So in 2017, I was naturally interested to see mother! I saw it on the big screen while I was moving from Utah to Georgia (back to back with Kingsman: The Golden Circle--what a strange marathon). There was me and maybe several other people in the theater. Two older ladies got up and left around the infamous baby scene. I couldn't blame them--this was an oppressive film full of horrifying violence and suffering. By the end, I walked out feeling like I had my head beat in--partly because it was such an intense experience, but also because the movie was so bloody confusing.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW
A house with a living, beating heart? What was that gold stuff J-Law kept taking? How could hundreds of people fit into this 7,000 square foot house and literally do everything in it? Seriously, one minute the house is a dance club, and the next it's a warzone. How could Javier Bardem's character survive all that fire? What's with the glass heart? Why does this heart magically repair the house? Seriously, what the hell is going on with this film?
mother! What Is This Film?
Before I get into all the details about what I think this film is about, here's a recap of the story. The film starts with this scary image of a woman in flames, staring into the camera. She closes her eyes, a single tear drips. The title appears (all lower-caps, handwritten, an exclamation point). Then a man appears (Javier Bardem). Among the ruins of his burned-down house, he finds this glass heart and places it in some kind of setting. The whole house repairs itself and all the ashes vanish. Yes, even in the opening scene it's all weird.
In the bedroom, the guy's wife suddenly appears on the bed (Jennifer Lawrence). She looks for her husband (henceforth known as Him, per the credits). We see that their house is a large, rustic, octagon-shaped place in the middle of the country. They are surrounded by grass and trees, and cut off from any semblance of human society. Him surprises her, they go through the motions of acting like a happy couple. She devotes everything to Him and his house. While painting, she touches the wall to get a sense for how things are going--she can sense a literal heart beating in the house, and it's healthy.
As it turns out, Him is a writer who's lost his inspiration and can't write anything new (hey, a movie about writers, awesome). Then some stranger knocks on the door. Him lets the stranger (Ed Harris) in, and they chill. The wife is as hospitable as she can be, but something seems vaguely off as Him chats the guy up and goes out of his way to show compassion. Him seems more interested in this stranger than his own wife. So the old man stays the night. But not without a few quibbles--even though the wife asks the guy to stop smoking, he smokes like a fiend all the same. Eventually, the old man's wife shows up (Michelle Pfieffer) and acts like a total lush. She goes on to pry into the relationship between Him and the wife, acting like she knows more than they do and everything. Basically, boundaries are crossed and the wife feels disrespected by all the messes and social faux pas that occurs. Among the worse of them, the couple finds the glass heart in Him's office, and they break it. Him kicks them out of the room in despair.
Things only get worse when the strange couple's kids show up, and they instantly have a big fight over what they found in the old man's last will and testament. Inevitably, one of the kids kills the other right in front of everyone. The murder left some blood on the floorboards, which seeps down the house and reveals a hidden chamber in the basement. Him's wife manages to break through and find a barrel of oil. We'll get back to this at the end of the movie. A funeral reception happens at the house. People just keep coming in, one after another--Him expected them, his wife did not. She tries to lay down some rules, to stop people from invading the office, the bedroom, and breaking things. Among the craziest of things, some folks decide to repaint the house, without permission or anything. Things reach their boiling point when some jerks break the sink and water bursts everywhere. Party's over.
Him and the wife talk, and she challenges Him with the truth: he seems more interested in feeding his own narcissism by inviting and caring for strangers rather than returning her love and bearing her child. He fixes that pretty fast, and she wakes up pregnant. She just knows, no test or morning sickness or anything. Him is inspired and he writes the best thing ever.
As the wife reaches her third trimester, Him gets his words published, and every copy sells. People come to the house in droves. What starts as a few people looking for a bathroom turns into an all-out invasion. People just start roaming around every room. They all want a piece of Him and his work, so they loot everything. They re-arrange the furniture. They yank stuff off the walls. They start hammering. More repainting. Suddenly, there's a rave. And the whole time, the wife wanders around, lost and helpless in the sea of people that suddenly take over the house.
