Last month, I got to experience — briefly, but enjoyably — my first WorldCon in Glasgow. This opportunity came my way courtesy of a kick-ass panel organized by Rachel van der Merwe, where she, Barbara Postema, and Greg Fuller provided the kick-ass bits, and I provided the short riff on Mrs., Davis I’ve shared below. One amazing feature of this event (probably because it’s primarily a fan convention with a small academic wing, rather than an traditional academic conference) was a Green Room for presenters to use immediately prior to their time slot. Logistically, it’s a brilliant idea. A dedicated space for panelists to meet and do last minute backstage prep/coordination before they go on stage in front of an actual audience. In this case, it came with the extra perk of free light refreshments (though, perhaps wisely, there was a one-drink-per-speaker limit). With or without the (semi-)open bar, the Green Room is something academic conferences should consider adopting.
I want to talk about Mrs. Davis, an 8-episode series that aired on the Peacock network, and I want to tell you some things that you potentially don’t want to hear. For folks who haven’t seen it, the show is centered around a bad-ass nun named Simone who’s trying to destroy a powerful AI algorithm that Simone blames for the death of her father. And one of the recurring themes of the series involves the problems that arise when people (or algorithms) try to make other people happy by telling them what they want to hear. There’s more, of course, but time is short and I’m trying to minimize spoilers. Those are not the kinds of things you don’t want to hear that I want to tell you, even though a few spoilers will unavoidably creep into the rest of my remarks anyway. My apologies for those.
When Rachel told me that the theme she was using to organize this panel was “home,” I wasn’t sure my desire to speak about Mrs. Davis fit very well since, in the traditional sense of a space shaped by love, warmth, family, and community, “home” does not play a prominent role in the series at all. The majority of the action takes place on the move, and the backstories we’re given for the major characters are filled with broken, dysfunctional, and/or absent families. “Home” is mostly a non-issue for the series . . .
. . . with two major exceptions: the convent that Simone belongs to, and the house on Electric Avenue that belongs to Joy’s nanna. These homes make brief (albeit important) appearances in the opening and closing episodes — and they are striking in two ways. First, these homes are emphatically analog and off the grid — places where contemporary digital technology is not just absent: it’s unwelcome. Second, these homes are very sharply defined by gender (the all-female convent) and/or race (Joy’s family constitutes almost all of the series’ unambiguously Black characters, and the only members of her family who are given names or voices are women).
On the surface, this version of home sounds very conservative. Even regressive. Home is a happy place where women make jam and play cards at the kitchen table, and where the chaos of the rest of the world is magically barred from entering. And yet . . . there’s something potentially progressive about a story that gives us visions of “home” as an idyllic space of family and community, while still rejecting such a vision as the magical solution to all the narrative’s (and all the world’s) problems. The series, after all, does notend with Simone returning to the warm bosom of some restored nuclear family or settling down to start her own family and live happily ever after, as if this were some kind of Hallmark Christmas special. Instead, she literally rides off into the sunset on a horse, without any clear purpose or destination, as if she were the rugged hero of some classical Hollywood western.
And yet . . . the series also ends with some very traditional visions of motherhood, with a particular emphasis on the “natural” bonds between a mother and her children. Simone and her mother Celeste reconcile after decades of estrangement and resentment. Mary’s love for her son Jay allows them both to finally find peace. Even Joy’s rejection of her digital child gets reframed as an act of love and caring.
And yet . . . this ostensibly conservative vision of motherhood is undercut by the narrative’s explicit recognition that mothers’ relationships to their children are inevitably flawed and even neurotically harmful. That a mother’s natural desire to protect her children from pain is not simply a doomed mission — life involves too much pain for anyone ever to avoid it completely — but may, in fact, itself be the cause of significant pain.
Meanwhile, there’s also something potentially progressive about a mythical vision of “the family” and “home” that is unmistakably Black. All the white families we see are either deeply dysfunctional or Stepford-wife creepy. Joy’s is the only biological family we’re shown who seems to be genuinely happy, healthy, loving, and mutually supportive. In the face of dominant cultural narratives (at least in the US) where mythical visions of happy homes and families are consistently white and upper middle class, and where Black families are routinely depicted as broken, abusive, and violent, it’s refreshing to see that script flipped.
And yet . . . in the larger narrative, this progressive reversal is something of a throwaway point. Though Joy plays an absolutely crucial role in the larger narrative arc of the series — she’s the woman who wrote the original code for the algorithm that Simone wants to shut down — she and her family are very secondary characters. They don’t appear at all until the 8th and final episode, and Joy gets a mere 8 minutes of screen time in a 440 minute series.
You’ll no doubt have noticed that I keep ping-ponging back and forth between claiming that Mrs. Davis espouses a potentially conservative set of values and that it espouses a much more progressive — and maybe even radical — set of values. This is not an accident. Part of the pleasure and frustration (but mostly, I think, pleasure) of the show is its refusal to give viewers easy answers to the big questions that it poses. It recognizes (to speak briefly to some of its more overt themes) that science, faith, and magic are often beautiful, empowering, and inspirational . . . but also simultaneously deceptive, disabling, and destructive. Similarly, it recognizes that “home” and “family” are important sites of both comfort and resentment, support and neglect,love and pain. And that, in all these cases, these upsides and downsides are simply different sides of the very same coin. And like the two sides of a coin, one cannot have one without the other. This is, of course, not a lesson about life that most people want to hear. Most people, after all, take comfort in easy, uncomplicated visions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. But a large part of what makes Mrs. Davis such a thrill is that it manages to tell us some ugly, complicated truths in a way that makes it easier — and even enjoyable — to accept them, even if those are not what most of us want to hear.