#frankly tired of feeling shamed by society for my background

[decolonizingmyfeels]

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE GENDER COMMENTARY IN MOTHER!

There's been criticism abound for Requiem for a Dream/ Black Swan director, Darren Aronofsky's latest emotional roller coaster, but the vast majority of it is founded upon a refusal (or inability - who knows?) to note even a snippet of the allegory to be found in it. Were I to have taken this movie literally I'm sure I'd have been similarly frustrated, if not downright annoyed, by the subsequent apparent lack of coherent plot and sudden, drastic, unexplained crescendos and denouements in its pace.  Without acknowledging the metaphor rooted in this dizzying presentation however, these criticisms, I feel, hold little relevance to the movie and my intent here is not to exhaust them any further.

The critique I do find interesting, however, is Dahlia Grossman-Heinze's at Bitch magazine, due to the sheer irony of what I had, until then, taken to be an explicitly and objectively feminist film being completely slandered by a feminist magazine, for feminist reasons. I had even assumed Mother!'s feminism played a part in its dismal reception, disgruntling the overwhelmingly white male demographic of powerful movie critics with its rare lack of regard for placing their priorities at the forefront.

Grossman-Heinze, on the other hand, argues she "didn’t need another pop culture artifact about the innate selflessness and nurturing qualities of women as they give and give and give until everything, including their hearts, have been taken from them;" and I’m suddenly wondering why more critics didn't hail this film as prime jerk-off material. Grossman Heinze is as sick as the rest of us of being forced to watch the white male's idealized conception of femininity dote on her man and take the bludgeoning for his mistakes. But I think such a vision of this film in particular fails to recognize femininity, specifically the western social and cultural conception of it, as a concrete entity able to be critiqued and metaphor'd; it instead assumes that to personify this conception is to claim it is a real one representative of actual persons. I personally felt Aronofsky is no more claiming Mother represents actual women than he is claiming that the 'Poet' represents an actual God. Mother!, to me, was a picking apart of a mythos, being of course the western Biblical story and its imagery. The story he is telling is someone else's story, not his, and these are not his characters or archetypes. It was not his fetish to put Mother through this torture. He is simply taking the already written story western culture has told itself for centuries and flipping it on its head. He makes Mother a caricature intentionally, asking - if Christianity's 'ideal feminine and mother' truly existed as she's been described to us, what would her story be? How are we treating her and how would she feel about it? The overwhelming majority of the film is shot as literally as possible from her point of view, from above her shoulder, or in close-up inspection of her face and emotional expression. This in itself is vastly different from the tropes Grossman-Heinze is referring to. What Aronofsky is doing is the equivalent of retelling the biblical parable through the perspective of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother, and in trying to recall the last time we saw anything of the sort, we realize just how radical Mother! is as a film, especially one that so sneakily found its way into standard theatres. He is framing for us our own imagery of womanhood, the one we ourselves constructed and have romanticized for so long, while we also spit on everything she supposedly cares about, considering her always an accessory rather than a full-fledged character with an experience of her own.

I understand the apprehension against just another male saviour complex in the case of Aronofsky: yet another man thinking he has anything to say about the plight of women or what to do about it. But it's a fine line to draw between checking that privilege, and tabooing men away from having their own experience of feminism. It can be difficult to draw the line between keeping feminist dialogue centered around women, and from designating the responsibility of it entirely onto women. The latter would only be a continuation of thrusting society's emotional labor onto women's shoulders, expecting them to be our saviors from patriarchal ruin by curating themselves into a new ideal. Yes, we are tired of the old narrative that expects women to prioritize doting commitment and motherhood above all else, but it does not make sense to reject that stereotype by rejecting motherhood and commitment as concepts. We have to make sure we are distinguishing clearly between expectations of women, and actual women, because it is the former, not the latter, that is problematic here. And yes, it is nice to witness women in media taking control of their bodies, and their work, and denouncing those who mistreat her - it is a woman's story that, for centuries, we've not been allowed to see, at least not in a positive light. But Mother's story is also a woman's story, and to deny hers for the sake of feminism is contrary to all that feminism is trying to accomplish. To do so comes dangerously close to declaring there is a 'right type' of woman to portray on screen. Even if not Grossman-Heinze's intent, I think it an important idea to address, for it’s not as if it’s rare to find people within the feminist movement rejecting ideals of womanhood simply by staking their flag in a new one. If it is not okay to depict quiet, docile, mother-oriented women in the media, we aren't liberating women to be themselves, but only perpetuating our connotations of femininity, as we imagine it now, as undesirable. Feminism can't only be about proving that women can be 'one of the guys' too. It can't just be about freeing people from adhering to gender expectations, but also about refusing to think of traditionally feminine traits as inherently shameful, weaker, or undesirable, for those women and men and others outside the binary who do happen to embody them (which is in some degree, all of us).

