Mother! mastermind Darren Aronofsky has said that he is open to audiences interpreting his surreal nightmare drama, premiering Friday, in a number of ways. He personally described the film as an “assault” and a “fever dream.” Star Jennifer Lawrence acknowledged that it isn’t a horror film as much as it is a giant allegory, and the film was only classified as horror because they wanted to mentally prepare audiences for the atrocities graphically depicted on screen. And last week, at a Toronto Film Festival premiere, co-star Ed Harris joked, “I’m still not quite sure what to think of it all.” Deadpanned Javier Bardem: “Basically I did not know what I was doing . . . I don’t even really speak English.”
[Spoilers ahead: do not read unless you have seen the film!]
But what can we make of the film’s symbolism? And what does the film’s punishing, final, 25-minute opus—in which Lawrence’s Mother Earth character is burned, beaten, and ravaged beyond recognition—mean? Ahead, we search through our interviews with Aronofsky, Lawrence, and production designer Philip Messina—as well as conversations elsewhere—for clues.
THE BIG PICTURE
According to Lawrence, the film “depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth. It’s not for everybody,” she warned The Telegraph. “It’s a hard film to watch. But it’s important for people to understand the allegory we intended. That they know I represent Mother Earth; Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; __Michelle Pfeiffer)) is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam; there’s Cain and Abel; and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.”
THE TITLE
Aronofsky has said that the odd punctuation of the title is a clue to the film’s dizzying, 25-minute conclusion—his cinematic exclamation point being a sequence in which Lawrence’s character, Mother, claws her way through a climactic, five-part fever dream of horrors that have fallen upon her cherished creation.
The Washington Post points out that, before settling on Mother! as a title, Aronofsky toyed with another marquee clue, giving his film the working name of Day Six—a nod to the day in the book of Genesis on which God created humanity and gave it dominion over the Earth.”
The Telegraph builds on the Genesis parallels, adding the following context:
You see, God’s creations have a tendency to go wild, leading him to continuously wash away his work and start anew over and over until things run more smoothly.
Bardem’s character is also obsessed with a mysterious crystal that he keeps in his office, which nobody is allowed to touch, and often takes advantage of Lawrence’s kindly nature. But she takes it in her stride, insisting that her husband is a very special sort of genius and needs time and space to create his next work.
THE VISITORS
First, Aronofsky’s allegorical Adam appears on Lawrence and Bardem’s doorstep, talking his way into a temporary stay in the couple’s guest bedroom. He appears to be dying and, in one scene, Lawrence walks in on Harris doubled over a toilet in agony—his rib noticeably bruised.
Soon after, Lawrence is in the bathroom when the toilet clogs. She plunges it, only for a red organ to surface in the toilet bowl. While some viewers assumed the body part was a heart, production designer Messina interpreted the script detail as being “the moment in the Bible when God takes Adam’s rib and creates Woman. My interpretation of it was that it was the piece of Adam that had been sloughed off. Because [Bardem] was in the bathroom with the surgeon. There’s clearly a wound on his back and on his rib cage. And the next morning, his wife shows up. I’m not saying that is what it was, but that was my interpretation.”
As for Pfeiffer, Aronofsky told Vanity Fair that the actress “was playing this kind of Eve character, the first woman character. I was trying to think, ‘What was Eve? Who was Eve?’ And I said she was mischievous—if I had to come up with one trait. You could sort of conceive of her eating the apple mischievously,” Aronofsky said. (Though in his version, Bardem’s crystal is the forbidden fruit.) “So I said, ‘Play that’ and she took it and became this cat playing with a mouse of Jen Lawrence.”
Though Bardem’s character is occasionally affectionate toward Mother, he cannot resist his worshippers and continually invites more into their home.
THE OVERFLOWING TOILET
Speaking of, Messina provided a few more details on this Cronenberg-ian moment.
