Editorials
What ‘Mother!’ (2017) Is Really About
Please give me a few minutes of your time as I take a weird deep dive into my favorite movie of all time. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is an incredibly divisive film, and I will never refute that. When I was thinking about what angle I wanted for this review, I was coming up blank. Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother is a compelling and beautifully written character so I knew it would fit this month’s theme. Cut to my 51st viewing of the film a few nights ago, a multi-hour call with a very good friend, and three pots of coffee…that’s when I found my angle.
Exploring the Infinite Monkey Theorem in Mother!
For those who are unaware, the infinite monkey theorem states that if a monkey is given a typewriter and an unlimited amount of time, it will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare. Even though NPR tried to disprove that, it still feels possible. If there was truly an unlimited amount of time, how could it not happen? But here’s where I have issues with this idea: who is the monkey, and who is the typewriter? Does Mother have the agency to actually change the outcome of her story? Is Him a passive observer? Does Him’s reactions to Mother’s actions dictate her next steps? And what can the death of first Mother/Foremother (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) and the awakening of third Mother/Maiden (Laurence Leboeuf) tell us? Join me as I try to decipher whatever the hell this movie is.
Mother! follows Mother, who awakens post-death from Foremother. Mother wanders around the house before being intercepted by Him. Him is a writer who has been frustrated by a bout of writer’s block. Man (Ed Harris) shows up out of the blue and is soon followed by Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer). After their two kids Youngest Brother (Brian Gleeson) and Oldest Son (Domnhall Gleeson) show up, and a fight ensues, one of them dies. This leads to a wild party to celebrate the deceased’s life in which Him eventually gets Mother pregnant. Him overcomes his writer’s block which leads to the downfall of everything.
My First Viewing Experience: Shock, Silence, and Obsession
When I first saw Mother! I was stunned. What started, on the film’s opening day, as a half-full theater ended with me and my friend sitting in a tearful silence. I went back the next day with another friend (the one I had a multi-hour phone call with for this piece) and watched the movie again. We both sat in stunned silence as the credits rolled. Thanks to being a MoviePass member (when it was still a movie a day), I was able to see Mother! every single day for the next five days. I have never had a theatrical experience like I did with this film. What was equally stunning was that Paramount Pictures had the guts to distribute a film like this.
Him as God: The Egotistical Storyteller in Aronofsky’s Vision
Aronofsky has been very tightlipped about all of the intricacies of Mother!, and that’s okay. Frustrating, but okay. Here’s what we know. There are three main ideas behind Mother! and that is 1) the story of an artist and their muse 2) the destruction of Mother Earth and the most on-the-nose allegory 3) Him is God and Mother is Mary. While these ideas have been talked about to death, I want to look into how the infinite monkey theorem works here and how Him is experiencing one of the wildest examples of insanity seen in film.
Mother as the Monkey
Let’s take note of what we can infer as well as what is directly told to us. In the beginning, we see Foremother burn to death/explode the same way that Mother does. Maiden ends the film by turning over and saying, “Baby” as Mother does. Mother’s recitation of “Baby” is quite different from Maiden’s delivery. When we hear Mother say the line it sounds partially panicky, partially forlorn. Maiden’s almost sounds calm and accepting. To me, Mother’s delivery of the line almost feels like she’s calling out for the recently deceased child while Maiden’s call is toward Him.
The wording of this may sound offensive, but it is simply used in conjunction with the infinite monkey theorem. For the sake of my argument, I believe that Mother is the monkey. When I started writing this piece, I thought that Him might be the monkey until I realized I was wrong. The actual inciting incident of Mother! is when Man and Woman destroy the crystal. (The metaphorical biting of the apple.) Him is not just testing Mother, Him is also testing Man and Woman. When Him, Man, Woman, and Mother are sitting around the table drinking coffee, Mother brings out some snacks. One of the snacks is a bowl of what looks like cookies and two singular slices of fruit that look very similar to apples.
One can imply that Him is watching Man and Woman closely because he yearns for the romance he feels between them. I think he’s intently watching to see if they go for the two apples. Him has put Man and Woman in this scenario before and they have failed; here they have passed. It’s not until the breaking of the crystal that all hell [literally] breaks loose.
The Crystal and the Apple: Symbols of Chaos in Mother!
