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starwarsnonsense · 7 years

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Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ as a feminist fable

* Spoilers for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! follow *

I must begin by apologising for what can only be a digression on a Star Wars blog, since mother! (beyond the inclusion of Domhnall Gleeson in a tiny role) has absolutely nothing to do with everyone’s favourite space opera series. However, I can’t feel too bad about it since I really, really need to talk about mother!. Excuse my indulgence, and I hope that those of you who do read these find my thoughts interesting.

I watched mother! for the first time at the weekend and it truly blew me away. I left the theatre with a deranged grin in my face, amazed and overjoyed that Aronofsky had convinced Paramount to fund, promote and distribute something this batshit crazy (amusingly, they actually felt the need to explain themselves in a statement). However insane you expect mother! to be, nothing can surpass the actual experience of watching it in a theatre and hearing the disquieted murmurs of an unprepared and steadily more agitated crowd.

mother! is any and all of the following, depending on how you choose to approach it - a black comedy, a parable, a pretentious pile of nonsense, an allegory, a muddle of metaphors, a home invasion film, an affront to all reasonable standards of good sense and decency, etc., etc. But what I’m going to focus on here is how mother! is also a rather shattering feminist fable. Just allow me a few paragraphs of scene-setting to get there.

To get right into the thick of it, it has been well established by many others (not least Aronofsky himself) that mother! is a biblical allegory - Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother (upper case mine, out of principle) is Mother Nature, Javier Bardem’s Him (note that all-important, end credits-sanctioned upper case!) is the Judaeo-Christian God, Ed Harris’s ‘man’ is Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer’s ‘woman’ is Eve, and so on and so on. mother! is, in essence, a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible - it is even neatly divided into discrete halves that correspond to the greatest hits of the Old and New Testaments. The characters here are not individuals so much as representations of concepts - they are forces of nature and qualities of man. The film bends time to breaking point, compressing thousands of years of progress, conflict and bloodshed into two hours and reducing the entire Earth to an increasingly dilapidated house.

By borrowing its structure from the Bible, mother! is, by default, a portrait of humanity and its capacity for harm - and it is upsetting people precisely because Aronofsky’s view of man is extremely bleak. Humanity is framed as an ever-swelling deluge of insatiable, greedy and thoughtless brutes, with only the barest glimmers of kindness and compassion visible amidst the chaos. At the film’s end, the only acceptable solution for Mother Nature - her heart black and withered, her love all-but extinguished by her suffering - is to burn them all to ashes.

mother! is a condemnation of humankind, but it is also a condemnation of the baser qualities of God Himself: His demand for worship, His indifference towards the natural world, and His insistence on the continuation of man even in the face of its violence and destructiveness. Him is portrayed as more akin to the curious, selfish, playful gods of the Ancient Greek pantheon than the bearded, stoic sky-father that the Christian God is now usually framed as - he has a short memory for the horrors wrought by mankind, and demonstrates inexplicable and senseless investment in perpetuating them, even as Mother Earth rages against their existence. The film takes the idea of the six days of creation and, rather brilliantly, makes it look as if God created man out of idle curiosity once he’d become discontented with the tranquil perfection of his creation.

One of the richest and most fascinating interpretations of mother!, as far as I’m concerned, is the one that approaches it as an allegory for the diminishment and sidelining of the divine feminine. This is conveyed through something as basic and obvious as capitalisation - while the exclamation mark in the film’s title has got all of the attention, the lower case ‘m’ means more than you’d first think. It is a very well-established convention that God is always referred to with upper case pronouns (His, Him, He) - this is done to distinguish Him from the petty, fading gods from other religions, and from all those lower creatures with no claim to divinity (or, as it turns out, upper case pronouns). By introducing mother! with lower case in the title of the film, the disadvantage of Mother Earth is being established from the outset.

To venture briefly into theology, the feminine divine is now usually considered inferior to the masculine one - it has been this way for many centuries, with the ancient goddesses of wisdom, fertility, love and creation being sidelined in favour of warlike, dominating male deities. As Bettany Hughes observes in The Guardian:

At the birth of society and civilisation I find a religious landscape littered with feisty female deities who make wisdom their business. There's Nisaba the Babylonian goddess who looks after the stores of both grain and knowledge in Mesopotamia; the Hindu goddess Saraswati; the Zoroastrian Anahita; the ancient Greek Athena; and the Shinto Omoikane (a fine goddess of holistic thought and multitasking).

