He often tries to wrangle together so many lofty themes and referents at once that they get in each other’s way; they seldom have enough screen time to fully gestate because he also tries to maintain the pacing of a conventional narrative, yet, despite his obvious penchant for the avant-garde, he refuses to abandon dramatic structure.
Yes. This is one of my favorite things about Aronofsky, but he DOES abandon the dramatic structure in this movie. He finally does abandon it, and wow, I see it in his eyes, this is his 'Perfect' moment, where he just ditches the 'story' once and for all:
Except it wasn't.
Next!
The same was true of Noah when it was released in 2014, and The Fountain in 2006. Mother! is something else: a near perfect synthesis of psychosexual horror and cosmic irony, a feminist Third Testament, a masterpiece that seems to broach the limits of his art.
Ok, I'm buying this: "a feminist 'third testament'" but he gets the Old Testament and the New Testament completely wrong (which is why I'm buying the idea that it is a post-modern third testament, subversive with no claims to accuracy).
Despite his bohemian trappings, Aronofsky is essentially a melodramatist, taking hyperbolic domestic tragedies about self-destructive individuals and close-knit family units and amplifying them through a lens of the epic and the fabulous. In that sense, his work is more operatic than theatrical, and mother!, which plays out in an enclosed space that might otherwise seem suitable for something like A Doll’s House, is his grandest expression of this mode, grander even than his self-consciously bombastic Hollywood blockbuster Noah.
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But this is never really developed, this WOULD HAVE BEEN a good movie, but it was never developed because that was never the point. There is no moment, like with Portman staring down at her mother in the audience in
Black Swan, that we see it all come together as it was for the original characters (as we understood them). No, instead he ditches all of this and tells us that Javier has been God the whole time. There is no desire to reconcile any of this.
And, because of that fact, the beginning of the story regarding the tale of a wife and her husband, can be simply disregarded because it was meaningless plot structure, and instead we look back and understand that it was God interacting with Earth --- and this is especially troubling, Aronofsky, wants to split up God's creations into many characters yet there relationship with God is different. Like, there is the house, there is Lawrence, and they are tentatively linked, but how humans interact with Lawrence and the house compared to how they interact with God is not at all how it actually goes. One of the main points of the bible is that every person has committed the sin of preferring creation to the Creator, so this point about how 'God' is so cool with the humans while the earth is neglected is dumb and backwards. No, humans deify the earth while ignoring the real God. Yes, the earth gets trampled on in the process, but that's the only thing Aronofsky gets right.
The boldness of Aronofsky’s religious metaphors makes it easy to misread the film as a theological allegory with Him as God, but metaphor is not allegory, and no allegorical reading of the film can be sustained. For instance, the first houseguest to arrive is simply called “man” (Ed Harris), and, after we see him with a strange wound near his ribcage, his wife, “woman” (Michelle Pfeiffer), arrives, followed by their two sons (Brian and Domnhall Gleeson), one of whom kills the other by smashing his head in with a doorknob. If you try to use this obvious parallel to the Book of Genesis as an entry point to “solve” the movie the way you might decode the self-important puzzle-box movies of
Christopher Nolan, the entire film will collapse, and reviewers who have tried have used this as a way to dismiss the film as intellectually hollow.
Exactly. The article makes my point. But you cannot escape this reading of the film because Aronofsky FORCES YOU to accept it.
You don't get to choose to say, "This is somehow something different than what he is actually saying, even though he makes it plain, scene after scene, what he is referencing." You don't get to ignore that and interpret the film as something totally separate. This article has now taken off into the realm of the imaginary.
It is, indeed, essential to understanding the film to accept that Him is a metaphor for God, but only in the sense that “God” is itself a metaphor, a mystical (as opposed to theological) approach typical of Aronofsky’s work. Him is not Everyman, but he is Man, men, and, simply, a man. He is creative, but self-consciously so: while mother creates of her own intrinsic nature, rebuilding the house and bearing a child, Him needs her to inspire him, and, even then, he is only able to create poetry about her and her power, a metaphor producing metaphors. He needs not just her approval, but the approval of others, of strangers, of worshipers to make his art meaningful to himself.
Except Man and God are not the same at all, and Him is certainly not 'man', He is God, for sure. It would be nice if Aronofsky chose to make this film instead of making it about God, but he didn't.
He seems giving without ever actually giving up anything that he truly values, and, though he never shows anger or displeasure of any kind toward mother, he seldom displays anything but a distant, paternalistic kindness. It is just enough to keep stringing her along so he can get what he needs from her; yet he is not an abuser, as that would suggest that he chooses to behave worse than he might otherwise. What is truly disturbing and tragic about Him, what makes him such an uncanny representation of masculinity, is that he does not seem to want to be this way, yet he is powerless to change. It is the best that he can be, and, as this endless cycle of women destroy themselves against him, he never improves.
And God is not like this at all. I agree this is a good reading of the character, but that is why it's so problematic that Him is God and not Man.
All of mother!’s cosmic and mythic dimensions, all of its horror and gore and strange sensuality, stem from mother’s depth of intellect and feeling. If the film’s dreamlike associations between sex, love, gods, and death are complex and stimulating, it is only because mother is, and if they resist simple analysis and seem to slip out of your hands just when you think you’ve figured them out, it is because she is too multidimensional to draw a line around. Him is God, yes, but only because, in some way, mother perceives him that way.
No. This author has a very nice imagination, but this is ridiculous. Especially the last line, ahhahaha. And the movie, if it were saying this, which it wasn't, but if it was, it would be even worse than I am saying it is now. There is nothing remotely interesting about Lawrence's character or how that character was portrayed. I do not see the
depth -- laughable. Multidimensional? She is no-dimensional. She's beyond basic.
Mother! provokes countless questions about the unending cosmic struggle between Him and mother (such as whether or not each mother is the reincarnation of their predecessor or someone new), but to accept an answer to any of them as definitive rather than suggestive would be to accept narrative logic and teleology as more important than subjective experience – in other words, to privilege Him’s story over mother’s.
Yes, here is something good, at least to help understand the author. If you want to privilege reality over unreality, then this film has major problems. Considering his source material is the bible, there is a clear delineation about whose story comes first: GOD'S story comes first, every time. And the earth isn't a person, either, and it is not to be personified. Ugh.