This coming weekend, a movie called Nightbitch, starring the popular Amy Adams, opens. The premise is a simple one: A frustrated career woman who becomes a stay-at-home mom transforms into a dog at night. I haven’t read the novel on which the movie is based, and I doubt I’ll see the movie. It’s the trailer that’s intriguing because it is the ultimate expression of unhappy feminism, coupled with leftism’s neo-paganism.

Regarding the unhappy feminism, I know all about that. I was utterly unprepared for motherhood, in large part because I, like most in my generation, was last around children when I was 15 and babysitting in high school. After that, I lived in a child-free world, so the reality of children when I hit my late thirties (yes, I waited that long) was a shock. I also worked from home, so I was simultaneously a mommy and a wage slave, which was a challenge I did not gracefully rise to meet.

Image by AI.

Thanks to being a Democrat, I didn’t view motherhood as a miracle or a unique opportunity to raise wonderful human beings. I felt displaced and as if I was falling behind in my own life.

Luckily, I got two wonderful pieces of advice that not only made me a better parent but that made me a happier person generally. These pieces of advice are relevant here because they speak to the trailer’s negative lessons about being a mother and even being a person. The first piece of advice was to catch my children being good.

Sure, we all praise their artwork when they bring it home from school and thank them when they trash the kitchen to make us breakfast, but we don’t catch them in all the little things that make up a child’s life. Thanks to the advice, every time my children did something that I wanted them to do, they got a word of praise. I wasn’t over-the-top, I just noticed it.

Children desperately want their parents to see them. If you only catch them being bad, they’ll be bad. Catch them being good...and they’ll be good. The trailer’s premise, though, is that children are an unmitigated evil in a mother’s life.

The other advice came from Dennis Prager’s Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual. Prager argues that humans are the only animals that can will themselves to be happy—under ordinary circumstances, of course. Being a Hamas hostage, for example, is antithetical to happiness.

Because we have that ability, which Prager considers a God-given gift, we have an obligation to use it, not just for our own benefit but for those around us. It’s morally wrong to be a drag on others (although that does not mean you are responsible for others making the same choice to be happy).

Armed with Prager’s advice, I started counting my blessings regularly, catching everyone (not just my kids) being good, and generally telling myself that I was happy. I made a choice, and it worked...and it still works.

The trailer, though, makes it explicit that happiness is not a choice. Indeed, only a pompous, condescending man who doesn’t understand the horrors of motherhood would think it is.

Rather than embracing and celebrating what we have, the trailer goes in another direction entirely: It literally tells us to tap into our divine side. Thus, Amy Adams, the frazzled mother, announces, “We [i.e., women] are gods,” complete with the creative power of gods.

There are two things going on in that statement. First, it represents the left’s neo-paganism, which rejects the monotheistic Judeo-Christian God. Rejecting that God means that one can also reject His worldview (e.g., “male and female he created them”) and His ethical values, both large and small.

Second, the statement taps into the Marxist concept that, when people are freed from the chains of labor, they essentially become gods. Logan Lancing’s and James Lindsay’s The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids explains that Marxism is not an economic theory; it’s a religious cult that sees the Western economic system standing in the way of each person’s apotheosis (that is, their ascendence to god-status).

We caught an inkling of this when Nancy Pelosi argued for Obamacare by saying that, freed from the chains of the jobs we held to get health insurance, we Americans could tap into our creative side, an important Marxist concept:

We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You won’t have to be job locked.

This goes way beyond the “Gaia” or earth worship that characterizes the green movement. If humans are truly gods, they can do no wrong. Moreover, viewed from that perspective, abortion is human sacrifice on a grand scale, not to a distant god on Mount Olympus but, again, to themselves.

And with those principles in mind, I present the trailer to Nightbitch:

Motherhood is a different beast. Amy Adams stars in NIGHTBITCH. Written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the best-selling novel by Rachel Yoder. In select theaters this December. #Nightbitch pic.twitter.com/fWOSQWF2zD

— Searchlight Pictures (@searchlightpics) September 3, 2024