It just won't stop. Before long, people are fighting. Shots are fired. Cops show up, busting through windows and doors with guns blazing. A riot breaks out in one room, complete with batons and molotovs. Mass executions occur. Sick and dying people line the floors. Just about every horrible thing that has happened to people happens in the house. The dizzying onslaught of people and violence whisks the wife to another room.
Eventually, Him gets back with the wife and they retreat to the office, and they hold back the zealous crowd. The wife gives birth, and she's determined to hold and protect their new son. But Him wants to share his son with the rest of the world. He waits it out, until she falls asleep. When she wakes up, the jerk took off with the baby. Sure enough, he loses the baby to the crowd--they carry and hold him up, while the wife's pleas to be careful and give him back go unheard. Inevitably, the baby's neck snaps and everything falls silent. When the wife cuts through the crowd, she comes across a priest-like figure who assures her that everything is fine. The baby is dismembered, and the crowd is eating the flesh and blood.
At this point, the wife loses it and fights back with a shard of glass. After killing a few of these f*ckers, they throw her down and beat her viciously. Him manages to cut through the crowd and pull her back up. There is no going back from this though--she freaks out and retreats to the basement. She comes across the lighter the first stranger had, and she takes it to the barrel of oil she found earlier. She bursts it open and lets oil spill everywhere.
Despite Him's insistence to stop and forgive all the people, she drops the lighter and everything explodes. Literally. Fire washes over every single person, before the house bursts into a giant fireball and the surrounding field is ignited. In the middle of it all, the mother looks into the camera while on fire. She closes her eyes, a single tear drips. Sound familiar? Yep, just like 2009's Triangle, this is one of those crazy loop movies where the end is the beginning and it just goes on and on. Sure enough, Him retrieves the glass heart from the burnt body of his wife, sets it in its setting, and the house restores itself. A new mother appears on the bed, and it all begins again. Credits roll and Fallout 4 music plays.
lol, wut?
Ever since walking out of the theater, I couldn't stop thinking over the movie and trying to figure out what's really going on. On the surface, it's an extremely hyperbolic home invasion film with a lot of scenes that don't make sense or can't be taken at face value. Not unless you can accept that a house can have a beating heart, or that one explosion can kill so many but not the two main characters, among other things.
On the other hand, arthouse films knows no boundaries. As someone who did sit through and enjoy Eraserhead, Naked Lunch, 1977's House, and more, accepting this film's absurdities shouldn't be a problem. After all, some movies (especially confusing arthouse ones) don't really operate on real-world rules, many stories operate on their own rules in their own little universes. Surely, if I can accept that Donnie Darko can bend space and time and fly through tangent universes, mother! should be acceptable on its own terms, right?
Except it isn't. Most movies succeed in suspending disbelief through consistency, and mother! is not really consistent. It wavers constantly from grounded realism to insane hyperbole that just can't work in grounded reality. In the movie's making-of featurette, Aronofsky admits that the film is a strange and odd experience precisely because he sought to make it grounded, but slowly lift the realism away and turn it into a fever dream. So it's by design, but I'm not wholly convinced it works. The problem lies in the film's main intention: to be an allegory.
What Does It Mean?!!
Aronofsky and Lawrence both claim online and in the movie's featurette that the film is an allegory that captures the entirety of human existence. Darren penned the original script in just five days, channeling all the outrage he felt over all the injustices and horrors of mankind. He spent another four months with the cast workshopping the script and rehearsing in a warehouse in Brooklyn. So when the actual filming started, all the action was already blocked and the camera moves were already figured out.
With everybody on the same page, Darren and the cast made it clear publicly what the film is really about. Lawrence's character is mother nature. And there are obvious hints to support this: she spends the whole movie in costumes that emphasize her natural body, to the point where some of her gowns are see-through, and she is barefoot most (if not all) of the time. The house she maintains is as rustic as they come--the kitchen looks like a beast, with a simple, blocky fridge that looks like it's made of wood or something, big sinks with big pipes that spew water, big wooden pieces of furniture everywhere. Everything is painted in earthy colors--brown, green, yellow. All the food she prepares and serves are simple, natural-looking dishes--no pizzas or burgers or anything, just good wholesome breads, fruits, veggies, cheeses, milk, and the like. Given the decor, colors, styles, etc., I came out of the film believing the house is Earth (although I'm not sure if that fits--more on that later). Surely, the oil in the basement is a pretty clear parallel to the oil we dig out of the Earth daily--oil that has substantiated war in recent decades, and many warn that oil and its burning will ruin the ecosystem and lead to our own demise. The film's final (or opening?) scenes show this very explicitly.
