NEW WAVE OF CINEMA
JENNIFER LAWRENCE STARRER MOTHER! EXPLORES METAPHORICAL SUBTEXTS THROUGH ITS NARRATIVE
By now you’ve almost certainly made up your mind about Darren Aronofsky’s mother! even if you haven’t seen the film — maybe especially if you haven’t seen it. The latest release from the director of Black Swan and Noah, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, of course generated all kinds of early fan buzz, then all sorts of weird and weirdly avoidant critical reactions, then all kinds of viewer confusion, then all sorts of flop pronouncements — all while a surprisingly high percentage of professional film writers seemed to care little about the film’s deeper meaning.
Everything you need to know about the movie’s image difficulties can be summed up by, well, how people summed it up.
Ostensibly a horror-tinged domestic drama about a poet and his wife in a country house beset by unknown guests, mother! is actually pretty clearly an alternate take on biblical history as well as a projection of future biblical-level disasters. According to this (pretty clearly evident) allegorical reading, the movie isn’t about marriage, not really. It’s about God (Bardem) and his main creation, Earth (Lawrence),
who are figuring out how to get along with each other when an onslaught of those pesky humans begin to arrive — Adam and Eve (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer), Cain and Abel (Domhnall and Brian Gleeson), early Christian disciples (Kristen
Wiig) and, eventually, war-mongering and environment-neglecting hordes who precipitate an apocalypse.
Really, though, it’s humanity in general they’re grappling with, since Mother Earth seems happy pretty much just living out her days with God, tinkering to make herself (the Earth) better and God happier. But
God wants people around and keeps encouraging more of them, for reasons either noble or narcissistic, depending on your point of view/religious upbringing. These human beings, Aronofsky warns in his distinctly bloody and baroque way, could well tip the world to disaster with their derelictions.
It’s heady stuff, in other words.
Yet in the face of such rich (and pretty clearly evident — did we mention that?) metaphors, many essays have been asking … less important questions. Rather than wrestle with the film’s spiritual and environmental ideas, they’ve taken mother! to task for such literalist flaws as why a poet would have so many people in his house, why the film contains so little subtext (!), why Aronofsky thinks he’s God and even how Jennifer Lawrence would be able to redecorate without visiting a homerestoration store. I mean.
One might be expected to love or hate mother!; it’s a film built to polarise. Takedowns are inevitable. But to never even mention words like Jesus, Genesis, apocalypse or history in an assessment — not to even bother engaging with the movie on its own global-biblical terms? It seems rather glaringly to dodge the point. One trade newspaper labelled mother! an “elevated horror movie.” Which is a little like calling Hamlet a “fun play about parents and children.”
I’m not here to try to convince anyone to see mother!, though as anyone in my personal orbit can annoyedly attest over the past few weeks, I do think every responsible citizen should; it’s a chance to watch a daring artist offer
a grand view of where we came from and where we’re headed. Nor do I want to give a detailed critical defence of the movie, though I think some very worthy writers will.
But I do think all this context is important, because it says something about the broader cinematic moment. If some of the above social-allegorical details remind you of another talked-about (if far more commercially successful) movie from 2017, they should. Mother! shares a number of commonalities with Get Out, the
Jordan Peele-directed phenomenon from last winter, soon to be revived in a boundless Oscar campaign. As with mother!, Get Out also employs pulp excesses and genre conventions to tell a deadly serious story about an abiding crisis — in that case, of course, the treatment of African Americans at the hands of white people.
Like Get Out, mother! is savvy in how it implicates its audience. Namely — subtly. It casts its criticism at a few highly externalised villains, and has them engage in some familiarly outrageous and Expressionistic cinematic acts. The whole enterprise is meant to make us feel like we’re watching from a safe remove. That is, until later on, when at dinner or at work or at some other unsuspecting point after we’ve left the theatre, it begins to dawn: “The people doing these terrible things are us.”
This is, thrillingly, where we are in contemporary pop culture. No longer are works like Dune obliquely telling of the Suez Canal crisis, as Frank Herbert’s classic novel did, or Star Wars offering a genteel look at foreign affairs through cartoonish Stormtroopers and huggable Ewoks. What this kind of genre filmmaking does (you can probably also add recent Emmy winner The Handmaid’s Tale to the list) is make comments brashly and boldly, mixing blood and gore into its batter of ideas and criticisms. This is Pbslevel social-mindedness, but by way of the midnight movie.
These movies’ unwillingness to absolve their audience is also a crucial feature separating them from earlier work. Where most genre parables from previous eras were about remote news events, holding leaders and famous figures to account, these filmmakers are all about the people watching the work — they’re aiming their cannons right at their customers. Get
Out and mother! aren’t interested in connecting their stories to some removed historical event so we can chew it over in restaurants and feel good about our enlightenedobserver status. They want to excoriate us right there in the theatre for participating in that event. Genre-of-meaning cinema never lets its viewers off the hook.
These baroque touches, somewhat counterintuitively, actually further this cause. The movies use (some would say go overboard with) genre stylization as a distractive technique, a way of Trojan Horseing into our brains a problem we might not otherwise let in. For all their provocative strokes, it would be a mistake to say that Peele and Aronofsky are hitting us over the head with the metaphor. To the contrary — they’re hitting us over the head with the movie. Which makes us not notice the metaphor until it’s lodged in deep.
But the subtext of the question is telling, and perhaps worth keeping in mind as we enter an era of more genre seriousness: When you have a message this scabrous, people might not be ready to deal with it all at once.