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Saw this myself this past weekend, and have been chewing on it all week like a dog worries a bone. It's... interesting to read the reactions to this movie, both in this thread and in the film reviews, and one of the most interesting things is:BeanpolePeckerwood posted:I'm sorry, I guess it feels like trolling since everyone and their mother! at this point pretty much acknowledges that the biblical allegory is not only easy to catch (sorry, detectives), but essentially facilitates the structure of the narrative, not the text. That is, religious iconography is used for flow over content. The only reason for the presence of religious iconography in this film (held in great contempt, if you ask me) is as a step-stool to a larger point. The very idea that someone could come away from the film having completely missed ALL OF THAT and then label the filmmaking "amateurish" is loving -just how many people, otherwise academic or making pretensions to the same, have come away from the movie thinking the Biblical analogy was "the point" of the movie. (I think my favorite is the New Yorker reviewer writing, "Unlike Buñuel, Aronofsky is not making sport of religion. He is plundering it for images of wrath and apocalypse, and it might be best if he simply filmed the Book of Revelation, complete with ten-horned beasts, and got the whole thing out of his system." and I'm like...  Dude, a) No, and b) Did you not see Noah? He already did. God, why is the New Yorker such trash?) And... I just don't see how somebody can come to that conclusion at all. First of all, the analogies are not simple, very deliberately so; not only can they be read as completely non-religious, as several people have already done, but one of the most interesting things about the way Aronofsky approaches religious depiction is that he doesn't take from one source of anything- his iconography and themes are this glorious grab bag of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jewish mysticism- pretty much anything he thinks will make his point, add to the narrative, or that he just finds interesting. That's the thing that made Noah such a blast to watch for me, the way he just took all of the ideas, both mythological and scientific, of the time of the Old Testament and the story of Noah's Ark, and just threw it all into his setting kitchen-sink style to compose a world both visually striking and memorable and pushing the themes he wanted to push, one of the most obvious being "Yes, climate change is real, and yes, it is completely our fault." Is it religious appropriation to do so? I suppose it is, but like what he's doing or not, you cannot just say "oh, look, it's a simple analogy and nothing else" and call it a day.For example- I'm probably going to get this wrong, I'm not a religious scholar or anything, but there is an idea in Gnostic philosophy that the God mainstream Christianity isn't really the Creator of the universe, but a Usurper who pretends to be, this stranger who just takes credit for the work of creation and wants to be loved. This theory further holds that Jesus Christ was actually an apostle of the true Creator, sent to the world not only to save mankind from itself but to save us from this Usurper by reminding us of the true path (which is certainly one of the more novel ways to separate the Old and New testaments that I've heard). Now, think about that, and think back to a specific part of the film: After the Baby is born, Him wants to show the baby to the masses to "calm them down", but Mother want's no part of it: she just wants them all gone, and suspects-correctly- that this is just another gambit of Him to get even more love. So Him straight up steals the baby from Mother, and gives it to the followers, who promptly kill it and eat it. That sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it... and another odd thing that one notices is that most everything supernatural in this story happens not because of Him, but around Mother- wounds on her manifest on the house, and it is through her heart that the house is created again. So... does Him have any real power at all, or is it all Mother- a fact backed up by the fact that she does all of the work and he gets all the credit? Was she the God figure in this story all along? Or is Aronofsky just deconstructing the idea of the Savior narrative and the horror of choosing some mother's baby to "die on the cross" to prove a point, especially to the mother? Or is something else entirely going on? There is no clear answer to that, and that's okay. That ferments discussion and debate, and the lack of a clear subject of the allegory speaks to the movies power not its weakness. If this were a straight-up, simple allegory with nothing else to say, then yes, it would be bad and deserving of scorn, but that's not this movie. Movies like this are part of the reason I got into movies in the first place, so it disturbs me just how many "serious" critics are dismissing it out of hand. But just as many seem to love it, so... I guess movie criticism is alive and well?
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Sep 26, 2017 14:20
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china bot posted:in all fairness, Possession is a horror-allegory about the crumbling of relationships & male jealousy that plays like an extra-gory Bergman film, so to say it does what mother! does is, at very least, inaccurate. Yeah, I'm... still kinda waiting for a description of how Possession and mother! are alike at all; they may be partially allegorical but the scope of mother! is purposefully broad while Possession's is really not, being about what the quoted referred to, and the only other similarity I can see is that they both feel like watching someone's nightmare.
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Sep 26, 2017 23:18
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:mother!, to me, was the most brazenly feminist film of the year...and in a sick way it makes sense in our incredibly masculine culture that people would lash out at that, especially when they thought (due to trailers) that they were just signing up for a torture/horror film where another starlet gets raped/flayed/murdered absent of any social commentary. Well, yeah- they couldn't really remove themselves from J-Law's suffering because they were never allowed to. A key ingredient to one of the torture/horror films you mention is that the audience is given room to breathe and to behold the "spectacle" of the horror from a removed, safe position from up in the sky (the God's eye view), from a corner, or even from the vantage of the monster in question- all of these viewpoints from either a position of safety or power... an ingredient that was purposefully missing here. The directing, the set design, pretty much everything about the movie was laser focused on Lawrence and her acting- we see what she sees and are directed to feel what she feels, so when she is disrespected, tormented, assaulted, when her baby is taken from her and eaten... that feels like it happens to us, too. It's a horror movie in which the victim is actually empathized with rather than sympathized, and it seems that's knocked a lot of people for a loop.
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Feb 21, 2018 18:33
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