Him is God, obviously. The biggest tip-off to me was the moment when his art drew in all the people--as it was written in the Bible, it was the Word that breathed life into the world, and sure enough that's what we see. God's word is what made the first stranger make his pilgrimage to the house in the first place. He writes new words that are so awesome, they bring in everyone. Thus, the poem that accelerates the plot must be the Bible itself. You can even go so far as to suggest that the publisher who goes on to frame the poem may represent the people who sought to translate, re-translate, alter, distribute, print, and spread the Bible over the centuries. This culminates in that scene where the publisher walks up and down with a pair of guns, shooting hooded victims on the ground. She sees mother nature and says "The inspiration!" Then she turns to one of her goons and orders, "Finish her." This same woman was so nice to nature in earlier scenes, but now she's a total villain. What provided the inspiration for the original words was to be wiped out, while the authority that framed and presented the words goes around killing in His name. This brings to mind historic atrocities such as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem Witch Trials--instances in which the holy word was used to justify widespread murder and suffering, while losing sight of the original intent or "inspiration" behind God's words.
The baby that Him and nature have is Christ. He is given to the world, and is sacrificed. Him insists "We have to forgive them," even as the multitudes eat the baby's body and blood--this is obviously a reference to the Holy Communion, in which Christ's body and blood are consumed in the form of bread and wine. Only the movie turns this literal, to drive the significance of Christ's sacrifice home in a more horrifying light. As it is with The Passion of the Christ, mother! is a movie that forces us to ask ourselves what has mankind done to God's one and only son.
Given these symbols, then it stands to reason that Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve. They were the first in the house (world), and it's their sons (Cain and Abel, played by Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) who introduce sin into the house. Sin becomes represented by this blood stain that sinks into the floorboards and just won't go away. It seeps down, rotting away wood and flooding a lightbulb that explodes and reveals the secret room with the oil (thus, maybe suggesting that sin will be our undoing). As the movie goes on, the blood stain is reference again and again. When the original group of strangers leave, nature is able to cover up the blood stain with some new wood, and it seems to go away. But more blood seeps through the rug when the new group of invaders show up, and it becomes a gaping hole after a while. At one point, some of the invaders snap selfies next to this thing, maybe suggesting that people are drawn to sin and will glorify it on social media. Think about that next time you go out clubbing and you want to take a selfie while drunk and doing something stupid. Sin does creep up every time Adam and Eve are on screen though--Adam is a smoker and a drinker, and it seems to take a toll on his body. Eve seems drunk and vindictive all the time. The two are always on the juice, while nature sticks with tea. The one time Eve makes lemonade, it happens to have booze in it, they just can't help themselves (and it's especially bothersome to nature, since they took something as simple as lemonade and corrupted it with man-made alcohol). And just moments after breaking the glass heart, they do the nasty in some other room.
Oh yeah, remember that glass heart? Considering that Adam and Eve burst into God's office (and nature told them they shouldn't be in there) and they shattered it, then it must be the Tree of Knowledge from Genesis. Just as it happens in the Bible, God sees what happens and casts the two out of...well, His office. At the same time, He doesn't cast them out from the world. Nature tells Him to, but He just says, "Oh yeah? Where will they go?" Him is always asking this and using it as justification to keep them around, and invite more into the house. Even though He judged mankind, He shows enough compassion to keep His front doors open.
Except, is compassion really His goal in the movie? He seems so open and friendly, but He winds up severing ties with nature. This is visibly seen when the beating heart of the home slowly withers, blackens, and finally stops beating. The living heart was fueled by the healthy relationship between God and nature, but humans cut between them and humans started feeding God more of their love and adoration. They fed His ego, and it was never enough. That line pops up constantly, "It's never enough." Nature tells Him this in the end--she gave Him everything, but it was never enough. Him owns up to it by saying "Nothing is ever enough. I couldn't create if it was. And I have to. That's what I do. That's what I am."
