Allegoric clash between male and female creative principles, played as horror

Rating: 9/10 (26 September 2017)

The exclamation mark reads several ways. Of course it's a celebration — of the maternal, the feminine, an exultation.
It also makes the title a call for help, a summons/prayer to the Eternal Feminine to restore our lost humanity.
It's our rededication to Mother Earth, which The Woman here rebuilds as her husband's house, a cold dark stuffy — masculine — mansion feminized by the bleeding vaginal wound on the floor and the uterine tunnel discovered under the basement. The man moves through the rooms unawares — it's his empire so he ignores it. The woman feels its pulse, shares an organic connection to it, sees life-forms flushed down aborted or throbbing in the material walls.
When both women from their bed initially call their absent lover with "Baby?" the romantic and submissive briefly supplant the woman's fertility and power, her creative as well as mythic force.
It's also a reassertion of the dominance of the feminine character, as in the two leads' exchange over the newborn baby. His "I am his father" is trumped by her "I am his mother." But she loses when he exploits her momentary loss of consciousness. His vanity and hunger for power proves catastrophic.
However else it's read, this film is about the clash of the male and female creative principles. It claims the impropriety and destructiveness of the male's advantage. The man exults in the woman's pregnancy until he swells with arrogance and vanity from the eruption of his new poem and its extraordinary public reception. His vanity destroys their world, as his egotism destroys each successive muse, each lover, when he plucks from her gut her crystalline love.
The madness of the mob is a contemporary image of the destructiveness that results from serving the male authority, whether in politics, art or mythology, from serving the macho strut over the nurturing maternal. Xavier Bardem is perfectly cast as a macho poet of both literary and sexual impotence. His resurgence into power makes his strength an even greater weakness that costs him his world.
Of course there are other themes, like the biblical history. Ot opens with the first visitors, an echo of he Jewish Edenic beginning. The central couple proceeds to a Catholic pseudo- Jesus birth and communion. These echoes of dominant faiths conclude in the nihilistic anarchic end. Horror movies are always a kind of religious experience, summoning the fear of the supernatural if not our supportive faith in it.
It's also about the nature, power and dangerous temptations of art. The artist here is a poet because that's the oldest of the arts, its timelessness validating this poet's unlikely rock star — and even saviour's — reception. Patti Smith provides the perfect poetic coda with The End of the World, combining the personal with the global.
This film is arguably unique because it makes no effort to be about people so much as about the universalized human condition. That makes it an allegory more than a story of psychological realism.
Nobody has a name here. The end credits identify the mother, the man, the woman, the first two sons, and so on down through the supporting cast: the whisperer, the defiler, the zealot, etc. Bardem is set apart as Him, capitalized as if The god or the creative force in more secular terms, e.g., art.
He is also the film's primary subject of anatomy. It opens and closes on the woman (du jour), his new muse, beloved, who will rebuild his world, offer him the chance to have a son, and finally be sacrificed and replaced because he can't suffer or allow her superior power. That's the male world Aronofsky here challenges more cosmically than in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan and Noah. Suddenly this is a very impressive canon.
Now Darren Aronosky is a major auteur!