We see moments of reflection and acknowledgment in some actions. When Mother is asked by Him if Man can stay the night she replies with, “Of…course.” A tinge of sadness echoes through the line and she chokes on her words. When Man sees the crystal he asks if it was a gift from Mother and she replies with a singular, “No.” Again, her voice cracks, she sounds like she wants to cry. It’s almost as if she has been asked this before and something inside of Mother is telling her it was Foremother’s heart she was looking at.
There are countless examples of these moments that crossover between timelines. One can assume that if a monkey will eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare, it will also type a few of the same lines over and over. Multiple moments coexist within these different timelines, and something in Mother is letting her know that.
Free Will vs. Fate: Can Mother Ever Escape Him’s Design?
Him is God. The Great Storyteller. The most egotistical man that can exist. The true definition of good and evil. But is he writing Mother’s story or is she in charge of her own destiny? When Mother wakes up, she wanders around the house. She makes her way to the front door, opens it, and steps outside. Before she can take any further steps, as it can be interpreted as she wanted to continue walking, Him stops her. (This raises another question of whether or not she can exist outside of the confines of this astonishingly octagonal house.) It’s clear that Him remembers everything that happens with previous Mothers, but how far will he go to ensure Mother goes the path he truly wants?
Later in the day, Mother goes to one of the walls in the house to paint it. She puts muted yellow paint on the wall but doesn’t seem content with it. Mother puts her hand on the wall and sees the heart beating inside of it, a small amount of decay starts to grow. This prompts her to sprinkle a yellow substance in the paint for a more vibrant yellow, and she seems happy with the choice. This is one of many examples of the house speaking to Mother, warning her of potential mistakes.
How the House Speaks: Decoding Mother’s Intuition
Later, Mother goes to the basement to grab sheets for Man after agreeing he can stay the night. As she grabs the sheets, the furnace kicks in. This seems to imply her decision to agree to Man’s stay is a mistake that Foremother made (which we know led to her demise). That same night, she flicks Man’s lighter off the dresser, which causes another bout of intense ear ringing and reveals a sliver of a charred floor. Once Woman is there, Mother finds Woman and Man making out. This reveals more of the charred floor.
The Yellow Underwear Scene Explained
Interestingly, we get a moment of Mother possibly making a choice previous Mothers have not. Mother and Woman go to the basement and Woman makes fun of Mother’s plain underwear. After Woman leaves the basement, Mother sees a pair of Woman’s bright yellow underwear sticking out of the washer. Mother throws the underwear behind the washer (presumably to save it and use at a later date) but there’s no furnace sound. Has she finally made a good decision?
After the brothers arrive and have their tiff, Mother is left alone in the house to clean up. The spot where Younger Brother died has now turned into a goopy hole that reveals the then-blocked-off furnace. She rests her head on the wall while emptying the bloody water bucket, and we see the heart again. It’s decaying more and more.
Mother is still making the wrong decisions.
Why Mother! Is a Timeless Cinematic Masterpiece
What does all of this tell us? Mother has a certain amount of agency. But also that previous mother’s soul wants her to succeed. We don’t know how many times Him has gone through this series of events, we only know that it hasn’t worked up to this point. We also don’t know what he wants. When Mother becomes pregnant, Him gets over his writer’s block and writes the New Testament. I believe that he’s completely Id-driven at this point. Him lost sight of what he needed to do and remembers the fame that comes with his writings.
The last thing Him says to Mother before she perishes is, “You were home.” As with nearly everything in this film that can have two meanings. Was that line meant to imply that Mother was in her rightful home? Did he think that she was the one who would end this cataclysmic cycle of pain and torment? Or was he saying that Mother was home? Is this his smooth-talking way of getting her heart to retroactively find solace in his love to turn into the crystal he so desperately needs to make Maiden?
Mother! has an undeniably dense amount of layers that become increasingly apparent with each viewing. As I finish this article I have the film on in the background and I’m noticing more pieces of evidence that make my point more apparent. An argument could possibly be made that Him is the monkey and Mother is the typewriter but that all falls down to perspective and selective examples.
If there’s one thing I can leave you with, it’s that Mother! is one of the most important films of the 21st century. With the recent death of David Lynch, many people feel that art in Hollywood is truly dead. Few filmmakers can make a truly astounding piece of art that transcends time with the conversation it creates. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a film that will be discussed for decades, if not centuries. That is unless we completely destroy Mother Earth and destroy it from the inside out.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
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