It's All About Him Isn't It?
This relationship is one-way only, always pouring from others into Him. In the beginning, nature gave Him love, but it wasn't enough to create the Word and fill the house with life like He wanted. So He found mankind. The more attention that was stolen from nature, the more episodes of pain would occur. She warded the pain away temporarily with this gold medicine she took (although I have no idea what the gold stuff is supposed to be). But for the story's purposes, it kept her going all the way through the funeral reception. Once she was pregnant, she ditched the gold stuff--she probably shouldn't have, because the whole world came into the house next and her relationship to Him just kept plummeting. People adored Him, but constantly disrespected her. They pushed her to the extreme, and they all paid for it, because He was too absorbed in himself and all the love people showered onto Him to see what was happening to His wife, the house, and everything. Only when the heart of the house shriveled to nothing did nature realize the truth: that she would always keep giving, He would always take, and it was never going to be enough.
This relationship is apparent in the twin posters for the movie. On one, nature is holding her own heart out as if it's an offering. In the other, Him is surrounded by flames and holding his hand out as if to take something. Put them together, and that's what their relationship is--one gives, the other takes.
The narcissism doesn't end there though. Just about everybody who pours into the house is there to take something away. Nobody, not even Adam and Eve, offer anything in return to Him and nature's hospitality. Worst of all, every time nature tries to lay down some reasonable rules (like not breaking the sink), she's ignored and everybody acts like they know better. Mankind becomes narcissistic, and all their shenanigans turn the house into a ruin by the end.
Him struck me as a frustrating man to put up with. Not only did he take and take to the point of valuing strangers over his wife, but he also kept hiding things from her. There's a passing scene where Adam seems to suffer, and we briefly see a wound in his side (Adam's rib). Once nature sees it, Him covers it up and shoos her out. What's there to hide? Later, when certain things happen (like the publisher calling, the people showing up at the house), Him seems to know exactly what's happening, whereas nature (and us by extension) are dumbfounded that He is letting all this stuff happen without telling anybody. Not to mention, He winds up losing track of nature, and is unable (or maybe even unwilling) to help her put her foot down and stop the looting and violence. The fact that Him and nature never united to lay down the law kinda ticked me off--it's just so flaky.
But that's the point--we're not meant to know what Him knows, and not even nature is privy to His secrets. So mankind does pop up unannounced, and He just lets them in the house without a fuss for reasons we can't really comprehend. He might even know how it all ends (especially if this cycle always repeats itself). But nature doesn't, and we don't (at least on the first, unspoiled viewing). To further emphasize how above-and-beyond He is, take a good look at his office. He has a good load of books lining the walls, as if surrounded by knowledge. This is also one of the rooms that's exclusive to Him and nature. Only Adam and Eve have been there before, but they were cast out--later, the baby Christ comes out of this room and enters the world. Could it be that this room is heaven? Or Eden? Or both?
But wait, wasn't the house supposed to be the Earth?
The Problems With Allegory
As fun as it is (at least for me) to analyze each scene and figure out what part aligns with what Biblical or historic piece, it doesn't change the fact that this film is fundamentally screwed-up. One of the biggest reasons is the allegory--I'm not convinced it actually works or fits correctly with the given story.
This is another frustrating aspect of the movie (which is something I tried to explain above with regards to arthouse cinema): the logos of the story should stand on its own, independent of the symbolism. It doesn't in mother! You need to know the allegory in order to understand and accept it. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of impossible things that happen for unknown reasons--I'm sure many viewers gave up trying to figure the movie out and just dismissed the whole lot as stupid, precisely because they may not have understood it. Which is why Aronofsky and the gang tried so hard to make the allegory known. But does an allegory really need to be spelled out by the artists? Shouldn't they have let the film speak for itself?
Look at other allegories. Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea can be accepted in two ways: a simple story about a geezer who catches a big fish, or an allegory to Christ. If you don't know it's an allegory to Christ, it doesn't stop you from reading it and accepting it as just a fishing story. Same goes for Moby Dick, the godfather of allegories, which can be seen as either a sprawling hunt for a whale, or a study of humanity, good and evil, God and Satan, damnation, and lord knows what else. These classics are packed with symbolism, but if you don't know or understand them, it doesn't stop them from being accepted on the surface level.
