There are lots of spoilers in this post.
Woe to the woman Darren Aronofsky casts in his next movie. What fresh tortures will he devise for her? In “Requiem for a Dream,” Ellen Burstyn got her brain fried on amphetamines and electroshock, and Jennifer Connelly was sexually abased by sleazy corporate bros. As Nina Sayers, the ballerina in “Black Swan,” Natalie Portman peeled off her own fingernails, impaled herself on broken glass, and was sexually abased by Vincent Cassel. Now, in “Mother!,” Jennifer Lawrence is not doomed by drugs or delusion. She is sane, and extravagantly punished for it: trampled, beaten, burned, and sexually abased by a crowd of fanatics who worship her husband as a god. Lest all that not suffice, Aronofsky also has Lawrence prepare an array of elaborate tarts, savory and sweet, in her farmhouse-chic kitchen, as if she were auditioning for a Nancy Meyers movie. For me, the buck stops with baked goods. If the title weren’t already taken, this film should be called “Get Out.”
It’s hard to think of a blanker performance than Lawrence’s, which I mean as no slight to her. As the unnamed young wife of an unnamed older poet, played by Javier Bardem, she has neither guile nor personality. Shot in claustrophobic closeup, she is pure youthful face and body: getting out of bed in a sheer nightie; washing dishes in flattering boyfriend jeans; inexplicably wandering barefoot into an unfinished cellar that screams “tetanus!” to search for the linens that she inexplicably keeps there in a steampunk trunk. Then there are her hair styles, messily perfect in a way that indicates a Type A trying to pass for low-key. I admired the character’s ability to braid her ass-length golden tresses into a perfect fishtail while dealing with a full-on home invasion, but some people have a talent for multitasking.
The other day, in an interview with the Times, Aronofsky revealed that “Mother!” is an allegory for climate change. The wife is Mother Earth; the husband is God; the lunatics who make pilgrimage to the couple’s creepy Victorian house in the center of a crop circle are, presumably, the rest of us, greedily ruining the planet. As my colleague Richard Brody wrote, “whatever”—though I do think that the movie can be seen as a fairly faithful adaptation of “The Giving Tree,” with Lawrence as the selfless tree and Bardem as the boy who devotes his life to hacking her down to a stump. The Biblical material is more muddled; the Hebrew God who so interests Aronofsky excels at getting angry at human beings and expelling them from places where He doesn’t want them to be—powers that Bardem’s wet noodle of a patriarch possesses not in the least.
Aronofsky’s allegorical explanation also reveals a common misunderstanding of what allegory is. Allegory gives concrete form to abstract concepts: a snake standing for envy, a toad for avarice. Climate change is anything but abstract; if you’re not already scared witless by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, I doubt that the image of Jennifer Lawrence screaming herself hoarse as pseudo-Satanists toss her newborn baby around like a crowd-surfing rock star is going to do the trick.
But, even if we go with the conceit and give it its proper name—metaphor—it is striking how conventional Aronofsky’s imagination for disaster is. Very little that happens in the film’s impressive orgy of destruction is unknown to our world. There are no Boschian leaps of imagination, few trespasses into the uncanny. What we get is the horror of war, as it is lived, in the present, elsewhere on the globe: massacres, rapes, executions, buildings collapsing, dead infants cradled by their keening mothers. There is something indecent about imagining this terrible reality as fantasy visited on a haute-bourgeois couple detached from time and place.
The oddest part of Aronofsky’s interview is his statement that he “wanted to tell the story of Mother Nature from her point of view,” since the wife has no point of view. She is obliging and passive, the better to give herself completely to her husband, the great poet. She is his muse—or, rather, an aspiring one, since Bardem cannot seem to write a word while she’s around. Who can blame him? I, too, would find it hard to write if my significant other sat anxiously staring at me from an armchair planted five feet from my desk, asking every ten minutes if I’d made any progress.
In the film, Lawrence’s great creative act is to prepare a home for Bardem to flourish in. (Among the more fantastic premises here, along with the idea that a poet starved for fame would tell his editor that he doesn’t want to do publicity, is that Lawrence’s character could not only build a house from its foundations with no help but also decorate it with distressed furniture in tasteful dun and moss tones without ever setting a foot outside to drive to, say, Crate & Barrel.) Then she gives him a baby. The moment she announces her pregnancy, Bardem leaps naked from bed to scribble away.
A woman creates life; a man creates art! The conceit is so astoundingly regressive that it is hard to believe that Aronofsky could be seriously proposing it. If, as some critics have written, he is trying to demonstrate what it is like to be the female “partner”—the word is not appropriate here—of an egomaniacal male artist, then why subject her to such abject torment and humiliation? Aronofsky may think that he is showing us something profound in its unsettling extremity, but nothing could be more routine, more familiar, than a woman made to suffer for the sake of a self-important man. The coup de grâce comes at the film’s end, when Lawrence lies naked on a bier, bald and charred like a ruined steak, as an immaculate, clothed Bardem leers over her before plucking her heart from her chest and grinding it to ash. Then we see it start from the beginning all over again, with a new woman in Lawrence’s place. One hopes that this one has more of a fighting spirit.
I happened to see “Mother!” in Paris. Earlier that day, I had visited the Picasso Museum, and found myself reflecting once again on the splendors of the man’s art, and the sorrows of the women who inspired so much of it: Olga Khokhlova, his first wife, betrayed and abandoned, then denied the peace of a divorce so that she could not stake any financial claim to her husband’s property; Dora Maar, the “weeping woman,” who inspired Picasso to note that “women are suffering machines.” In the bookshop, I bought a copy of “Life with Picasso” by Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress after Maar, and the mother of his children Claude and Paloma. It is a gem, a textured account of the man, his art, and his milieu, full of intelligence and insight. It is also a remarkable self-portrait of a young woman in search of life and self. When they met, in 1943, Gilot was twenty-one, Picasso sixty-one; she had already broken with her bourgeois family to become a painter. “I saw myself a seasoned philosopher disguised as a young girl,” she writes. At the same time, she knew that she lacked “the experience of living” that would enrich her art. Picasso seemed to offer it to her, and she seized her chance.
Picasso, in Gilot’s account, is charming, playful, passionate, brilliant. He is also egomaniacal, childish, and paranoid, given to bouts of tyranny and psychological and physical abuse directed at both her and his friends. When she first goes to his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, Gilot remarks that it seems “the temple of a kind of Picasso religion, and all the people who were there appeared to be completely immersed in that religion.” A decade later, after she has left him—she was the only of Picasso’s women to leave rather than be left—she returns to the house that they shared in the south of France to discover that all of her possessions have been thrown away, and that another woman has taken her place.
Gilot was a muse, a famous one. But she was also an artist in her own right. There is a wonderful scene in the book where Claude, then a little boy, knocks on the door of her studio. “Mama, I love you,” he says. “I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t put down my brushes, not just then,” Gilot writes,
That is written like a mother with a point of view and a healthy ego, and thank goodness. Gilot’s memoir is overdue for an American reprint, and, I’d say, for a film adaptation. May one muse get the treatment she deserves.
