How the hell do you punctuate this film?

I saw a film with the words "mother" and "couch" in the title last night, but almost everything else about the title seems to be up to the interpretation of wherever it's printed.

On iTunes this movie was called Mother, Couch when I purchased it for rental. It was renting at only $1.99, which was a minor miracle as I rarely pay less than $5.99 for a current year iTunes rental these days, $4.99 if I'm lucky, or $3.99 if it's a movie from the past. Mother, Couch seems to be the most common way to list the title around the internet. 

There are two possible semantic meanings to the title when listed this way. I prefer the one that suggests they are being introduced to each other, like "Mother, Couch. Couch, Mother." I include the second half of the introduction just to illustrate exactly what I mean. I like this one because indeed, the story revolves around an 82-year-old woman (Ellen Burstyn is actually turning 92 in three weeks) who sits down on a couch in a furniture store and then refuses to leave.

Or there is the simpler "This is a movie about two things, and the two things are listed with a comma so you know they are not part of the same thing. One is a mother. The other is a couch."

In the movie itself, though, the title appears as Mother, Couch! in the opening credits. I thought it might have been Mother Couch!, but I went back this morning and saw that indeed the comma was present. Which I was glad to see, because otherwise that would mean someone made up a comma out of whole cloth. 

The possible semantic meaning of this is less clear. It could be the same as meaning 1 above, only it indicates the excitement of this introduction, particular on behalf of the mother. (We have to assume that the couch, as an inanimate object, is indifferent to the introduction.) Or it could be that the mother is ordinary, but the couch is extraordinary, which is certainly her impression of it. Though that is not spoken in so many words, nor is it clear this particular couch has any particular value to her other than as a symbol of arriving at a moment in time where she is not going to budge anymore, and this happens to be where he was physically located at the time she passed this point of no return in her head.

But then on IMDB it is just listed as Mother Couch, with an acknowledgement of the original title Mother, Couch -- which is still not accurate from the film itself. Mother Couch offers a new possible interpretation in terms of meaning, which is similar to "mother country." Like, this is the couch from which all the characters -- who include three grown children -- originate. Or more literally -- but then I suppose more figuratively -- she is the mother in a family of couches, and they are all baby couches, albeit grown baby couches.

So then I started to think about other possible punctuations that would give us other meanings.

The one I like best here is mother! Couch. And the reason for starting it in lower case is that it evokes Darren Aronofsky's mother!, another film with an exclamation point that befuddled people. It's appropriate because as this film goes along, it leaves behind some of the shackles of realism to provide us with material that is more chaotic and symbolic, or just projections of what the characters may be seeing in their minds, which is akin to the most common mode of mother! Then there's the connection that the last time I saw Burstyn as anguished as this on screen was when she was in Aronofsky's classic Requiem for a Dream.

Not that mother! Couch makes much sense considering our ordinary grammatical rules, but even less sense would be Mother Couch,. Yes, that would be ending the title with a comma. There I suppose the comma would serve sort of the same function as an ellipses, which suggest there is more to say on this topic -- and in watching the film, you would know for sure that there is. 

So how about going outside the punctuation marks already provided?

Mother? Couch. - This would be asking the question if this character is a mother, and then returning the answer that no, this character is a couch.

Mother Couch? - This would be questioning whether this is indeed the couch from which all the younger couches emerged, or do we have a case of mistaken identity.

Mother? Couch? - This would be where both the mother and the couch got lost in the woods, and as the kids are searching for them, they are calling out their names to see if they will answer.

(Side note: I always think it's funny when people are searching for other people in the movies and they have to individually call the names of each person they are searching for. Let's say there are four lost children. You have to rotate through calling each of the names, as though a lost child hearing this call would not respond unless their own name had been called. Maybe the parents just don't want to have to explain, after the fact, why one of the kids did not have their name called. Do the parents love that kid less than the other kids?)

Mother; Couch - The couch gives us additional understanding of the mother, but the two concepts don't have a close enough literal connection to be separated by something so simple as a comma.

