“A Very Dangerous Film”: A Mouthful of Air and the Use of Art in Advocacy
Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers and reveals important plot elements from the movie and book A Mouthful of Air by Amy Koppelman.
I started my reflection about the use of art in advocacy last summer during the “11-11” crowdfunding campaign. I never got to publish it, mainly because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what it meant to create a documentary project and lead a nonprofit organization that uses storytelling to raise awareness and create art.
Much like Amy Koppelman expresses it in the podcast episode we recorded together last November about her latest movie, A Mouthful of Air, it took me a while to be comfortable with calling myself an “artist”.
But if an artist is someone who brings their unique and honest perspective into this world through a variety of mediums, then be it: I am one.
I like to think that I often create at the junction of two roads: one serves a population, while the other is utterly personal.
Sure, both are interdependent to one another, but each follows a different set of expectations, genres and aesthetics. And since no one creates in a vacuum, our work is as unique as it is connected to those who also practice in our field.
For example, when I publish a documentary image stating “This is Postpartum,” it implies some sort of truth telling. Viewers can expect that I haven’t altered the photograph too much by adding elements that weren’t there in real life when I captured it.
Beyond that, I inevitably impose my eye on what I create. In photography, I’m the one who picks what’s in the scene, and what I leave out is as important as what makes it into the frame.
When I tell a postpartum person’s story and rewrite the sentences from an interview, I leave behind the hesitation or add an ellipse to convey an emotion that might (or might not) have been there in that particular moment, but unveil a general feeling that is important to the story.
Inevitably, what is reproduced and represented is not what happened at the moment it was captured. Yet, it is still real, or as real as the perception of the person who conveys it and the one who receives it.
I always hope that those of you who follow along in this artistic and advocacy journey understand this. Of course, putting myself out there always carries the risk of being misunderstood, but I’m good with it.
When I sat down with Amy Koppelman two months ago, I knew I wanted to talk about what it meant to her to represent the postpartum period in general and postpartum psychosis in particular, and how it could help facilitate difficult conversations.
What I got instead was a master class on the brutal limits of art when it comes to advocacy.
The film, starring Amanda Seyfried, is inspired by Koppelman’s novel (same title) published twenty years ago. Both open up with the principal character, Julie, a couple of weeks after she attempted to take her life by cutting her wrist in the bathroom, on her son’s first birthday.
We then follow her and her family throughout her recovery, unplanned second pregnancy, psychiatric treatments and the birth of her second child. This event, mixed with her stopping her medications to pursue her breastfeeding journey, will send her spiraling down into an even deeper depression.
Both the movie and book treat the topics of postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis to various degrees and depths. At the end of both, Julie dies by suicide: by cutting her wrist laying down in the garden in the movie, and by drowning her infant daughter in the sink, then herself in the pool during a psychotic episode, in the book.
These are the plotlines and, as with any good book or movie, they don’t matter as much as the multiple ways the director and writer have led us through them, unveiling a unique sense of style, a deep understanding of the human psyche, and a precise and honest voice.
Back in the early 2000s, when Koppelman was trying to publish her book, she was told by a handful of agents that it could never be published because it was “too dark.” One particular agent even told her that her writing was the very reason she had gotten into publishing in the first place, but that sadly, her book would never sell: she had to pass.
Koppelman proved them wrong, got someone to publish her novel, and then went on with writing three more books.
A Mouthful of Air was even picked by a movie studio when it was originally published, “with a big movie star and all,” Koppelman tells me. “But then they couldn’t even get the ending right. They kept saying, ‘When she dials 911 and saves herself and her baby.’ It’s like they completely blocked the tragic ending from their minds! When they finally realized Julie commits a murder-suicide, they asked me to change the ending for a happier one. I refused.”
If Hollywood couldn’t stomach such events back then, things haven’t really changed since. “It was so hard to get this movie funded,” Koppelman says. “I can’t tell you how many cheese platters Amanda [Seyfried] and I ate just to be told ‘no’ at the end of our meetings with prospective producers.”
