Unnatural Fruit
Hostile homosocial settings in scary nun movies and the Catholic girls’ school
It’s just like Louise Bonner says: “Someone is in trouble, something bad is happening!” A woman in trouble: when Louise Bonner (Lee Grant) unforgettably interrupts Mulholland Dr. (2001) as a shrouded, oracle-like neighbor, she appears as the incarnation of the probing camera-eye, inserting herself to deliver David Lynch’s definition of cinema. Trouble could be anywhere, and it could mean anything: a secret affair, an unwanted pregnancy, a crime. I mention Louise Bonner because not only does she look kind of like a nun, she also defines the story of nun movies, in an extreme sense. In nun movies, there is always trouble, and the baseline for trouble is at a particularly low boiling point (sex, rules, individual versus the collective).
In this newsletter, I will discuss nuns. The nuns here appear in constrained and claustrophobic homosocial settings. But first, a few broad generalizations: a nun appearing in a book or a movie, even if it’s Miss Clavel from the beloved children’s book series Madeline, will inevitably be intertwined with the spiritual undermining of this very same nun. It’s the inevitable undermining that blends the distinction between lurid “nunsploitation” movies and movies (such as horror movies) “with nuns in them.” As with many a genre, that of nunsploitation is on the one hand recognizable (we know a nunsploitation movie when we see it) and porous. Any nun movie is really a nunsploitation movie, insofar as that cinema is an inherently heretical medium. I look for the appearance of nuns in movies because she signifies that there will be some kind of battle between the seen and the unseen (the flesh and the soul) which is also the problem of film itself. But there’s also the specifics: with all the restraint an abundance of veils, shrouds, and candles that depictions of Catholic religiosity can muster, a nun movie will as a rule be about the actual desires of the flesh manifested in a visual form, with the individual standing at odds with the will of the collective/the demand for order and righteousness.[1] This dialogue is inexhaustible, and I’ll probably be writing another email about this soon. I might as well also preface all this by saying that while I grew up in a Catholic country, I personally am not Catholic, nor did I go to an all-girls’ school.
Recently, I’ve been fascinated by the twinned appearance of two horror films featuring involuntarily pregnant nuns. Both Immaculate and The First Omen depict the crystallization of our current cultural fears: banning and restriction of access to abortion; loss of bodily autonomy for women; weaponizing of women’s bodies in political discourse; a re-emerging consciousness of the female body and its vulnerability.[2]
While working at very different scales, these two exquisite scary movies offer almost identical plots: in both, a young American novitiate, on the brink of her vows, arrives in Italy with the intent of taking the veil. While relinquishing her vague and unexplored sexuality, our heroine finds herself at the center of conspiracy to birth a new messiah/antichrist in the name of the Catholic Church. With their panorama of shifting characters within convent walls, both movies come across as boarding school movies, or even women’s prison movies, with an ensemble of various nuns who can easily be grouped into the tropes of the schoolyard: mean girls, rebellious girls, all in uniform. Both movies are detailed, imaginative, and incredibly sensitive to their context. Immaculate harnesses final girl energy and late 1970s revenge thrillers while The First Omen, a prequel, neatly manages the tightrope walk between sliding successfully into franchise code while also doing its own fantastical thing—spanning intragenerational politics and making unwieldy cross-references to classics like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Italian cinema of the late 1960s.
I loved Immaculate, but I was particularly moved by The First Omen. Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a girl with a dark and secretive past, shows up in 1971 Rome to take her vows, work at a convent orphanage, and assist the Vatican’s PR with the Roman youth. Times are changing and the church is hemorrhaging relevancy: student protests are roiling the city, and the film’s imagery seems taken from all across film history—I even thought, suddenly and unexpectedly, of Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), in which a Messiah-like figure blows up a bourgeois household through seduction. Margaret quickly becomes concerned with one of the orphans in her convent, Carlita, a feral teenage girl whom Margaret identifies as the prey of a nefarious plot in which the Vatican intends to impregnate a virgin with the spawn of the devil.
As with Immaculate, there’s the trouble and horror found in impregnation: to bring the church back to prominence, an antichrist must be conceived—“unnaturally,” of course, which to me at this point just sounds like IUI and IVF, a hot and very actually exciting topic in our contemporary lesbian circles, now that we’ve suddenly found ourselves in our mid-to-late thirties. I was even more delighted to learn that in fact, while sounding almost as barmy as the idea of the Catholic church re-spawning Satan, Vanity Fair reported this week that it was the urine of nuns, menopausal nuns, who were an indelible part of the creation of IVF!! I wish someone could travel back in time and tell Pasolini.
The First Omen really goes into almost fantastically uncomfortable directions. On the one hand, Margaret is wrangling with her sexual awakening. A hot co-novitiate suggests the great nun-movie conundrum (know the flesh before you relinquish the flesh!) and encourages Margaret to have a destabilizing nun-Rumspringa. Simultaneously, Carlita’s appearance in the film is charged and weirdly suggestive: she is at the brink of puberty, that “poltergeist and exorcism”-age, and the first time we see her, Carlita tackles Margaret and licks her face. Like the character of Miles in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, Carlita also seems possessed by another overbearing young nun, Sister Anjelica. Focusing on her growing paranoia and obsession with Carlita, Margaret begins to understand her own sexuality and repression, and her nighttime is haunted by visions of a past too horrifying to recollect.
