Shiva‌ ‌Baby:‌ ‌Testament‌ ‌to‌ ‌Better‌ Representation Among Content Creators

Screenwriter-director Emma Seligman put her experience as a young bisexual Jewish woman into her film Shiva Baby.

Screenwriter and director Emma Seligman has created a masterpiece with Shiva Baby. The film's premise is simple at first glance: A bisexual Jewish feminist college graduate is stuck at a shiva with her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. Alright, maybe it's not that simple. But Shiva Baby's magnificence lies in its complexity.

The film begins with the film's protagonist Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott, who is in an apartment with her 'sugar daddy' Max (Danny Deferrari). She heads to the shiva— a Jewish mourning ceremony— with her parents. Her loving, caring, and rather naïve parents, are played by Fred Melamed and Polly Draper.

As soon as she enters the shiva, you become aware of the lack of space - both literal and figurative. As of now, the film is about a young college graduate who has no concrete plans for the future (but she's doing something in "gender and business").

Shiva Baby will suffocate you, perhaps willingly, with its tight shots and haunting background score (by Ariel Marx). The overly intrusive relatives, standing way too close, running their hands over Danielle's waist only to flit off into corners to discuss her "eating disorder" are all too familiar.

However, she also runs into her ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon), and later her sugar daddy Max….and his 'Malibu Barbie' wife and newborn baby. The entire movie could be summarised as a claustrophobic look into a queer feminist's personal diary.

Seligman's portrayal of feminism, too, is nuanced with Danielle's personal feelings making her bitter towards the 'shiksa' her sugar daddy married. Seligman's debut, however, is heavy and unsettling but not exploitative; because of the way it's written and performed. The credit, while shared by a phenomenal cast, goes to Seligman; and it points to a very important aspect of cinema: representation.

Shiva Baby is a personal piece, no matter how fictional it is. Seligman, herself, is a bisexual Jewish woman who is fresh out of college. And it shows in the film. The need for representation in the writer's room, behind the lens, and the director's seat, among others has been long discussed.

Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze credited the misrepresentation of women and minorities to the filmmaker's tendency to cater content to a cisgender male audience. Even if a film tackled a male gaze, it doesn't absolve itself of bias— the racial bias, the cis bias, the white bias.

Consider Stonewall, directed by an openly gay filmmaker Roland Emmerich. The film was widely criticised for its focus on a white male instead of the actual legends of Stonewall: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; both trans women of colour.

Even Francis Lee's highly anticipated Ammonite was chronically white and fell into the trope where lesbianism acts as a comfortable gateway to challenging patriarchy, and barely anything more. The solution simply lies, again, in representation.

TV shows like Pose and Schitt's Creek have shown what representation can do to a story. Both shows have won accolades including Emmys and GLAAD awards. Pose is directed by Janet Mock, a transgender woman. Schitt's Creek was created by Dan Levy, who is a gay man.

Their identity plays a huge role in the sensitivity of the stories portrayed in their shows. With Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma subverts the male gaze and portrays a queer relationship with a nuanced sensuality and raw emotion.

Though queer relationships in cinema are slowly building a presence, these relationships are often fetishized by the directors, or get wrapped in misery by the writers. This compulsion often shapes queer relationships according to norms that abide by the cisgender and heteronormative understanding of queerness.

However, Seligman’s Shiva Baby takes away all of these expectations from the duo. They are far from perfect— oscillating between soft glances and passive aggressive remarks.

The relationship between Danielle and Maya isn't just about two women in a homosexual relationship— it's much more. They're dealing with their clearly unresolved feelings for each other; they fight and snap at each other as exes often do. It's refreshing to see a queer relationship dealt the way it should be and Seligman's identity as a bisexual woman equips her with the power to understand its nuances.

Their 'queerness' is evident in Danielle's mother's 'soft homophobia' where she acknowledges but doesn't accept her queer identity, insisting that she was "experimenting".

Female Jewish directors have been making groundbreaking films. Seligman's Shiva Baby is reminiscent of Claudia Weill or Joey Soloway, especially with its sophisticated idea of feminism and female sexuality.

Hollywood often exploits the profession of sex work for its sob stories, painting sex workers as 'damsels in distress'. Pretty Woman did it, Quentin Tarantino did it with True Romance, and Martin Scorsese did it with Taxi Driver.

But there is hope yet. Refreshingly, Hollywood has been moving away from the trope. Netflix's Cam Girl and Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz's The Girlfriend Experience gave their protagonists much-needed agency by giving focus to their lives.

Further expanding on this phenomenon, Shiva Baby brings in Seligman's experience into Danielle's exploration of sex work. It's natural. Even when one of the characters finds out about her 'sugaring', she isn't outwardly ashamed. It's honest work and for Danielle, it isn't even a necessity— it’s a choice, even if it’s rooted in Danielle's need for validation and self-worth.

Max believes she needs the money for college, and that's what the audience believes too. But that thought is banished as soon as it is presented, as it should be.

"Sugaring made it easier for me to explore a relationship about power, and a woman realising that her self-worth is completely based on sexual validation and that underneath it, she has none. I gave all of that to Danielle."

Emma Seligman

Shiva Baby's excellence stems from the fact that Seligman as an individual represents the story she told. Her sexuality, her gender identity, and even her identity as a Jewish person gave the story a perspective that freed it from the shackles of being 'just another teenage story'.

Shiva Baby is a testament to better representation in film crews, perhaps one of the loudest. It isn't even the film she was originally planning to make. Shiva Baby has been extrapolated from Seligman's thesis short film, which was originally going to be sci-fi dystopian film. But her professor said, "Why don’t you just do something that you know?”

So, she did. And it worked.