With mother! the story can't be accepted on the surface because most symbols that appear have a lot of attention drawn to them. Hearts are a big motif--the house has one, there's a glass heart, there's a heart-looking thing in the toilet in one scene. If this is just a regular home invasion movie, these scenes become meaningless. Then why put them in the movie to begin with? Some would call this pretentious. I say it simply lacks subtlety.
What mother! fails to do is marry the symbols transparently into the story. Instead, they stick out and distract from the narrative, confusing the audience and disrupting attention from the story. Consider other stories that work: in the examples I had above, the symbols were interwoven seamlessly in each story's action and environments. You don't see Captain Ahab crawling on the deck of his ship, checking the pulse of an invisible beating heart that only he can see. But his last scene where he's dragged beneath the ocean by the whale--now that means something, but it's also a natural outcome of the events.
What happens in mother! happens only because the allegory demands it. On the first watch, I wondered constantly why Him doesn't put his foot down on everybody looting and ransacking His house--no rational person would put up with that. But knowing that Him is God (and a narcissist), we understand that He permits all this chaos because He is swimming in their love and adoration. This story could have gone any number of directions, but because it's meant to encapsulate all of human history, it goes against the current of common sense and becomes frustrating.
Even the allegory side of mother! falls short. For one thing, if we accept that the house is Earth, then what is everything outside of the house supposed to be? Outer space? Where did everybody come from? The original couple is Adam and Eve, but they weren't created by Him as Genesis lays out--where did they come from originally? And everyone else afterward?
This could boil down to understanding Aronofsky's world view, which we got a glimpse of in 2014's Noah. That was a challenging and frustrating experience in its own way, because he rejected the classic telling of Noah's Ark and focused on Noah experiencing survivor's guilt. That also meant Noah couldn't interpret God's message directly--they were vague and disturbing visions. And in one of the movie's most interesting scenes, the story of creation is juxtapose to images that depict the cosmos developing over eons, and life coming naturally to the Earth via evolution. So, could it be that mother! suggests that people simply evolved on their own in the wilderness, then came to the house of God?
But (at least as I understand it), once God and man came together, they never really parted ways. God was always watching over us, guiding us, and giving His only son at the right time. That's not what happens in the movie though--man and God are separated repeatedly. God and Adam take a walk and leave nature alone in the house, so she and Eve can chat it up. What point in history is this supposed to represent? Did Adam literally leave the planet? Absences continue to happen, first when Abel is killed and everybody leaves to find a hospital, and then again between the Old and New Testament phases of the movie. Where did all these people go when they leave the house? Where did they come from when the Word gets published?
There are a few instances in which the phone gets used. Who are the people on the other end supposed to be? One is a publisher--is this supposed to be the prophets? Or is the phone like a "radio for speaking to God?" Does that mean the phone is the Ark of the Covenant? I do like to think that all the looting in the movie are efforts for people to find and take holy relics (which brings to mind the Lost Ark, the Spear of Destiny, and the Shroud of Turin). One person declares, "I have to have something of His!" The sheer zeal in these scenes really drive the point home that God and his Word were so great, everybody wanted a piece of Him. At one point, nature picks up the phone to call the cops, crying out "They're taking everything!" Now wait a minute...who are the cops? They're outside the house, which is Earth, so...are there space alien cops somewhere? And the hospital everybody went to earlier...what is that supposed to be?
Chances are these aspects are beyond the scope of the allegory. But that's the same problem in reverse: now the literal side of the story is screwing up the metaphor. The line is too blurred and it's hard to reconcile the symbols with reality in this movie. All you can do is just shrug it off. Unless you really want to accept that the cops and hospital represent space aliens.
