ATTENTION: THIS POST HAS SPOILERS! IF YOU WANT TO GO SEE MOTHER! WITHOUT BEING SPOILED, STOP READING. ALSO, BLESS YOUR HEART.
I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road one week after giving birth to my daughter. In that Pulitzer Prize wining book, a woman gives birth to a baby and then her fellow travelers roast the baby on a spit, as they are starving in the post-apocalypse wasteland. That scene was very tough to take. I had post-partum anxiety and “baby a la gyro” did not help things.You may have read some articles that warn you a baby is killed and eaten in Darren Aronosfsky’s mother!. Yes, that happens. But if I had to choose a baby buffet while I breastfed, it would have been the one from mother!. The scene wasn’t horrifying; it was guffaw-inducing. mother! is so terrible that the entire theater gasped (we aren’t monsters!) and then howled with laughter as a riotous crowd feasted on JLaw’s newborn like they were getting all you can eat apps at Applebee’s.
What Is Mother! About
I went in to mother! hoping to love it. I enjoyed Black Swan and I love Requiem for a Dream. I like Aronofsky’s brand of weird. But mother! isn’t weird; it’s head-scratchingly vexing.
My daughter asked me what mother! was about after I picked her up from the babysitter. This kid knows the entire plot to The Ring, even though she has never seen it. She likes to be in-the-know when it comes to scary movies without having the scary experience. But as I drove with her in the backseat, I was struggling to tell her what it was about. She said, “Are you afraid to tell me because I’ll be scared?” No, honey. It wasn’t scary. In fact, the only thing horrifying was Jennifer Lawrence’s wig.
Jennifer Lawrence (Mother) and Javier Bardem (Him) are married. He is a writer and she is an avid-viewer of This Old House, as she repairs his rural manse after a devastating fire. Except we don’t know if she is an actual viewer of that show or any show. Mother has no internal life of her own, no agency. She just reacts with a drugged detachment to everything Him throws her way, including inviting strangers Ed Harris (Man) and Michele Pfieffer (Woman) into their home.
Him is busy writing, while Mother is busy applying earth-tones to plaster and telling everyone to stop sitting on her sink counter as it hasn’t been properly anchored.
Mother wants a baby, and she finally gets her wish after haranguing Him that they never have sex. He nails it on the first try. And then things start to get really crazy when Him finally publishes his book to worldwide acclaim and his fans show up to the house to fawn, rave, and riot, as pregnant-to-bursting Mother runs around in horror with impotent cries.
I Went to Film School, Dammit!
If you had told me mother! was the creation of a first-year film students at RISD, I would have believed you. The whole mess is an unsubtle metaphor for religion, God, and how humanity treats the Earth. Spoiler alert: we ruin it. Aronofsky doesn’t bother to build a believable world in which unbelievable things happen because when everything is symbolism, nothing needs to be grounded in reality.
Bardem is God. Mother is the designer of Earth (Mother Nature) and men (Mother Mary). Her infant is the Christ figure, and offering the baby at the candle-laden alter to be eaten is Holy Communion. The Man and the Woman are selfish sinners, the Adam and Eve of the story. Their children are the Caine and Abel, so naturally, one kills the other one in a fit of jealous rage. Bardem is writing his text—his Bible, his Koran, his Torah—that inspires his fans to do many things. They dance, they kill, they terrorize, they love, they fuck. The fans are us, and the only thing Him wants is our adoration. He craves the religious followers, and he cares for our gifts, not our pain.
It’s so obvious that as the minutes progress, it becomes a “spot the religious metaphor” game. When Kirsten Wiig shows up as the Herald/book publisher, aka the Church, I was pissed we had run out of of the booze my friend snuck into the theater.
Like, Obviously
Not every artistic enterprise that tries to make a statement succeeds, despite best efforts. But mother! is so conspicous in what it’s doing, Aronofsky is treating his audience like dimwits. I’m a recovered Southern baptist/middling atheist and liberal, so I am up for any thoughtful accusation on religion or capitalism’s ruination of the Earth. But I could feel Aronofsky’s arrogance as I watched this film. I could feel him thinking, “Aren’t I clever?” No dude. John Milton was clever. And a genius. And readable. You gave us sexy panties in a front loader washer as a metaphor for temptation.
I am one of the few people who adored Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. All three hours of it. I am up for an intimate story that makes me think on a macro-level about what hell we hath wrought.
I am here for your metaphor/allegory/whatevs. You want to tell me that greed is bad and that government is inept? I’ll watch Die Hard. You want to tell me that being a Fascist is bad? I’ll watch Star Wars. Those movie entertained me. This movie irritated me. And according to my best friend, this movie gave a us a God that looks like the brother from “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Towards the end of the movie, the fawning crowd (Us) gets ahold of Lawrence’s Mother and beats the shit out of her, calling her “cunt” and “whore” in the process. It’s how we treat we treat the Earth; it’s how we treat women. But when that woman is also a manipulated, doe-eyed supporter of Him, I can’t figure out the message. It’s a bad case of mixed metaphors.
MOTHER! IS CURRENTLY PLAYING IN THEATERS. SO ARE OTHER MOVIES. GO SEE SOMETHING ELSE.