Mother > Couch - It is better to have a mother than it is to have a couch.

Mother "Couch" - It is only a symbolic couch, and this is its mother.

¿Mother Couch? - The same movie, but dubbed into Spanish.

On my blog and in all my lists, I have decided I will refer to this movie as Mother, Couch!, with the last comma only for the structure of this sentence, and only the first comma and exclamation point as part of the title. That's how it appears in the movie.

However, when I put the label in on my blog, I will have to go with mother couch! -- which I do not see as the actual listed title anywhere -- because Blogger interprets the comma as a separation of two different labels, not part of a single label that happens to contain ambiguous punctuation. 

King Darren: mother!

This is the fifth in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Darren Aronofsky in the year after he became the first to repeat as director of my top film of the year.

This was my fourth viewing of mother! in the only six years it has existed, so you know I like this one -- or at the very least am still trying to work out my feelings toward it. If it were the latter, though, I'd probably stop at two viewings. I'm up to four, with more coming probably every three years if I had to guess, because I do enjoy the exquisitely excruciating experience of this movie so much.

It also makes an appropriate way to kick off October, since this is, for all intents and purposes, a horror movie. There are no jump scares, no ghosts and goblins, just constant senses of unease, stress, anxiety and life unraveling out of your control. It may be one of the best psychological horrors of the 21st century.

Not everyone agrees with this. In fact, a cultural critic I respect immensely, Stephen Metcalf of the Slate Culture Gabfest, thought it was one of the worst moviegoing experiences he had ever had. He's ten times the intellect I will ever be, but he just doesn't get it on this one. And I don't think he's a squeamish guy who doesn't like to be confronted when he's watching a movie; far from it. He just thought it was garbage, and I don't think he could have been more wrong.

That said, I can understand why a person would feel assaulted by this movie. That's entirely the point. If you thought you were buying a ticket to something with a conventional narrative, and you got this, you might be disappointed.

But even if you did think it was a bait and switch -- I can't remember whether the ads suggested something more straightforward, though that seems likely -- I don't understand how you don't get oriented to what this film is doing and become enthralled by its assaultive nature. 

With some obvious exceptions, my favorite sorts of art at the ones that have so much to say that they become a veritable explosion of ideas. mother! is such a movie. So is Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. So is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. So is Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (You get the idea.) 

A movie like this can obviously be sloppy. You might generously call Beau is Afraid that kind of movie, but I didn't care for Beau is Afraid. The key -- and what I think Aronofsky does so well -- is to have a grand design for this chaotic explosion of themes, ideas and images. mother! is a veritable symphony of thought-provoking notions.

Is it a version of the creation story and the fall from the Garden of Eden?

Is it an environmental parable?

Is it a study of new fame and the horrors of the paparazzi?

Is it a contemplation of the creative process?

Is it a consideration of depression and/or a mental breakdown?

Is it the pre-pardom anxiety of how children will destroy the house and the life you worked so hard to build?

Is it a more general sort of horror of manners where everyone you meet will say inscrutable things and sit on your unbraced kitchen sink?

Is it one of my beloved "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies, where events are speeding past you without any ability to slow their momentum?

The answer is: yes.

mother! is all of these things, which is why I think it's such a vital document, with such a terrific performance by Jennifer Lawrence at its center, requiring her to push herself to the physical limit and threatening to overwhelm her mentally and emotionally. Just like any great acting performance should do.

Of course, in this series I am focusing on how Aronofsky's works speak to each other and reveal themselves in each other, and I think this is a rather obvious corollary to the last film I watched for this series, Noah. Although I don't think that film is bad by any stretch of the imagination, Aronofsky seems to have realized he'd prefer to work out those themes in a less literal sense. mother! explores many of the same ideas about the toxic, irredeemable human species through set pieces that are in some cases explicitly biblical, but it doesn't have to stick sacredly to that most sacred of texts. It is enough that we understand the fall of man rather than needing to watch the literal beat-by-beat points of that fall.