“As a viewer, this is still early enough in the film where you think this is a real environment and you’re not quite sure how crazy this world is going to get,” Messina said. “On set, we called it the chicken breast. It was like an amorphous, fleshy piece. To me, it was too gross to be a heart. It was made of silicone. It looked like a jellyfish with more mass to it. It had tendrils on it. We called it the pulsing anus because of the way it opened up. Darren was very specific about how, when she flushed it, it gets stuck and comes back up.”
“We shot that thing in the toilet I think three different times to get it right, so that was all a physical effect on set. That was all there . . . literally shooting that toilet take after take because you’ve got to get the flushing of it right. God, it was so many discussions about the toilet.”
THE OCTAGONS
Aronofsky did not think about the shape until he and Messina began doing research on Victorian homes. They discovered that some Victorian homes were actually built in the eight-sided shape, explained Aronofsky, because “scientists believed it was the perfect shape for the brain.”
The more Aronofsky read about the shape, the more he embraced it. In the film, it appears everywhere from the footprint of Bardem’s office to the lighting fixtures, door panes, and picture frames.
“There are all of these alchemy theories about the octagon and numeric beliefs about the number eight and about infinity and regeneration,” said Aronofsky, adding that it also gave him a new, literal dimension to play with in terms of cinematography. “The reason I like the octagon shape as a filmmaker was when I shot through a doorway you’re not looking at a flat wall. You’re looking at a diagonal wall that adds depth and just makes things more interesting.”
THE ELIXIR LAWRENCE DRINKS
It looks like orange Emergen-C that Lawrence’s character knocks back several times throughout the film. And Messina said that the significance of the elixir is actually open to interpretation.
“This movie comes from Darren’s mind, but he really wanted the people around him to interpret it and give their opinions about it,” Messina said about the production process. “Given the movies that Darren has made, like Requiem for a Dream, is she dosing herself?” Messina wondered to Vanity Fair, noting that the film is told entirely through Lawrence’s perspective with careful camera angles. “‘Is this really happening? Is this all a dream?’”
“It was never really spelled out by Darren,” Messina said. “We talked about the feeling of it and what he wanted it to feel like, but he was never like, ‘So the tincture is this.’”
“To me, the tincture was something that grounded her, brought her back. As humanity starts coming in the door, you start to see the harm they’re doing to her world, her house. The sort of blackness that happens, the degradation, the little bits of pieces of destruction that start happening. And the tincture, in some ways, I think, was a self-medication.”
MOTHER’S CONNECTION TO THE HOUSE
At several points in the film, Lawrence’s character reaches out and touches the walls of the home—feeling something inside of them. Both Lawrence and Aronofsky have spoken about one major breakthrough about Mother’s character being the idea that the house she built from the ground up is an extension of her.
“We both came up with the idea that she should go barefoot for the entire movie and be more connected to the house, which was sort of part of her—one organism—so she slipped off her shoes and put her feet on the hardwood floor and I just saw her change and she became the character,” Aronofsky said.
Messina said that he and Aronofsky spent a lot of time discussing “Mother’s direct and visual and emotional connection to the house. It was called ‘the darkness of her imagination’—the moments where she touches the walls and has this direct connection, seen as almost a beating heart—a more organic structure inside the house that she was connected to.”
As for the moments when Lawrence puts her finger through the wooden floor, Messina and Aronofsky had a lot of discussions about what kind of texture the wood required. “Do we want the wood to splinter? Do we want it to be mushy?”
“I just remember Darren saying, ‘No, it’s like a wound, a gushy wound.’ At some point we had to let go of the literalness of what we were doing. It’s a house, but it’s not a house. It’s a wood floor, but it’s really not a wood floor. You have to keep those rules of what the reality is somewhere in there, but kind of break it out into a broader interpretation of what we were trying to do.”
THE SINK
When guests storm the house for a funeral, two break a sink that Lawrence has been pleading that no one touch. Water pours into the house—a mini-Noah’s flood—and guests are finally driven away.
