and maintaining the status quo that has served him pretty darn well so far, communicating less and less often and only by text message.  Further to a fulfilled demand for a paternity test and confirmation that he is, indeed, Jim’s father, he texts “I had to know for sure,” which seems fair enough in the circumstances, until he writes again immediately afterwards: “I am moving to Spain.”  The fucker.  And so begins Victoria’s role as a single mum and Jim’s as a fatherless son.

MOTHERBOARD was shot over nearly 20 years and we have extraordinary access to this small, wonderfully loving, funny family unit and unbelievably charismatic pair.  The love between them is palpable, yet so, too, is the strain, the pain, the shame, the sacrifice and the fear of being solely responsible for bringing another human being into the world and raising him to be a man.  If there is a critical question of our time (i.e. a time of incels and the Andrew Tates of the world), it is surely how we raise good men, and I think Victoria sets a pretty exemplary example.  The film should be mandatory viewing, imo. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

There is one element of MOTHERBOARD that particularly spoke to me on this fourth (and unlikely to be final) viewing.  Further to a breast cancer diagnosis and an ensuing course of treatment, Victoria contemplates the make-up of cells in her body, the presence of cancer cells (and, amazingly, she asks the hospital to let her view and film her own cancer cells, saved for posterity’s sake as medical samples) and the lasting presence of foetal cells in a mother’s body long, long, long after the gestational period and birth (certainly for decades and potentially for life).  Women incorporate a foetus’s cells into their own cellular make-up during pregnancy and so our children remain, quite literally, part of us.  The scientific term is microchimerism.  Our feeling that we are connected to our children has a basis in our biology and is a rather beautiful, maternal thought to ponder, right?

But… following through the logic, those foetal cells include the DNA of the biological father, and so he, too, forms part of a woman’s body long after the pregnancy.  Microchimerism to the brain is pretty common and there is plenty of evidence of male foetal cells found in the brains of mothers, and there is a (less well evidenced…) notion that male cells from sexual partners (i.e. where there is no pregnancy) can remain within a woman’s cellular makeup, too, also crossing the blood-brain barrier.  That is, on a cellular level, women are most certainly carrying cells of each of their children, by default they are carrying the DNA of their children’s father(s), and it is very possible they are carrying a little, teeny cellular memento of every sexual partner they have ever had.

The idea that my ex-husband’s DNA is part of my body and possibly my brain is something I find quite comforting, really.  It helps me understand why “letting go” or “getting over” a relationship with the father of one’s children is so difficult for women (and seemingly less so for men) and why an ex-lover may be always on one’s mind, quite literally.  Amazing, right?  It is proven by science, but it is also poetry…. There is something positively Shakespearean about it.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare 💕