mother!
Aronofsky does Rosemary’s Baby. Requiem for a Dream of pregnancy.
This is a very uncomfortable film. While there are some scenes so wrong that you can’t help but laugh, nothing is played for laughs. The most common thought through the film is “WTF is wrong with everybody!?”.
Litres of ink was spilled over this, including by the director and the actors. The discussion crystallised over two interpretations: Mother Nature (Global Warming) and Abusive Relationships.
The Abusive Relationships theory fails to explain most of the stuff. Sure, Man treats Mother like shit, but so does everyone else. She is not exactly oppressed by him, it seemed to me she was most of the times disappointed that Man acted with contempt. After the wake, she pushes back hard, but the entire world seemed to conspire against her. The wake woke something in her, feelings she had been repressing for a long time and that she released at once. After that, she feels relieved and more content, until Man returns to his old ways. Now that I write it down, I have to give it some credit.
We are left with the Mother Nature mixed with religious allegories, which abound. Doesn’t make much sense mixing Abrahamic religions with the Mother Earth concept, but what do I know?
The third but Doylist explanation is that Aronofsky wanted to bewilder the viewer by throwing as much contradictory references as possible into the screen. Mission accomplished.
While Mother is the protagonist, and the only person that feels human, she is a sideshow.
The mob is the main character. You can’t fight the mob. The mob is no one and everyone. Capable of manifestations of love and cruel and inhumane actions. The mob is everything. The mob is life.
The best review I read so far called it:
a divisive film with a raw diamond inside
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.