Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism were pretty awful and played as aggressively with those notions as a pit bull with its jaws clamped on a rubber bone. To be sure, there was a frisson of countercultural excitement to be had from the “this isn’t the land of the free and the home of the brave, it’s a murderous pit of bigotry and consumerism and imperialism” theme. But as time passed, pop-culture anti-Americanism became just another fusty cliché spouted primarily by people who had—in the unintentionally revealing I’ve-passed-my-sell-by-date words of Hillary Clinton—“come from the ’60s, a long time ago.”
So what is a good liberal moviemaker to do these days if he wants to set up a morality play in which the collective villain would in olden days have been considered the hero? The moviemaker has to go further. The moviemaker has to find a bigger, grander, more stunning bad guy. If the villain can no longer be America, it will have to be . . . humanity itself.
The most recent example of this is mother!, the lunatic allegory from writer-director Darren Aronofsky starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem—a movie that is gripping the way reading a delusional letter written with no margins by a paranoid schizophrenic can be gripping. In mother!, Lawrence and Bardem live together in a house she is fixing up, and she is happy, if a little vague. Then people come and destroy everything.
Lawrence and Bardem are not playing people. They are Mother Earth and God, and their idyll is shattered when Adam (Ed Harris) and Eve (Michelle Pfeiffer) show up. They act all weird, Eve is mean, and then their sons arrive and one of them kills the other—leaving a mess Jennifer has to clean up! Later, Jennifer gives birth (to Jesus, I guess) just as Javier publishes a successful poem (the Torah, I guess—the timeline’s a little screwy here). Suddenly, hundreds if not thousands of his admirers swarm the house, trash the fixtures, literally tear their baby to shreds, and begin fighting a war in the basement.
“What are you doing?” Jennifer says, over and over again (Aronofsky must simply have cut and pasted the sentence 500 times while he was writing his screenplay, which he did, he says, over a mere five days). Humanity is nothing but a needy, greedy, thieving, careless, monstrous, murderous, teeming, and utterly loathsome force for evil.
Just as the driving impulse behind the explosion of cinematic anti-Americanism in the 1960s was the antiwar movement, antihuman movies have an ideological root: environmentalism. The relentless logic of environmental extremism, according to which the Earth is a pure good being destroyed by the collective evil visited upon it by human beings, also animated Aronofsky’s 2014 Noah. In that fascinating and equally bananas movie, the human race’s ecological depredations lead the biblical Noah to seek the extirpation of all mankind, even compelling him to seek the murder of his own grandson.
The most successful movie ever made, 2009’s Avatar, is also an environmental fable of a kind: It tells the story of a soldier sent to a distant planet so that the people of Earth can drain its precious resources. It turns out the residents of Pandora are the wokiest woke beings in the universe, literally existing in fiber-optic harmony with the animals and the planet itself (as represented by a really big tree). Our hero is so disgusted by his own kind and so inspired by these others that he literally abandons his humanity and transforms into an alien. Avatar asked the audience to root for blue-skinned cartoons against poor actors representing the human race and made $2.8 billion doing so.
The three new Planet of the Apes movies, made over the past six years, tell us to support the poor tortured simians, who only want to live in peace, against the monstrous humans who tortured them and then lost control of the Earth to them. And in the clever 2012 horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods, two teenagers disgusted by the efforts of manipulative adults to sacrifice some people to underground gods—because those sacrifices have kept the people on the surface of the planet alive—decide the demons are better than the jerky adults and so assent to the destruction of all human life.
The world would be a beautiful place, mother! and these other films argue, if there were no human beings in it. But then who would buy a ticket?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
