Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of mother!
2017 · Darren Aronofsky · mother! on Sightlines
A woman walks into a room and the camera comes in behind her shoulder and does not leave. That is the whole machine.
Aronofsky and Matthew Libatique had the house built in Montreal as a 360-degree set on a soundstage, engineered so the camera could cross rooms and climb stairs without a wall ever being pulled away. Then they used that freedom to build a cage. We see almost nothing Jennifer Lawrence's character cannot see, and we almost never leave her proximity. When the guests arrive, they arrive at the edge of her face.
Deleuze has a name for this arrangement: the dicisign. An ordinary shot shows you a room. A dicisign shows you somebody perceiving the room, and you feel the camera in there as a second body, close enough that its attachment to her becomes part of what you are watching. Pasolini called the same thing free indirect subjective, the author's vision and the character's vision folded into one lens. The result is that the invasion registers as pressure on a nervous system before it registers as plot. The debt is exact. Rosemary's Baby tied its camera to a pregnant woman inside one apartment so the audience could never know more than she did, and made helpful guests into horror by that limit alone. Aronofsky takes the template and shortens the leash.
The face is doing particular work. The affection-image, in Deleuze, is the close-up: a feeling that has landed and has nowhere to go. He splits it in two. There is the reflecting face that holds one quality, wonder or contemplation, immobile. And there is the intensive face, where small movements climb a series toward a threshold. The second he calls a potisign, an icon of power, power meaning what a body is on the verge of. Lawrence plays nearly the entire film in that register, absorbing without breaking, while the 16mm grain keeps the face close and unglamorous. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc is the named ancestor, a drama carried on one woman's reactions to her tormentors. Dreyer's close-ups open onto heaven. These open onto a hallway, which is worse.
The standard complaint is that she never does anything. She does, constantly. She cleans, she repaints, she asks people politely to leave, she tries to get a name out of a stranger. None of it changes the situation. Deleuze's term for a character whose perception stops converting into effective action is the voyant, the seer, someone who can only look and endure. He found the type in postwar Italy, among people standing in ruins with nothing useful to do. Here it arrives by another road: the only action her position sanctions is hospitality. That is the engine of the horror, and the debt to Buñuel's Exterminating Angel, where guests will not leave and nobody can say why. The Tenant runs the same siege as a slow eviction from selfhood. Politeness is the trap. Her verbs are host verbs, and host verbs cannot evict anyone.
Which opens the category that really holds this film. Between the close-up and the action movie, Deleuze puts the impulse-image: cinema of appetite rather than psychology. Its method is to present an ordinary setting, the derived milieu, as a crust over an originary world of raw drive, then let the drive eat through. Stroheim and Buñuel are his cases. mother! is built this way from the first guest. Pfeiffer and Harris are corrosive, funny, insinuating, entirely recognizable as bad houseguests, and that naturalism is what makes the crust convincing. Then the Gleeson brothers stage their fratricide, the house tips, and what comes through is worship, riot, war, desecration. The impulse-image always has a direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope, an irreversible descent toward exhaustion and death. The furnace in the basement, the wound that keeps opening in the floorboards, the rooms repainted and violated and repainted again: that is the slope, drawn in domestic labor.
Space obeys the same logic. Deleuze distinguishes a relative out-of-field, the next room you could point to, from an absolute one, a beyond you cannot place anywhere. The continuous set makes every room relative, always just there through the doorway. The dread comes from how reliably the relative starts producing the absolute. The crowd multiplies past counting. Nothing outside the house ever gets a scene of its own. Whatever is out there comes in through the front door. By the final act the house has stopped being a setting and become what Deleuze calls any-space-whatever in its disconnected form: rooms cut loose from geography, each charged with a single affect, a warren of atrocities the camera pushes her through. Repulsion is the ancestor there, an apartment treated as a psychic membrane rather than an address.
There is an inversion worth naming. Bazin's case for the long take and continuous space was ethical. Do not chop the world up for the viewer; leave the frame open, let the eye choose. Aronofsky builds Bazin's dream house, a set with no walls to strike and takes that run as long as the actors last, and turns the ethic inside out. Continuity here is what leaves you nowhere else to look.
The invention is the fusion. Teorema ran a household allegory with characters as theological ciphers, cool and programmatic, watched from outside. mother! keeps the parable architecture, the unnamed people, a protagonist credited as mother, and routes it through a first-person body. You sit in domestic embarrassment for an hour before the symbolic scaffolding declares itself, so the allegory arrives as something that already happened to you. Allegory normally asks to be decoded at a distance. This one is administered.
Which is why it detonated. Paramount sold it as a Jennifer Lawrence horror picture and put it in multiplexes; audiences handed back a rare F. The film has no score, so the rail that usually tells you how to feel is gone, and what is left is designed sound behaving like physiology, breath and creak and low frequency tightening around her. Artaud thought cinema's real power was not to give us thoughts but to confront us with our inability to think. Deleuze built that idea into his account of what the strongest images do, and an F is that encounter recorded at scale. The forward influence is not a style anyone copied. It is the case every studio now cites when deciding how hostile a wide release is allowed to be.
Watch it again and keep one question open. The camera stays at her shoulder for two hours and never once helps. From that distance, devotion and complicity look the same, and the film is about a man who turns a woman into material for his work. The last thing to ask is what we were doing in the room.
Concepts in play
- dicisign — Libatique's near-programmatic scheme: over-the-shoulder following shots and unforgiving close-ups, so we rarely see anything Lawrence's character cannot see and rarely leave her proximity — the camera felt as a second presence attached to her perceiving
- icon of power (potisign) — Lawrence's role is almost entirely reaction: micro-expressions absorbing the invasion in sustained 16mm close-up, climbing toward a threshold rather than holding a single quality — the Passion of Joan of Arc debt named in the lineage
- the seer (voyant) — A role of watching, absorbing and being violated; her available acts — cleaning, repainting, asking guests to leave — never alter the situation, since hospitality is the only action her position sanctions
- impulse-image — The guests colonize by appetite and the poet runs on hunger for adoration; Pfeiffer and Harris's insinuating, corrosive naturalism holds the social surface while the drive eats through it
- originary world — The neutral, timeless domesticity (no phones, no period markers) revealed in the second half as a savage world of worship, riot, war and desecration, tipped by the Gleeson brothers' fratricide
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The basement furnace, the mysterious wound in the floorboards, the endlessly repainted and re-violated rooms, and a bipartite structure that abandons plausibility for a headlong rush to the sacrificial climax
- out-of-field (absolute) — The house is the film's only real location; nothing outside gets a scene of its own, yet the crowd multiplies past counting and arrives through the front door, so the adjacent space keeps producing an unlocatable beyond
- any-space-whatever (disconnection) — The climactic apocalypse pushes her through a house become a warren of atrocities, the space turning nightmarishly plastic as editing collapses time and cause
- fetish (part-object) — The crystal guarded in Bardem's study and the wound in the floorboards: part-objects charged with compulsive force inside a house staged as a body
- spiritual automaton (Artaud's impower) — No conventional non-diegetic score, so the audience's emotional guide-rail is removed and only designed physiological sound remains — a film engineered to block rather than guide, answered by a rare F CinemaScore on a wide studio release