Analysis of ‘mother!’

I: Introduction

mother! is a 2017 psychological horror film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky (who also did Black Swan). It stars Jennifer Lawrence in the title role, with Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It is about a wife (mother) and husband (Him–Bardem) whose idyllic home is intruded on by increasing numbers of guests, whose outrageous behaviour drives the agitated wife into madness and despair, causing her to burn down the house that the guests are treating more and more disrespectfully.

The story is an allegory of how the human race is slowly destroying our ability to live on Earth. The house represents the Earth, mother is the goddess of the Earth, and Him (the only character whose name is capitalized) is God. The Biblical parallels continue with man (Harris) representing Adam, woman (Pfeiffer) representing Eve, their two adult sons representing Cain (Domhnall Gleeson) and Abel (Brian Gleeson), and the infant son of Him and mother representing the Christ child.

These two allegories resulted in a polarized reaction from audiences, some of whom praised the environmental message, while others found the Biblical parallels and violence offensive.

II: Quotes

“Baby?” —mother, after waking up (first line of the movie)

“I wanna make a Paradise.” —mother

“My wife *loves* having company.” —Him

mother: Stop, they’re ruining everything!

Him: These are just things. They can be replaced.

[to Mother] “The inspiration! Where have you been hiding?” [to revolutionaries] “Finish her.” –herald

“Make them go!” —mother, to Him

Him: I’m his father.

mother: And I’m his mother!

[to the followers of Him] “Murderers!” [to Him] “Murderer! It’s time to get the fuck…” [scratches his face as his followers gasp] “…out of my house!” —mother

mother: *What* are you?

Him: Me? I, am I. You? You were home.

mother: Where are you taking me?

Him: The beginning. [pause] It won’t hurt much longer.

mother: What hurts me the most is that I wasn’t enough.

Him: It’s not your fault. Nothing is ever enough. I couldn’t create if it was. And I have to. That’s what I do. That’s what I am. And now I must try it all again.

“Baby?” –next mother, after waking up (last line)

III: So Much Allegory and Symbolism

Since the ecological allegory has been discussed so many times before, I don’t have all that much to add to it. Instead, without denying the ecological interpretation, I’ll be doing a different one, since this movie is so rich in symbolism that many overlapping, intersecting, and even contradictory interpretations can coexist. And if you, Dear Reader, are familiar with my writing, you’ll know of my dialectical treatment of contradictions, making all interpretations valid, since any one interpretation can flow into the other, then back again.

Because the characters’ generic-sounding names will make the distinction between them difficult, I’ll usually be calling them by different names, those indicative of who the characters represent. Hence, mother is “Gaea,” Him is “Yahweh,” man is “Adam,” woman is “Eve,” the oldest son is “Cain,” the younger brother is “Abel,” and the baby is “Jesus.” This renaming will remind us of the original allegories, helping us see how those ones intersect with mine to uncover new meanings.

IV: In the Beginning

“Yahweh” smiles as he places a crystal object on a mantel, which causes his and “Gaea’s” home, previously burned down by his ex-wife, to be instantly and miraculously restored. “Gaea” wakes up in bed, noting that he isn’t lying beside her. She calls out, “Baby?”

What’s interesting about her saying this, referring to Him (the first and last word said in the whole film), is how it contrasts with their ages. “Yahweh” is old enough to be her father; “Adam” (who, incidentally, is just barely old enough to be the father of Him) later will mistakenly think she is “Yahweh’s” daughter.

Yahweh is a storm and sky-father god like Zeus and Uranus, the latter being Gaea‘s son and husband. Uranus was also castrated, which corresponds with “Yahweh’s” sexual impotence early in the film, a symbolic castration that prevents Him from getting “Gaea” pregnant.

This symbolic swapping of the ‘parent/child’ relationship introduces the theme of the dialectical unity of opposites in the film. Another example of this swapping can be seen in how, usually, the sky is a father god and the earth is a mother goddess; but in ancient Egyptian myth, Nut is the sky goddess and Geb is the earth god. Since, in Biblical myth, God will destroy all life on Earth when the apocalypse comes, and “Gaea,” having already spoken of preparing for the apocalypse, burns down the house at the end of the film, mother can thus be seen in this way as a sky mother goddess.