I will give the film some benefit of the doubt--it's possible the house is not meant to represent the Earth. Especially if one room of the house is supposed to be God's domain (as explained earlier, the office seems to be His domain of knowledge and nobody else is allowed in). It might be a better fit for the story to say that the house is God's house, or the Kingdom of Heaven, rather than Earth. This fits some things--it explains the people's absences, because people do sway farther away from God then come closer. It's also a little more messed-up, because this suggests that mankind's actions have tainted, mutated, and ruined God's kingdom. It is easy in the film to see how God's Word and teachings are warped to justify violence, looting, and disrespect for nature. But wait, if the house isn't Earth, then all the Earth parallels that were established wouldn't mean anything anymore. Unless you want to accept that nature may be a tenant in God's kingdom, and she maintains His house through her love and devotion.
The more I think about it, the more I believe this interpretation jives better with the story and themes. Alas, Lawrence confirmed on TV that the house is indeed the Earth. Which still makes sense because she, nature, takes care of it, and it's the oil from the bowels of the house that unleashes literal Hell. So we just have to accept that it's a partial fit.
Unfortunately, the religion is also a partial fit, likely due to Aronofsky's own views. The biggest thing that made me scratch me head was the baby--Christ exists in the movie as the offspring between God and nature. Unless you want to say that nature became the Virgin Mary for just that one scene. And that might be the intention, given the movie's title--J-Law is there to represent all mothers, including the Holy Mother, not just nature. Or, maybe because Christ is born from nature, he is also born from man, so the allegory could fit regardless. But given that our two leads are established as entities above and beyond mankind, this felt like an odd relationship, when Christ should be a bridge between Him and everybody invading the house (in which case, I wondered if it would have worked better if He had a child with a random stranger, who would then become the Virgin Mary).
Few other pieces of the Bible are totally absent. For one thing, there is no Satan. At least not in the flesh. You could argue that evil is present in men and their actions (and there's plenty of it in the film). But without Satan, there is no direct antagonist for Him, and the whole point of the Bible is to chronicle the ultimate triumph over evil. The film takes the opposite approach, suggesting that cycles merely repeat themselves and nothing will ever change. There is no Devil, just men, and they will always be evil and irredeemable. I guess that's fine for the movie, but it is a dark and troubling message (and that's something I'll get to in a minute).
There are no angels. No demons. God and nature exist in a vacuum, according to the movie (although, funnily enough, I think I did spot an angel on the wall in this screencap).
The movie really doesn't need the whole multitudes of the heavenly host to make its points known, but it does diminish the allegory slightly. Consider another film seeped heavily in Biblical allegory: Only God Forgives, a bizarre crime film from 2013 in which a vengeful cop goes after an underground Thai boxer and his crazy mother (what is it with these films and mothers?). This is another film that's hard to swallow on its own merits, unless you accept that the cop can kill lots of people with swords and chopsticks without so much as a reprimand. But if you accept that the cop is actually God (per the movie's title), then things start to make sense. Guess what? He had an entourage: every other cop around this guy were angels. And in all those weird karaoke scenes, this was the film's way of referencing the holy choir of angels. This is the only film I know of that symbolizes such a thing. And yet, OGF is a film that suffers the same problems mother! does--it doesn't hold up unless you apply the allegory and accept that Chang is God. Frankly, I think Refn improved his allegory skills in The Neon Demon--it might not be subtle, but so long as you can accept monstrous cannibal models, the film holds up both ways. In regards to mother! all the theology seems stripped to the bone. It wouldn't have been hard to throw in a nanny or two and make them symbolic angels. Suppose one of them decides he hates Him and doesn't like Him showing affection to these strangers coming to the house--he could leave, then come back and try to rile up the other people to do awful things to the house. Boom, that could have been Satan. It doesn't happen that way though.
Outrage
Character is what makes or breaks any story. Strangely enough, character manages to do both with this movie.
What works in the film is how closely it sticks to the main character. The vast majority of the picture has only three types of shots: over-the-shoulder, close-ups from the neck up, and point-of-view shots. We see, hear, and experience every passing moment the character does. This is a blessing because we immediately connect to her and her experience becomes the same as ours.
It's also a curse because so much happens in the film that it invokes feelings of outrage. Part of it is the way others treat the character--there's hardly ever a moment when the character is treated with niceness, so we spend most of the movie wondering why everyone is such a jerk and what their problem is. It's also frustrating watching Him through her eyes, as he consistently lets people into the house while she wants them out. Everything that happens is outrageous, so the film invokes feelings of outrage.