Quick digression: only after googling her did I remember Nell Tiger Free’s perfectly cast appearance in Game of Thrones, where she played the unfortunate Myrcella Baratheon, daughter of twins Cersei and Jaime Lannister and sister to the psychopath Joffrey. Myrcella is sent to the overseas kingdom of Dorne as a child in Season 2 and reappears as a surprisingly lovely and sane teenager three seasons later. One of the things Game of Thrones did exceptionally well was repeatedly allow viewers to feel relief and curiosity before smashing us over the head with an extremely creative tragedy. In Myrcella’s case we are instantly struck by how not-awful she is, and the story arc feels suddenly exciting and hopeful. Myrcella’s assassination then winds up being sort of humorously homoerotic: she is fatally poisoned by another female character’s farewell kiss, a strike that echoes the fantastic finale of mesmerizing lesbian wuxia, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972). (Many thanks to much-admired friend of this substack Ella Dorn for urging me to see it!!)
It's this sense of elation and guilelessness that Nell Tiger Free brings to Margaret. She balances a lucid intelligence with the growing inanity at the depth of the movie, performing the conviction of someone wishing to act righteously after a lifetime of religious indoctrination. Whereas Sidney Sweeney’s religiosity in Immaculate comes across as sensual, even romantic, Free’s is all warped logic and misguided earnestness—making for a genuinely sympathetic antiheroine. Even the vague homoerotic undertones of Myrcella’s character seem to resound in this performance, where we see a nun and teacher visibly obsessed with her ward.
With its young nun preoccupied with an even younger girl, mixed in with some uncomfortable homoerotic moments, The First Omen feels like a reverse Mädchen in Uniform (1931)—the Weimar Republic-era lesbian boarding school movie by Leontine Sagan that was quickly banned by the Nazis. Here a haunted and lonely student, Manuela, crushes on her attentive teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg, to the point of delirium and scandal. There are alliances between girls and teachers, pageantries, bullying, overt lesbian kisses, and a suicide attempt from atop a staircase. Mädchen in Uniform is an icon of lesbian and queer cinema, and it’s a progressive and optimistic one that stood to criticize Prussia’s military past and burgeoning fascism. It even seems to endorse the notion that perhaps Manuela’s love for her teacher is reciprocated. One technicolor remake starring Romy Schneider, from 1958, was politically more timid, and there is also a Mexican remake, from 1951. Muchachas de Uniforme, which you can watch on YouTube, trades protestant rigidity and the foreshadowing of fascism for Catholicism—with harrowing results. Manuela this time succeeds in her suicide attempt—an echo of which can be found replayed in a horrifying scene in The Last Omen— and Fräulein von Bernburg’s Mexican equivalent responds by taking the veil in a ceremony atop Manuela’s grave. Shot on an expressionistic and jagged soundstage with a fantastical fortress architecture that remind you more of Dr Caligari’s cabinet than a school building, with its students a toxic clique and the faculty a group of malevolent nuns, Muchachas de Uniforme reveals itself as a latent horror movie. [3]
For more horror about “unnaturally” conceived babies:
Catalan author Eva Baltasar’s antiheroines are acerbic and deeply unpleasant lesbians: her trilogy, starting with Permafrost and concluding with Mammoth, the English translation of which will be released in August of this year, crescendos with the almost unbearable Boulder. I’m not a prime target for novels on social isolation, but Baltasar’s women are feral and insatiable, and Boulder’s heroine is witness to her girlfriend gestating and giving birth to a baby—all of which turns out more obstinate and funny than I had anticipated.
Finally and in all earnestness:
I loved J Wortham’s profile of Brittney Griner! I cried.
[1] This applies to meek movies such as the Audrey Hepburn vehicle A Nun’s Story (1959) as much as to the dull and sanctimonious Ida (2013), from Jacques Rivette’s tendentially pedantic adaptation of La Religieuse (1966) to Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels and its looney sibling, Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)—all the way back to the howling and spectacular force of Black Narcissus (1947).
[2] See also: the Rachel Weisz-fronted Dead Ringers remake. I would watch anything starring Rachel Weisz, especially and obviously with Rachel Weisz playing queer (which is how I wound up watching the absolutely dismal The Favourite, 2018) but I simply could not make it all the way to the end of this way too long show, the politics of which kept beating over my head until I fell asleep. I intend to get to this later though.
[3] Horror movies are usually autumnal fare, which is also the seasons for scholastic tropes. For more of this horror/school combination, try Hasta el viento tiene miedo (1968) by Carlos Enrique Taboada as well as the magical, hysterical Veneno para las hadas (1984) about two little girls’ Catholicism-inflected toxic friendship.