mother!

I guess I’ll preface this by admitting that I’m not really a fan of mother!’s underlying biblical allegory.  I caught the gist of what ulterior mythos Aronofsky was creating for our couple and their riotous guests early on and every turn of the screw after felt maladroit.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I literally rolled my eyes at the scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s mother (i.e. mother earth, mother Mary, the eternal feminine) is asked to forgive wretched humanity by Javier Bardem’s heavenly father for killing her baby Jesus.  It felt forced/obvious.  A labyrinthian film with copious figurative threads to pull from suddenly became one bulbous rope dangling coyly before us to grab and climb so that we could be transported to its higher plane of redoubtable revelations.  This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with Aronofsky’s critique of religious fervor and environmental destruction or that I don’t share is ire.  I’m right there with him and I admire his take on our profoundly fucked up world.  However, I do feel that this grandiose allegorical relation is the one slipshod conceit in an otherwise flawlessly told phantasmagoria. 

I like mother! more as a hallucinatory physical manifestation of a relationship’s decay.  As someone who has recently lost a home I worked tirelessly to cultivate into a sanctuary for me and my loved ones, I am painfully aware of how it feels to have that home adulterated by an intruder and have your things torn away like refuse only to be rebuilt in someone else’s image after you are gone.  And as someone who has recently lost someone I loved to the point of pure blind devotion, I know the feeling of dawning horror as you realize you gave yourself entirely to a false, weary idol.  The nightmarish parade of marauders and Bardem’s indifference to Lawrence’s suffering felt all too real to me as a physical representation of a relationship’s toxic denouement.  I felt that way as my world collapsed around me and I live every day with the scars.  The unseen terror and claustrophobia Aronofsky builds in these scenes as hell unfolds around Lawrence is the best work of his career.  It’s as tightly controlled and ferociously realized as any recent filmmaking I’ve seen.

I also like how mother! critiques our dreams of autonomy and our naive pastoral fantasies.  I think most of us, consciously or not, try to turn whatever space we inhabit into an eden we can share idyllically with our loved ones, just like Lawrence’s mother.  We lock our doors to prevent intrusion, we shut our blinds to shield us from onlookers, and furnish our surroundings with things we have imbued with meaning and emotion.  Naively, we dream our home and relationship are autonomous phenomena, excluded securely as if enshrined from the terrors or degradation that may befall them.  In many ways, this is all part of a larger pastoral fantasy we yearn for, a desire we have to return to prelapsarian grace or some illusory wholeness.  But how quickly our dreams can become nightmares when we realize our idea of haven is just myth we’ve convinced ourselves is real, perhaps something we read about long ago but never actually possessed.  The horror of our true vulnerability to a fractured world probably looks something like mother!