Monday, October 29, 2018

hEllO mOthEr!

Okay, is two times the charm?

Darren Aronofsky's mother! (so capitalized) seems nice. A amiable and unassuming domestic family drama.

Were it so. This Molotov cocktail, designed intentionally to incite, was insufferable to me the first time I watched it, and also as fascinating, broken, and audacious as anything else I used to obsess over when I wasn't quite sure what the actual rhetorical, industrial, or genre rules were in filmic story-telling.

We would watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, Blue Velvet, Plan 9 From Outer Space, or Special Effects not because they were particularly insightful or moving. Because they seemed to come from another planet. People who stuttered and couldn't get their consonants out. Films circling around some metaphoric truth but unable to speak the right language.

They're all genre films. But they don't follow the rhetorical rules. They lurch and fail to explain. They spend too long motivating what's already understood. They hide their intentions poorly, say the quiet part loud, and obscure the loud parts in hyperbole, or hysteria, or drowned out in even louder noise.

It's often blamed on the unintentional failure of the proper emphasis. How boring would Blue Velvet have been if Sidney Lumet directed? Or if Pulp Fiction had been told chronologically? I'm all for movies that go off the rails, or maybe have no rails to begin with.  Aronofsky seems to have embraced the "hysterical" part.

I don't think there's anything unintentional about mother! It pretty clearly screams early its uber-trappings as idyllic domestic drama as ripe for decoding. Visions of beating hearts and bloody floor openings presumably aren't to be taken literally, and a rogue's gallery of arbitrary visitors into the kingdom of the needy creator (Bardem) lead to the destruction of his talismanic crystal egg in his study, which he thereafter shutters closed, ensuring no one else will enter. Should our lead character (Lawrence) take this seriously or personally? A disorienting, hyper-subjective mise-en-scene centered on our heroine frustrates and compels us to watch. Wondering when the rabbit scene is, waiting for him to pull out an axe, or even just the mother part.

The real screams come soon after.

It helps to know your film history. It also makes you impatient with ground already trod. Mr. Aronofsky clearly had big metaphors in mind, and relishes the cognitive challenges of making plot into thesis, philosophy into conflict. He's made dreams carnal, reality into hallucinations. From Pi to Noah, he reduces (elevates?) plot mechanics using literal metaphor into character studies. He strips his symbols of literal meaning by making them too literal.

In mother!, I feel he's stripped his metaphor of outside meaning and all he has left are the symbols. It's a POV fallacy, which leaves us looking in the wrong direction, but the plot's hiding in plain sight. As an afterthought, detritus of the grand experiment, scratches in the bark that mean nothing to those who don't know what they're looking at. Have some more water.

No wonder people hated it. Both too confrontational and weirdly obvious, mother! boldly breaks what we would consider proper emphasis between text and subtext. The first and best hint is in the title font itself, a lowercase one-word title misdirecting you to a pretentious yet quiet drama of domesticity and yet insisting on its self-importance by that exclamation point.

I swear, it made me miss the restraint of Larry Cohen.




1 comment:

Not Amused said...

I am sorry. Your analysis may be correct, but I am not smart enough to understand most of what you said. I hated the film and found it to be too disturbing. God, I wish I had not seen the last 10 minutes. I need therapy for a year after that. W@as this film necessary for some reason? To me, it was madness and depravity---it had no redeeming value whatsoever.