“Gaea” looks around the house for Him, reaching the front door, opening it, and looking out at the Edenic scenery surrounding the house. She’s wearing see-through bedclothes, with her nipples showing; this suggests Eve’s unashamed nakedness, which leads me to my next point about the swapping of opposites.

Since this married couple are the first man and woman we see in this Edenic setting, “Yahweh” and “Gaea” can also be seen to represent Adam and Eve, every bit as much as man and woman do. The creators swap roles with the created. This parallel between the two married couples continues when we see the sons of both violently killed. “Abel” is killed by jealous “Cain,” and “Jesus” is an Abel in his own right, killed by the Cains of the crowd of “Yahweh’s” fanatical followers; were they jealous of the love of Him toward his newborn baby, and in ingesting its mutilated body in a ghoulish variation on the Eucharist, are they hoping to be similarly loved…by being “Jesus”?

V: Hell is Other People

When “Gaea” is startled by Him, behind her at the front porch, we can see a foreshadowing of her anthropophobia, her fear and intense dislike of people. She would be only with Him and their future baby, not with anyone else.

Her anthropophobia leads to the central conflict of this movie, something sidestepped in the ecological interpretation. Her life with Him is Eden, a paradise…heaven; but as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, hell is other people. In this movie, Sartre’s dictum applies in both its correct and incorrect interpretations. The popular misconception of Sartre’s meaning is shown in how, the more that people intrude on “Gaea’s” life, the more hellish it is; but the correct meaning, the hell of never escaping from how others’ perceptions of us shape our self-concept, is present in the film, too.

People throughout the movie say disparaging or invalidating things to “Gaea,” and they give her dirty looks, all to depreciate her worth. They don’t listen to her or respect how she feels. This makes her dislike herself so much that she burns herself with the house and all the other people. The split external object becomes the introjected split internal object.

VI: The Other as a Mirror of the Self

Her growing dislike of herself is necessarily linked to her dislike of the others, because other people looking in our faces are metaphorical mirrors of ourselves. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the structural growth of the personality is relational with other people; there is a bit of the other in the self, and vice versa.

“Gaea” would rather remain in a one-on-one, dyadic relationship with Him than engage with society in general, because her interactions with Him–that is, she and “Yahweh” looking into each other’s eyes lovingly–are, metaphorically, a narcissistic mirroring of each other that she can’t replicate with the world.

She is stuck in the Imaginary Order with Him; “Yahweh” is her symbolic mirror, a (non-visual) kind of counterpart for her who reflects her narcissism back to her (and his narcissistic vanity, as we know, is off the charts!). Since he’s old enough to be her father, her relationship with Him can be seen as symbolically Oedipal.

VII: The Need for More People

This symbolic Oedipus complex can be seen in reverse, too, since “Gaea” calls out to her son/lover Uranus at the beginning and end of the film, saying, “Baby?”; but “Yahweh” wants to break free of the limitations of the dyadic relationship with her, since he can’t use language and write poetry while stuck in the Imaginary. He must enter the Symbolic Order‘s world of language, its shared signifiers, customs, and societal laws.

To do so, he must bring people into the house.

So, with this idea that characters’ roles can be reversed–the ‘parent/child’ relationship between “Gaea” and “Yahweh” (or Uranus), and the creator/created relationship between ‘the gods’ in the house and the “Adam” and “Eve” visitors–now we can see that the arrival of man not only symbolizes God creating Adam, but also that man represents Yahweh “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8), beginning the chain of events that will bring about the Fall, symbolized by the coming mayhem in the movie.

So “Adam,” whose stories inspire Him, is also in this context the Name of the Father (le nom, or Non! du père–recall that man is just old enough to be the father of “Yahweh”), whose nom gives “Yahweh” the words he needs to write again, but whose Non! forbids “Gaea” to keep “Yahweh” all to herself.

Lacanian psychoanalysis explains how the Name of the Father dissolves the Oedipus complex, taking boys out of the one-on-one relationship with Mother (and girls out of the dyadic relationship with Father) as symbolized with the ‘parent/child/marital relationship,’ if you will, of “Gaea” and “Yahweh”/”Uranus,” and thus freeing them of the constraints of the Imaginary to bring them into the social world of the Symbolic. [For a more thorough explanation of Lacanian and other psychoanalytic concepts, click here.]

