After the art monster: Imagining women's creativity otherwise

This article examines two recently released films, Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2023) and Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023), and argues that they exemplify a discourse of women’s creativity that departs markedly from the one that has been dominant in both mainstream cinema and much contemporary fiction, which has been beholden, at least since the publication of Jenny Offill's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation , to the figure of the “art monster.” Rather than reify and repeat this trope—which I position as at once understandably popular and politically regressive—Reichardt and Triet model a different and more forcefully feminist vision of women’s artmaking on screen, one that presumes a far less contested relationship between creative work and caretaking, by representing the artist-protagonists of both films as successfully pursuing their work in the midst of and alongside domestic tasks. Through close analyses of both films, I illustrate the particular aesthetic strategies each uses to insist on the compatibility—rather than catastrophic incommensurability—of professional ambition and personal obligation. The result, I argue, is cinematic portraits of the artist that are less indebted to the ostensibly progressive figurations of millennial fiction and recent Hollywood film than the radical theorizations of earlier generations of feminist writers including Natalia Ginzburg, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. Showing Up and Anatomy of a Fall , then, contribute to a feminist tradition of imagining otherwise, attending to the material conditions of their characters’ creative lives while refusing to insist on their determinism.