Film Review: Mother Mary

A song is a prayer is a spell is a confession is an exorcism is a spectacle is a revelation is a birth

From time to time, horror writer Gabino Iglesias reposts this litany on his Bluesky profile:

Many people have a book in them,
but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness,
cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain,
find the Blade of No One Made You Do This,
and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

Such is the view of art that permeates David Lowery’s film Mother Mary. The story sounds deceptively simple: Mary, a dance/pop diva in the middle of a creative crisis, returns to the workshop of her former costume designer, Sam, to apologize for breaking their professional partnership and beg for a new dress. Most of the film consists of this single conversation, like a one-act play that reveals entire inner lives as the two lead characters tear down their barriers and take off their veils. Within the space of a small interpersonal drama of wounded trust and unspeakable regrets, Mother Mary weaves its statement about what it takes to produce any genuine art.

Anne Hathaway’s performance as Mary, which includes providing her own voice for all the songs, balances, on one hand, an irresistible scenic presence capable of commanding the adoration of masses of fans (her character is presented as a world-class star on the level of Lady Gaga or Beyoncé), and on the other hand, when she’s off stage, a consuming sorrow that overwhelms her words and movements. Both facets of this character convey the same vulnerability, but it’s fascinating to see how differently she expresses it before a full stadium versus in private conversation with her artistic collaborator. Sam, as played by Michaela Coel, is like a bird with a broken wing, but a bird of prey with eyes that miss nothing and a deadly beak. She takes delight in the return of her muse, but can’t just shake off the years of hurt. This creation is going to be personally costly for both of them.

I often say on this blog that the best stories are those about stories. Mother Mary is something very close: art about art—barely a story, more a portrait that’s being painted as you watch. The emotional bond between Mary and Sam is kept tight, on the verge of snapping, under looks of compassion that shoot daggers and poisoned recriminations coated with sweetness. Mother Mary isn’t trying to convince you that artistic creation has to hurt; it just assumes that it already does. So it’s fitting that Mary shows up on a Thursday to request a dress for the Sunday: the exact timeframe for a full Via Crucis and resurrection.

In a film like this, filled to the brim with Catholic imagery, the fashion designer’s name, Sam Anselm, has to be read as an allusion to the 11th-century Burgundian monk and philosopher St. Anselm, whose method of theology put faith before reason: in his system, you first assent to the revealed truth and then seek to understand it. That’s how you’re meant to experience a film like Mother Mary. It defies logical analysis unless you first accept it on its terms. Instead of arguing for a point, what it’s doing is push out a raw feeling through a scream drowned in sobs.

The connections between the religious experience and the mass ecstasy of pop music have been noticed since before “Madonna” became a stage name. In keeping with the theme of death coming before resurrection, Mother Mary links the act of creation to a demand for bloody sacrifice, an interchange of equally sincere love and hate (think Black Swan, Farinelli, Amadeus). This pain is physically inscribed on the two protagonists: when she’s not performing, Mary is shown with plain, shoulder-length hair, evoking the image of a suffering Jesus, while Sam wears her hair in rigid, pointed locks, arranged like a crown of thorns. The turning point of clarity, when the nature and shape of the new dress is revealed, arrives by a succession of stigmata, confession, forgiveness, and angelic visitation. The film opens with a song about a burial and closes with a song about a cradle, in a moment marked visually on the screen by a line that literally goes full circle.

But then, the end credits conclude with a puzzling statement: a shot of a human skull on a shelf, a common motif in Western painting that retroactively casts the whole film as a vanitas piece. The traditional function of this motif is to remind the viewer that eternity outweighs worldly pursuits, and ultimately anything we build here turns to dust. And yet, Mother Mary exists. It’s a complete experience of rhythmic beats and color and dance moves and ritual and brightness, as if defying the verdict of time. All is dust, but some of that dust is glitter.

