ARONOFSKY CH. 2 PT. 2: mother!
Manage episode 404183613 series 2854826
SCARF SEASON #4: GARDEN OF EDITS: mother!
Rejoin Ken and Thomas along with guest Shannon in the rebirth of Season 11, Chapter II as they tackle (figuratively) Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER! (the 2017 film, not the parent of Darren!).
After the big budget success of NOAH, and having not made a movie with a female lead with whom he was romantically involved in well over seven years (if rumors about Black Swan are true), Aronofsky returns to lower budget filmmaking with a bottle story about JudeoChristian terror or the inherent evils of humanity or perhaps a home improvement show gone terribly wrong, casting Jennifer Lawrence as the titular Mother.
SPOILER! ALERT! Mother defends the house she’s rebuilding for Him (not a pronoun but the name given in the credits to the unnamed Javier Bardem), her romantic partner in a tasteful callback to late-90s Eastwood film in age discrepancy! Him’s house was badly burned and Him is a poet. All is idyllic except Him can’t write. When “man” played by Ed Harris intrudes upon their remote home mistaking it for a B&B and then man’s wife “woman” played by Michelle Pfeiffer shows up looking for her smoking doctor husband and gives Mother a hard time for not being a mother and not being a drunk like her and Mother wants them out of the house.
SPOILER! ALERT! CONTINUES! Mother eventually gets her wish and, after being ignored, has angry staircase sex with Him, which results in a wanted pregnancy and his ability to complete the poem. Soon, visitors arrive, as it turns out that Him has quite the cult following, including his publicist played by Kristen Wiig in a very unfunny role. Eventually, Mother gives birth, her baby is ripped to shreds, and she is burned alive and harvested as a crystal before it all starts over again. Hey, we warned you there’d be spoilers!
So follow along as the three mortals recover from REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and unpack Aronofsky’s latest (but earliest discussed by Ken and Thomas as Season 11 matches the first with last films moving inward in a temporal pincer movement) allegory, Shannon gives a new title to BLACK SWAN, Thomas pointlessly cites passages from critical theory books, and Ken sings the 1988 Danzig classic.
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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167 episodes