“Rex Reed called it the worst movie of the century. For me, [that] is a victory. “
Here Aronofsky is talking about mother! and this echoes similar statements made by the Danish Lars Von Trier and Nicholas Winding Refn, that negative reactions are just as important as positive reactions and polarization is good. Drawing a reaction is ideal and if you have done that then there’s no space for boredom. Aronofsky’s films certainly do that considering every one of his films, aside from Black Swan and maybe The Wrestler, draws varied reactions from all corners of the movie-going crowd. To some he is an masterful auteur who gets inside his character’s skins and probes their psyche in a way only he can. To others he is an intermittent hack, who coasts along on his self-arrogance and the self-importance he himself gives to his work. There are others who fall somewhere in the middle, although they may despise one film completely while thinking another great. Then there’s divisions among the film themselves. Some may be more appreciative of his mythological inspired work than others. The point is that the name Aronofsky has many different connotations for different people.
Aronofsky’s films can roughly be divided into two categories. First, there’s the body films i.e. the films obsessed with the protagonists’ bodies which include Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan. Second, there’s the films inspired by mythical stories which include The Fountain, Noah and mother!. This is however, at best only a surface-level distinction since there’s no strict rule that elements from the latter don’t show up in the former films or vice versa. For example, a huge part of Pi involves the discovery of a 216 digit number that may or may not be the answer to god while in The Fountain the protagonist is obsessed with finding a cure for the decay of bodies. What it does provide though is a rough outline for how the subject is treated by Aronofsky. In his body films, Aronofsky’s camera is concentrated on the here and now and he uses a more rapid editing scheme to go with the convulsions happening within the protagonist’s bodies (The Wrestler is an exception to this) while in the mythical-inspired the camera is more relaxed (though there are still a lot of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots) and the editing style is more conventional (again, the ending of The Fountain is an exception). What’s more interesting though is the point at which both of his considerations, the body and the myths (which are more mythical environmentalism) meet. Aronofsky seems to treat the body and the environment as indispensable parts of each other and this comes off seamlessly in his best films.
Pi (1998)
Released in the same year as Nolan’s debut Following, there are times when Pi recalls the black-and-white debut of the great David Lynch, Eraserhead. Pi ultimately however ends up taking a much more conventional approach to it’s narrative than both of those films and it’s moments of innovation are brought down by a straightforward ending.
In Pi, mathematics is philosophy. This is particularly evident in the conversations between our protagonist Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) and his mentor Sol Robeson (Aronofsky regular Mark Margolis). In these conversations, Sol warns Max of the pitfalls of going on a certain route in his findings, about seeing patterns where there are none, about the rabbit hole that is pi and about taking a break once in a while. He uses various illustrations and stories to make his points like the game of Go, but his intent remains clear, he wants to ward off Max from getting his head in too deep (perhaps even literally because Max’s head is shown to be a commodity desired by many people). Max lives in a small-scale apartment where half of the space is taken up by his super-computer Euclid. Max starts out with a ‘modest’ goal of making stock predictions but soon Max is getting numbers that are other-worldly in their aspect.
Pi sometimes suffers from being too showy and expositionery. That’s maybe a risk you take when you are trying to explain complex mathematical concepts (although in the end they are not that complex as will be seen) but some scenes just fall flat. Take, for example the scene where Max meets Lenny (Ben Shenkman), a Hasidic Jew who tries to impress Max with some quick Torah maths. It isn’t that what he is saying is boring but it’s that Aronofsky frames it in a way where he wants to show Max is being unimpressed while trying to impress the audience himself. Or where Sol tells Archimedes’ “Eureka, Eureka” story. Margolis is a fine storyteller and his presence is always welcome, but Aronofsky makes the most juvenile point through the story (plus, wouldn’t someone like Max have already heard the story a thousand times?). No, the film is at it’s best when it’s letting the imagery do the talking. The stark black-and-white grainy cinematography combined with the frenzied editing gives us a headway into the mindset of Max who suffers from various hallucinations. Of note is the scene at the railway station, which is the one reminiscent of Eraserhead, where Max follows a trail of blood and finds a literal brain. As he pokes at the brain, he hears a screeching sound. This is pure visual experimentation and you wish the film was comprised of more of this type of imagery.