To the extent that Mother Mary is articulating someting, as opposed to inviting you to feel it, its verbalizable content is dressed in swirling, uncut drapes of black and crimson. Image here is paramount, which makes it easy for viewers more inclined toward tangible substance to dismiss this film as too enamored with its own aesthetic. Meanwhile, in the real world, Madonna has just released a new album, Confessions II, whose third song, “One Step Away,” contains this spoken monologue:

People think that dance music is superficial. But they’ve got it all wrong.
The dance floor is not just a place. It’s a threshold,
a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.

So go into Mother Mary as you go into a holy ceremony. You have my blessing.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

--

Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Feminist Futures: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Dossier: Tiptree Jr, James. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever [Tachyon, 2004]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: This collection of 18 short stories and novellas spans the publication career of Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote chiefly under the pseudonym "James Tiptree, Jr." until her identity (and gender) was revealed. She also wrote under the name Racoona Sheldon, a persona also represented by a pair of stories included here.

The stories included in this anthology span a wide range of sci-fi settings, from present day ("The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" and "The Women Men Don't See") to established outer space operations ("And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways" and "We Who Stole the Dream") to scientific or space exploration ("The Man Who Walked Home," "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and "Houston, Houston Do You Read?"). There are a number of other stories that center the point-of-view in an "other" or "outsider" character, whether it's a human gripped by some form of madness or psychic distress ("Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" and "With Delicate Mad Hands") or some type of far-future, evolved human or sentient, decidedly non-human alien ("Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" and "Slow Music"). The breadth of the collection is truly staggering. 

One of the best-known works here is "The Screwfly Solution," which tells the story of a mysterious pathogen that is driving men all across Earth to commit femicide — murdering women without seeming to realize what they're doing. I will not spoil the reveal buried in the last line of the story, which gives some clarity to what's been taking place. 

Another story that has come to take on something of a legendary status is "The Women Men Don't See." In this one, a male narrator — Don Fenton, a comfortably middle-class businessman who has nothing much to distinguish himself — tells the story of an ill-fated jungle tour in Mexico when the chartered plane he's on crashes on a sandbar in a storm. He and Ruth Parsons, one of the other passengers, set off to cross a marsh in order to find help, leaving Ruth's daughter and the pilot, Esteban, behind with the plane. Don struggles to perceive Ruth as anything but a collection of types — a "Mother Hen" with her daughter, one of the countless "Mrs. Parsons" working in accounting and billing et cetera throughout the D.C. bureaucratic corps — but as Ruth begins behaving very strangely and mysterious lights and sounds accost them in the marshes at night, Don begins to realize that Ruth might be preparing to go to extreme lengths to get away from the world of men...the kind of men who refuse to acknowledge in her any individuality or unique humanity.

One of the more heartbreaking stories in this collection of heart-breakers and gut-punchers is "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" This is a parallel narrative of the authorities and family members of a girl who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital, and the story of the girl herself, who believes that she is a courier in a far-future after the nuclear wars, when all men have died off. The collision of her beautiful fantasy world and the ugly, brutal reality that she (thankfully) can't see but is nevertheless tightening its net around her is a painful journey to go on, but one that is beautifully rendered.

Feminist Future: There are a number of feminist futures (and presents) on display throughout Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. And, truth be told, most of them are pretty grim. These are stories where individual women and groups of women are victimized by men just as a matter of routine, where women are expected to perform scientific as well as sexual roles for their male crewmates during space exploration, and about women in societies where men have vanished, but (unlike Herland) hardly find themselves at peace in a worry-free utopia. 

Hope for the Future: These are not hopeful futures. The worlds of James Tiptree, Jr. reflect in various far-flung settings a profound, nuanced, and lived-in understanding of the big and small ways in which women might be victimized, ignored, made invisible, or treated like property throughout most of the 20th century. Alice Sheldon took her lived experiences, which clearly filled her with a pervasive sense of righteous outrage, and transposed them into speculative frameworks that could illuminate her struggles and the struggles of women more broadly. By couching daily rituals of degradation or possessiveness in narrative and genre trappings, Sheldon was able to discuss and probe with deep empathy the effects of gender inequality that plagued her own era, and many of which sadly persist to this day, despite some progress. So in that way, thirty years after her death, her pessimism was at least partly justified.

