“The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly,” warns Donna Haraway, “on the brink of becoming much Too Big.”¹ In Staying with the Trouble (2016), she continues to write, nonetheless, with the hope of our inheriting the “bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan”.² mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017) displays no such bravery and no such capacity. It is overwhelmed with essentialism, determinism; repetition of the same, teleology; and ideals, plans. At best, Aronofsky’s most recent film could have been a big-enough contribution to an ethical cinema concerned with gendered economies of the gift: the narrative of Man (Ed Harris) and Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) lingering for far too long at the house of the heralded poet, Him (Javier Bardem), and his muse, his wife (the eponymous mother, played by Jennifer Lawrence) is, for whatever it’s worth, reminiscent of the cinema of Luis Buñuel and Lars von Trier. Yet mother! is burdened in its second half by not only one ideal, one plan, but several – and a heavy several, at that (even a miraculous crystal and a mysterious elixir are unmemorable, here). It is something much Too Big.
With allusions to both the Old and the New Testament, Aronofsky concocts an allegory about narcissism in the age of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene: climate change is The Fall of Man, the cult of genius is The Birth and The Coming of Christ, etc. A mouthful? Certainly. Didn’t you see those visuals? Didn’t you hear those sonics? It is two eyefuls, two earfuls, and more.
mother! starts with a woman who stares fixedly at the spectator: her lineaments, framed in close-up, are ashen and lacerated; her hair, aflame. Fire is licking at the edges of the image. She sheds a pathetic tear.
Just as the beginning of mother! offers up an image of a woman, burning, so the ending offers up an identical image of Jennifer Lawrence, burning. Though there is some difference between the appearance of each actor, it is slight. Moreover, if this token of difference is intended to be indicative of some significant difference in the bifurcating structure of the film, in general, it is just that old one of first as tragedy, then as farce.
tragedy: mother is forced to welcome two strangers, Man and Woman, into her home; Man and Woman assume her hospitality, without her offer of it, only to abuse it; Man and Woman are only hostile towards her, not Him, our precious poet/prophet.
mother bears witness to fratricide; in the middle of an argument with Him, he rapes her, in so doing, impregnating her – and finding himself able to write well again (more than well, we are told).
farce: mother is forced to endure crowds upon crowds of grotesque, worshipping fans invading her home; crowds upon crowds who are only aggressive towards her, not Him, our precious poet/prophet.
mother bears witness to executions; as she is sleeping, her newborn son is taken from her, in order to be sacrificed at an altar to Him; the people beat her almost to death.
And indeed, as the people beat her almost to death, it is horrific – but it is farcical. That said, awareness of its absurdity makes it no less of a threat, to paraphrase Jacqueline Rose’s recent essay in London Review of Books.³
When we feel in mother!, we are forced emphatically to feel via the body of Jennifer Lawrence, who, in the contemporary, symbolises some cliché of the everywoman, a certain sexuality, a certain wealth. One of the most depressing things about the film, then, is the way in which Aronofsky cynically renders a cinema of the senses farcical – a cinema that is described in some studies of the moving image as a sphere specifically of the feminine – using it in the service of what is practically point-of-view pornography, centred on violence against the body of Jennifer Lawrence, and all that this signifies, culturally. At the time, Aronofsky and Lawrence were an item.
“Don’t you understand?” I hear. “It’s a metaphor.” I do understand. And it’s not that I don’t care that it’s a metaphor. I do care. In the history of art, literature, and philosophy, the specificities and the differences of women are continually defaced and effaced in order that the zeniths of metaphor may be reached. In this tradition, mother! manipulates a maternal-feminine-domestic triad into an oversimplified vessel via which another male artist can force his agenda and vision. And a metaphor as unexceptional as what we have here is nothing but a dead metaphor. Tired, trite, a dead metaphor has no chance in hell of ascending to new heights of the imagination.
Should we require a satire of misogynistic violence executed in the name of creation, we do not need it from Aronofsky, who is all extremes, no nuance; who (to borrow Donna Haraway’s words, once more) operates only on opposite poles of a binary: ‘apocalyptic or salvific’.⁴ mother! – don’t omit the exclamation mark – adds and adds to a hazardous culture of accelerationism and overblown news cycles. Of course, there are a few things, a few details, it forgets or forgoes: for a film of this title, it isn’t enough about the maternal; for a film filtered through the presumed perspective of a woman, it isn’t enough about the feminine; for a film staged in the home, it isn’t enough about the domestic.
To whichever wannabe auteur is lined up to tell the same stories in the name of The Father, next, I reiterate: we do not need it. We do not need a cautionary tale without any caution, one which is all cruelty, no love. As Jacqueline Rose writes in Mothers (2018), “Unless we recognise what we are asking mothers to perform in the world – and for the world – we will continue to tear the world and mothers to pieces.”⁵ Take it seriously, Aronofsky – there are real consequences to your empty metaphors.
1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 50. 2 ibid. 3 “Harassment is ruthless,” she states, “but it also has a desperation about it, as if the harasser knows at some level that his cruelty, like all human cruelty, has its source in a fraudulent boast. Not that this makes it any less of a threat.” 4 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1. 5 Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), 2.
Laura Staab is a PhD student in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her current research entails reading the moving image for forms of the feminine, via the poetics of Hélène Cixous.
