The season of fall horror movies is upon us; It reigns the box office
and a slew of Halloween slashers will soon follow, but it is Darren Aronofsky’s
Mother! that is generating the most debate.
At once a psychological thriller and eschatological allegory, Mother! is
perhaps more horrific than horror, though it brushes at the edges of the genre
in several regards. The film dissects the relationship between “Mother”
(Jennifer Lawrence) and “Him” or the Poet (Javier Bardem). As unexpected house
guests arrive at their home, the poet nonchalantly and unceasingly undercuts
Lawrence’s character at every turn. In this respect, I believe Mother! serves
both as a metaphor for human existence and participates in a lineage of horror
films concerning marginalized, tormented young women that undergo some sort of
supernatural transformation (Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Witch come to
mind).
The movie closely aligns audience members with the Mother.
Over-the-shoulder, hand-held shots follow her throughout the home she has so
lovingly restored for the Poet after a fire. Numerous extreme close-ups of
Lawrence’s face as well as point-of-view shots strengthen the audience’s
connection to the character. We share her sense of beleaguerment when Michelle
Pfeiffer’s character, one of many unwanted guests, brazenly leaves the kitchen
filthy after making lemonade, teases the Mother about her underwear, and
interrogates her about having children. Lawrence’s character begs the Poet to dismiss
the rude visitors, who multiply exponentially by the film’s climax. The Mother,
now heavy with pregnancy, inspires the Poet to write after a long stretch of
writer’s block. The success of the new work brings with it pilgrims hoping to
meet the Poet. He refuses to turn the visitors away; he thrives on their
adoration and abandons his wife’s love for the blind devotion of strangers.
What begins as fanatic fervor transforms into a violent mob of anarchic
disciples seeking to steal, consume, and destroy the Mother’s beloved
creations: the home, and, eventually, her newborn son. Devastated and
desperate, the Mother sets fire to herself and the home. All is char. Yet, she
remains conscious in a black coal of a body while the Poet is unscathed. He
carries her up to his study, where she bestows him with a final gift: her
heart, now a crystal of flame. The Poet digs the crystal out of her chest and
places it in a display stand. The world is renewed; the film “returns” to the
beginning, with a new Mother.
Just as the narrative and cinematography work to generate audience
empathy for the Mother character, so does the sound design. The soundtrack for Mother!
exploits sound design to effectively arouse tension and fear. In this, it is
hardly unique; horror films from Hitchcock’s The Birds to Peele’s Get Out utilize
sound to heighten the cinematic sensorium. Mother!, however, pushes the
boundary between sound and music in a specific way. I argue that not only can
we consider sound as musical in the film (a Cagean approach to listening that
befits many horror films), but that sound in Mother! does the semiotic
heavy-lifting that is typically expected of an underscore. In other words, not
only does sound seem musical, it acts like music in the film. The aesthetic of
sound rendering along with a few key sound effects contribute to this
phenomenon.
In Mother!, sounds are hyper-rendered; they are sweetened with reverb
and raised to the foreground of the audio mix. From the very opening of the
film, this super-sonicity is associated with the Mother. Throughout the film,
it is as if auditor-spectators hear through her tinnitus-afflicted ears. The
groans of the house reverberate through the auditorium thanks to Dolby stereo.
The sounds emitted by the house envelop the audience; it is as if the structure
replicates an in utero soundscape. External to the body, electric lights buzz
like lightening, a broken teacup rings its destruction without decay, water,
wind, crickets all are hyper-realized in the soundtrack. This effect is used
most powerfully towards the climax of the film. The Poet steals the newborn son
from the dozing Mother’s arms and passes the crying babe to his thralls. Like a
demented crowd surfer, the baby floats on the hands of the mob; at the doorway
a disgusting thud, offset by a silent pause, reverberates through the
soundtrack. I gasped at the shock of it; auditor-spectators, like the Mother,
are attuned to the sounds of the newborn and horrified by the sound of his head
being crushed. It is the sound of finality. Overall, the hyper-rendering of
sound effects lead auditor-spectators to hear from the point of audition of the
Mother; they are thus encouraged to empathize with her position in the
narrative.
Two other effects work as narrative bookends for the film. The first
appears during the opening credits; the sound of a nibbed pen echoes in
synchronization with the animated scrawl of Mother! in the title credits. The
scratching immediately informs auditor-spectators of writing’s centrality to
the story. Yet, the sound is sweetened with an effect reminiscent of the
unsheathing of a sword. There is a violence to these handwritten words, a
violence made apparent in the film’s final half hour. The end credits complete
this impression. After a haunting cover of “The End of the World,” the sound of
the slashing pen returns, illuminating the end credits. The ink blots splatter
like the blood of the baby and the Mother that the audience saw destroyed a few
minutes earlier. When natural sound effects like the chirping of crickets
encroach on the sound effect of the pen during the end credits, it seems as if
nature might remedy the world of violent logos.
Immediately following the opening credits with the metallic scratch of
writing, the audience receives a sound advance. The screen remains darkened
while the sound of fire blazes in stereo. A close up of Jennifer Lawrence’s
face aflame fills the screen a second later. The emphasis on the sound of fire
before the film’s visual narrative begins is a striking one. It indicates
through sound the thematic relevance of fire to the story. Beyond this, the
sound of the fire is deeply elemental—it is a giver and destroyer of life,
ruinous and purifying at once. Over the course of the film, the audience
discovers that it is the sound of the Mother, the cyclically ravaged and
renewed muse to Him.
While Mother! is not a horror film in the traditional sense, in many
aspects it functions like one; its story reveals humanity’s deepest fears and
dark desires. What is so haunting about the film is the accumulation of minor
offenses into something of apocalyptic proportions. It can be read as
allegories of humanity’s relationship to nature, to gender politics, and to Christianity.
However we choose to perceive Mother!, one thing is clear: the soundtrack
invites us to listen to the marginalized and maltreated. It is in this act of
listening that we might lay a foundation of empathy upon which a home can be
rebuilt.
***
For more on this, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female
Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008), 101-140.
***
Brooke McCorkle is an opera and film music scholar. She is currently a
Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at SUNY-Geneseo. Her published and
forthcoming works address topics as varied as Star Trek Concerts, Wagner
reception in Japan, and ecological critiques in monster cinema. Please see here for more information.
No comments:
Post a Comment