Legacy The work of Alice Sheldon inspired generations of female authors who felt that, for the first time, they were able to see themselves in science fiction. At a time when Arthur C. Clarke was writing stories where a hyper-intelligent ape might be a member of a space crew but a woman could not, Alice Sheldon was telling stories with female protagonists that could make women who experienced the same kinds of societal constraints that she did feel seen. That she had to do it in the guise of a man was instructive to the science fiction community at large, and Sheldon's contribution remains memorialized today in the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award and Tiptree Fellowships.

In Retrospect: First, a quick primer on "James Tiptree, Jr." For a wonderful audio profile, check out this story from KCRW's Unfictional in 2015. Tiptree appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a string of short stories that immediately landed on lists for the top awards in the field, but he never arrived to pick up the awards. Never made personal appearances at all. But Tiptree kept up correspondences with a number of fans and young genre authors, particularly young women. Known to these correspondents as "Uncle Tip," Tiptree wrote overtly sexual, explicitly phallic stories in a muscular, brash style that often centered on female protagonists or on men confronted with a woman or group of women who explode against their plans, perceptions, or worldview, forever altering or imperiling them. In the landscape of late-1960s science fiction, this was a startling anomaly. Men simply didn't write women's stories in that field. Women's stories largely weren't told — unless women were included in roles like the ones in which Don Fenton saw Ruth Parsons...secretaries, mothers in the background of men's stories, assistants, etc. 

So people began to wonder if maybe James Tiptree, Jr. wasn't secretly a woman. It's hard to imagine this detective work coming from anything but a place of ill will. Whether to discredit the stories or the author, the digging into who Tiptree *really* was ultimately forced "Uncle Tip" to come clean as Alice Bradley Sheldon, formerly of Army intelligence and the CIA. Alice Sheldon and Racoona Sheldon never received the acclaim James Tiptree, Jr. did, but the work remained astonishing, gripping, and bleak. 

In reading Tiptree, I couldn't help but be reminded of Flannery O'Connor in that wherever the stories started or whichever direction they may start heading, they would always veer hard to death. Characters don't get happy endings, hope is inevitably extinguished just when it seemed likely to pay off, and those misgivings nagging at the back of characters' minds always turn out to be harbingers of a doom lurking just up ahead. The writing veers from aggressively straightforward to experimental, but the characters remain vibrant and engrossing. Even though plowing through this anthology winds up taking a toll, making the world look perhaps a little more gray, a little less trustworthy when you look up from the pages, these stories represent a towering body of work. 

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 5/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 10/10

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012.

Microreview [book]: Crossroads of Canopy, by Thoraiya Dyer

If you haven’t read this yet, why on earth not? And if you have yet somehow didn’t like it, seriously: why on earth not?

Dyer, Thoraiya. Crossroads of Canopy. Macmillan, 2017.

You can buy it here, and by the time you’re done reading this review, you’ll want to!

Despite being the target of polarizing reviews (some of which, I am convinced, are consciously or unconsciously motivated by dislike for precisely what makes it unique, namely the unconventional heroine), this story is awesome. Its awesomeness stems partly from its world-building (the unique forest world, consisting of the mysterious Floor, the savage Understory, and the elitist Canopy, with the people and creatures from each a strange and fascinating mix of familiar and alien traits) and partly, perhaps mostly, from its main character. Here’s why heroine Unar is the best female protagonist—and indeed, one of the best protagonists of any biological sex or gender—in years.