VIII: Rejecting Society Leads to Madness

“Gaea,” however, doesn’t want to leave the dyadic, symbolically Oedipal world of the Imaginary. In her refusal to accept the Symbolic, its society, signifiers, and language, she expels, or forecloses, the fundamental signifier of the Name of the Father, and this Lacanian foreclosure will lead to her having a psychotic break with reality. Her psychosis explains the increasingly surreal, hallucinatory attacks on her house that we see later on in the film. We see them because, in seeing the film entirely from her perspective (camera shots show either her face, her point of view, or what’s seen over her shoulder), she hallucinates them.

Before any serious disruption of her peaceful life with Him by all those people has even begun, we see hints that she is already mentally disturbed. She notices a heart beating within the wall: it’s the heart, we eventually learn, of the previous “Gaea” who burned down the house at the beginning of the film. Her identification with her predecessor in the wall suggests a connection between mother! and Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s “Yellow Wallpaper,” a first-person-narrated short story about a Victorian-era woman slowly going mad.

Environmentalist and Biblical allegories aside, mother! shouldn’t be taken too much at face value. One should give serious consideration as to how much of what we see is just “Gaea’s” imagination running wild. After all, this isn’t the first of Aronofsky’s films to feature a woman going insane. “Gaea” may be upset about all of the damage being done to her house, but she’s also the one who burns it down to the ground.

Sometimes, in her growing social anxiety, “Gaea” drinks a yellow powder mixed in water, which gives at least some relief to the shakiness and nausea that result from her anthropophobia. I’m guessing that this medicine is, or at least represents, a kind of psychiatric drug that, while not outright eliminating her hallucinations, at least makes them manageable.

When she knows she’s finally pregnant, she seems to think she doesn’t need the drink anymore, so she flushes it down the toilet. As we soon learn, though, when all those people arrive to celebrate “Yahweh’s” new poem, her hallucinations fly out of control.

IX: Eve

Having “Adam” sleep in their home makes “Gaea” uneasy enough as it is, but the arrival of “Eve” makes her all the more agitated. It doesn’t take long for “Eve” to reveal herself as nosy, prying, and obnoxious.

Still, let’s reconsider woman‘s personality in light of what we know about “Gaea,” whose perspective is all we have telling the story. We sympathize with “Gaea” because all the events are given from her point of view, making her into the main victim; but the increasingly surreal nature of what we see through her eyes must be hallucinations and delusion, thus making her an unreliable narrator.

So, objectively speaking, is “Eve” really as irritating as “Gaea” perceives her to be? The same legitimate question can be asked of mother‘s perception of Him, “Adam,” “Cain,” “Abel,” and all the other intruders of her home. I’m not saying that “Gaea” is completely in the wrong, and that all the others are beyond reproach; it’s just that she must be exaggerating what’s wrong with them in her mind, as well as portraying herself as blameless.

X: Knowledge

So, with all these considerations in mind, we can now see “Eve” in a whole new light. Since the Biblical Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat of the Tree of Knowledge (“Good and Evil”—tov wa-ra, being a merism reflecting everything from the best to the worst; therefore, it’s a tree of the knowledge of, potentially, everything), and she in turn tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit of the tree, we can see not only “Eve’s” nosiness, but also her giving “Gaea” the glass of lemonade (the forbidden fruit drink, if you will) as instances of her wanting to share knowledge and have knowledge shared with her.

Recall in this context the swapping of ‘parent/child,’ or ‘creator/created’ roles: “Eve” is old enough to be “Gaea’s” mother, just as “Yahweh” and “Adam” are old enough to be her father. With this mother/daughter roleplay in mind, we can see how “Eve” is like a mother to “Gaea,” seeking to give and receive knowledge (Wilfred Bion‘s notion of the K-link) by connecting socially with her ‘daughter,’ so to speak. “Gaea,” however, rejects such a communal exchanging of knowledge (-K) because she doesn’t like socializing.

“Gaea” says she’s uncomfortable talking to “Eve” about her relationship with Him, which on the surface seems like a perfectly reasonable objection, given “Eve’s” forward, prying questions; but how much of this questioning is truly inappropriate, and how much of it is hallucinated, a product of “Gaea’s” paranoid imagination?

According to Bion’s expansion of Kleinian object relations theory (again, click here for more info on Bion‘s, Klein‘s, and other psychoanalytic concepts if you’re unfamiliar with them), a baby develops an ability to think by learning how to process emotional experiences with its mother, who (through maternal reverie) processes the agitating external stimuli (beta elements) first, then sends them back to her baby in a tolerable form (alpha elements). The baby thus gradually grows in K, learns how to process and relate to the external world for itself, and grows to be a mentally healthy person.