In regards to the romantic relationship between Lawrence and Aronofsky outside of the film, it doesn't feel appropriate to me to play it as evidence of Aronofsky's inherent martyring of women. To assume anything about the power dynamics at play between them, and implying Lawrence's only role within the relationship is as 'muse' to her man, is to deny Lawrence agency and her own vision of this film as an artistic piece, just as it does to assume that embodying femininity is only the result of having had it forced upon us (read: it is so abhorrent, who would want it otherwise?).

And I can't take seriously a claim that stories about the subjugation and exploitation of femininity are “old hat” and unhelpful to women when, in a possibly narcissistic argument that I'll stand by anyhow, I myself spent days after watching this film reluctantly acknowledging how much I emotionally identified with Mother and with having had my body, investments, and creations shat on by patriarchal values. I was eventually forced to reconcile with the places in which I still allow these things to happen in my life despite all my feminist ranting and literature. It was reaffirming to see a protagonist with whom to identify with over the struggle of knowing when and how to hold boundaries without denouncing the 'femininities' of nurture and patience, especially when so often given only dismissive disrespect, at best, in return. Patriarchy isn't going to end simply by teaching women to embrace masculinity. We must also be willing to have an honest relationship with how we, as a social entity, treat femininity, and that is what this movie is trying to establish.

Jennifer Lawrence did express frustration that Aronofsky refused to be up-front about what this film had in store for us while instead selling it as another, mostly inconsequential, fun-time Amityville-esque horror that would pass through our systems easily some relaxed Friday night, only to leave us choking trying to swallow it down the wrong tube. She knows that in planting false expectations and not warning us of the allegory, we were more likely to miss it, and thus Aronofsky ensured the bombed ratings and criticism that might not have been quite so poisonous otherwise. But as he giggles in the background of the interview, I feel comfortably certain that ratings are not his priority here. He recognized that in disclosing the intent of Mother!, he would have attracted only a self-selective audience already interested in having the dialogue he's starting, rendering the film less impactful and frankly, less entertaining as a cultural phenomenon. Critics claim "we get the message; I sympathize with what he's trying to say. But did he really have to cannibalize a baby?" rather than admitting bluntly '"Did he really have to say we cannibalize babies? Did he really have to ruin the memory of my communion? Did he really have to be so harsh?" Whether he did is, of course, debatable. It could even be argued as a debate about the merits of femininity vs. masculinity, gentle patience vs. blunt force.  But regardless of the answer, the method was certainly intentional, and in Aronofsky's history, nothing new. His body of work pretty blatantly reveals a conviction that emotional horror and intense discomfort is the way to hit home with an audience, or is, at least, the fun he gets out of directing.

He leaves us at the finish of the movie with the face of a new woman whose innocent concern juxtaposes the doomed fate we know comes her way, having been forced to witness the Poet's insistence that the cycle must repeat itself, that he has no choice, that his fans have no choice, and that the only one who does is the woman who can choose to surrender the only thing she has left. Aronofsky gives us a new face whose treatment we can again allow to befall her, knowing full well its cruelty, or for whom we can look back upon our own mythos as a lesson in what we could change for the future. He asks if we can dare let go of attachment to our idea of womanhood and instead see actual, real life women, with wishes and needs that may not cater to our own.