Her masculine-without-being-stereotypically-tomboyish femininity:

Unlike the squeaky clean, often virginal heroines of recent popular fantasy and sci fi literature (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan!), Unar has desires…and acts on them. In fact, her coming of age reminded me quite strongly of Tenar’s awakening in Ursula Le Guin’s immortal The Tombs of Atuan. I wonder if Unar’s name might have been inspired by that rather similar story of social and sexual repression, out of which, like two glorious butterflies, these two heroines irrepressibly burst? Unar is not a model of demure femininity; instead, she’s an interesting mix of feminine and (what we might identify as) prototypically masculine traits, especially her tremendous ambition and her hunger for power, qualities that stay-in-the-kitchen traditionalists would doubtless call ‘unfeminine’. Given men’s dismal track record of monopolizing power, controlling female sexuality and indulging their ambitions throughout history (both in the world of Canopy and our own), ‘unfeminine’ girl power doesn’t sound so bad to me.

Thanks for taking a giant dump on the Earthsea cycle, creators of this crappy 2004 miniseries!

Her moral ambiguity:

Generally, heroines are presented as always doing the right thing, so even when, e.g., Katniss Everdeen shoots a certain character in the Hunger Games trilogy, the reader certainly is not meant to question Katniss’s essential goodness. That is, female anti-heroes, true anti-hero(ine) protagonists (not just pure-hearted women forced by cruel circumstances to do bad things, or black-hearted ‘fallen woman’ villains) are very rare, as though even most authors can scarcely conceive of a woman anywhere in the ethical spectrum between the polar extremes of pure goodness and total evil. Unar, however, is decidedly a mixed bag, ethically, and as the reader continues to cheer her on, we too become complicit in some of her darker deeds. I’m not talking about when she’s being mind-controlled, her magic used against her will to harm others; that’s just standard victim stuff. I’m talking about when she does have control: often she acts bravely, and sometimes altruistically, but also occasionally acts out of pure selfishness. Gosh, this mass of contradictions almost sounds like a real person—a lot more than most fairytale heroines, to be sure!

Her overall awesomeness:

Unar is betrayed many times, in many forms, by family, friends and allies, but she is like a juggernaut—nothing can keep her down. She’s also almost unique, given her privileged position, in being quick to recognize the worth of people in a lower social class than her; she both uses their talents for her own ends and, sometimes, uses her own vast powers to help them. She is essentially the only person in her highly and literally stratified world that is able to travel between these distinct layers, combining the best parts of both Canopy and Understory. I can hardly wait until we get a sequel and she begins exploring the still dark and mysterious world of Floor!

The fact that there’s no ‘happily ever after’ in sight:

Usually, books about girls (or boys, for that matter) bring everything to a cathartic and suitably romantic conclusion; the heroine finds and wins the man of her dreams, etc., etc. But Unar has no such too-pat ending waiting for her. Even if no sequel is ever written (though that would be a terrible shame!), Unar’s story is complete in its incompleteness. The worth of a young woman, the sum total of her life, cannot be expressed in hetero(or homo)sexual union—nor is her value necessarily tied to her youth. This story emphasizes that, by focusing more on the life-cycle of the oppressed women of this fictional world, introducing not only Maidens, but also Mothers and Crones, and insisting we the readers take notice of their valuable contributions. Fittingly, at the end Unar finds herself decisively deprived—by her own actions—of the chance to settle down and enjoy a quiet, happy life, and given her morally questionable deeds, her inability to resume her old life, while in a sense a cruel fate, is not a surprising one. It’s only surprising if we the readers have been fed a diet of happily ever afters. I for one am looking forward to future stories about Unar’s fascinating exploits, as something tells me her story is far from over.

 The Math:

Objective Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for making such a morally complex, endlessly fascinating heroine as Unar

                +1 for quite creative bout of world-building

Penalties: None!

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Totally sweet!”
  

See more about our scoring system (under which 8/10 is quite rare!) here.

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, aficionado of fictional worlds and devotee of earth-shattering heroines like Unar, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since ancient times (2013).

Microreview [book]: Honor's Knight, by Rachel Bach

Bach, Rachel. Honor's Knight. Orbit Books, 2014 (last week!).

