The Abominable Manbaby
The search for and destruction of right-wing art.
The idea of “right-wing” art exists in the broader public imagination, to the extent that it exists at all, less like a contradiction in terms than as a conceptual chimera. It is dreamed up by obsessive minds, and feverishly searched out in ill-advised expeditions in the cultural wilderness, only to have its existence “confirmed” by circumstantial eyewitness testimony or suspiciously acquired concrete evidence. This notion is enabled by the fact that what makes a cultural artifact right-wing is forever in contention. Someone or something may be right-wing in the pejorative sense, like Joe Rogan, or they may be right-wing in the affirmative sense, like John Milius. An artist may be right-wing in expression, like Agnostic Front, or by example, like Fugazi. Right-wing artists may reject state power, like Ernst Jünger, or they may embrace it, like Camilo José Cela. And sometimes right-wing art may simply be what ever offends left-wing sensibilities at a given moment, like Kanye West.
All of these contentions are not to be ignored, but for my present purposes I’d like to set them aside so that we may look at right-wing art from an intuitive perspective rather than a programmatic or cryptozoological one. Or to borrow a term from younger people, I’d like to examine works of culture that are “giving” right-wing “vibes” whether they intended to or not. It’s not a new phenomenon as discourse around the most recent season of White Lotus has shown. Though I think we put ourselves on firmer ground with works that pre-date the age of memefication. And in fact I’d like to look at two films that were both released in 1973 (apparently both in March if you believe the internet) to either drive-in or drive-in-adjacent audiences: The Roommates and The Baby. Both films, aside from existing in the schlock market, have enough thematic overlaps and narrative contrasts that they are not only interdependent, but practically in debate with each other.
Arthur Marks’ The Roommates follows five roughly college-aged California women, each beautiful and with an assigned archetype—the cut-up, the prude, the ice queen, the naïf, the black one—who travel to Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains for a summer of mostly carefree, little-to-no-strings-attached sex and possible romance. Indeed, all of them have no problem commingling with ideal types of the opposite sex—a rugged local sheriff, a worldly older man, an introverted teenage camper, and some all-purpose generic hunk I can’t immediately recall. There is also a murderer on the prowl, which I will get to later, but by all accounts, the film is a picture-perfect conception of the cultural mood of the moment, and it is so in explicit terms.
“All those women libbers, where are they from? It must be the Victorian age,” star Marki Bey declares in the opening scene. “They’re so anti-fun. I mean I believe women should have basic rights. Like 60 percent for women, 30 percent for men, and 10 percent for the other kind.” In many ways, The Roommates carries itself in a mode of manifesto, depicting the utopia that the Sexual Revolution was supposed to usher in after Griswold v. Connecticut, Deep Throat, and the Republican Party’s implosion. The film was not simply by and for men, but for women, for swinging couples, and conceivably for anyone else freed from the shackles of repressive hang-ups, eager to get into far more fun kinds of shackles. “Well I am [a liberal], politically. But I’m against everything,” star Laurie Rose declares in the women’s shower. It was the defining statement of the New: The New Casual, the New Maturity, the New Freedom, suffocating the old hierarchy, its old mores, and its old shame.
Ted Post’s The Baby also revolves around women who live together. In this case it is the Wadsworths, a mother and her two adult daughters, who all dote, for lack of a better word, on their adult son/brother, named simply “Baby,” who lives in an infantile state. Baby neither speaks nor walks, he wears diapers, sucks on a pacifier, and sleeps in a crib. He is entirely dependent upon the mature people around him, including a doomed teenage babysitter. All of which, so far, seems no different from a John Waters film. Indeed, Ruth Roman’s neurotic, sinister Mrs. Wadsworth could easily have been played by Divine. But this does not account for the point-of-view that comes not from the family but from Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) a social worker who has to monitor Baby as a developmentally disabled adult. The view is one of suspicion, namely that Baby’s mental maturity is being stunted and otherwise exploited by his family, a suspicion that is confirmed.
