Headscratchers / mother! (2017)

• What's the medicine an allegory for?
  • Many viewers see the medicine as Mother's faith in God. She regularly takes it to reassure herself that everything will be fine if she believes. When she flushes away the medicine, she feels she doesn't have to rely on her faith anymore.
  • The medicine — which has a golden, almost glowing color —- could also be a reference to miracles/divine intervention. Mother seems to get sick when her visitors do something to damage the house, and then takes the medicine to feel better (and give herself strength to fix it), matching the pattern in the Bible of humans committing sin or causing disaster and God intervening to pass judgment and fix it. Notably, many Christians — especially Protestants who adhere to the doctrine of dispensationalism — believe the "age of miracles" stopped with the Incarnation of Christ (i.e. Mother's pregnancy), explaining why miracles are absent or at least much less visible today.

• Reviewers have raised the question of what exactly Him's poem is as a Riddle for the Ages.
  • The publication of the poem takes place roughly at the same point in the biblical narrative as God giving the Torah to the Israelites. Kristen Wiig ("the herald") framing the manuscript and putting it on a pedestal mirrors the high priest Aaron placing the tablets of the Ten Commandments in the Ark of the Covenant. The party scene when this occurs is also a pretty clear filmic reference to Moses' return from Mt. Sinai in The Ten Commandments.
  • Other candidates include The Lord's Prayer (see All There in the Manual on the main page) or Genesis 1, since the only clue we have to the poem's content is mother's Imagine Spot of standing hand-in-hand watching the house emerge fully-formed from ashes. (Since Him says he was inspired to write by the intense emotions of the previous day, the poem may cover the Book of Genesis up to the story of Cain and Abel or even up to the Flood, which could conceivably fit on a single page.)
  • The poem, of course, may also symbolize The Bible as a whole or even all written religious texts, with the many different interpretations and contradictions they contain. The Take Our Word for It contents of the poem are lampshaded by the first of Him's autograph-seeking fans (credited as "the zealot"), who says, "I feel like it was written about me!" Him good-naturedly allows that all his fans have their own interpretation of his work and all of them are valid. This lack of clarity has tragic results.
• If him is fittingly shown to be invulnerable to harm at the film’s end, how is he hurt by pepper spray?
• If everything they say and do is really a kind of translation convention for God and Mother Nature interacting with the universe, why does the Man, presumably Adam, say he is an orthopedic surgeon? What biblical meaning can that possibly be a translation OF?

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