But they persevered, and finally got enough capital to produce the film by producers who believed these stories weren’t too dark or depressing to be told.
People like Sarah Wynter, executive producer of the movie, who recently wrote an article in Vanity Fair about her experience with postpartum psychosis. As she writes,
“It took me six months after leaving the hospital to feel safe enough to be left alone with my kids. It took a year and a half for me to make a dinner. Two years to wean myself off the heavy antidepressants and return to my old self.
For a long time I felt ashamed of my illness. It was a dark secret to anyone not in my very inner circle. But in time, the shame lifted. Now I understand that I was struck with an illness that I did not choose.”
PMADs don’t discriminate. They don’t care if you have a nanny or a chauffeur. They couldn’t care less if your partner is supportive, if you’re a famous person or someone who pains to make ends meet.
Of course, there are very real risk factors like race and socioeconomic status. But when they hit you, they don’t give a shit about the color of your skin or what’s in your bank account: they will make you see spiders crawling on the top of your car, die by suicide, or painfully check yourself in a psychiatric ward to make sure you don’t harm yourself or your child.
But as the number one complication after childbirth, PMADs are also not always so spectacular. Many times, they will creep into your life sneakily, making it impossible to pinpoint (and tackle) their effects until you’re at your breaking point. As many Faces of Postpartum’s participants told me, “I thought this is what becoming a mother was: painful, overwhelming, and lonely.”
For many of us, this means suffering for years without proper help simply because we didn’t know we deserved support and light.
No one wants to drown their infant in a sink. But if we don’t address that these mothers exist, and that their pain is similar— if not identical— to ours, we’re going to keep going in circles and prevent real families to get real help.
Movies like Koppelman’s can help shine a dim light into our darkness. As an undiagnosed postpartum depression and anxiety survivor, she admits that writing this book, years after the birth of her children, was a way to make sense of an experience that didn’t get much attention in the early 2000s amongst medical professionals, let alone the public eye.
“I wrote this book through the lens of ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t gotten the help I needed after my son was born.
My hope was always to start a conversation so others don’t suffer in silence like I had.”
But the reception of her movie wasn’t what she expected. Prominent perinatal mental health organizations sent “trigger warning” newsletters about the movie to their members. If some commended her for tackling a difficult topic such as postpartum psychosis, all warned us that the movie could have “dangerous” effects. None endorsed it. One organization even went to the production company and demanded for the movie not to be released in theaters and online.
As advocacy and peer-support organizations, stating that a movie about PMADs is “dangerous” is all at once hypocritical, ignorant and patronizing. Hypocritical because they themselves publish — as they should — difficult stories from their members that are then used to raise grants and donations. Ignorant because it shows a lack of understanding of the power of art, narration and storytelling as a healing tool. And patronizing because it implies that postpartum people are too “weak” to make informed decisions on their own.
You can like the movie or not. Think that it’s gone too far or not enough. I’m not a movie critic so my job here is not to tell you if you should watch this movie or not.
My job, as a trained discursive expert and writer with more than a decade of experience, is to say that all stories are valid and worthy of being skillfully analyzed and not butchered under the weight of righteousness.
My job, as a perinatal advocate, is to state loud and clear that individuals’ stories and art do not deserve to be censored by anyone or any organization. That each voice is unique and brings more light to an issue we all are, ultimately, dedicated to support.
Corporate and personal egos don’t have their place in someone else’s story.
For us artists, fiction allows us to speculate and combine contradictory feelings by putting them into a transitional object — a book, a movie, a painting — that carries the load of traumas, horrors and other difficult realities.
It allows our worst fears to land somewhere safe and, by offering them publicly, to process them with others.
Art does not owe anything to anyone. But at its core, it will always remain an exemplary way to connect with our fellow humans. It is proof that our darkest moments can be transcended into light.
Koppelman’s movie does not incite to suicide as some have implied: it shows us that the helping hands — much like everyone else’s demons —are all around. Should we simply agree to have difficult conversations, we would soon realize that A Mouthful of Air’s message is, much like ourselves, desperately human: wanting for someone to notice, wanting for someone to care.