Alas, the plot trudges forward and there’s a subplot with Wall Street stock dealers or something (it’s not clear who they are) that’s undeveloped and for all Lenny’s exaltation that the “Torah is all maths” what they are essentially looking for is just a sequence of numbers, nothing mathematically challenging like the golden ratio or Fibonacci numbers. This is not the most disappointing end to a storyline either. The actual climax is even more disappointing, as if Aronofsky is himself saying I don’t know what to do with this knowledge I have presented to you. I don’t want to drone on too much though because I know some of the problems may arise due to budget constraints. For a debut film plus considering how it got made, Pi if not entirely fulfilling, is still a massive achievement.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
“The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person’s head when they’re trying to quit drugs, as with cigarettes, as when they’re trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me.”
It’s really not what happens after taking drugs but what the characters do just to satiate their needs that’s so gut-wrenching in Requiem. Some critics have derided this film for a being a huge and puffed up “Don’t do drugs kids” pamphlet, even comparing it to a modern day Reefer Madness. But what I think the above quote makes clear and the impression you get from the film if one actually thinks about what happens in the film it’s clear that the film is actually about addiction and drugs are just used as a crutch by which Aronofsky makes his point. Is not Sara (Ellen Burstyn) actually first addicted to the game show on television that causes her to get hooked on amphetamines? In one scene her son Harry (Jared Leto) admonishes her for taking them before she explains that losing weight and appearing on the game show is the only thing she has going for her in life. We know this as we see her holed up in her apartment only the TV for company. Even her conversations with all her friends (who appear interchangeable and form an echo chamber) revolve around the same topic. People may be hooked up on the drug angle though because of the ordeal she goes through in the second half and the tricks Aronofsky uses to show the intake of drugs. He uses rapid cuts (also called an hip-hop montage) to heighten the senses, so whatever the characters are feeling, paranoia, euphoria, hallucinations, withdrawal, ecstasy, devastation you are drawn in and not allowed a moment’s rest.
Once again, on the point of the portrayal of addiction vs. a simple drugs are bad message. When all shit hits the fan, it’s only Sara who is getting her drugs. Harry, Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are all experiencing withdrawal syndromes and will go to any measure to get their fix. While this is meant as an in-film pursuit of drugs it really transforms into obsession of the kind everyone is familiar with. At some point this scrambling for drugs just starts to resemble regular human scrambling for resources. This is greatly aided by career-best performances from all four principals, but especially Connelly and Burstyn. The script reserves it’s most harrowing moments for them and both of them reveal that feminine incongruity. This is not the last time Aronofsky would torture his female protagonists and this points to a certain helplessness on the part of Aronofsky as in he can’t help but be a by-stander as women are abused (This theme is further expanded upon in mother! where Aronofsky takes a little more responsibility). Ultimately, I would compare Requiem to a bad but nonetheless essential trip.
The Fountain (2006)
Aronofsky has said The Fountain is his favourite of his own films (well until mother! came along) and it’s easy to see why. This is the most Aronofsky film and by that I mean it marries the two concerns Aronofsky has been dealing throughout his career that I mentioned before: the body and the myths through which he explores his environmentalism. Throughout the film the characters played by Rachel Weiz and Hugh Jackman talk about being afraid of death. Weiz’s character seems tranquil and resigned to her fate, accepting of the fact that death has come calling and there’s nothing she can do to change her fate. Jackman’s character, her husband and a doctor, however seems reluctant to let her go, understandably. When Weiz character says “I am not afraid”, Jackman’s character takes it as acknowledgement from his wife for the work he is doing in developing a cure that would lead to immortal life (he believes death is a disease), instead of her coming to peace with her looming death.
These scenes are interspersed with scenes taking place in the past during the Spanish Inquisition and at a uncertain time during the future (again played by Weiz and Jackman). Aronofsky draws heavily from Mayan mythology to make his point. Through these flash-backs and flash-forwards (which do in the end come together) he proves the folly of the doctor and emphasizes the necessity of death through a environmentalist perspective. Death is a responsibility, part of a cycle on an infinite timescale where every life is deemed meaningless. In the climax of the Conquistador’s storyline, he finds the Tree of Life and applies it’s sap to his wounds. The wound heals, the Conquistador thinks he has found eternal life. But, in the single most literal scene of the film, nay Aronofsky’s entire career, the body turns into the earth, instead of him attaining eternal life through the tree, the tree attains eternal life through him. This was as foretold in the Mayan tale that inspires Weiz’s character in the present day. The signal here seems to be that the only way to achieve immortality is to become one with the earth. Death itself brings a form of immortality, as in your death brings upon and sustains other life on earth. A piece of the dead lives on in these lives. Of course, how literally the past and future sections are to be taken is up to interpretation due to the framing device of Weiz’s character writing the book in which the section take place. They could just as well be interpreted as Weiz’s character’s way of saying to let go.
