Mother! and the Cli-Fi Conundrum Part IV

When His story of Mother’s creation is suddenly published, the eco-disaster on display becomes almost unbearable to watch. The hallucinogenic sequences show a home invaded by ever- larger hordes of followers of Him. Him and the visitors take even more from Mother and her home. “But it’s not yours,” Mother tells the masses stealing food from her table, while Him orders her to “share it. They’re just things. They can be replaced.” 

Ever larger hordes of invaders intensify Mother’s pain.

Eagerly Him even shares their newborn son with the mob, perhaps because he knows another woman will fix the mess and call him “Baby.” The only way Mother can cope with such intense pain is immolation. In the end, Mother gives us the environmental message we crave: “You never loved me. You just loved how much I loved you. I gave you everything, and you gave it all away.”

In a May 2014 interview, deep-green activist Dan Bloom—arguably the first to use the term cli-fi for climate fiction and film—asserts, “I believe that cli fi novels and movies can serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it” (Vemuri). 

Bloom’s claims echo those of Rahman Badalov, who in 1997 declared, “Blazing oil gushers make marvelous cinematographic material…. Only cinema can capture the thick oil bursting forth like a fiery monster.” But Badalov not only views these oil gushers as monstrous nature. He also notes the dual message of monstrous nature cinema: to both condemn environmental degradation and entertain with spectacle. Bloom’s admission that “the impact of cli fi novels and films has been minor, very minor” may point to the same dual role of cli-fi cinema. 

For Badalov and Bloom, cinema has the potential to bring environmental issues such as climate change to the forefront. But the cinematic mechanism also has the potential to obscure that message with spectacular beauty. In Mother!, the treatment of women, of Mother, obscures any cli-fi message with disgust.