Darren Aronofsky describes Mother! as his “howl” and it shows.
Photo courtesy of EW, edited by Abby Webster
When I saw Mother!, my expectations had been set by a marketing campaign that made the film out to be a mysterious psychological thriller akin to Get Out. What I got instead was an alienating psychodrama that turned out to be one of the most upsetting movie-going experiences of my life.
A feverish nightmare of creation and destruction, Mother! is a film that intends to crush you under its own suffocating weight. Laden with religious imagery, Mother! is a tale of altruistic creators, thankless hostesses and rapacious guests that closely parallels biblical epics. Javier Bardem (‘Him’) plays a writer in the midst a dry spell, unable to be broken by the gracious homemaking of Jennifer Lawrence (‘Mother’). When two unexpected guests enter their home under the guise of mistakenly believing it to be a bed and breakfast, life for the couple suddenly becomes very interesting. Mother! is intensely divisive amongst audiences, for content and storytelling mechanisms alike, but it seems to care very little about whether it’s adored or hated; it exists merely to elicit a strong reaction from the viewer.
Popular film critics are taken with the religious and environmental messages in the film, so much so that I had to dig to find articles analyzing the movie from a feminist lens; even then it was mainly social media users relating the film specifically to women’s issues.
Claims of sexism are rooted in scenes throughout the film, but the most glaring example is a sequence in which the newly born child of ‘Mother’ is passed from the author to his ravenous fans, who brutalize and devour chunks of the baby. Mother Earth’s child is destroyed at the hands of God’s creations, and with misogynistic slurs hurled at her, ‘Mother’ is physically abused by the crowd. Whether or not the violence is gratuitous is up for debate. One one hand, it’s indulgent and overwrought, making it extremely difficult to watch. But this was exactly what Aronofsky wanted; he desired to make an impactful statement about the state of the earth to his viewers. And, of course, depiction is not necessarily synonymous with endorsement.
The visuals are shocking, to be sure, but that’s not where my issues with the film lie. The graphic violence perpetrated against the wife of the author isn’t what makes the film misogynistic; rather, its faults lie in how it only allows Lawrence’s character to be an allegory for the Earth and not her own fully fleshed out character. Women who relate to the film’s themes of toxic relationships, domestic expectations and public scrutiny are denied validation by the film, which conceptually attributes these struggles to the Earth, not to womankind. ‘Mother’ sacrifices everything she has for ‘Him’—her home, her body, her mind—all in the name of his creation. Yet we aren’t expected to empathize with her, a living, breathing human being; we are supposed to to weep for what her story represents.
Aronofsky claimed, “We’re basically holding up a mirror to what’s going on,” referring to the abuse of the environment that he sought to portray. Yet by using Jennifer Lawrence’s body as nothing more than a disposable metaphor, stripped of all agency, Aronofsky is blind to some of what the mirror reflects.