But if–either through bad parenting, or through one’s aggravated refusal to accommodate external excitations–one won’t accept this indispensable need to grow in K through linking with society (a problem explained, in Lacanian terms, as foreclosure–see above), external stimuli are projected outwards with split-off pieces of one’s personality; and these pieces become what Bion called bizarre objects, hallucinatory projections of one’s psychotic inner state. This degenerative process explains what’s happening to “Gaea”: the hostility and violence she sees all around her is a projection of her own misanthropy.

XI: The Fall

“Eve’s” meddling in the private affairs of the house extends to “Adam” when they enter “Yahweh’s” room and accidentally cause his crystal to fall from the mantel and break. He is so upset that he yells, “Quiet!” at the chattering couple. Since this crystal, we later learn, was in the heart of the previous “Gaea,” we realize that “Yahweh,” being as upset as he is about the broken crystal, must have really loved her. She was more than someone he was merely using; which is not to say he never mistreated her (or that he isn’t mistreating the current “Gaea”), but that he isn’t as wicked as he seems. In spite of his obvious flaws, “Yahweh” sincerely loves the current “Gaea,” too, as he will love future “Gaeas.”

She opens a door and, to her embarrassment, stumbles upon “Adam” and “Eve” making love. Since they are her symbolic parents, seeing them this way represents the childhood trauma that Freud called the primal scene. Later, “Gaea” returns to tell them they have to leave, but uncooperative “Eve” opens the door to reveal herself in her bra; like Biblical Eve, she is “naked…and…not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25)

XII: The Downward Spiral

So far, we have seen a slipping-away from “Gaea’s” paradise, which–understood in the terminology of Hindu cosmology–would be called the Satya Yuga, a Golden Age from which would begin a decline to progressively corrupt and wicked ages, ending in the Kali Yuga, in which–according to Hindu thinking–our sinful world is now, close to total destruction and a cyclical rebirth to a returned Golden Age.

I would describe this cyclical decline, from Edenic paradise to fiery Armageddon, in the symbolism of the ouroboros, as I’ve done many times before. The serpent’s biting head is the Satya Yuga, its bitten tail is the Kali Yuga, and “Gaea” and “Yahweh” are, as of this point in the movie, just behind the serpent’s head, at the end of the Satya Yuga. They will continue to slide down the length of the ouroboros’ slippery circular continuum of a body, till they get to that bitten tail…then to the biting head again, at the very end.

XIII: Brotherly Hate

The shit really hits the fan when “Cain” and “Abel” barge into the house, fighting over what “Cain” believes is “Adam’s” unfair will favouring “Abel” over him. “Cain” hysterically shouts that “Adam” and “Eve” don’t love him. The brothers fight, and we all know who kills whom.

This sibling rivalry and jealousy parallels the jealousy “Gaea” feels whenever “Yahweh” neglects her in favour of their guests. As I’ve said above, “Yahweh”–about twenty years older than her–can be seen as a symbolic father of hers. Her jealousy of the guests can thus be seen as Oedipal. She wants Him all to herself, and doesn’t want to share. “Cain” feels the same way about “Adam” (as Biblical Cain felt about God and His favouring of Abel’s sacrifice over his), and he is so upset about what he perceives is a favouring of his younger brother that he kills him. “Gaea,” at the end of the film, will kill all the “Abels” in the house.

The Oedipal Eden is the dyadic parent/child relationship: one child and his or her opposite-sex parent, or, in the case of the negative Oedipus complex, one child and his or her same-sex parent. The point is that one wants to live in an ideal world of oneself with one idealized other as a mirror of one’s own narcissism, this other being an extension of oneself in the Imaginary Order.

“Yahweh,” however, wants the radical alterity of the Other, or a society of many other people in the Symbolic Order. So he leaves the house with “Adam,” “Eve,” and the corpse of “Abel,” while “Cain” leaves the area alone with a bloodied forehead.

“Gaea” is traumatized from having witnessed the murder, and she’s terrified of being alone in the house, without Him. On the surface, it appears that “Yahweh” is being insensitive to her by leaving her alone; she later accuses Him of having “abandoned” her. But without “Cain” around to help carry the body (he would be too ashamed even to show his face), “Yahweh” feels obligated to help. He is being negligent to her, to be sure, but she is exaggerating his negligence in her mind.