But come the end of the bronze age and many of these deities have been demoted. Here we witness a precursor of the Judaeo-Christian scenario. Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses – notably in charge of fertility and learning – have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.

It is my feeling that we see this dynamic - with the divine female creative force being forced to the margins by an overbearing figure of male authority - played out in the marital relationship between Him and Mother in the film. Mother is the central creative actor - she is the one who makes the house at the centre of the film (which is analogous to the Earth) beautiful and vibrant following its destruction in a fire. Without her, it is impossible for Him to create. But her efforts are constantly overlooked, scorned and belittled - the guests in her house destroy her belongings, invade her sanctuaries, and show outright disdain for her wishes. Her attempts to resist them are perceived as comical, with her will only being enacted on those rare occasions that Him deigns to support her. Mother is clearly expected to be a passive source of inspiration for Him, an ornament whose attempts to assert herself or share her opinion are swiftly shut down. Just as history has erased goddesses and female deities as patriarchal structures have become more and more entrenched, the characters surrounding Mother in the film seek to trample her down and ignore her role in creation.

A big point is made in the film of the generational divide between Him and Mother - Him is middle-aged, his face lined and weathered, whereas Mother is a beautiful young woman with immaculate skin and an abundance of golden hair. This distinction drives home the imbalance between them - it is a divide designed to unsettle and disquiet from the moment you first see them together, the kind of union that makes your skin crawl from an instinctual sense that something is profoundly wrong with it.

As the film unwinds, this suspicion becomes fully realised - the film is cyclical in that it begins and ends with a mother setting herself and the house aflame, her heart transforming into a shimmering crystal that Him places on a stand in his study as a new mother forms from the ashes of the marital bed. In this way, He is revealed as the collector of countless women’s hearts - He is essentially a Bluebeard figure (with the study functioning as his forbidden bloody chamber), and the central tragedy of mother! is that the heroine is offered no escape from him. In keeping with Aronofsky’s dim view of existence, the relationship between Mother and Him is destined to repeat itself in an unending cycle of destruction and rebirth. We are all doomed to repeat the same mistakes, being nothing more than the playthings of a capricious God.

There is no sense of lessons learned or mistakes avoided here, and one of the greatest injustices on display is the sheer contempt with which Mother is treated. Aronofsky has been open about the fact that mother! is an environmentalist film, and the vitriol that Lawrence’s character is dealt with is, of course, a statement on how we treat the Earth. But it is also effective precisely because it frames this contempt towards Mother Earth as a very specific kind of contempt - misogyny. The misogyny is most overt in how the avatars of humanity treat Mother, with their subtle disapproval, judgement and objectification building and building until they overflow into a riot of violence and verbal abuse at the film’s climax. The allegory is three-fold - we are witnessing contempt for women generally, contempt for women as a force for creation (in everything from the mundane sense to the divine one), and contempt for nature as a maternal force.

Some commentators have misconstrued the film’s depiction of misogyny as evidence that the film itself is sexist, but I could not disagree more strongly - Aronofsky’s film is a pin-sharp deconstruction of how society treats women, and it is uncomfortable because it is meant to be. Misogyny is real and it is ugly, and by depicting its evolution across a spectrum ranging from a disapproving look to seething violence we are being forced to confront it. The film is entirely told from Mother’s perspective, which makes the brutality and cruelty of her treatment inescapable - she is the only character we can truly feel empathy for, with her suffering registering on an acutely visceral level because it is portrayed so intimately.

While the film offers its characters no escape from a cycle, I like to think that Aronofsky designed mother! to be as shocking as it is in order to confront us with some of the hardest truths - the truth of how we treat the Earth and the truth of how we treat women. Too much cinema is the audiovisual equivalent of junk food, encouraging passive and unthinking consumption. The very fact that mother! has inspired such emotional responses - from passionate hatred to profound admiration - is testament to the fact that it did exactly what it set out to do by jolting people from their complacency.

#mother!#darren aronofsky #not star wars #not sw #film #cinema #film analysis #essay

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