THE ENDING
Aronfsky referred to the final 25-minute opus—a disturbing escalation of violent images—as “one of my best accomplishments, just because it’s a nightmare. It just builds and builds on top of documenting the horrors of our world, and throws a pregnant woman into it.”
In the span of the final half hour, Aronofsky, somewhat incredibly, charts the biblical plagues and the history of the world in a dizzying sequence. While heavily pregnant, Lawrence claws herself through the maze of horrors until finding quiet in an upstairs bedroom.
Messina said, “We talked extensively about the last 30 minutes and how we could get it to scale. The house was a big set but it was not as big as it looked on film. We had to make it look maze-like and disorienting. There were discussions about, ‘How do we stage a war and riot police and Molotov cocktails in this big house?’ At one point we talked about letting the house get physically bigger—and considered moving walls out and building a bigger version. But Darren really wanted to always feel like the house was still there. Like we never really left the house. That it was always a presence. So, physically, all those scenes took place within the same space that we shot the entire movie in. There was no trickery there at all.”
“We had these mapping meetings where we’re like, okay, this is going to be the apocalypse with all this ash, and she crawls over the bodies. This is going to be the part where the guy gets shot in the head. This is the part where people are in trenches. This is the part where it’s a refugee camp. We literally were changing over things as we were shooting them. There was only one set, so as they were shooting one scene then we’d come in at night and start destroying more of the walls, or building the refugee camp. Every morning, or every couple of mornings during that shooting period, the house was changing dramatically. We had a lot of discussions about how we transition visually from one of these worlds to another.”
“That was called the fever dream as we were shooting it. So in the fever dream, it was like five different worlds that we were transitioning to.”
THAT KRISTEN WIIG CAMEO
Kristen Wiig’s casting as Bardem’s publisher was pure coincidence, which married well with Aronofsky’s aspiration to create a fever dream for audiences.
“There were actors we were talking to, but when I heard Kristen was available, I said, ‘Sure,’” explained Aronofsky. “I think it works with the whole weird dream vibe of the movie. That suddenly this familiar face shows up. I don’t want to say that Kristen shows up in a nightmare, but it’s very strange and odd. You’re not expecting it, and it kind of throws audiences. I think it’s just another way of people going, ‘What’s she doing?’ and seeing her character take all these surprise turns you would never expect of her. It was fun, and about giving audiences a little gift in the middle of the film.”
THE BABY
Mother Earth gives birth to a baby she wants to protect from the evils swirling in her own household. She stays awake for days, refusing to hand the baby over to Bardem for fear he will share him with his worshippers. When she falls asleep, Bardem does just that. His worshippers swiftly snap the baby’s neck in their frenzied excitement, dismember him, and eat his body parts—literally consuming the body and blood of Christ.
Overcome with rage (understandably!) and refusing to listen to her husband, who pleads with her to forgive the worshippers, Lawrence takes it upon herself to destroy everything in the home she has created.
THE IMAGE OF BARDEM TAKING MOTHER’S HEART
As unlikely as it sounds, Aronofsky said that the children’s book The Giving Tree partially inspired Mother!, one of the most haunting movies in recent memory.
At the end of the film, Bardem carries Lawrence—burned beyond recognition—out from the ashes of their demolished home. He asks her for one more thing.
“I gave you everything,” Lawrence tells her husband. “I have nothing left to give.”
When Bardem points out that she still has a heart, she gives him permission to take that too. He plunges his hand into her chest cavity and pulls out her last bit of life.
“Here’s a tree that gives up everything for the boy,” Aronofsky said of the parallel. “That’s pretty much the same thing.”
In a nod to Hindu religion—which states that God created and destroyed the universe infinite times—the cycle begins again: ashes, crystal, a new home, a new Mother!
WHY?!
“I think Hubert Selby Jr., the author of Requiem for a Dream, said you have to look into darkness to see the light,” explained Aronofsky. “It’s important to reflect back on ourselves and think about what’s really going on in the world to be able to change course.”
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