Shock art has been relatively calm for the past eight years, but with Donald Trump in office, that’s like whacking a beehive with a baseball bat. The shock art community has only just begun to show its wares.
Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Mother!’ could be one of the biggest anti-Trump shock art pieces released to date. Due to the lull in shock art and the over-the-top nature of ‘Mother!,’ the mainstream public was not prepared at all for a film like this.
Aronofsky even admits he wanted to punch you in the teeth with his film and make you think.
“We always knew it was a strong cocktail. (…) It’s a punch. It’s a total punch. And I realize that we were excited by that. (…) It came very much from a place of a lot of frustration, and I guess a certain amount of impotent rage on what was going on in the world,” said Aronofsky to John Horn of The Frame.
“We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish, and I wanted to express it. (…) It’s scary when you talk to the people who are studying this and thinking about this and then you have other people who basically believe in the power of an iPhone that they can communicate to 35 million people in a blink of an eye, yet they don’t believe in science in other ways. You know, which is as proven as gravity at this point, really. It has as many people believe in it as believe in gravity. And it scares me, and it’s time to start screaming. So I wanted to howl. And this was my howl. And some people are not going to want to listen to it. That’s cool,” said Aronofsky to John Horn of The Frame.
‘Mother!’ is trending on Rottentomates at a 67% from 236 film critics, but it appears moviegoers are not ready to get punched as the movie has only grossed $18 million worldwide from a $30 million budget. Time will tell if ‘Mother!’ is profitable, but that wasn’t Aronofsky’s point.
What do you think of Aronofsky’s comments? Use the section below to start a conversation with me.
