It’s been said that Darren Aronofsky’s style has the subtlety of a
chainsaw, which is not entirely undeserved and can pose a big problem for an
artist with a taste for “big themes”; but Aronofsky also possesses the
technique of a virtuoso and a striking ability to conjure abstract, elusive, and
esoteric concepts through innovative audiovisual means. You could say that
Aronofsky’s audiovisual and narrative style channels the earnestness and
brilliance of a Romantic artist/genius, amplified by the sensibility of the MTV
generation and the tools of digital technology: the result can be
embarrassingly pompous at times, but it never fails to hit the designated mark
and then some.
In his latest film Mother!, which addresses the plight of our exploited
and abused planet, Aronofsky muses on the cyclical nature of history, the
reckless, destructive, and violent nature of humanity, and the seemingly
endless power of nature’s resurrection which has managed to sustain us so far.
I couldn’t help but also read it as an allegory of a much more personal kind,
an exploration of the dark rooms of the artistic soul; the exhilaration of
creation and the terror of writer’s block; the conflict between the purity of
inspiration and the corrosiveness of fame and need for recognition; and the
ultimate selfishness of the creative drive which is willing to sacrifice
everything that it can feed on, which – Aronofsky’s film suggests – applies
both to the Almighty, embodied by the character played by Bardem, and to humans
(who are “made in God’s image,” after all). My impression is that Aronofsky
pursues both layers of meaning, following the dream logic of a nightmare.
Shortly before the film’s general cinema release it was revealed that
Aronofsky, in consultation with his new collaborator, composer Jóhann
Jóhannsson, decided to eliminate the already-written score in favour of an
elaborate sound design. Aronofsky stated that he didn’t want to give the
audience “any
relief by allowing them to lean back on something that easily gives you emotion.”
Echoing the sentiment of many other directors who avoid the use of non-diegetic
scores, Aronofsky’s comment goes to the heart of the central aesthetic question
facing directors and film music composers today: should music fulfil its
traditional roles by shadowing the characters, reacting to and illuminating the
narrative, or could there be some other purpose to its presence in film? And,
should music “tell the audience how to feel” or should its “hand-holding”
function be eschewed for establishing a space for exploration, interrogation,
and generally more active engagement of the audience? Hollywood’s answer to
these questions is well known. Others who prefer more semiotically neutral film
scores or no scores at all tend to look for alternatives in expressive sound
designs which sometimes feature overtly musical qualities. Interestingly
enough, Darren Aronofsky’s own hip hop editing style which he developed in his
first two films, Pi
and Requiem for a Dream, became one of the most recognizable tools of
this new film sound vocabulary, epitomizing the digital-era style of sound and
image musicalization which is imitated across audiovisual media. While Mother!
does not exactly burst with the same ambition for audiovisual innovation,
it does draw on the notion of sound design as an expressive device which
can replace the functions of a traditional film score; it embraces the idea of
musicality in its broadest sense while also taking advantage of the narrative
and emotional ambiguities traditional scores tend to eliminate. The danger, of
course, is that the lack of score can be experienced as a lack of emotional
commitment and guidance from the film which denies the viewer an affective
“reckoning” with it. I would argue, though, that this decision makes
Aronfosky’s allegory more powerful, opening up a space for spontaneous and
highly individual responses.
Mother! is not a genre film but, as part of its strategy of undermining
a single point of view position and interpretation, it pretends to be one for a
good portion of its first half. Leaning on the archetypal “damsel in distress”
scenario, it reinforces genre tropes by gravitating towards moments of surprise
or anxiety-inducing ambiguity and by using sound effects in a manner typical of
horror scores. From the beginning the sound design encourages us to
perceive the house in which Mother (Lawrence) and the Poet (Bardem) reside as a
living, breathing organism which sighs, throbs, groans, and bleeds. Creaky
sounds of doors and floorboards dominate the first half of the film and
although mother is almost always barefoot, her footsteps nevertheless resonate
through the house, alluding to its age and the mystical aspects of its nature.
These sonic allusions gradually give way to increasingly visceral moments of
discomfort. When uninvited guests start appearing at the house, their actions
are sonically amplified with whooshes and echoes which affect Lawrence’s
character, making her physically sick, as if she’s reacting to the guests’
“sonic footprints.” The repeated scenes in which Mother communicates with the house
by placing her hands on the wall to feel its heartbeat are evocative of those
key moments from Aronofsky’s earlier films – pill or drug taking, communing
with the tree of life, etc. – which, treated as audiovisual samples, become
symbolic of their core ideas. In this case, the image of a gradually shrinking
and dying heart comments on the state of our planet, but the first time we see
it, the sound in the scene is bent on creating a sense of suspenseful
ambiguity, leaving the viewer guessing whether Lawrence’s character is mentally
disturbed or if the house might embody some malevolent presence.
It could be argued, though, that these sonic flirtations with horror
conventions serve more as a comment on the nature of our relationship with
Mother Earth than as an actual tool of suspense, because it is the later scenes
in which the house is overrun by people that evoke the real terror of
nightmares. Although the eye of the camera is generally focused on Lawrence’s
beatific face, which is often framed as a Madonna from Renaissance paintings,
the sound design reflects the chaos surrounding her, the shouts and mayhem
caused by strangers filling the house to the brim. In the midst of all that,
Mother’s repeated but ineffective requests to the guests to stop destroying her
house and leave, and her helplessness in the face of humanity’s destructive
nature, are more unsettling than any scenes of violence before or after.
The God-like figure of Bardem’s character called “Him” in the credits
and the Poet in the film is a Creator who preaches love and generosity but also
abandons his abode from time to time and seems equally impotent when confronted
with the human propensity for violence and destruction. He’s also vain and
hungry for adoration, which seems to be the main reason his “projects”
regularly end up burned to the ground. More disturbingly, he can create only by
sacrificing those who love him. Aronofsky’s decision to have the male
protagonist represent both God and the Artist is probably the most provocative
and biting aspect of the film, which seems to carry both religious and
autobiographical resonances. The audiovisual allusions to the divine aspect of
Bardem’s character, however, are executed with the same playfulness Aronofsky
displays when dealing with genre conventions. Apart from obvious biblical
references in the narrative and some memorable low-angle shots, this
character’s deific nature is also implied by sound, his voice reverberating
unrealistically in several crucial moments. In one of those moments, when he
comes to rescue Mother from a mob of uninvited guests, the unnatural volume and
resonance of his voice is “explained” by his wearing of a gas-mask even though
by that point in the film any expectations of the narrative being grounded in
realism are long gone.
The unlikely combination of an interest in esoteric topics and an
intensely visceral type of filmmaking inspired some ground-breaking practices
in the use of sound in Aronofsky’s early films. Mother! won’t be remembered for
the same reason, but the passionate
opposing reactions it has provoked with its allegorical narrative and
storytelling style indicate that Aronofsky is not done with rearranging the
landscape of contemporary American cinema.
***
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson is Lecturer in Music at University College
Cork. Her research interests include comparative arts, approaches to film that
emphasize its inherent musical properties, the musicality of sound design and
musical aspects of Beckett’s plays. She is the author of The Musicality of
Narrative Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and co-editor (with Liz Greene) of The
Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated
Soundtracks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 
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