There isn't another perfect partner within Aronofsky's work for mother!, though visible here are some techniques from Requiem for a Dream and the scope and scale of metaphor from The Fountain. 

In fact, it's occurring to me that Aronofsky may be split in his filmmaking identity in a way similar to Steven Soderbergh, for example, in that Soderbergh alternates between idiosyncratic personal choices and bigger budget popcorn movies intended to attract mainstream audiences. Except that I think neither version of Aronofsky is laid out on the same sort of platter as audience pleasers like Ocean's 11 and Logan Lucky. With Aronofsky you have head trips like The Fountain and mother!, and then you have fundamentally realistic movies like The Wrestler and The Whale, and never the twain shall meet. (Actually, they do sort of meet in Black Swan.) But neither mode is especially expected to rake in the dough at the box office.

It's interesting to me to note that given how much I love Aronofsky in mother! mode, the two films that have been my favorite of the year have been his two most extreme on the realistic end of his personal spectrum. This versatility just makes me value King Darren all the more.

The final film for this series in December will be the only #1 I watch for this series, my first reckoning with The Whale since I crowned it #1 in January. (You may recall that I didn't rewatch either The Fountain or the previous #1, The Wrestler, for this series, since I had seen them both for other reasons within the past two years.) 

There are a lot of people who really dislike this movie -- it wouldn't be Aronofsky if they didn't -- so it should be interesting to see if my views on it change at all with a year's distance from my first viewing. 

Personal apocalypse

For whatever reason, in the past couple months I have rewatched two movies where the events can be read as a metaphor for the main character cracking up. Don't worry, I'm fine.

But it does appear I really like a movie like this, in which the events have one literal interpretation, and a second that functions as kind of a personal apocalypse for the main character.

Of course, sometimes those apocalypses are literal as well, and sometimes the main events can't be interpreted in a way that also makes sense literally.

Both Melancholia, which I rewatched on September 28th, and mother!, which I rewatched on Friday night, are excellent artistic distillations of what it looks like for a person losing their marbles and seeing their world come to an end.

It's difficult to do this, mind you, without some very heady concepts and intense imagery, like a planet colliding with Earth or a house being overrun by religious fanatics and exploding in an inferno.

Oops, spoiler alert.

Lars von Trier stays more with the literal interpretations, even though they are fairly fantastic from a scientific perspective. Not that a rogue planet couldn't collide with Earth, just that it wouldn't in the way shown here. There are any number of laws of astrophysics broken here, one of which I suspect is the one that allows the characters to see the planet filling the sky as it comes close to its impact. That's one of the film's many wonderful images, so I'm glad von Trier went with it. And it functions very well as a metaphor for a depressed woman who sees no hope.

Darren Aronofsky is a lot more always in the realm of the imagination, something you get the sense of when you first see the house where all the action is set, which is isolated in a natural setting without anything like a driveway or a road leading away from it. We're in the realm of metaphor pretty much from the start. You could argue it's a metaphor for at least a half-dozen things, but one of these is a woman who no longer recognizes the perfect man and idyllic home she thought she once knew, feeling her world close in on her until it suffocates her.

(Both films, I just realized, are kind of neatly divided into two halves -- an old testament and a new testament in the case of mother!)

I haven't experienced depression very often in my life, but when I have, I can easily understand either of the metaphors presented in these two movies. You feel like you don't recognize your surroundings, or in any case, can find no joy in them. You feel a sense of doom that seems inevitable. You know on a rational level that you will not always feel this way, but when you're in the depths of it, you feel there is no way out.

Art in its purest form should approximate the experience of emotions we cannot otherwise put into words. It should dramatize scenarios that allow us to grapple with feelings we have, and at its best, it should give us a valuable new perspective on those feelings that keep them from dominating us.

Surprisingly, mother! is actually the more bleak of the two films, which is strange considering that a) von Trier is probably considered more the misanthrope than Aronofsky, and b) Melancholia portrays the literal end of the world. But Jennifer Lawrence's title character ends as a used up resource, looking on helplessly in the last charred moments of her life as her husband prepares to go on and start the cycle again with a new muse. Meanwhile, Kirsten Dunst's depressed bride is the calming influence as her sister and nephew wait for impact, a slight smile on her face.

