Mother! and other recent visions of the apocalypse

Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is only the latest in a new slew of films which confront head on humanity’s relationship to the natural environment with a new tone of desperation and rage

Feature by John Bleasdale | 14 Sep 2017

Cinema has approached the Environment – with a capital E – in basically two ways. The most obvious treatment is the activist documentaries, like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and its recent sequel, or the Leonardo DiCaprio fronted Before the Flood. Designed as parts of campaigns – sometimes very specific ones, like in the cases of Black Fish or Jeremy Irons’ Trashed – these eco docs are rigorously researched and meticulously detailed, and usually you'll find globetrotting arguments with a strong thread of didactic optimism running through them. If only we could explain to enough people – measures can be taken; legislation put in place, the whole thing could be resolved in some way.

On the other side, the Roland Emmerich-style disaster movies use environmental armageddon as a playground for action adventure antics. Billed as nightmares, they’re actually fantasies, wiping the slate clean and allowing us to engage in some satisfying running and jumping, safe in the knowledge that most of the world’s population is no longer our concern. Despair and nihilistic pessimism absolves us of all responsibility. Mad Max doesn’t drive a hybrid.

Darren Aronofsky’s new film Mother!, released tomorrow, is a furious screed – Aronofsky himself described it as his “howl at the moon” – against the destruction humanity has wrought on the world. It starts off as a Polanski-esque, paranoia-laced, haunted house story in a setting reminiscent of the shifting psychological interiors of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple renovating an old house which has been destroyed in a fire. She works on the renovations while he struggles with his writer’s block.

The arrival of another couple – played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer – becomes increasingly intrusive and destructive until the film forsakes its semi-realism of social awkwardness and passive aggression to reveal itself as a full-blown allegory, depicting the history of humanity’s treatment of their physical habitat. The mother of the title begs for "nature" to be appended as a surname.

Aronofsky’s audacity is justified by how much he manages to pack into his allegory. We have a Biblical patriarch, Cain and Abel, the invention of culture, the transition from the Old to the New Testament, political fanaticism, terrorism, political violence and repression, celebrity culture and the mass insanity of magical thinking as well as some genuine horror and obsidian comedy, all told in a contemporary American vernacular. Early on, Lawrence’s character contemplates a bit of tidying up: “I’ve got to get to the apocalypse,” she says, heading downstairs. Little do we know that’s exactly where we are going.

But this apocalypse is minus the revelation. It is not a secret cathartic wish: not the universal door slam that will, at least, bring closure. Rather, it is a horrible cycle of selfishness and destruction and suffering. The tone is full-throated rage. We’re not asked to sign petitions or write to our MP. Ultimately, the film is saying we’re fucked. And not in a good way.

Mother! premiered at the 74th Venice Film Festival and it wasn’t alone in its concerns. Paul Schrader presented his best film for decades: First Reformed. It stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who takes on a young man’s radical support for environmental causes. It is a psychological portrait of alienation and despair comparable to Schrader’s first script Taxi Driver. I asked him about the influence that earlier work had on the new film: “Taxi Driver is the music I write to,” he said. Whereas Travis Bickle is damaged by the Vietnam War and projects his psychosis on to the criminal sleaze of late 70s New York, Pastor Toller (Hawke) has lost a son in the war and sees man’s destruction of the environment as an evil sin.

Schrader made no bones about his own take on Toller’s ideas: “If you are hopeful about humanity and the future of this planet you’re not paying attention. I don’t see humanity outliving this century… This experiment in carbon-based intelligence has been going on 150,000 years or so. We’ve kind of exhausted it. The planet will be just fine: humanity seems to be the problem. I lived in the magic cone of history – the Baby Boom era – a life of leisure, a life of affluence, a little pestilence and a little war, and for that my generation has screwed the planet for our children. You asked what I thought, that’s what I’m thinking.”

Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (currently on Netflix) seeks to do for the industrial meat industry what Bambi did for deer hunting and Babe did for bacon. Its rollercoaster action is matched by a tonal bouncy castle, as the children’s adventure following an anthropomorphic super-pig bashes into a wholly adult world of corporate exploitation and murderous manipulation of living things. The 'happy ending' is fatally compromised by the fact that nothing has changed and those who have seen Bong’s Snowpiercer will know where this is ultimately heading.

Even director Alexander Payne – responsible for such mild-mannered comedies as The Descendants, Sideways and Nebraska – returned to his acerbic roots this year with Downsizing, which also opened in Venice. At first the Matt Damon-starring film plays like a Charlie Kaufman-style high-concept comedy, with scientists finding a solution to global warming by shrinking people to the size of Star Wars figures. It’s as sharp as a tack, but as with all the other films above, it is riven by the new pessimism. Not only is the solution literally 'too little, too late', downsizing also represents the fantasy wonder cure we’re hoping for: something which will solve climate change but won’t force us to modify our behaviour. In fact, as many Green entrepreneurs insist, we might actually be wealthier as a result.

In her 2014 book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argued that reducing our carbon footprint, personally or through policy tweeks, was never going to be good enough. The crisis demands a radical alteration of the economic and political structures we live under if we are to stand a chance. Yet, we are so ideologically blinded, so confounded, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Now with these films from such diverse filmmakers as Aronofsky and Payne, Schrader and Bong, the end of our world is no longer being envisioned as a far off science fiction fantasy but rather as a possible if not probable outcome, a self-inflicted wound which in all likelihood will prove fatal.


Mother! is released 15 Sep by Paramount
Okja is currently streaming on Netflix
Downsizing is release 19 Jan by Paramount