With her alone in the house that night, there is a moment of relative calm. “Cain” briefly returns, frightening her (after all, he “did the first murder”–Hamlet, Act V, Scene i). “Yahweh” returns, and things seem better for the moment.

XIV: The Treta Yuga

The second quarter of the movie begins, representative of the Treta Yuga, a decline from the Satya Yuga. These Yugas may not be paralleled point for point with their four counterparts in the film, but neither are the Biblical parallels. That things are clearly changing for the worse, quarter by quarter, until there begins a repeat of the cycle at the end (as a previous cycle ended at the very beginning of the movie), is justification enough to compare the four quarters of mother! to the Yugas.

A kind of funeral gathering is held in the house for grieving “Adam” and “Eve.” “Yahweh” tries to comfort them with a poetic speech, saying that, in a way, one never really dies. He says, “there’s a voice crying out to be heard, loud and strong. Just listen.” [The guests, especially “Adam,” weep out loud.] “Do you hear that? Do you hear that? That is the sound of life. That is the sound of humanity. That is your son’s voice.” He means that their weeping is “Abel’s” weeping…thus, he is still alive.

The growing number of guests entering the house makes “Gaea” extremely uncomfortable. A young man and woman plan to use “Gaea’s” and “Yahweh’s” bedroom to have sex, reminding us of when the sons of God lay with the daughters of men. “Gaea” kicks the lovers out of her room.

“Gaea” has her yellow-powder drink, and tells some other guests not to occupy the upstairs to chat. The man and woman who were going to have sex in her bed are now painting the walls of the first floor of the house; “Gaea” tells them to stop. A man tries to pick her up, and calls her “an arrogant cunt” when she rejects him. She begs guests not to sit on the unstable kitchen counter by the sink.

How much of the above is really happening and how much is hallucination, is hard to say (her yellow drink seems less effective; perhaps, because of overuse, she’s building a tolerance to it?). Presumably the more outrageous things that happen are more her imagination than reality. In any case, the sink breaks down because those sitting on the counter won’t respect her wishes; the spraying of water everywhere symbolizes the Great Flood. “Gaea” can’t take the guests anymore, and screams at all of them to leave the house.

She argues with “Yahweh” over how he’s been neglecting her in being over-accommodating to the guests. He insists he needs them to help Him write, as I’ve explained above with the Lacanian interpretation. She taunts Him over his impotence; this symbolic castration is their shared manque (recall, in this connection, how she, as Gaea, is symbolic mother to Him as her lover, Uranus). Her taunt drives Him to grab her, and they finally have sex.

Thus ends the Treta Yuga, and we have another moment of temporary calm. She soon discovers that she is pregnant, with no need of any tests: she just knows, and she’s right. “Gaea,” the earth mother goddess has become the Mother of God; for with “Yahweh” as the baby’s father, her intuitive prescience of her pregnancy suggests an Immaculate Conception, a coming miraculous birth.

XV: The New Testament–New Words, New Desires

So, with “Gaea” as Mary, we begin the Dvapara Yuga, or the New Testament, as it were. And the New Testament is symbolized by the new poem that “Yahweh” writes; and since their baby symbolizes Jesus, “Yahweh” can now be seen as God the Father. He has an explosion of inspiration: the words just flow from his pen.

Since there isn’t the limitation of a two-person relationship anymore, that of the mutually mirroring world of the Imaginary, but now a three-person relationship (that three being representative of all of society’s people in general, the many-peopled Other instead of the two-person other), “Yahweh” can exploit the language of the Symbolic. He can finally write.

Now, the signifier (i.e., the word) takes precedence over the signified (the meaning) because one cannot express meaning without something visual or auditory to represent it (think of looking up an obscure word in the dictionary, only to find it defined by other obscure words that now have to be looked up, too!). The chain of signifiers is like a long surface of cracked ice over a flowing river of signifieds; meanings (and potential future meanings) flow under that chain of signifiers that we’re compelled to follow. This following is expressive of human desire, because we always want more…we’re never satisfied.

The urge to keep that meaning flowing, from signification to new signification, is the basis of the idolatry of the many followers of “Yahweh.” A kind of priest representing Him blesses them, saying, “His words are yours.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Him, and the Word was Him. Accordingly, “Yahweh” blesses his followers with a mark, a brown smudge on their heads, that mark being a kind of signifier.

