Mother and the Cli-Fi Conundrum, Part I

Mother! and the cli-fi conundrum 

by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray

We went to see Darren Aronofsky’s most recent film Mother! armed with the director’s own claims about the film being about Mother Nature’s “love and her gifts and the way people ultimately cause her pain” (Dockterman 72). [open endnotes in new window] According to NYT reviewer Melena Ryzek, Aronofsky even told Jennifer Lawrence “The movie is about climate change, and humanity’s role in environmental destruction.” We wanted to find the commentary on climate change we were promised. What we found instead was a visually appealing homage to the 1960s avant-garde that presents women, their bodies, and a feminized earth as replaceable and interchangeable, like the parts of a mass-produced rifle. 

Aronofsky is no stranger to movies meant to enlighten audiences about environmental disasters and climate change. Aronofsky donned his Cecil B. DeMille suit in Noah, presenting a hero (Russell Crowe) who teaches his family to live sustainably, protecting nature as a steward rather than a figurative rapist. But even in this more blatant cli-fi film, Noah’s also a super-masculine action hero protecting the Earth from humanity at any cost. In this reboot of the biblical story, Noah decisively revises God’s plan to rebuild all life, including humans, by eliminating wives and children from the Ark. In other words, because “everything that was beautiful, everything that was good we shattered, mankind must end.” Humanity would have died off if Noah’s grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) had not intervened. The remaining extended family serves as a curious genesis for the rise of human populations around the world.

In Mother!, Aronofsky also draws from biblical stories as “myths that belong to the world” because, as Aronofsky explains, “There’s power to them” (Dockterman 72). The bulk of Mother! seems to comment on another Genesis story, turning Earth’s ecology into a home, a literal and confined ecology protected by an innocent but sexualized Mother played by a back-lit Jennifer Lawrence, who “want[s] to make a paradise.” She reproduces as she renovates each room, and with the pregnancy near the film’s climax, connects her work with the birds, wind, and grass “creations” beyond the house.

While she spackles a wall in the home she is renovating, clouds even seem to emanate from the yellow putty, and visions of breathing human organs appear behind the wall. According to IndieWire, “Lawrence is Gaia, or Mother Earth, defending the living, breathing organism she has built into a perfect home. She can’t handle or fully understand why people are being so disrespectful.” When uninvited guests arrive, they bring up even more biblical stories with disastrous results, from Adam and Eve and the pregnancy, to the Cain and Abel battle between two sons (Domhnall and Brian Gleeson), a basement fiery furnace, and a perversion of the Christian Eucharist. 

In mid-renovation, Mother gazes at the natural Eden surrounding the domestic paradise she is creating.	Mother’s spackling of a wall is compared to Mother Nature’s creation of a natural Eden.