Mother!

And on the eighth day, the Lord created allegory.

I have to start by admitting I’m a huge Darren Aronofsky fan due to the towering achievement of Black Swan, my top movie of the 2010s and a Top 5 all-time personal favorite. I will cavalierly claim that Christopher Nolan is my favorite director, then remember The Fountain and Noah and Mother! and that an Aronofsky film feels like the deep struggle to convey something powerful, even universal. Nolan is the accomplished author easily placing his polished pages into place for us to enjoy; Aronofsky is the writer waking tormented at midnight and scrawling out his dreamlike meditations before they disappear back into the void and then, come morning, attempting to assign them form and narrative and daring to believe we will understand. If it seems like I’m romanticizing him a bit, it’s because I know very little about him other than what has dazzled me on the magical screen, and I’m a little fascinated that he looks like he could be my building’s FedEx delivery guy.

Mother! is his audacious 2017 thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, which I watched while visiting my friend in Austin. (Same friend with whom I watched Nope, and Us, and Crimes of the Future, and Veronica, and…) It was quite the experience and stuck with me for a long while, and sure enough, when I recently revisited it, I discovered additional layers ripe for interpretation, framings even more fantastical than the head-scratching surface narrative with its cloistered setting and intense buildup of home invasion insanity.

We start with a woman on fire, literally, and a house reduced to ashes by the flames that, as the camera takes us on a tour, slowly reconstructs and remodels itself back to a semblance of its former glory. We end in the master bedroom, where Lawrence’s character, never given a name, wakes up alone and calls out to her partner.

Lawrence and Bardem (also never given a name) are a loving, introverted, but imperfect couple living in a masterful octagonal house tucked away in the countryside. Lawrence has spearheaded the renovations, restoring every brick and frame and molding in meticulous detail; Bardem is a writer, a poet, who has had writer’s block ever since the house initially burned down.

Their idyllic but isolated existence is interrupted by the arrival of a man, a doctor, who says he mistook the house for a B&B, and Bardem is too thrilled by the prospect of company, a new face and conversation, to send him away; in fact, he lets the man stay the night, even though he does inconsiderate things like get drunk and smoke in the house. The next day the doctor’s wife shows up and she, too, assumes her presence is welcome, while all of this newness thoroughly rattles Lawrence.

Then it happens: their son shows up, angry and waving paperwork about, rambling about a trust and betrayal and being robbed; a second son shows up, they fight, and in the intensity of the moment, one of the boys murders the other. He dies at the hospital, and while Lawrence is attempting to deal with what she witnessed and how her home life has been so ruptured by the imposition of these impossible people, the man and woman show back up at the house dressed in black with mourners in tow — Bardem has allowed them to hold the wake at their house! Suddenly it’s like an infestation, people walking around like they own the place, being overly familiar, and subtly disrespecting the property, including sitting on a dry sink that Lawrence has to tell them isn’t braced so get off. She even catches a couple going into the master bedroom to make out — and they are weirdly cavalier about their infraction when she orders them out, as though…just, weirdly as though somehow her room didn’t really belong to her at all.

The violations intensify (one guy literally starts painting a wall) until finally the idiots who insist on sitting on the sink manage to break it off of the wall, bursting the pipes and effectively flooding the downstairs. Lawrence screams at everyone to leave, which they begrudgingly do.

To keep this abridged, I’ll just say that in the reacquired solitude Lawrence becomes pregnant and Bardem is able to write again. They share more idyllic months together until at last he has completed his work and she reads it; she calls it “perfect” while a tear drops.

On the first day of publication, the work sells out. Every copy sold. While Lawrence prepares a celebratory dinner, people begin showing up outside the house in the twilight, wanting to see, to touch the poet who has so drastically changed their lives with his words. And because of the poet’s not-altogether-cloaked vanity, things go downhill and do not stop. Though Lawrence protests about the gathering, he gently insists, and soon the fans have matriculated into the house while he signs autographs at a makeshift table. Then, instead of autographs, he is smudging their foreheads — more and more people come into the house seeking the poet — nature finds a way — despite Lawrence’s angst she is defenseless against this invasion, and also heavily pregnant; no one heeds her pleas to leave the home, to stop stealing their wares, to not set up camp. And it escalates and escalates, into what by now the viewer has to understand is pure fiction within fiction. There’s an active nightclub in one room; in another, trafficked women are held behind a gate. The police show up, fires have started, people are revolting, a bomb goes off — all while Lawrence is enduring labor pains. Pure, honest, categorical mayhem, and Bardem is also at this point helpless to stop the madness.