The thing to admire about mother! is how the narrative POV succeeds in invoking the right feelings. In this sense, the film is a success. It makes audiences so angry, many will leave the theater and decry it as the worst movie ever.
Aronofsky's handling of pathos has been more successful in the past. It was probably at its best with The Wrestler--you really couldn't help but to feel for the main character thanks to its script and performances. Unfortunately, Aronofsky fumbled it with Noah, on account that he characterized one of the Bible's most faithful characters as faithless. In mother! it seems to work too well, because we are so close to all the horrors of the movie that it pours out of the screen into the audience.
The Void
One of the most poetic lines in the movie happens during the funeral reception, where Him delivers a speech to honor Abel's death. He asks everybody to stop and listen for the voice from the void. "That is the sound of life. That is the sound of humanity." Mother (and we by extension) hear nothing. But everybody weeps all the same, and they claim to hear the voice. All of this is repeated at the end during the baby scene. It's something of a sermon that people clung to.
Knowing Aronofsky's work, I can't help but to see these lines as the unifying theme to the movie: nihilism, in the sense that the universe is cold, uncaring, and indifferent, and humanity derives its own meaning in it through faith. Only the faith presented here seems perverse--Him's words are mutated and used to justify the murder of His own child. Above all, the only sound we hear is the crying. If there is a voice calling out from the darkness, it's only our own.
It's a somber reflection, but not one I find particularly appealing. What these lines suggest is that the "sound of life" and the "sound of humanity" has no sound at all. Does that mean Him's words have no substance either? In the funeral scene, He clearly says these lines as a way to comfort the family, so does he really hear a voice or is it just a way to help them cope?
The film ends with hopelessness. Even though Him wants to forgive mankind and keep them in the house, even he can't stop nature from unleashing her wrath. This is not how the Bible itself plays things out though--by the Bible's end, evil is vanquished and a new paradise is established. Granted, all of Revelations has to happen first, which does include horrible natural disasters, but it's a whole mess of events that wouldn't have fit into mother! in any good way. At the same time though, the film rejects the Bible's one-way tracts and goes for the looping method, suggesting there is no hope or salvation. History will always repeat itself, mankind will always ruin the world, and nothing stops evil (nothing can, because evil is implicit to man and has no personification).
For Better Or For Worse
mother! is a film I struggle to reconcile with. If for no other reason than it's a frustrating watch, since we behold a good character suffering so much disrespect, and eventually abuse and terror, while her own husband fails to stand by her side and people continuously cross lines. Given the closeness of the POV, the effect is amplified. Plus, the film is loaded with surreal visual clues and motifs that defy rational explanation and can only be substantiated by allegory, which in turn drives the plot. This is frustrating if you aren't familiar with the symbols. Even if you are, it's hard trying to reconcile all the pieces between fantasy and reality.
Admittedly, I'm probably being too harsh with the film. I might be looking too deeply and critically at each symbol and trying to make them fit in places that they're not supposed to. Accepting it on its own merits is possible, so long as you accept that the film's sole purpose is to express a nihilistic message that mankind will suffer the wrath of mother nature--maybe even repeatedly--and not even God can help us.
Personally, I find the message too bleak, and I don't believe it accurately conveys the same messages the Bible itself carries. But then, maybe it's not meant to--the film emulates the events of the Bible, not its message, thus offering an alternate take (or maybe an anti-thesis) on the meaning of our existence. Either way, I find myself disagreeing with it, but that's only my personal disposition which is naturally optimistic. Even I won't deny that the film succeeds in its purpose: to incite outrage and relay a dark message of hopelessness.
Ultimately, I do value the film most of the way and see it as an interesting piece of art. Not one I particularly enjoy, and it's still my least-favorite of Aronofsky's work so far. Somehow, the experience did stick out in my brain and compel me to see the movie again and study it deeper. Maybe someday, my appreciation will rise as all the issues I griped about become non-issues. If nothing else though, it's been a fascinating mental journey for me to look at all the symbols and see what works and what doesn't.
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| This is how I should write all the things... |
