Mother!: To See but Never Touch

Darren Aronofsky’s latest film continues in the footsteps of much of his career whereby he takes a select set of emotions and introduces them harmlessly, yet two hours later that emotion has been pushed to its extreme, exploring the way habituation of something seemingly insignificant can be truly earthshattering.

Mother!’s select emotions are raw and relatively rare in the cinematic landscape—confusion and frustration. Veronica (Jennifer Lawrence) is married to an unnamed writer (Javier Bardem) who has seen better days. Quickly his career begins to gain a cult following yet he simply cannot say no to his new fans, causing everything to spiral out of control in their secluded ‘family’ home. We, as the audience, however only receive an uncompromised perspective of Veronica, attached to her almost umbilically from opening to close. This viewpoint is the exact source of our confusion and frustration, we are never provided with any information independently of Veronica—and she is a trophy housewife who is side-lined whenever Bardem’s writer attends to business. This starts out trivially, missing seemingly unimportant events in the writer’s life, yet as his fame increases we miss ever-larger events climaxing in a surreal mashup exploring how everything has changed while Veronica, and the audience, was left in the dark. This endless lack of information builds into a frustration as we are taken into a realm of narrative cinema we do not often visit. This isn’t to say the experience of these emotions is negative, although I feel that many audiences would interpret it that way. On the contrary I associate Aronofsky’s cinema with these intensely negative emotions being thrust upon the viewer leaving you endlessly uncomfortable and almost unable to watch—yet a few days later I feel hugely emotionally satisfied. The films become a very vent for these emotions we don’t want, or have time to experience, in our everyday lives thus satisfying a deep (silent) desire for the experience of intensely negative emotions in a safe and structured format.

However these elements can be applied to Aronofsky’s other work (Requiem for a Dream, Pi, Black Swan). Instead I want to look at the source of the frustration, providing my interpretation of it’s content. Upon exiting the cinema I asked myself why am I frustrated by this film? Confusion. And why was I confused? Because neither I (as the camera) nor the character had any control over the films world. We were both cast aside to miss out on so many pieces of information and narrative shifts, only to be explained to later after it had already happened. However, this feeling didn’t feel ‘new’ to me. I had experienced it before, but where? News. I feel that our experience of ‘news’ (or journalism) can be quite similar. Firstly news is always presented to us in the past tense, it is something that has happened. Good or bad it has happened and we have been unable to affect that event. This is exactly the same problem Veronica is having, always being delivered vital information that will directly affect her life in the past tense, once it has been decided for her. Throughout the film this happens so frequently you are unsure which piece of information is significant and which isn’t, similar to the endless array of newsflashes we receive daily. Furthermore when she is finally able to interact with the world she is ignored by strangers and again shoved to the side, she becomes just another bystander in her own home. Thus the likeness to news becomes clearer. As consumers of news we are only able to respond to what has happened (instead of stopping it from happening) and thus our voices appear nearly powerless to turn a decision that has already been stamped and posted. This effect is worsened by the increase in stories that turn our attention to a different part of the globe, such as the stagnant North-South Korea struggle, in order to misdirect the public eye away from massive national instability. Headlines are hijacked by these stories, hiding away what really matters about our future only to reveal it later irritating the exact response we just mentioned. This isn’t to say that those issues are unimportant, but to turn gazes away to instead focus upon an issue which has remained relatively stable for over 30 years is blatant aversion of attention—making the public’s fears leave for a new destination so they can sleep soundly missing what will affect them directly.

But why, then, are we so affected by Veronica’s confusion and frustration if they are in fact almost identical to what we experience on a daily basis? Is it because we are only in the early stages of the downward spiral, or are we simply used to it?

2/3/3

8/13

~Leo