The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which debuted in 1992 and featured an early, awful Julianne Moore performance, was the first “scary nanny” film of America’s two-income era1. The gothic story starred Annabella Sciorra as a professional class mother tormented by Rebecca de Mornay’s plotting caregiver who wants – as Maika Monroe’s reptilian governess puts it in the new Hulu remake – to “sleep in [her] bed, fuck [her] husband, and raise [her] beautiful daughters."
The original THTRTC – specifically the bathroom-mirror-murder climax – was hokey. Also, a big hit. The film became a date night grand guignole for the first generation of mothers in the odd position of being able to afford help, but unable to not afford it. Presumably, the movie performed well at the box office for precisely the same reason Mrs. Doubtfire, which copied its plot outright, did $219,196,147 at the box office a year later: There’s a haunting truth embedded in caregiving work. The nanny is either pretending to love the kids, which is scary, or really does love the kids, which is arguably scarier.
Since the THTRTC came out there have been, give or take, 20 scary nanny movies to open in wide release. These films are structurally similar to haunted-house movies in which the homeowners don’t move out because of the sunk costs. The monster is only scary because the victims lacks the economic wherewithal to escape. But the scary nanny is a far more insidious foe than any haunted doll because she’s “like family.” That means that she has access, but also – far more importantly – that she’s performing kinship.
Whether or not she’s wearing a mask like Robin Williams, she’s wearing a mask.
Who opens the door for a masked intruder? A lot of us. In 1990, when THTRTC was greenlit, 53% of married couples with children had two incomes. By the mid-1990s, that number was closer to 60% and roughly two million domestic workers were employed nationwide, a third in childcare. Another million worked in day-care centers (which had already endured the pedophilia panic that accompanied the Satanic Panic of the 1980s2). At the same time, the social distance between the upper middle and the middle, including the women doing much of the care, was widening. An increase in homophilous marriage – the coupling of partners with similar educations and incomes – created a high-earning class of parents with more money than time (and not enough money to hire one of those real British nannies).
For young professionals with children, nannies became the price of staying in the top quartile. A white-collar problem was solved with pink-collar labor.
All these nannies – many from the other side of town, plenty of others from Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Phillipines – brought both stability and instability. They became middle management for the home and made schedules sustainable, but they also intruded in intimate spaces because American homes aren’t built with the upstairs-downstairs delineation of Gosford Park (or the basement from Parasite). The practical solution was to oh-so-magnanimously treat them as equals, which also helped assuage the guilt of outsourcing the most meaningful labor to an ostensibly less qualified woman. The trouble with this approach is that it created a crack between the narrative of the home and the reality. Scary stuff hids in that kind of crack.
“When a housewife says her maid is like a friend or a daughter, she is not dismantling the hierarchy between them; she is reinforcing it,” wrote Mary Romero in Maid in the U.S.A.
Romero’s point was that “like-family” language upholsters hierarchy with warmth and sentimental obligation. The phrasing allows the employer to feel benevolent and the worker to feel chosen – right up until there’s a conflict. At that point, something alarming becomes clear: A nanny’s economic power is inversely related to how much she cares for the kiddos.
The benign version of this is best illustrated in the 30 Rock episode “Kidney Now!” (Season 3, Episode 22) in which Jack Donaghy, author of “Jack Attack: The Art of Negotiation,” attempts to bargain with his nanny, who counter-negotiates by looking bored and peeling an orange. He offers to put every member of her family through college.3
The not-so-benign version of this involves holding the kids to ransom or at knifepoint or in some kind of psychological thrall. It’s not just the basis of THTRTC, but of The Guardian (pagan nanny), While the Children Sleep (psycho nanny), The Perfect Nanny (French nanny), The Housekeeper (sad French nanny), Emelie (feral nanny), Nanny (haunted immigrant), The Babysitter (satanist nanny), Mother’s Helper (single-white-female nanny), and Good Manners (werewolf wet nurse). Interestingly, though, most scary nanny movies aren’t about a nanny who doesn’t care at all; they’re about nannies who care the wrong way. These villains lack the very specific thing yuppies look for in nannies: the ability to love convincingly without loving maternally.
“The love and devotion expected of childcare workers is rarely reciprocated in kind,” Shellee Colen wrote in Like a Mother to Them: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers in New York. “Their affective labor is seen as evidence of natural feminine virtue.”
Many two-income households run on that assumption of a third party’s feminine virtue. The nanny’s affection makes the employer’s autonomy possible; her constancy makes dual-income life seem sustainable for working mothers even when it isn’t (again, see Mrs. Doubtfire). The scary thing is when that virtue comes under suspicion but Mom can’t do anything about it because she has a meeting in the morning. Workplace dynamics take over. As Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote in The Second Shift, “When both partners work, the home becomes another workplace.”
You can’t PIP the nanny without putting the pipsqueak at risk.
The new remake of THTRTC is interesting because it makes that anxiety explicit. A shocking percentage of the movie takes place between the moment Caitlin, the mother, realizes something is wrong and the moment she actually does something about it4. She’s reluctant because she’s dependent and because that dependence is, on some level, inevitable (though it’s a bit unclear in the film if she’s working part-time or, if not, if she intends to work again). The movie is subtle about this.
Caitlin (Mom): You’re not here—you don’t see what’s been happening. They go to her room. They’re in there for hours. We don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.
Miguel (Dad): You’re saying all the attention Emma’s been giving her – and how close they’ve gotten – is making you jealous.
Caitlin: Well that sounds bad.
Miguel: It’s not bad. It’s just been us the whole time. Now there’s a new person in the house. It’s weird. I get it.
Caitlin: I guess there’s just part of me that... I don’t want her to grow up. I want her to stay mine.
Of course, no kid stays their mom’s forever. The world gets in one person at a time. That’s the whole scary thing about being a parent. The nanny is scariest because the nanny is first and no matter how professional she may be, her mask is going to slip. As Robin Williams puts it after being found out in Mrs. Doubtfire: “You can’t act 24 hours a day.”
It’s worth remembering that these aren’t just movies about nannies. These are movies about moms grappling with the deep pain that inevitably accompanies deep love. In the new THTRTC, Caitlin is depicted as unstable, which is normalized. She’s professional and postpartum – of course she’s losing it. The movie is sympathetic enough to admit that’s not weird, but meanspirited enough to punish her anyway. The most insightful scene in the film is the one in which the older girl being nannied comes out by saying she wants a wife, not a husband. Caitlin, a bisexual married to a man who might as well be a ficus, feels the same. The nanny is a stopgap, a wife and mother unencumbered by the baggage of authentic emotion.
They dynamic there ain’t new. It’s as old as Jane Eyre. The gothic tension is a product of what sociologist Dorothy Roberts describe as “the fiction that love can be divided from work.” It can’t, which breeds suspicion. These movies run on that charge: the manager’s suspicion a subordinate might be taking their work home.
What animates the two-income scary nanny micro-genre is the static electricity generated when the emotional rubs up against the economic. The horror is less supernatural than logistical. The nanny arrives whenever the gap between affection and availability grows too wide to ignore. Each generation of professionals believes it can fix that gap – with better boundaries, better daycares, better pay – but fails. Their own employers won’t allow it.
But that’s a different horror for a different day.
