Eileen G’Sell, lecturer in writing in Arts & Sciences
“My heart’s aflutter!” launches Frank O’Hara’s 1957 “Mayakovsky,” “I am standing in the bath tub/ crying. Mother, mother/ who am I?” Later the speaker blurts, “That’s funny! There’s blood on my chest … what a funny place to rupture!” The voice is by turns rattled, brash, and shenanigany — not unlike the lines of the Futurist poet for whom the piece is named.
Similar excess and bleak caprice mark Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, a film that, for all its convolutions, is as glorious as it is gory. With critical responses inconsistent at best, the film has already been pegged “2017’s Most Hated Movie.” Be that as it may, it could also be the year’s most loved. For those with an appetite for the absurd — and a stomach for the abject — Mother! succeeds precisely where Aronofsky’s earlier films do not; it doesn’t pretend to be realism, nor does it simply bat its eyes at horror. It is Black Swan dialed up a dozen grand jetés, The Wrestler body-slammed into the comically baroque.
Read the full piece at Hyperallergic.
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