When Mother! came out I was struggling to stay awake during the Eric Rohmer movie My Night at Maud’s. I was still in that cinephile stage where I thought I had an obligation to watch “important” movies, and within 20 minutes something in my head snapped. I immediately closed Filmstruck (R.I.P) and started watching Mother! instead. I never liked Aronofsky and had heard the movie was terrible, but I was dying to see something that would at least make me feel something. It’s silly, but after turning off that French New Wave to watch this utterly sickening movie, I felt liberated from “the canon”. Thankfully, Mother! blew me away on top of helping me give myself this freedom, and after rewatching it the other day, I still adore it. It’s an audacious film that literally should have never been made, should have never starred Jennifer Lawrence, and should have never ended up in theaters. It is a total miracle and one of my favorite movies.
It’s hard to talk about Mother! without addressing the many, many interviews where the director explains what the movie means, so I’ll get it out of the way first. His explanations seem taken out of context to me - Aronofsky has said that he wrote the film in a few days as a sort of fever dream vision. I don’t know many fever dreams that have a straight and narrow interpretation, so it’s clear to me that his corny Mother Nature allegory is a result of him not respecting his audience to draw their own conclusions. There are obviously so many different things running through this film that it’s absurd to reduce the film down to what he said it meant. Mother! is two things to me - a supposed atheist’s admission that the Bible is the greatest story ever told, and a damning criticism of a couple that fails to uphold their roles in a relationship.
The biblical references in Mother! are overwhelming, but there isn’t a one-to-one symbolic order that lines up to any neat story. Mother! is a film that pulls many threads from the Bible together, not because it’s lazily written, but because it is the source from which all other stories come from. Mother! is a dream, and what populates our subconscious more than religion? The stories, lessons, and archetypes in it are the same stories that haunt anyone brought up Christian, especially people who’ve abandoned it.
I recently started reading parts of the Bible again and was astonished at how much of culture is inspired by it - it’s pretty much the lexicon of Western culture. This might sound obvious, but the world has gotten pretty secular, yet even in its secularity, most people cannot escape Christ. Jennifer Lawrence is the Virgin Mary (and therefore the church, and therefore the mystical body of the world itself), Eve, a woman of God, and probably many more things. Javier Bardem is God, the poet, Adam, Joseph, Jesus, a false messiah, maybe even the devil, and probably many more things. To state what I think should also be obvious, it’s a jumbled mess because our associations are jumbled. This kind of fast-and-loose should be liberating in its confusion and exciting in its complexity.
Mother! transposes the horrors of modern life onto its essentially biblical figures not to make a lame point about climate change but to show that the interpersonal evil between man and woman begets larger and more serious evils - the movie starts as a series of increasingly uncomfortable and humiliating conversations between people, and descends into the hell of organized evil. All of this threatens the purity and sanctity of the house, the mother, the family, the world. It’s a tale as old as time. My favorite aspect of Mother! is the way the house completely changes shape and form as the story morphs - the house is a living, breathing creature in a way I’ve seen no other movie portray.
Mother! is a deeply archetypal movie, and our associations with these archetypes make it a rich film. It’s completely Aronofsky’s fault for feeling like he had to explain it, maybe he felt insecure about releasing a movie without a clear, psychologically structured script like his other films. Maybe he anticipated the amount of people who wouldn’t understand what he was doing with this film and would immediately Google “mother 2017 explained” after finishing it. Ultimately, it’s really up to you if it ruins the movie for you. I worry that the pressure put on artists to explain their art, and especially relate their films to “their lived experiences” will completely sap the beauty of the generality of art. I don’t think any director owes anyone an explanation. It’s demeaning to artist and audience alike. Who knows what the reception to Mother! would have been like if he never said that?
Mother! is probably one of the most blasphemous movies ever made (the Eucharist scene, need I say more?), but ultimately, its blasphemy admits to the power Christianity has over us.