Lawrence and Bardem manage to escape up to his study to be alone and deliver the child, and the baby’s cries have the power to bring everything outside the room to a halt; it is now silent. Yet instead of taking advantage of this, Bardem insists, again in his vanity, on presenting the child to the masses. The people immediately abscond with the infant and it dies in their mishandling; when Lawrence runs through the crowd to find her baby, she sees (and here again the viewer has to know A Point is being made) that people have begun to solemnly eat the baby.

She loses it. It matters not what transpires or how; it’s game over. Lawrence sets the house on fire and cleanses it of all the evil and ugliness and unthinking primitiveness that had invaded what was once a beautiful refuge just for her and the man she loved.

We see a woman on fire, and a house reduced to ashes by the flames that, as the camera glides up from the cellar, slowly reconstructs and remodels itself back to a semblance of its former glory. We end in the master bedroom, where a woman wakes up alone and calls out to her partner.

* * * *

By now you’ve probably guessed this is just One Big Biblical Allegory. Let’s retrace our steps — and do stick with me, because this is a required stop on the journey to the real hidden meaning of this film.

A man shows up to interrupt the monotony of the couple’s isolated life. He’s an orthopedic surgeon, because a veterinarian would have been too on the nose. As he converses with Bardem in the study, he notices a book and discovers that Bardem is the author. The man says: “I'm a huge fan. I've read it many, many times. Your words have changed my life.”

Later, very late in the evening, Lawrence discovers the man sick in a downstairs bathroom after having too much to drink, with Bardem attending him. The man is shirtless, and we catch a glimpse of an angry wound on the right side of his back before Bardem covers it up and shoos her away. A tiny voice in the back of my mind, where metaphors and intuition live free, said to me, I wonder if a woman is going to show up? And the next day his wife shows up.

The man is Adam, and the women is Eve. The wound represents the taking of one of Adam’s ribs to make his mate, and she shows up in due course. Of course, in the surface narrative they are just a married couple with two grown sons.

Bardem, then, is God. When Adam says “Your words have changed my life,” he truly means words like “Let there be light.” The words of creation which led to the world in which Adam lived and was one day given a helpmeet. While in the study that first evening, Bardem—God—showed off his most prized possession, a large crystal the size and shape of a human heart. He told Adam he found it in the ashes of his home after it burned down, and it gave him the hope of being able to create again. It was obviously very precious and Adam was not allowed to touch it.

Adam and Eve, however, were a little rambunctious as a couple, and even though Lawrence told them not to go into the study, that no one was allowed in there without him, the next thing we know the crystal heart is lying broken on the floor and Adam and Eve look like two badass little kids who need a spanking. God throws them out of the study in a rage. Kind of like tossing them out of Eden after they ate the forbidden fruit because now they had the knowledge of good and evil. He then proceeds to board up the study, the same way God locked up Eden.

Their sons are, clearly, Cain and Abel, which plays out as it must, with the jealous brother ending the life of the favored one, and if you know your Genesis, you can see it coming a mile away. However, Aronofsky is more clever than that—when I went back and listened to the actual argument that they were having, it was the familial disagreement of Jacob and Esau. To recap quickly, their father Isaac was to give them both a special blessing, but Jacob and his mother Rebecca conspired to have him pretend to be Esau to receive the blessing reserved for the elder brother. (Classic Old Testament hijinks) In the movie, you can hear one brother protesting that “she’ll side with him every time”—meaning his mother would choose her favored son Jacob in any decision regarding their trust. It’s a really clever way of giving Cain and Abel something to argue about that, again, isn’t too on the nose, and Aronofsky is good at avoiding unnecessary literalness throughout most of the film.

There was also a really fun moment where, during the brothers’ increasingly physical argument, the camera panned up to where Bardem was standing at the top of the highest staircase, wearing all white, and he let a paint can drop to the floor where the noise reverberated like thunder. Above him light shone through the skylight in a particularly glowing manner. It was all very “angry God about to make a commandment” and one of those great touches that let you know the filmmaker was dead serious about this Bible stuff.

I knew the flood was next, so when the idiot mourners wouldn’t stay off the unbraced sink, it was just a matter of time. As the great flood managed to wipe out the entire population of the earth, so the broken pipes allowed Lawrence’s character to clear out her house and regain solitude once more. And again, no Noah character in order to not be glaringly obvious.

With the interim pregnancy months — Lawrence growing an actual child, Bardem writing his book — we close the Genesis chapter of the film, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fly on the windowsill and the frog in the basement — tiny nods to the plagues in Exodus from which Aronofsky clearly could not refrain.