XVI: The Beginning of the End

With idolatry comes zealous loyalty to Him, hence the religious wars that are symbolized by the fighting, violence, and destruction we see when the next group of guests comes. Before they come, “Gaea” reads the new poem and weeps, knowing the tragedy that is prophesied; when the writing ends, the signifier chain of desire ends, with nothing more to fulfill it, and that’s the end of the world. Before even reading the poem, she has already said that she’ll prepare for the Apocalypse…and recall her flushing the yellow powder down the toilet, the only thing that will keep her hallucinations under control.

Her embrace of fatalism shows that something much larger than “Yahweh” merely manipulating “Gaea” is happening. He must do what he’s doing, or else he can’t write. She must have a baby, or she won’t be mother; also, she must allow herself to lose her mind, for such is the drama of history as set in the poem. Creation must be for there to be destruction, and vice versa; the same goes for life and death. All opposites are dialectically linked.

Marx once said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” As we see our world dying from the ravages of imperialist war and global warming, do we want to sit back and be fatalists, or do we want to do something about it?

Since “Yahweh” is a poet, a writer of verses with a large, fanatical following, we can see Him not so much as representing God, but as representing the manipulative religious authorities who pretend, with their pretty writing, to have the moral answers to all our spiritual problems.

XVII: If I May Digress for a Moment…

Similarly, “Gaea” doesn’t so much represent our mother Earth (that would be the house and surrounding trees and grass, which she burns to a crisp at the end) as she does the liberal Hollywood establishment that preaches about the dangers of climate change, but does little, if anything, about it. These green capitalists don’t have the answers.

I’m sure that Greta Thunberg is a sweet girl with a good heart and the best of intentions; but the green capitalists are leading her by the nose. The greatest pollutant threatening our ecology is imperialist war…all those bombs being dropped. The green capitalists have nothing to say about this problem, because they need to continue generating profits to build, for example, electric cars using the lithium they can steal from Bolivia.

The liberal rails away about how insane the business leaders are when they pollute the air, water, and land. A radical Marxist analysis, however, recognizes the diabolical logic, the evil intentions, behind these businessmen’s schemes. Knowing this logic leads to a real answer to our problems, that will to change history instead of merely interpreting it: not with the violence of war, but of socialist revolution.

XVIII: Gaea’s Baby, Gaea’s Madness

Back to the movie. “Gaea’s” pregnancy, her preparations for the birth, and her growing paranoia about the new flood of guests to come into her house remind us of Rosemary Woodhouse and her nosy neighbours, the Castevets, who drive her to near madness with their conspiracy over her baby. Recall how the heartbeat of the previous “Gaea” through the wall, as well as the ‘bleeding’ yonic mark on the wooden floor, agitates her, suggesting the growing madness of the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper. “Gaea” is having a psychotic breakdown. We sympathize with her, but we mustn’t rely on her perception of events.

When I say we she’s an unreliable narrator, am I saying that the environmental allegory is invalid? Am I agreeing with the right-wing climate change deniers? Of course not. I’m simply saying that the bourgeois liberal reaction to the problem is hopelessly wrong-headed: in fact, her burning down of the house at the end implies that even Aronofsky knows that the liberal reaction is wrong. This is why, in spite of its wrong-headed nihilism, I still consider mother! to be a great film. As I’ve argued in a number of my other film analyses, there is an undercurrent of truth to be discovered in these films…if one looks carefully enough behind the bourgeois Hollywood covering.

XIX: Narcissism

Narcissism expresses itself in a number of ways throughout this film, not just in the overt way in which we see “Yahweh” basking in the adulation of his fans, while generally neglecting “Gaea.” It’s also expressed in the group narcissism of his fans, who idealize and identify with Him. He displays the grandiose self, while they have done a transference, making Him, “Yahweh” as God the Father, into their symbolic idealized parental imago.

Then there’s the third manifestation of narcissism: the timid, covert form exhibited by “Gaea” herself. She wants “Yahweh” to mirror her narcissism back to her in a dyadic relationship; when she gives birth to “Jesus,” she’ll want to replace Him with the child. As Robert Graves once said, “Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life.” (Graves, page 110)

Covert narcissists often make themselves out to be victims, and this self-pity is much of the basis for “Gaea’s” hallucinatory exaggerating and catastrophizing of the presence of “all these people.” To be fair to her, “Yahweh” is ego-tripping and focusing on his fans at her expense…to an extent. Similarly, at least some of the guests are probably doing some inappropriate things…again, to an extent. But I am convinced that her paranoid imagination is making up the rest of the problems.