Science and medicine has grown to the point where average life expectancy is rising all across the globe, so it’s natural that we would want to take the next step and cancel death all together. What Aronofsky seems to be asking here is is human life worth it. Whether human life is worth interfering with nature’s balance and whether death is not only an end but also a beginning.
The Wrestler (2008)
In The Wrestler Aronofsky uses as his point of focus a washed-up professional wrestler with no internal life to speak of. He isn’t a global superstar like those WWE wrestlers but we see that he can still pack venues. He has a wrestler’s body and we can surmise that in his youth, the exhilaration one gets from performing in front of large crowds was part of why he devoted his life to wrestling. But eventually that life would be so demanding that he would have no time for his family.
When we first see Randy “The Ram” (Mickey Rourke) he is a vision of a broken man way past his prime. He still takes joy in wrestling, but after a heart attack instigated by a gruelling match beforehand, he is forced to re-evaluate. He becomes close to a stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) (which was originally going to be a ballerina before that was spined-off into it’s own film with Black Swan), while trying to right his wrongs by establishing contact again with his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). This seems to go on well for a while before it all inevitably comes crumbling down.
Aronofsky’s direction here is more somber compared to his earlier works. Randy is not addicted to drugs nor is he a genius trying to find patterns in nature or trying to find immortality. He is in ways, despite his mini-celebrity stature, just like any other middle-aged man who has given himself to his work at harm to his personal life. Aronofsky studies Randy’s body closely, sparing no detail. We see the toll of all those years of jumps and holds, scissors and kicks, pins and punches, supplements and steroids not only on his body but also on his face and in his eyes. Rourke is perfect for this part because while he can be explosive he has a quiet tormented manner which suggests the crisis going on underneath. He has one of those naturally inexpressive faces that is quite suitable for a wrestler, who when he steps into a ring is supposed to represent a symbol of the spectators’ own wanting machismo. The appeal of wrestling isn’t just a need for violence, it also stimulates a fantasy of (usually) men of taking shit into your own hands and fighting forces of evil. In the film, this is best represented by the wrestler Ayatollah, who is the heel. On the outside he is a nice guy who is a friend of Randy’s who ensures Randy doesn’t take too much of a toll in light of his heart attack, but when he steps into the ring he must put upon a character that is very easy to hate so that all the fans can have their power fantasy as the white Randy pummels the brown-skinned Ayatollah.
On a rewatch, I realized that Wood only actually has three scenes and her role is much shorter than I initially thought. Her character exists more as a reminder of all the things Randy did wrong and he has to now reconcile with (which he horribly fails to). Cassidy, the other female character is a parallel to Randy since her body is aging too in a field related to the body. Aronofsky thankfully doesn’t place too fine a emphasis on this point although that didn’t stop critics at the time from comparing these two professions and theorizing that they are essentially similar. Yes, both of these professions involve fantasies but stripping and wrestling can only make for a laboured comparison. It’s like comparing weight-lifting to tennis, which are only superficially comparable as sports. Cassidy does serve as a valuable companion to Randy though and fits neatly into his story. The Ballerina on the other hand would have a much harder time of it.
Black Swan (2010)
Call me a hipster. Black Swan is by far Aronofsky’s most critically acclaimed and award-garnering film, the film that could be said to have gotten him into the mainstream. But for me it’s Aronofsky’s worst film and makes me feel one with his detractors for passing of trashy material as deep. Trashy it is though and no amount of polishing can overcome that. You just can’t say it’s inspired by Rosemary’s Baby (a film that was actually aware of it’s trashy origins and knew how to overcome them) and have it serve as an excuse for a hokey character motivations and a screechy scruff screenplay.
