M3GAN 2.0 and the Unexpected Origin of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work"
The 2023 surprise hit M3GAN introduced delighted audiences to a killer robot with a weakness for song and dance. The dead-eyed monster wowed audiences with her preternatural dance moves.
M3GAN 2.0 builds upon its predecessor’s combination of music and murder. In the film’s most unforgettable and iconic sequence, M3GAN bewilders Gemma (Alison Williams), her creator, by performing Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” for her.
It’s a surreal and hilarious sequence that derives its dark humor from Williams’ wonderfully confused reaction to a profoundly human, heartwrenching song being sung by an android whose primary emotion seems to be murderous hatred.
I enjoyed M3GAN 2.0. It speaks loudly to my sensibility, but I will be the first to concede that it is entertaining schlock, whereas “This Woman’s Work” is great art.
I was surprised to discover that “This Woman’s Work” was specifically created for a scene in a silly, inconsequential movie.
Sometime in the 1980s, John Hughes sent Kate Bush the script for She’s Having a Baby and asked her to write a song for a scene where an expectant father played by Kevin Bacon wrestles with the possibility that he will lose a wife played by Elizabeth McGovern and his baby.
Bacon’s everyman is confronted with the terrifying possibility that what should be the happiest, most joyful, and promising moment in his life—the birth of his first child—will instead be the darkest, most despairing, and traumatic crucible he could possibly experience.
A Tim Buckley song was used as a temp track for the scene, but they could not get the rights. “This Woman’s Work” subsequently owes its existence to the prickliness of Tim Buckley’s estate.
There is a certain warped poetry in M3GAN singing “This Woman’s Work” to Gemma because she is, in a sense, her daughter. M3GAN is Gemma’s creation. She is, in a literal and metaphorical sense, a woman’s work.
“This Woman’s Work” has the sacred solemnity of a prayer. It begins, “Pray God you can cope” before referring to childbirth as “the craft of the Father”, the Father being God.
Bush’s heartbreaking ballad isn’t a song that appeared in She’s Having a Baby or was repurposed for its emotional climax. It was, rather, a strange, fruitful collaboration between England’s preeminent ethereal weirdo and the King of American teen movies.
“This Woman’s Work” is literal and figurative. When Bush, singing from the perspective of a freaked-out expectant father, pleads, “I know you have a little life in you,” she’s referring to the baby fighting for life inside her. When Bush implores, “I know you have a lot of strength left,” she’s paying tribute to the strength and resilience that will allow the wife and the baby to survive a harrowing ordeal that puts both of their lives at risk.
In “This Woman’s Work,” an ordinary man confronted with an extraordinary situation is forced to come to terms with the very real possibility that he will lose the two most important things in his life.
He’s overcome with regret and remorse over all the things that he never said and did. “Give me these moments back/Give them back to me,” she implores desperately.
Bush is praying through song for more time. She’s staring down death and yearning for more life. Hughes' death at a young age adds an additional element of pathos to the song.
Musically and lyrically, “This Woman’s Work” captures the aching fragility of life and the omnipresent specter of death.
Bacon’s face captures the swirling, complicated, and overwhelming emotions of his character as he teeters unsteadily between life and death, hope and despair.
The title of Hughes’ film serves as a spoiler. The movie is called She’s Having a Baby, after all, not She’s Having a Miscarriage.
She’s Having a Baby wasn’t a hit, but if the film were called She’s Having a Miscarriage, it would become the least popular film in history.
Bacon’s performance is raw and honest, but Hughes piles on the schmaltz with a montage of their life together that’s shot and edited like a jewelry commercial. It’s still affecting because of the power of Bush’s music and words. The montage is maudlin, sentimental, and calculating, whereas “This Woman’s Worth” addresses an impossibly melodramatic crisis with raw intensity.
“This Woman’s Work” is ultimately too powerful and profound a song for an aggressively unambitious movie like She’s Having a Baby. That’s part of the sublime conceptual joke of the song’s appearance in M3GAN 2.0.
Bush’s classic is a tearjerker on wax and in film. The key difference is that the song’s unexpected appearance in the underperforming killer doll movie generates tears of laughter (if you’re being very generous) in the case of M3GAN 2.0 and tears of sadness (if you’re being even more generous) where She’s Having a Baby is concerned.