The movie ‘mother!’ explained

You can watch the video above or read the analysis below.

The movie mother! was a dynamic allegory of white supremacy’s use of religion to control and socialize humanity to invade and destroy the earth and cultures most connected to the earth, in particular indigenous cultures of brown and black people. However, to have made the mother character other than white would not have made the audience empathize with her as quickly or at all, I believe. It is similar to what Matthew McCaugnhey’s character in the movie A Time to Kill says to the jury when trying to evoke empathy for his black client who killed his daughter’s rapist (you can read the monologue below or skip to my analysis continued after the jump):

Now I wanna tell you a story. I’m gonna ask ya’all to close your eyes while I tell you this story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves.

This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl.

Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up, and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on, first one then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure — vicious thrusts — in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they’re done, after they killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to bear children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. So they start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw ’em so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones — and they urinate on her.

Now comes the hanging. They have a rope; they tie a noose. Imagine the noose pulling tight around her neck and a sudden blinding jerk. She’s pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking and they don’t find the ground. The hanging branch isn’t strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck, and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge and pitch her over the edge. And she drops some 30 feet down to the creek bottom below.

Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body, soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood — left to die.

Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl.

  Now imagine she’s white.

The defense rests your honor.

White people and those who view the world through a lens of whiteness needed to see the damage of white supremacy through a lens where a white woman is victimized by the system running our world.  Religion is at the forefront. Since religion is man-made, its creator is a man guided by ego, spite and a selfishness that trumps an ability to appreciate the very thing that makes it possible for him to be sustained.

The heavy-handed visualization of war, rioting, bodies heaped upon each other, the literal consumption of the products of the earth without care and compassion seemed intentional by the director to convey the harmful impact man-made religion has had on our world.  The excavating of the mother’s body to retrieve a diamond heart was an obvious illustration of the devastating impact white supremacy has had on Africa and her people as well as the raping of earth all over the down to the very core. Think pipelines and nuclear plants to get an idea.

Visually layered, unapologetic and despairing as it illustrates how we refuse to learn from history, mother is a horror movie where humanity in general, white supremacy in particular, is the terrorist.