The film traces Nina’s (Natalie Portman) journey as she prepares for her role as The Swan Queen/ Black Swan. It’s a journey into madness, a descent into hell. And yet the whole experience is cheapened by Aronofsky’s insistence to go for the obvious metaphor. It can’t be said Aronofsky is not an on-the-nose director because he is but in Swan there is an insistence that what is happening has a certain art-house aesthetic to it and there’s a sheen of paranoia like evidenced in the likes of Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. And yet the appeal of Repulsion is the non-definiteveness of the threats felt by Catherine Deneuve. When strange things start happening in her apartment and the apartment seems to start to swallow her whole Polanski has given us just enough to form an idea of the woman in our mind and yet he holds back enough that we are not sure of what we are seeing on the screen. Of course, Aronofsky is not Polanski and it’s harsh to expect this of him but Swan doesn’t have the narrative balls either to embrace it’s trashy trappings. A major motif is Nina seeing herself being followed by a doppelgänger. This doppelgänger is sometimes implied as being Lily (Mila Kunis), a rival dancer, sometimes it’s Nina’s idea of Lily while sometimes it’s implied to be plain paranoia. And yet here too we see Aronofsky going the obvious route. Lily is less a character than a feeling in Nina’s mind. She is whatever Nina (and in turn the script) wants her to be. This gets tiring after a few scenes and when the inevitable sex scene happens (because let’s face it this is a film with art-house aspirations and one easy art-house stereotype is lesbian scenes between rivals) (see also: American Hustle) the next day Lily denies this ever happening and taunts Nina. This proves Aronofsky’s insistence to not just let scenes lie. Not only does Lily have to deny it but also mock Nina to her face but in a sultry tone to the consequence that any ambiguity goes out of the window. I was half-expecting by the end a Fight Club-like twist where Lily is all in her mind and in a way that happens too. But that isn’t even the worst scene of the film. That’s the one where a shouty Winona Ryder comes yelling at Nina about how she will age too and somebody younger will come as her replacement. This scene feels like self-parody, especially coming on the back of The Wrestler where aging was a reflective topic, not made fun of like it is here. Doesn’t help that Ryder is terrible and she dies quickly after leaving the scene all but purposeless as the film quickly shifts focus from Vincent Cassel’s character to Nina’s fight with the apparition that is Lily.
Black Swan and The Wrestler first started out as one film. That would have been an interesting dynamic to see, the two worlds of ballet and professional wrestling colliding, the former considered elegant and refined, the latter coarse. But while The Wrestler survived on account of it’s bare bones story and a somewhat realistic style (that film didn’t need dream sequences to be taken seriously) Swan crashes because of a lack of awareness of what it’s really about.
Noah (2014)
Rather than an anomaly in Aronofsky’s career Noah may be more of a stepping stone. Aronofsky’s career path seems pretty straightforward all considered. Preppy young filmmaker starts with low-budget indie then works on the fringes of the mainstream for about a decade before getting his big break (meaning awards attention) and therefore being able to get the backing of studios to make a big-budget epic and then when that film becomes a hit using that goodwill to make a story more closer to his previous style just with a bigger budget. That would be a cynical way of looking at it though because Noah doesn’t feel like a sell-out and it isn’t because in a way Noah lays out the carpet for mother!’s biblical revisionism.
Noah features a lot of scenes where a character tells another character stories. Aronofsky has said various times he is drawn to biblical stories because they were the first stories and formed part of the earliest canon. Aronofsky is telling us stories himself but just like any other narrator he puts his own spin on the stories. Depending on what Abrahamic source one is reading these stories change form and in his hand too he molds the story to suit his need. Like in The Fountain he uses these myths to convey a mythical environmentalism, or in this case more specifically Judeo-Christian environmentalism. When Noah gets his revelations of God, the film’s treatment of Noah’s interpretations are definite but there’s also room for doubt whether Noah is following God’s instructions to a tee or whether Noah’s free will impacts his choices. Noah decides that all animals, in pairs, are the only beings that deserve to be saved and that must mean the end of mankind. God’s anger at mankind’s treatment of earth (mining is carried out by the descendants of Cain) is equated to today’s concerns over global warming, the film implying that humanity’s mistreatment of the earth has been a constant since ancient times and that as a species we go through the same cycle of problems (which explains why Aronofsky went to the Biblical stories). It is prophesied that Noah’s flood will come again and once again we see in it the same foreshadowing of the doom that awaits as sea levels continue to rise. The film’s words are creationist but it’s images are evolutionary.
Of course, there are differences too. Aronofsky ends with a note of hope with only a implied indication that the flood will come back, not the sinister tone of the Christian myth that postulates that the flood will definitely come back. Plus, Aronofsky also has a vegetarian agenda here that is missing from the original myth (in fact in the original story God allows the eating of animals as long as you don’t drink their blood).
