Darren
Aronofsky’s Mother! is an exceptionally bleak film. It offers an ambitious and
disturbing allegory of creativity and, evidently, “climate change and
humanity’s role in environmental destruction”—though the final blast of total
destruction is performed by the central, unnamed character played by Jennifer
Lawrence, whom the credits identify only as “her” and, as Lawrence stated in an
interview, represents the figure of Mother Earth.
Mother! has also
proven a divisive film, less among critics, who have generally given it
grudging respect if not love, than among audiences, who have responded with
surprising vigor to a film that is faring poorly at the box office. The New York
Times even devoted an article to its readers’ responses to the film, with one
reader claiming that the film’s “repetitive theme of creation and destruction
plays out more like Groundhog Day in hell than a biblical allegory,” a
statement that encapsulates well my own experience. Throughout the film, the
allegory is nothing if not heavy handed, but it is also not fully coherent. The
various levels of allegorical content often collide in a way that gives the
film more the heady, disorganized quality of a dream—or a nightmare—than an
intelligible story.
The film is also
closed-in on itself, almost claustrophobic at times, presenting what Gilles
Deleuze would call an “originary world.” In any event, the film accords as well
as any film of recent vintage with Deleuze’s category of impulse-image. The
originary world of the impulse-image, Deleuze says in Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image, makes “all the parts converge in an immense rubbish-dump or
swamp, and all the impulses in a great death-impulse. The originary world is
therefore both radical beginning and absolute end; and finally it links the one
to the other, it puts the one into the other, according to a law which is that
of the steepest slope.” Characters in Mother! wander in from some nebulous
outside, but anyone who is sucked into the vortex of the house seems fated to
remain (or if they leave, they soon find themselves back), and the longer they
remain, the more destructive they become.
The house offers
a world of immanence. This closed quality is also manifest in the film’s
treatment of sound, which is virtually devoid of music and so makes it
difficult for the film to offer a promise of an exterior, transcendent
position. The most overtly musical moment in the film occurs during the
apocalyptic sequence in the final act. Here, we briefly hear throbbing club
music, the narrative situation forging an association of this music (and dance)
with carnal urges and the breakdown of social order. Otherwise, music is used
very discreetly in the film, invariably serving as a furthermost point of
stylization in the film’s sound design, moments that are mostly reserved for
Lawrence’s “her” communing with the house. Although the film is about
creativity and explores through allegory issues of responsibility (or irresponsibility)
in the creation of a world, the sound design mostly emphasizes realistic rather
than stylized sound, which has the effect of presenting the world more as posited
than created or constructed.
Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) reacts to the disruptions of Man and Woman.
The house creaks
and groans with hyper-realistic detail as the characters move through it—this
is especially the case in the early scenes that introduce Lawrence as Mother.
This approach to sound gives the house an undeniably haunted quality, and the
sound is effective in investing the house with the potential to become a
character in its own right rather than simply a space for the action to play
out. The Man (Ed Harris) and the Woman (Michelle Pfeifer) soon arrive, however,
and if the house doesn’t stop making noises in their presence, those sounds
more frequently move to the background behind the seemingly endless chatter of
the guests. The house’s potential to become a character diminishes as its
sounds recede into the background, and ultimately it haunts no one really,
certainly not Mother, who seems if anything drawn to the house, nor her
husband, “Him” (Javier Bardem), the self-absorbed poet who should be haunted by
the past destruction he has caused. The house seems only to haunt itself, as it
recoils from the endless cycle of destruction that it seemingly knows to be its
fate. But the film seems to have little empathy for the plight of the house,
just as the Poet has little empathy for the plight of his wife, from whom he'll
nevertheless demand everything—over and over again.
During the final
act, the house becomes populated with an impossibly increasing number of
guests, and the action turns violent. The world, already closed off, seems to
collapse in on itself, and the geography of the house grows more and more
confused as the guests in the house devolve into figures of pure drive and
impulse. The action in this final act also traces a rapid line of descent for
Mother. She moves from the relative quiet of the upper reaches of the house
where she initially escapes with her baby, through the chaos of the middle
floors, to the final descent into the basement. Here, Mother traverses the
steepest slope of the impulse-image. In this horrifying descent, she and the
house are subject to increasing amounts of violence. The sound crescendos and
increasingly relates directly to the guests or the violence the guests inflict
on the house (and one another). Slipping through to the basement, Mother finds
a degree of quiet again, but, despite the pleading of her husband, she destroys
everything except Him in a fire. Before she dies, the Poet asks whether she
will give him her heart from her charred body. She agrees, he takes it and
transforms it into a crystal that will create the world anew, and the film begins
again with a new Mother.
This structure of
eternal return is another feature of impulse-images. The curvature, Deleuze
says, allows beginning and ending to touch, creating a closed loop of time.
Brooke’s post notes the significance of the sound of a pen scratching on paper
that appears in both opening and closing credits as a framing device that
insists on the power and violence of logos. A variant of this sound also
appears in the middle of the film, when the Poet writes the poem that will
renew him but also bring ruin to the house. The slope of the impulse-image,
Deleuze says, either “makes it into a closed world, absolutely closed off, or
else opens it up on to an uncertain hope.” In the sounds of the pen, in the
sounds of the house, the film offers inconclusive signs of a world that might
escape the cycle of bad repetition if only we could hear them as music.
***
James
Buhler is on the faculty at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at
the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on music and media.
He writes frequently on music and film and is the author of Hearing
the Movies, now in its second edition. He is active on Twitter (@jimbuhler), where many of the ideas
in this short essay were first broached.
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