Buy it here .

Honor's Knight: Or, the Rom-Act Grows a Conscience

The Meat 

Recently I've been rather curmudgeonly about second installments (in trilogies or longer series), pointing out that almost none manage to equal, and astonishingly few surpass, the 'original' work from the first installment. How many Empire Strikes Back-level sequels have there really been, after all? But as various songs would have it, "This is it!" Rachel Bach (a.k.a. Rachel Aaron) charts a thrilling ride for Devi Morris and the reader, bringing her and us several giant steps closer to the clearly apocalyptic denouement looming just over the horizon (in book three if not beyond). She's managed to improve on the already excellent foundations laid in book one, ramping up both action and a sense of emotional engagement between characters (and between the characters and the readers) to dizzying new heights.

Bach also delves deeper into the mechanics, so to speak, of the various races and their physical (and more ethereal) attributes, treating the reader to a fascinating and fully fleshed out rendering of their capabilities. And she's also brought a new level of attention to the possibility of shifting loyalties and alliances, even for Devi (who by her Paradoxian upbringing is a bit of a samurai, "Death before dishonor or betrayal" kind of loyalist). She finds new allies in the unlikeliest of figures, and friends turn into enemies and then into the intermediate limbo of frenemies with breathtaking speed. Yet Bach handles such situations with considerable care, ensuring the reader can follow such rapid changes in alignments without any difficulty accepting their plausibility.

In fact, Bach even raises the philosophical level of her tale from relatively harmless rom-act (romantic action) in book one to a more serious "At what price (individual/species/universe) survival?" It is this greater level of nuance, more than anything, that humanizes both allies and frenemies alike, because as readers we instinctively sympathize on an emotional level with the romantics who insist some prices are too high to be worth paying even as intellectually we are forced to concede the logic of the utilitarians who insist that for the survival of the many, a few must be sacrificed...in short, there are no Voldemorts or Dumbledores, no simple paragons of good and evil, in this tale.

That said, Honor's Knight never risks becoming too gloomy in tone or losing its (or, one might imagine, Devi's own) irrepressible sense of optimism, that classical Hollywood-esque feeling that everything not only might, it surely will turn out all right in the end. Whether you approve of this sunny quality will depend, of course, on whether you think the world is getting better or getting worse (let me just say, for all you committed pessimists out there: what evidence can you possibly have that the world is getting worse? And don't you dare say "because it's more violent/dangerous," because invasion of the Ukraine notwithstanding, humankind has never enjoyed such relative freedom from violence, on such a (nearly total) global scale, in all of recorded history!) And speaking of violence, Devi brings the goods: Honor's Knight contains plenty of good old fashioned awesomeness in the form of Devi using her fancy armor to devastating effect against a host of different enemies.

What isn't there to like about this sequel, in short? I can only think of one thing, and that's the on again, off again romance between now frenemies Devi and Rupert. Naturally we can all appreciate why a man would fall for Devi—she's pretty amazing, after all—but why would she keep doting on this guy (even leaving aside for a second the difficulty I have with the seriously uncool name "Rupert") after all the crap he's put her through, and more importantly, after she figures out his deal? Perhaps the title should be "White Knight", because she's definitely got the syndrome, wanting to save him from his own crappiness...

Be that as it may, however, Bach really delivered in this volume, and she's got at least one reader who can't wait to read book three! Will Devi uncover the mystery of the phantoms? Discover how to restore the Daughters to themselves? Or just die in a blaze of (cool but ultimately ineffectual) glory? Given the inexorability of a happy ending, something tells me it won't be the latter!

The Math

Baseline assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for graying the story and characters up, and rising above a Harry Potter-style simplistic view of good and evil... and +1 for doing so without losing the essential action-packed awesomeness at the heart of book one

Penalties: -1 for still not quite selling the Devi-Rupert "love conquers all" plotline

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention"

For more info on our scoring system--and thus, why an 8 is a fantastic score--see here!