Much of the discourse surrounding Noah has been centered around Aronofsky’s decision to turn the story into a Hollywoody action blockbuster. While I didn’t mind the action so much (much of it is to reinforce Noah’s guilt at letting all these people die) I did think the script is a bit weak. Like in Pi, I found the imagery fascinating but I also found parts that are over-explaining the themes. Perhaps Aronofsky was aware he was making a film for a big studio that expected the film to be a commercial hit and the vagaries of modern studio filmmaking are to be blamed but it brings the film down several notches. But I nonetheless find the film to be fascinating and don’t think it deserves the condescendation with which some people seem to treat it with.
mother! (2017)
If Noah was a classic protagonist in fear of God’s word and entirely loyal to him then Javier Bardem’s character in mother! is the post-modern “I am the author of this story and therefore I myself am God.” Noah at end of the film has to make a hard choice but at least he has the luxury of a choice unlike Jennifer Lawrence’s character here whose path is telegraphed and she has to follow this path without respite, a path of nothing but despair and pain. Unlike Noah, mother! at least at first seems to take place in the real world. From the first image we know that the idyllic existence of Mother and her husband (or whatever you want to call him, Him, the Poet or even God) is not going to last for long but depending on how much one knows going into the film you don’t know exactly where it’s headed until about half way through. Noah theorised that God is punishing humanity for it’s evils. mother! is more cynical. It theorises that He himself is responsible for all of the destruction of mother earth and the humans act as nothing but his agents and that mother must suffer cyclically for that is her journey.
Mother is most always dressed in white. She has long blonde hair and she is hapless. She is played by Jennifer Lawrence, whose face takes on a helpless quality even at the slightest hint of something wrong. When Ed Harris’ character first enters the house you get an inkling that he is not to be trusted. He appears friendly and hits it off with the husband but it’s all there in Lawrence’s face, the doubt and the misgivings. It doesn’t take much time for her life to devolve into chaos and Aronofsky piles on the misery on mother, first psychologically and then physically. She is trapped inside the house, trapped in her love for her husband trapped in an out-of-body experience. Amidst all the carnage, there’s a sequence with a sink that hits all the wrong notes in all the right ways.
Aside from the Judeo-Christian environmental message, there’s a few other ways to read the film. Some of the scenes where mother is at height of her trauma recall the scenes in Requiem for a Dream where Burstyn and Connelly’s characters are at the end of their rope. While that film was focused solely on the destructive powers of addiction, a message implicit was the systematic treatment of women. In mother! that feeling of seeing her suffering on the screen is punctuated by the fact that this is enabled by her husband, that women suffer at the hands of men but also because of a system that allows other people to turn a blind eye (other women are included in this). This oppression may also be justified by the husband sacrificing her in the name of artistic gratification. The adoring fans, which the husband lets take over his house are a manifestation of his large ego, letting the fame get to his head. But, as is the case his wife’s well-being falls by the wayside. Mother fights her own battles, first renovating the house by herself and then fighting the intruders in the house her husband being notoriously absent when she needs him the most. And what does she get for all her trouble? “Ah, the inspiration” says Kristen Wiig’s publicist, again just making her a part of what makes Him. She is left no individuality, like many women before her who have to bear the sacrifices because “the husband is the one who works and earns money and without him they would have nothing.”
But foremost of the message mother! wants to convey is environmentalist with the help of Judeo-Christian myths. Mother is mother earth and the m is not capitalized, not only to signifying her vulnerability, but also because she is a place of warmth and to address her informally comes easily. She is God’s creation and sometimes even feels like his plaything. He gets her pregnant but then rips away her child from her. Humans are a plague that he sets upon her and they trample her. He, however doesn’t seem concerned even offering their son, Jesus born of God and also of the earth, making him die for humanity’s sin and then being devoured, suggesting the story of Jesus to be some sort of masochistic fantasy. When mother burns down the house she herself lovingly built, he doesn’t seem to be affected, instead asking for her love and taking her heart. A cruel god who turns his legions of devotees into fanatics who’ll do anything in his name they ultimately destroy mother and it seems that’s what the task given by him is to his people. And yet when she is destroyed another takes her place and the cycle repeats. No matter how far we get, the Hims of this world know how to prey on our devotion and turn it into fanaticism and the cycle of violence and war repeats and the earth suffers.
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