Please, I Beg: Stop Using This Kate Bush Song in Everything

Rumor has it that I enjoyed The Mother, Netflix’s new action film starring Jennifer Lopez. But really, I’m not so sure if that’s true. I’ve been a little too hung up on one moment, right at the very end of the movie, to remember what came before. Everything up until those last 10 seconds was more than serviceable—at least, I think it was. It all turned into flat, static noise the second I heard two piano notes, followed by the familiar coo of a certain English chanteuse, rattling over a shot of a resolute and triumphant-looking J.Lo: Ooooooohhhhhh haaaaooooooooooo.

If you’ve not yet experienced the phenomenon of music supervisors plopping Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” into a piece of visual media that you’re watching, then you either have hobbies that don’t include mindlessly staring at a screen all day (good for you!), or you haven’t yet seen The Mother (a curse unto your firstborn). At this point, “This Woman’s Work” is starting to veer on, well, any song on the Suicide Squad or Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks in terms of sheer overuse.

It’s kind of like when a lot of us cried watching that one gay episode of The Last of Us, before the most annoying people online cropped up to say, “Stop weaponizing Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight.’” Since its release in 2004, Richter’s song appeared in notable moments in The Last of Us, Arrival, Shutter Island, and several other films and television shows as well. I don’t really have much of an ear for recognizing the repetition of a sappy orchestral piece, but I certainly do for a bravura vocal performance from one Kate Bush. And I fear that too many music supervisors are misunderstanding the intention behind “This Woman’s Work” and using it as a slapdash form of emotional exploitation.

“This Woman’s Work” was written by Bush for John Hughes’ 1988 film, She’s Having a Baby. The song is introduced in a pivotal moment during the film, which is by-and-large a romantic comedy—until the titular baby that she’s having comes a-knockin’, and the movie suddenly takes on a very real gravity. In a hospital waiting room, Jake (Kevin Bacon) reflects upon his relationship with his wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern), whose health is in danger during labor, when their child reaches the breech position. Jake understands that he could lose Kristy, their child, or the both of them, and he can’t even be near them in this moment. As he waits for news, a flashback montage of his life with Kristy plays, set to “This Woman’s Work.”

It sounds almost a bit corny—and distinctly ’80s—but the scene is incredibly effective in its context. That’s especially true, considering that this was the first time audiences ever heard “This Woman’s Work;” it was written by Bush about experiencing a crisis during childbirth, from the man’s point of view. The video for the song made these details a bit murkier, so it could resonate with a larger audience, but the crux of the song’s meaning stays the same. Put simply: If you’re going to use “This Woman’s Work” in a film or television show, it should stay far away from the thin line between sentimental and hokey.

In the past five years alone, I’ve seen two shocking and unforgettable debasements of “This Woman’s Work,” which were equally appalling, but for different reasons. The first was in the second season premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, where a group of 50 or so handmaids are sent to a barren, dystopian version of Fenway Park and made to climb up to gallows, where they think they are about to be hung under the glare of stadium lights. As nooses are put around their necks, that Bush’s memorable warble sings out. “I know you have a little life in you yet/ I know you have a lot of strength left,” she croons, while the handmaids, who have had their mouths muffled, silently exchange glances and tearfully try to accept their fate.

It’s absolute torture to watch. It’s cruel to the point of viewer manipulation, pure trauma porn from a show that made its name by trading in the stuff. And Bush’s song, once a tender examination on the fragility of life, transforms into a vicious ordnance, stripped of any meaning to give viewers a psychological beating.

Somehow, this scene being a big fake out, where no one actually dies, only makes it feel more ruthless. I was so angry with The Handmaid’s Tale after that episode, so upset that its writers and music supervisors thought that no one would call them on their bullshit, that I never watched another frame of the show. Was I paying for Hulu at the time, meaning my viewership, or lack thereof, would have any effect on their metrics and margins? No. But I like to think I stuck it to them.

The second shrewd use of “This Woman’s Work” came just as recently as this year, in A Man Called Otto. That Tom Hanks clunker is already a deeply narratively confused film, and it doesn’t help that Otto has no conceivable idea where to start, when it comes to sprinkling in stirring resonance throughout the movie. However, the one thing going for this entry is that it has the good sense to mimic how the song was used in She’s Having a Baby (though if you’ve got to imitate a scene that already worked much better, you’re already juggling bigger problems than deciding what song to slap over it.)

In Otto, Bush’s song scores a flashback, where a young Otto (played by Hanks’ real 27-year-old son, Truman) and his pregnant wife are in a bus crash. The destruction is intercut with present-day Otto preparing a suicide attempt, which he doesn’t ultimately go through with. Obviously, neither of these things are comical. But the way in which the film presents them in conjunction has a similar air to that scene in The Handmaid’s Tale—you just can’t believe the lengths that someone went to, just to get you to cry.

You see, writers and music supervisors think that if we cry, we’ll be blinded by our own physical emotions. The simple biological act of moisture forming in our tear ducts turns us into vegetables. If we get choked up, we’ll automatically assume that correlates to a movie or a television show being good. That’s not the case! Sometimes, it’s just overwhelming. Other times, I’m crying with laughter; there is nothing quite so funny as seeing a bus twirl through the air in slow motion, set to Kate Bush wailing. At that point, the use of “This Woman’s Work” becomes a parody, and you’re basically asking me to giggle.

And now, with The Mother, we have whittled down this poor, forsaken Kate Bush song into being nothing more than an end-credits needledrop. As if Handmaid’s Tale and Otto didn’t do a good enough job at eradicating all of the potency of “This Woman’s Work,” The Mother showed up to finish the job. In the film’s final seconds, Jennifer Lopez—having saved the day and her daughter—smiles to herself and pivots toward a different direction. Bam! Cue “This Woman’s Work.” Cry, you little baby!

The song is entirely out of place here, and its use in the film doesn’t even manage to do a good job of preying on our better judgment, either. It doesn’t elicit any tears or even a lump in the throat. It’s just sort of there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Netflix still has the rights to a few of Bush’s songs laying around after last year’s success of “Running Up That Hill” in Stranger Things, and threw the song in there because it wouldn’t cost them another dime.

While I could never be anything but happy for Bush’s continued longevity and late-period success, a line has to be drawn somewhere, when it comes to one of the greatest voices and songwriters of the last century. The bastardizations of Bush’s art, however, are getting far too flagrant for my taste. But it would seem that they’re still working on some, given that “This Woman’s Work” has had a surge in search popularity since The Mother’s release, according to this tweet from the fan account Kate Bush News. And there again, in the replies under that tweet, are the automatons falling victim to the song’s overuse. “It couldn’t be better than this moment,” one user said, linking the “This Woman’s Work” scene from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Yes, it could be. It could be so much better.