XX: Hallucinations and Trauma

Allegory aside, are we really supposed to take seriously the idea of police and army raids on the house, with gunfire, explosions, tear gas, and flames everywhere? Are we expected to believe that a religious cult will grow around a popular poem? “Gaea” is hallucinating!

Speaking of religion, I suspect that the real reason she is seeing and hearing all these Biblical references is that she, as a child or teenager, was sexually abused by Catholic priests, maybe even gang-raped by them, in the manner described in Sade‘s Justine. This would provide the traumatic basis of her social anxiety. After all, the environmentalist allegory is about the rape of the Earth.

All those people pouring through the doors–front, back, and sides–and breaking through the windows symbolizes a gang rape of the house she identifies with, multiple penetrations of the vagina, mouth, and anus. Her hallucinating of such aggressive entries suggests a reliving of PTSD trauma.

XXI: I Am Not What I Am

She identifies with the house, but she isn’t the house. This méconnaissance is symbolically an example of the self-alienation felt in the mirror stage (i.e., the house walls and bleeding floors, where she senses the presence, the heartbeat, of the previous “Gaea,” are a metaphor for her reflection in a mirror, her self-perception through externality), the disparity between the ideal-I that she is facing and her imperfect self facing the ideal.

“Yahweh,” of course, has his méconnaissance, his narcissistic ideal-I, too, as the God-like poet, versus his real, imperfect, vain self, whose neglect of his wife is precipitating her growing madness. He does show some caring for her, though, even if it is woefully inadequate. He helps her find a place alone and safe, his boarded-up study, where she can go into labour, and she does, ending the Dvapara Yuga. We have another moment of calm.

She holds and guards baby “Jesus” like the Madonna. Now that she has her son, he can fulfill her need for a one-on-one, mirrored relationship. As an extension of herself, “Jesus” is all-important to her…”Yahweh,” not so much now. In fact, “Yahweh” is becoming inimical to her, especially since he wants to show “Jesus” to all his loyal followers, whom she so intensely fears and hates.

In their arguing over whether or not he can take the baby and show it to his followers, his appeal to her as the baby’s father is easily rebuffed by her far more sacred status as his mother, so “Yahweh” must respect this…at least while she’s awake. His taking of “Jesus” from her arms while she sleeps, and taking him out of the study to show to his cult thus begins the most horrifying Yuga of them all: the Kali Yuga, named after the demon, not the consort of Siva (who is also known as the Divine Mother, and the Mother of the Universe)…though the mother goddess’s burning down of the house is certainly in keeping with Siva‘s and Kali’s destructiveness.

XXII: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

“Gaea” wakes up and frantically races after “Yahweh,” demanding to have “Jesus” back. The hallucinatory nature of this scene is obvious in how absurd it is to imagine a religious cult passing around a baby over their heads, the way fans at a rock concert would carry a rock star after he did a stage dive.

Probably what has really happened is that “Yahweh” wanted to show their baby to some guests, a perfectly reasonable thing that any proud new father would want to do; but “Gaea’s” anthropophobia forbids it, and so she hallucinates the horrific scene that we see. Perhaps, in reality, a guest has been clumsy with the baby, dropping him, his death caused by his head having hit the hard floor; but instead, “Gaea” hallucinates an act of cannibalism, a gory parody of Holy Communion…and she explodes.

After she attacks a few of “Yahweh’s” followers, she’s hit on the head by the priest (who has echoed the words of the eulogy “Yahweh” gave for “Abel”: “a voice still cries out to be heard,…” etc., thus further paralleling his death with that of “Jesus”). Then the crowd of fanatical “Yahweh” worshippers beat on “Gaea” in such an obscene way, tearing at her clothing and exposing her breasts, that it can be symbolically associated with a gang rape.

Again, I see this attack as another hallucination, a reliving of the gang-rape trauma I speculate as the basis of her fear and hatred of large groups of people. That the priest hits her with the first blow reinforces my speculation that priests were her gang-rapists, hence the association of Biblical concepts with the rape-like attacks on her house/Earth.