We enter a sort of limbo as Bardem/God/the Poet receives worldwide acclaim for his work, which represents the Pentateuch or perhaps anachronistically the entire Bible; Adam and Eve are long gone as we move toward Judaism and Christianity. We see the invention of church as, where initially God was smudging the foreheads of his followers in honor of their faithfulness, now a man was ordained to do the smudging in his place, saying each time, “His words are yours.” The first fan to step forward onto the porch became the same man who got hold of the original copy of God’s work and would not return it to the publisher or share it with others; and who later was seen with it gold-plated and held aloft while he and others hopped to a distinctly Eastern beat. The kitchen and dining room are raided, this time literally, by people who insist on having “a piece” of the poet; stealing relics to we assume take back to their home church and place in the altar as is the Catholic rule. All of this and more as the octagonal house descends into chaos as more and more people enter it and change it and society metaphorically evolves and devolves into war. It was actually the only way I could justify the violence eventually, that it speaks to the endless wars of the Old Testament fought in Yahweh’s name.

Interestingly, through the violence, we see that God has no power beyond inspiring people to believe, to follow him, to canonize him. He cannot stop the number of people in the house from multiplying; he cannot direct the evolution of this micro-society; he cannot even be in more than one place at one time. He even gets maced by a police officer who has no idea who he is, showing that Aronofsky’s version of God is localized, regional, prey to the strength of other missions and beliefs. It is a messy and shocking and frustrating act of the film that still serves a purpose toward the overall allegory, and as with the religious allegories in Nolan’s Interstellar, falls into place more easily if you are familiar with less traditional interpretations of the Bible.

Lawrence’s character becomes a Marian figure as she gives birth to a son (back in the Garden of Eden, now a simple barn) who brings peace on Earth, or rather to the house, with his presence. She wants to keep him safe, knowing what awaits them outside, but “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son.” The people wanted to be blessed with the presence of the child and he could not say no. Why did he love them so much? It was still just vanity, always vanity; as Lawrence says at the end of the film, “You never loved me. You just loved how much I love you.”

So the child is given up, passed along high above the crowd, mishandled until its neck is broken, and as mentioned, we see a congregation has already begun to eat of the flesh and drink the blood when Lawrence finds his mangled body on an elaborate altar. As she wails, the congregants weep with her, and a minister echoes Bardem at the wake of Abel as he proclaims, “This is the sound of humanity!” And so it is.

When God insists that instead of taking revenge on the populace, she forgive them for their sins, Lawrence loses it and decides there is nothing worth saving in a place that would ask forgiveness for such a grievance. She goes downstairs (where they have been several times, but which now can metaphorically serve as Hell) and drops a lit match into spilled oil.

And we see Bardem, God, is untouched in the explosion, and that Lawrence’s character is the owner of the crystal heart which he takes each time this happens and places on the mantel in order to recreate the world he so loves because it will one day so love him. It is with this idea of the cyclical nature of death and rebirth — not just dying and rising again, but an endless reincarnation — that Aronofsky chooses to tie up his film in a decidedly Eastern religious way, and perhaps that is the point.

* * * *

Who or what is Sophia?

To quote from earlychristiantexts.com:

Second-century readers of [The Secret Revelation of John] (or those to whom it was read) would have been familiar with Sophia from her long history in Hebrew scriptures and frequent references to her among Christ people as well. To be clear, sophia is a Greek word usually translated in English as ‘wisdom.’ At least in some form, Sophia may be known as far back as the Hebrew Wisdom writings, where ‘wisdom’ (chokmah in Hebrew) appears in Proverbs in a personified context. ‘Lady Wisdom,’ as she was sometimes known, is not really a divine attribute of God or a distinct goddess on her own, even though she appears to take on the function of God or express God’s active involvement in the world.

Wisdom is so highly valued in the Secret Revelation of John, she is part of the original order of the divine creation established for the purpose of glorifying the invisible Spirit. This picture of Sophia (Wisdom) fits with the Jewish writings showing that personified Sophia was present when God created the world, and that she is able to assure humanity of the continued existence of this order.

Lawrence’s character is Sophia, the wisdom that has been with God since the very beginning, and who “assure[s] humanity of the continued existence of this order” with the crystal heart God takes from her at the end of each world. She’s not just his girlfriend who’s really into home renovation.

Sophia also represents the Divine Feminine and Mother Earth (she can perceive within the walls of the house a beating heart that slowly necrotizes with the abuse she endures) and this is expressed extremely well when Eve first shows up. Until then, Sophia knows her place in the order of creation — she knows she is uniquely special to God — and her ability to additionally create and restore within the world is also unique and necessary.

