The movie Mother explores a mother’s extreme mothering to protect her son, and how that mothering is twisted into guilt and a desire for oblivion. Mother commits murder to cover up her son’s sins, and then attempts to turn a blind eye to her own sins by performing a dance of oblivion to deceive herself. Through this process, the film explores how motherhood can be taken to extremes.
The concept of “maternal love” is often associated with warm words like unconditional love and devotion. However, in the movie Mother, the feelings of a mother, played by Kim Hye-ja, for her son are not simply described by the word devotion. This is because Bong Joon-ho doesn’t portray Mother’s emotional arc in such a simple way, and the relationships between the other characters are also intertwined with Bong Joon-ho’s unique metaphors, making it difficult to understand them from a single perspective. After watching the movie, I will talk about it based on my understanding.
The movie revolves around a murder case. Ah-jung, a high school girl who makes a living from prostitution, is murdered, and Do-joon, who has an intellectual disability, is a suspect. His mother, Mother, refuses to believe that her son is the culprit and tries to get to the bottom of the case. However, the real culprit is none other than her son, and when Mother realizes that what she firmly believed was not the truth, she chooses to turn a blind eye and kills the only witness to the murder.
It may not have mattered to her who the real culprit was in the first place; her twisted maternal instincts would have found a solution as long as it wasn’t her son. What’s interesting is how this maternalism is shown in the movie. In the movie, Mother’s motherhood is presented as a way to wash away her guilt. Although the movie doesn’t explicitly say so, it is implied that the pesticides she fed Do-joon in an attempted co-suicide when he was five years old are the cause of his intellectual disability. She seems to feel guilty about it, and is deeply distressed when Do-joon occasionally reminds her of it. In this context, Mother’s overprotection of Do-joon and her attempts to prove his innocence are portrayed as a desperate effort to free herself from the original sin of being a bad mother. However, most of her efforts are futile. Until the dramatic final scene, when the mother commits the murder, her efforts are like swimming in a tidal pool: the more she tries to get out of the tragic situation in which her son is trapped, the deeper she sinks, and the greater the sin she ends up committing. Nevertheless, in the end, she succeeds in rescuing her son.
Regarding Do-joon’s intellectual disability, there’s something Mother always says to him. If you hear the word ‘stupid’, don’t put up with it. This may stem from her guilt that she has made her son stupid, as mentioned earlier. His mother’s words act like brainwashing, and the word “stupid” becomes a trigger for him. When he hears the word “stupid,” he either assaults the person or glares at them as if he’s going to kill them. These triggers accumulate and lead to the murder of the “rice cake girl” Ah-jung. Interestingly, Ah-jung had her own triggers. Due to her poverty, Ah-jung turns to prostitution to make ends meet. Being called a “rice cake girl,” men were nothing more than slaves to her sexual desires. When Do-joon asks her if she doesn’t like men, he unintentionally hits a trigger that makes her lose her cool. Angry, she calls him an “idiot” and throws a stone at him, which he responds to by throwing a stone at her, killing her. Mother’s guilt-ridden admonition, “Don’t hold it in,” ultimately motivates him to kill someone. The fight between Do-joon, who is poor, and Ah-jung, who is rich, and the fight that ensues as a result of touching each other’s dignity, is depicted as a poignant quarrel between the lower classes that Bong Joon-ho often depicts.
As mentioned earlier, Mother, like Do-joon, ends up killing people. When she does something as shocking as drugging Do-joon, her coping mechanism is oblivion. In the opening of the movie, Mother performs a bizarre dance, which appears to be the same place where she murdered the witness. She dances in agony, shaking as if trying to forget what she’s done. In addition to this, Mother tries to forget the memories that have haunted her, including placing acupuncture needles in her head to make her forget. However, despite her efforts, at the end, Do-joon hands her the acupuncture needle that he left at the murder scene, saying, “Don’t leave this behind,” implying that he knows about her murder. This is the beginning of an uncomfortable cohabitation between a mother who knows her son has committed murder and a son who knows she has committed murder. At the end of the movie, the mother dances on the bus once again. This time, she dances in a crowd of people, and it becomes impossible to recognize who “Mother” is. It’s like watching a painful skit of many mothers.
In addition to this, there are many sexual metaphors in the movie. Some are direct, such as the rice cake girl and the scene where we see Mina and Jintae having sex, but others are implied, such as the golf club and the white blood. Sexual metaphors are constantly present in the movie, along with the murder that drives the movie, reminding us of the connection between sex, life, and death.
The movie shows how extreme motherhood can be. The dance of the many “mothers” at the end of the movie shows the pain of many mothers living under the emotional bondage of motherhood and connects the movie’s “mothers” to reality. It is a twisted version of motherhood that is different from the idealized version of motherhood. After watching the movie, the emotions that have been stirred up in our hearts don’t disappear easily after glimpsing the reality of motherhood, which is different from what we expected.