“Yahweh” intervenes and stops her attackers. I believe he is feeling sincere, though feebly expressed, love for her in his tears, apologies, and angry demand, “What are you doing?”. His Christian wish for her to forgive them for the–as I speculate–accidental killing of “Jesus” pushes her over the edge, given how she has hallucinated about the cannibalistic eating of their baby. She sees Him now as being as evil as all of them: she projects her psychosis onto all of them.

XXIII: Apocalypse

After burning down the house, as he carries her, she says that what hurts her the most is how she can’t be enough for Him. Such is Lacanian desire, to have the recognition of others: one wants what one imagines others must want, out of a wish to be acknowledged by them. Desire is of the Other. This is true of “Yahweh,” too: he, wanting their recognition, desires what his readers desire, so he gives to them as best he can, giving “Adam” and “Eve” accommodations, helping carry “Abel’s” body, and eulogizing him.

This desiring what others desire, recognition, something ultimately unfulfillable, is linked to Sartre’s dictum, “hell is other people.” We cannot fulfill our desire in fulfilling theirs, we won’t get the recognition we want, and so their judgement of our inadequacies is our hell, our fiery inferno, for we can’t escape judging ourselves based on their judgements.

Desire is the fire that Buddhists blow out with nirvana. Our endless quest to satisfy that unfulfillable desire, however, spreads the fire that ultimately destroys everything.

“Yahweh” removing the crystal from her heart–which I believe is a continuation of her hallucinating, even to the point of being a wish-fulfilling dream (i.e., she wants to die, and the green capitalism that she personifies leads to more destruction, not less)–is the ultimate evil of the ending of the Kali Yuga. “Yahweh” at this moment is like those capitalists who tear up the Earth to enrich themselves with her natural resources.

His toothy grin, seen when he puts the new crystal on the mantel, looks wicked in the extreme, given the context of what just preceded. But this is the beginning of the next Satya Yuga, the superlatively joyful beginning of a new Golden Age: what else would “Yahweh” be doing but smiling?

The restoration of the house, and the appearance of a new “Gaea,” waking and calling out “Baby?” is really the same woman reliving the trauma all over again, what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat” what is painful, a manifestation of the self-destructive death drive. She doesn’t look like the previous “Gaea” because she is alienated from herself, with her heart buried in that wall.

XXIV: Alienation and Capitalism

She is alienated from herself, just as she is alienated from humanity, hence her fear and hate of all those around her. This alienation is something most, if not all, of us share, because the real root of the problem of ecocide is the same as that of alienation: capitalism.

Those liberals who think we can solve the problem of climate change merely by ‘reforming’ capitalism are fooling themselves, and they are doing so at everyone’s–and the planet’s–peril. War is the greatest polluter of them all; the green capitalists ignore this. When Thunberg meets and greets Obama, whose administration was responsible for bombing seven countries in 2016, that should tell you something. Trump has been even worse.

War is big business, making profits for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc. If you want to solve climate change, end all these wars. Defund the Pentagon. The powers-that-be, of course, won’t let the people do that, which is why the US can never get even a moderate progressive to have a shot at being elected president. We can’t legislate the super-rich out of their wealth. Only revolution will stop them from destroying the planet.

Conservatives, of course, ignore the ecological problem entirely, imagining that all the fuss is just part of an agenda to bring more ‘intrusive government’ into our lives, while they cheerfully and hypocritically support right-wing governments that do plenty of intruding into people’s lives. It doesn’t occur to the climate change deniers (assuming they aren’t outright lying) that the real political agenda is to avoid paying taxes and taking responsibility for the mess that their endless quest for profits has caused.

XV: Conclusion

At the same time, though, we’ll never solve the ecological crisis in a spirit of misanthropy. “Gaea” is no more in the right, when she rejects people and pushes them away, than “Yahweh” is, in his narcissistic addiction to being worshipped by his fans, all the while ignoring her emotional needs.

We must acknowledge a mixture of good and bad in both “Gaea” and “Yahweh,” to see them both as basically well-intentioned, but also as seriously flawed; not to see one as all-good and the other as all-bad, which is the essence of splitting, an inhibiting of healthy object relationships that is the cause of alienation. First, we must mend our relationships with others, having a healthy sense of ambivalence in people (that ability to see both good and bad in everyone); then we can all rise up in solidarity and defeat the capitalist class, who always put profits over people and the planet.

Only then can we save our home from the fire.