However, when God creates woman with Adam’s rib, he introduces a creative (reproductive) ability outside of Sophia’s domain. It’s different than the plants or the animals — as evolution she made those and they are a part of her expression of existence. These are humans with the consciousness of the demiurge and no formal mating season, giving God an endless diversion and a reason to leave her and his love of the world behind (which we see is not an unfounded fear at all). When Eve arrives, the smoke alarm literally goes off; breakfast is burning on the stove, and Eve tries to help but instead burns her hand on the pan, leading Adam to scream at Sophia for ice, and it is general mayhem until the alarm is finally silenced and the women exchange awkward greetings. It is quite the entrance into the world not only of Woman but of all that this Humanity will mean to it going forward.

It’s important to note that Aronofsky does not utilize much of the actual myth of Sophia (in which she falls from heaven and has to regain her position), but it’s enough that the idea of Sophia having been present with God since the beginning is absent from the traditional Bible (some might say expunged) and to see her represented here rings all the bells. There’s no one else, as far as I know, said to have been with God at that crucial juncture. It’s a bit reminiscent of the myth of Lilith, Adam’s first wife who jumped the fence and therefore is now also missing from the Genesis story.

Although Sophia is not a goddess, even in Greek and Roman mythology, God does call her that once in the film: “Come here, my goddess,” he says to the very pregnant Sophia as he stands at the front door looking out on the sea of fans, soon to be believers.

Where else does Sophia show up in history? According to Robert Kopecky:

Sophia ends up being the giver of wisdom in so many forms: She is Shakti in Sanskrit, the powerful Hindu personification of feminine wisdom, and the personal and collective linking soul as atman, realized in the transcendent state of samadhi (Gnosis). She is the compassionate boddhisatva (Avalokiteshvara) in Buddhism, returning to light the path to nirvana (Gnosis); personified by the deity Guanyin. She is both Mother Mary, in her ascendant form, and Mary Magdalene, as the Earthly companion of the Christ potential in Christian Gnosticism. In Jungian psychology, she is the unifying power (“individuation”) of both the feminine and masculine archetypes, anima and animus, and of the lower self of the psyche with the higher spiritual self (Gnosis).

From the paragraph above, Aronofsky gets away with having Sophia be both the female companion to the male companion in the film (as the Magdalene) and the virginal Mother of Christ, because there is a lot going on here with two main characters and a very small host of supporting characters (not including the nameless invaders).

As Mother! Earth, we see when we pay attention that she is the one who provides food; she puts the log on the fire to provide warmth; she cleans the dirty dishes and the blood on the floor with water; she paints the walls a vivid shade of gold like the sun. At various points men leer at her — literally admiring Nature. We also see that she is helpless to defend her realm. Both times the house is invaded she can only plead with people to stop and to leave and has little to no effect as the humans wander around “as if they own the place,” including the master bedroom. Aronofsky is well known for his urgent views on climate change; if you saw Noah, you may think as I do that he truly believes the world is better off without humanity at all, and Mother! does nothing to contradict that, especially when “the flood” cleanses the house of those nasty pests in both films. Our treatment of the planet is exemplified by Adam and Eve’s treatment of the house; they leave the water running and dirty tissues strewn about; when Eve makes lemonade she leaves everything out on the counter, jars, utensils, lemon rinds; and this foreshadows how the others to follow them will be just as careless. In the end, the only solution is a cleansing fire.

Eve had warned her: at the wake, slightly drunk, she cornered Sophia and confessed that as a mother, you give and give and give, and get nothing in return.

The house as a metaphor for the world is simple but can also be fun when you watch from that view, as when at the beginning of the movie, when Sophia is looking for God, and she steps out onto the porch and scans the yard and surrounding woods — it’s like she’s looking up at the stars. It makes it very interesting, then, when God takes Adam on a turn of the property. (Is this celestial journey hidden in another Gnostic gospel, perhaps?)

What I love about this movie is that it was never meant to work solely as a surface narrative; the surface narrative is metaphorical within the larger allegory. Religious, and specifically Biblical, themes seem to play an important part of a lot of the films I end up reviewing here, and so it seems that the symbology and mythology of Christianity is too tantalizing for many filmmakers to ignore. Having knowledge of the Bible makes this viewing experience what it is, and I think Aronofsky is immovable in that respect. He has something to say — a lot of something, actually, from the way the Earth is treated to the way we treat God — and he’s not going to dumb it down just so more people can ride along.

It has been reported that Aronofsky wrote the first draft (not the final draft, the first draft) of this screenplay in about five days, which many people have sniffed at as reason not to take it seriously, but I actually think there are some quite profound things happening at the micro level of this film, which I will talk about after the break for subscribers.