I finally got around to watching mother!, last year’s controversial pseudo-horror film that National Review called “the vilest movie ever released by a major Hollywood studio,” and that many others found simply bewildering. I didn’t think it was nearly that hard to understand; it’s an allegory, and a clever one. It just happens to be intensely evil.
“Clever” is, of course, the most that can ever be said for allegories; as an artistic form, allegory isn’t capable of more, because while it can be made indefinitely wide, it can’t be made deep. Pilgrim’s Progress is clever, perhaps even inspiring to some, but it can’t delve to the level necessary to make it art rather than propaganda. Propaganda and allegory are essentially the same, because the characters and action are nothing more than proxies for matters adjudicated elsewhere. So mother! is clever, and that’s not a bad thing. Nor is it badly made. It’s quite well made, in fact, and the acting is—well, fine enough. I’m not a fan of Jennifer Lawrence, who’s always seemed pretty monotone to me. But she’s up to the material here.
Yet this is a film of such intense misanthropy that it literally longs for the destruction of all mankind. Celebrates it, in fact; lusts for Armageddon; dreams fanatically for the death of all mankind—and ends as a kind of tragedy in which the audience is invited to be disappointed that such a thing is impossible, in the terms offered by the film. I’ve certainly never seen a movie as full of hatred for the human race as this one.
What caused confusion about mother! was that some in the audience only saw it as a satire or criticism of Christianity. And it certainly is that. The husband (Javier Bardem)—referred to only as The Poet or Him, or in one especially obvious scene, as “I am I”—is the Judaeo-Christian God. The film shows Him up as insane, bull-headed, vainglorious beyond measure. But mother! does not stop there. In fact, it is not an anti-religious movie. Quite the contrary. It is a pro-religious movie. Just—of a different religion.
Mother! is a showdown between Christianity—or, more accurately, of Christendom; the culture and legacies of Christianity in addition to the faith itself—and the religion of Environmentalism, as represented by the Earth Mother, Jennifer Lawrence. The film does not celebrate any secular virtue; it does not lead us to admire or even consider reason, science, discovery, or any kind of human value at all. The only value the film approaches celebrating is fecundity, but even this is merely asserted as a value yet (rather prominently) without any explanation of why it is a value. And the film does not condemn the God-figure husband for the faults that skeptics and atheists have long cited in criticizing religion. Rather, He is condemned most of all for His affection for humanity, an affection that is shown to us as pathological.
Humanity appears in the film as a contemptible, diseased, rude, crude, greedy, suicidally stupid race of monsters. From the Cain-and-Abel sequence at the beginning (notably, only Gaea sees the stain of sin they leave on the floor; God does not) to the people who, told it’s unsafe to sit on the sink, insist on hopping up and down on it (thus causing Noah’s flood), to the socialist rioters and imperialist warriors at the end, humanity is portrayed as nothing other than a thoroughgoing disaster. They break and defile the home, stealing and destroying everything in it, despite the mother’s constant begging that they stop. In other words, mankind insists on polluting the earth, trespassing on it, and taking it as their own. Fair enough—that much is to be expected in any sort of Deep Ecology Fairy Story. But God encourages them throughout to do so—giving them dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock—and this is shown to us as an abuse of the Earth Mother, one that rises to such intensity that the audience is enlisted to sympathize with her when she begs God to destroy humanity so the two of them can be “alone together.” She pleads with Him time and time again to “make them (human beings) go away,” and He stubbornly refuses. In other words, we are expected to share her panicked frustration that God refuses her pleas to engage the Final Solution. The climax of His faults comes when the vile humans have murdered Gaea’s newborn baby, and He insists on the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. This makes her snap, and she blows up the house, murdering all humanity, and herself in the process. The audience is expected to see this as a triumph.
Mother! thus condemns Christianity not for its faults, but for its few virtues—for those aspects of the faith that are arguably humane and civilized; for its emphasis on forgiveness, compassion, celebration, abundance, fellowship, hospitality, understanding, and human life. The film longs for the possibility of God and Earth alone together in silence, undisturbed by the rapacious vermin that is homo sapiens. It is because God refuses to do this—His reasons being a mixture of corrupt longing for human adulation, an insatiable need to create beautiful things, and a tenderness toward the strange and sweet creature that is man—that He is portrayed as the villain. At last, longing for the peace of oblivion, the Earth Mother begs Him to kill her, only to find that even this is impossible, because He has locked her in an infinite cycle of creation and cruelty. God has made her, and sold her into slavery to His wicked creatures, for eternity.
Mother! reeks with hatred for man, hatred that comes almost as an afterthought to its thoughtless and inhumane worship of Gaea, in contrast with whom not only Yaweh but all other gods, prophets, values, and virtues are made out to be false. Thus the film is not just “mocking Christian dogma,” as National Review claimed; it is intended as a tract in support of an alternative faith, a faith more hostile to humanity and secularism than almost any other religion you can name—a religion whose godhead is Nature undisturbed by human beings, and in which everything that gives life meaning has been eradicated to make the planet pristine. Of course, a planet cleansed of humanity isn’t clean. It’s just a rock.
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