First-time director Emma Seligman’s Shiva, Baby came highly recommended. I was promised a claustrophobic, deeply Hebraic film about all the things Jews care about: death, food, sex, and status.
I wasn’t disappointed.
At the start of Shiva, Baby, we’re briefly introduced to Danielle (Rachel Sennott), an NYU undergrad student who’s doing some sex work on the side. When the film opens, she’s fucking her John and cumming convincingly. She gets a phone call from her mother, reminding her to attend a shiva service in her hometown, which seems to be New Jersey. She doesn’t know who actually died, and when she shows up, she’s characteristically bombarded by the eager faces of everyone she’s known since she was a baby. And they all want to remind her of how not-far-enough she’s come from that time. Something is really wrong with Danielle, but there are no words for what it is. We’ve all been there. And death always puts one’s life into an odd, depressing kind of perspective.
Danielle—like everyone who has no idea what they’re doing with their life—is committed to believing that everything is ok. She feels she’s got it under control, even if the semi-scandalous reason for that control has to kept secret. When she enters shiva headquarters, she has to instantly account for her life and her future. “What are you doing,” everyone wants to know. The fact that she’s going to Gallatin (it’s strongly implied) isn’t impressive enough for people. Her mother does a lot of explaining for her. “She’s making up her own major,” she says. “Something about gender and business.”
Danielle doesn’t seem particularly interested in gender or business. She seems interested in not being where she is at any given moment. She’s caught in that weird space between “baby” and “adult,” and all the adults in her life feel like it’s fine to talk about her childhood and her future and her body (“is she anorexic!?”) They were, after all, witnesses to her life. Unwanted witnesses. And now, all they can do is lean on their memories of the past Danielle, because they have no idea who the present Danielle is.
Neither does Danielle. And when the John from the first scene shows up to the shiva with his hot shiksa wife and baby in tow, the rate of Danielle’s deterioration accelerates. She deals with it—the small lies she has to tell and the excuses she has to make—until she can’t anymore, eventually breaking down in front of everyone saying “I can’t.”
Again, we’ve all been there.
Shiva, Baby manages to capture a very specific (very Jewish) malaise. No matter how far you get from home, the second you return, it’s time for you to be measured up. Jewish culture in this country has traditionally been very focused on assimilation. There’s a nervousness about proving our worth here, and a restlessness about life in general. If we see Jewish slackers, they’re usually men. They’re Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill et al. But Danielle is a character I don’t think we’ve seen before. She’s bisexual and still scarred from a high school relationship with Maya, her high-achieving counterpart, who also happens to be at the shiva because of course she is. Everyone Danielle has ever known seems to be at this shiva, stuffing their faces, talking about fake bullshit, and pretending that somebody didn’t just die.
It’s just so Jewish.
There are many deeply Jewish aspects to this movie—the hair, the fashion, the treatment of food and discussion of bodies, the close, up-the-nostril view of the camera. The insistence on retreading the past, the need to apologize for trying to uphold privacy when somebody who doesn’t know you very well asks you a personal question. You know, like, “when are you going to grow up and get a real job?” The Jews at the shiva are rude, invasive, clueless, and everywhere. They’re also wonderful, because they’re people you know and have always known. You see them every time somebody dies, and why shouldn’t they be curious about your future? They love you, and they think they know who you are.
The problem is that there’s no way not to hate yourself when someone asks you what your goals or plans are for the future. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you feel about your life at any given moment. Because what’s anyone planning for the future? For Jews, the future is always terrifying, because everything is terrifying for us. There is a gnawing in our gut about the future, the past, the things that happened before we were born and the things that will happen after we die. Like the circle-shaped foods that define the shiva service, we are without an ending and without a beginning. And there’s the sense, always, that we are a part of all the Jews in history, and that history is forever on our shoulders. Within Jewish culture, there are no solitary acts. Whatever you do, you do it as a Jew in a long line of Jews who did it before. You continue the work of your ancestors, even if you never got a chance to know them. And that becomes part of the story, too.
The John and his wife are the only ones who seem excited about the future. They’re planning on having another baby. Danielle is still freaked out by the existence of the first one. She didn’t know about the breadwinning goy wife or the newborn baby. She just knew this guy she was fucking for a check. Now he’s here, and his wife is showing off tourist pictures of that time they visited Auschwitz.
“You’re at a holocaust memorial,” Danielle monotones when the wife insists on showing her. “You look so happy. “
For her part, Danielle seems fine flying by the seat of her pants. She’s savvy enough, however, to know that that isn’t something your elders will necessarily want to hear about. It would have been fine if the John hadn’t shown up. But he did, and, faced with the two halves of her life suddenly and traumatically merging in a stranger’s living room, Danielle loses it. She tries to fuck with the John, sending him nudes from the bathroom. She loses her phone. She finds Maya outside and makes out with her, one hand firmly planted on her ass. But nothing works. She can’t perform her way out of being seen.
To be in your senior year of college or high school is to be vulnerable. Everyone wants you to know your future, and you can’t do that for them. So for Danielle to be surrounded by all these messy adults is even more stressful. Because the adults expect you to grow up into them, unaware that you’ve already made secret plans with yourself to make sure that never, ever happens.
Unfortunately, time has other plans. We all become old Jews eventually—bickering yentas living vicariously through others, using death as a context for life, fighting and fucking our way through it. What else is there for us?♦