If a personal apocalypse is inevitably ahead of us, it's something at least if we can face it with equanimity.

Movies that seem like passwords

In scanning down the list of movies I've seen with my critics card -- a list I have no purpose in keeping other than obsessiveness -- I couldn't help but notice that consecutive slots were taken up by Mother! (or is it mother!?) and Patti Cake$.

And I thought "Those would make good passwords."

For those of you who don't know, I reset passwords. It's one of a hundred things I do in my job working on a service desk, but it's one of my most regularly recurring tasks, something I do as many as five times on an average day. I've even got my personally developed script down exactly:

"Okay, I'm going to give you the password in upper and lower case letters and numbers and symbols, and I'm going to use the military alphabet, so for example if it's the letter 'A' I'm going to say 'alpha.'"

I say these exact words as many as five times a day, and then I get a password that looks something like this -- D!7*(xB -- and give it to the end user.

(And yeah, I've got my military alphabet down cold, because I'm a hard-ass muthafucka.)

Don't know where that came from. Maybe it's all this talk about Patti Cake$. Or, the talk I'm about to launch into.

Setting aside all discussions of the quality of the movie, which I liked a lot (it's a bit like Hustle & Flow meets 8 Mile), its title makes for a valid password in my organization's complex 7 password criteria. In order to set a valid password, it has to be at least seven characters long and contain three of the following four: an upper case letter, a lower case letter, a number and a special symbol. (What makes them so "special," I don't know.)

Patti Cake$ certainly qualifies. It's 10 characters long, has two upper case letters, seven lower case letters, and a valid "special symbol," which is no guarantee -- it won't accept just any old weird symbol you can find on your average keyboard. In part to avoid conflicts with coding, I assume, the [ and the { and even the & are right out. You can't even use a ~, but I suspect that's because it's a major pain in the ass to have to explain to your average person what a "tilde" is, especially when most of them don't know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. (Making matters more complicated, in Australia the parenthesis is referred to as a "bracket," while [ is called a "square bracket" and { is called a "fancy bracket.") Strangely, you can select either < or >, but for some odd reason, when these characters come up as part of a system-generated password, they prevent you from successfully setting a preferred password, which begs the question why they appear among the eligible characters in the first place.

The one area Patti Cake$ falls short is by containing a space, so you can just knock that right out. Oddly, though, the space is recognized as part of password if you are cutting and pasting and accidentally cut a space either before or after the password. The system will reject the password under those circumstances. Don't ask me. I don't understand these things.

The other thing that makes this a good password is that a common method of setting a complex 7 password is to type a real word that's easy to remember, only replace certain letters with symbols or numbers that look like them. The most common are things replacing an "a" with @, an "i" with 1, an "e" with 3 or, yes, an "s" with $.

Now Mother! is a slightly different story. Let's again set aside discussion of the film's quality (I liked it, it's like ... well, I'm not even going to get into what two or maybe 50 movies "meet" each other in this movie). If this were your password, it would perfectly qualify by being exactly seven characters, containing no spaces, having both upper and lower case letters and using a valid special symbol (the exclamation mark is also sometimes referred to as a "bang," but only among IT geeks, never to the general public).

Lately, though, I'm seeing the title written as mother!, lower case, and damn sex, lies and videotape for making other films think they can come along and do this. If that is indeed how Darren Aronofsky intended the title to be, it's no longer a valid password as it is missing the upper case letter, giving it only two of the four necessary content criteria.

Now if you want a valid administrator password, then you need to opt for the movie I'm seeing on Thursday night: Blade Runner 2049 (again excising the spaces). Administrator passwords have the stricter standard of a complex 13 requirement, which still permits you to use only three of the four (there are no numbers in my current administrator password) but requires it to be at least 13 characters. Blade Runner 2049 clocks in at 15 characters, even without the spaces.

I gotta stop taking work home with me.