What ensues, at least at first, is a rescue mission on the part of the welfare system to extricate Baby from an unhealthy situation. Ann exudes a compassion and humanity typical of her profession that contrasts radically with the antisocial Wadsworth brood, a dynamic which Ann roots in their unusual makeup: three children all born out of wedlock with Baby the object of Mrs. Wadsworth’s misandrist scorn in addition to being a source of state-funded income. So when we see the Wadsworths attempt to kill Ann and Ann retaliating by kidnapping and trying to improve Baby’s life, our sympathies are all in order. It even remains that way when she lures the Wadsworths to her home, killing the daughters and burying the mother alive with them under her in-ground pool.
If I stopped here, politics only vaguely enter into the two films compared to tone and psychology. The Roommates is a freewheeling romp; The Baby is a menacing thriller. The former plays into male aspirations; the latter plays into male anxieties. And that’s that. But both films take striking detours in narrative and tone that accentuate and complicate the political assumptions of both, to say nothing of the psychology attached to them. This necessarily involves spoilers, in case you care about that kind of thing.
The Baby is as much preoccupied with Ann’s personal life as her professional conduct. It is haunted by the images and memory of a husband, seemingly killed by a boating accident. Until at just the right moment it is revealed that he was not killed, but debilitated; reduced by brain injury to his own infantile state. Now, Baby is in a new, happier family, albeit still playing a specific role of convenience. Here is a seismic shift. It is one thing to be lulled into supporting the extreme dispatching of welfare cheats, but quite another to side with a bureaucrat concealing another agenda. A cynicism pervades the film at every aspect. It looks dimly on single motherhood, on the consequences of sexual liberation, and on the functionality and intentions of public welfare. The Baby could not be more neoconservative if James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol had scripted it.
The Roommates endures its own narrative disruption in the form of a midway shift into slasher horror. Though realistically it is less unhinged than anything in The Baby, the choice is narratively jarring as a deranged woman, assumed to be a jilted biker chick, stalks the main characters going about their sexy misadventures none the wiser. This goes on until the final scenes, where the woman is revealed to be a young man emasculated by his parents and girls into homicidal madness, and who is only stopped by the sheriff’s bullet. The film ends on a cheery, nostalgic note, as if the traumatic mass event had not taken place, which is actually pretty realistic as well.
Originally I went away from the film thinking that the socially liberal ideal it proclaimed and lived out was more or less intact. Certainly little that is said or done that cuts against the post-Roe v. Wade consensus it prefaced. But unstated aspects reveal a liberalism with certain qualifications. For one it is quite heteronormative. And not just heteronormative, but idealized to an almost fantastic degree. Women are distinctly and hotly women, men are somewhat more nuanced (some are brawny and honorable while others are sensitive but decent enough) but remain fairly consistent. There is a fear of the latent feminine and of its destabilizing effects on the insufficiently socialized. Nothing threatens the public order more, and when it is noticed it is corrected with haste. This well-ordered, semi-hierarchical freedom drifts further and further away from the 1970s and seems closer to the ideals of 2020s MAGA culture, which, contra the conservative-tempered liberalism of today, is tolerant of a variety of behaviors and beliefs within a new social contract rooted in national identity and citizenship over raw individualism.
I’d embarked on this essay in search of the elusive right-wing art of America. Like all great expeditions I did not anticipate what I found. It was not that I had failed to discover right-wing art or even disproved its existence. Instead what I discovered was less like cryptozoology and more like something out of Lovecraft, defying all logic and most description. Right-wing art cannot exist without a left wing to frame it. Yet finding evidence of a left wing in enfeebled form at best only leaves a successor polarity. That is, a new left and a new right: a communitarian liberty against a conservative antiauthoritarianism. Truly the stuff of nightmares, very possible Curtis Yarvin’s, and with an art still to be discovered.