There are many sad films, films that stay with you and darken your spirits for some moments, maybe a little longer, in the passing shadow of a remembered pathos. But there are some films that haunt you. This film, ‘night Mother, haunts me.

I’m trying to promise myself that, in writing this piece, I’ll make of this hauntedness nothing of the cheap grotesque that is the plastic ghoul you pass along a ghostride. But I write these pieces each their own, and ghosts emerge of their own accord, first to amuse me, and later horrify in the guilt of an ill-considered bargain.

Fuck it, a digression. In his Second Treatise, John Locke advocated for the necessity of capital punishment on the grounds that it was necessary to offer a potential murderer the ‘ill bargain’ of death as the advertised price of their crime, that they might be deterred from committing to the purchase. Centuries later, it’s known empirical fact that capital punishment correlates zero percent with any kind of deterrence. So here I stand, upon the scaffold, and all I am thankful for is the hangman has but a hood on me, and so I pay this ill-bargained price for my amusement without you ever seeing my face…

I reprent. Clemency. Gratitudue.

I’ll see what comes of this criminal writing, but I want to be clear, at least, of this: that this film truly haunts me. It is no amusement. It is horror.

It’s a film about death. It’s a film about suicide. And, sure, there are enough films attendant of the theme; but in their irony or style, so many of those films beckon the reviewer to join hand-in-hand in some aestheticised danse macabre. A bit less wankerish: that sort of phenomenon (film and viewer doing a death dance hand in hand)—it’s something grim, and yes, it’s all still death, but there’s this safety of redemption in the fact that it’s art, and often the aesthetics of the thing make that black awful nothing morph into something more palatable… because now it’s a black dog or a sickle moon or a reindeer, and not that darkness we fear but can’t see.

It's late, dark, as I write these words.

Anyway, there’s that kind of movie, that kind of movie where death’s bad, but you can deal with it.

But ‘night Mother isn’t that movie. I’d like to say it’s not that movie, in a more essential sense, but I can’t bottle in verbiage the essense of that sense, nor make sense of what’s the difference.

So I’ll settle for something more material, for now, and maybe I’ll find a way, somehow, later, to get closer to what I want to say. I’ll say this: ‘night Mother isn’t that film because the death to which the film attends is not mythologised, stylised, or in any way otherwise beautified.

The film’s aesthetic is American domestic suburbia and, sure, there’s been death filmed here in this locale before, often well. But it’s my assessment that this film is different from the rest, and if any of what I’m writing has worth at all, it’ll be proving that difference.

My assessment of the film, is this: ‘night Mother is a film that knows true darkness for what it is, and it doesn’t feel compelled to make its darkness look any darker by stringing it about in pretty lighting.

I’m trying to stay close to that darkness, to stay close to the film and not get off track. But there’s a comparison emerged in my head just now that might illuminate some meaning in this darkness.

First, the inexplicability of suicide in suburbia, captured so beautifully in Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides (1999). But that film attains a beauty its own, and it does so, in part, by the imposition of a frame of reference that is the grim nostalgia of the neighbourhood boys reflecting on the suicidal deaths of the beautiful, young, Lisbon girls. The bleak scenes of suicide are intertwined (wonderfully) with a picturesque suburbia always dappled in the warm hues coming through the filtering lenses of the seasonal foliage of the tree-lined avenues of Middle America. The point is, the death is dark, and we know even the bright innocence of safe suburbia won’t save us from it.

But to go from Coppola to Coppola, there’s maybe yet another suite of brighter images I ought compare with the darker dark that is ‘night Mother’s death.

Starting point: Josef Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It’s well-known that Francis Ford Coppola’s (by pure inncidence, Sofia’s father) majestic Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of that work. But if you consider the choreographed spectacle of Kilgore’s helicopter raid on a Vietnamese village (set to the grotesque dazzlement of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’)—or, more literally apposite, the lightshow ornamentation of the sex-spectacle of pin-up models dancing for the amusement of US troops further down Kurtz’s dark river—there is in the film a photon fantasticality that adorns the true horror of the darkness that is Kurtz so deep in the heart of that dark jungle.

Don’t mistake: much like his daughter’s deft touch of shining a honeyed afternoon light on a young girl’s suicide in suburbia, I adore Coppola’s ornamentation of depravity in the bright lights of the Vietnam War’s grotesque. They are visionary. And, besides, the book of Revelation made it pretty clear that Apocalypse was always going to be well-lit by the sparkling of fire and brimstone.

The point—and I hope I haven’t lost you on it—is not about better or worse. It’s just this: there is but one darkness; sometimes it sparkles in the filigree finery of the devil’s masquerade; and sometimes you find it, like Kurtz did, in a horror just horror, in which case the darkness is darkness just darkness.

Same river, different lights.

I repent for my dark thoughts of light.

Back to the truer darkness of ‘night Mother. What no doubt was overshadowed in the foregoing, is my essential point: that ‘night Mother is an incredible film because it reveals to us darkness for what it is, and it needs no grand scaffold of filmic lighting to illuminate its revelation.

All this dishonest metaphor, unworthy of such an honest film.

So this: The plot of the film is simple. I will tell you what it is. In doing so, nothing is lost to you, even if you haven’t seen it yet, because the film tells you what its own plot is, from the very start.

There are two characters: Jessie (Sissy Spacek), a single, middle-aged woman, and Thelma (Anne Bancroft), her widowed mother. The plot spans the course of a single evening, and it takes place in a single setting. This setting is the home that Jessie and Thelma share, the mise en scène a clean, near-drab aesthetic of middle-class suburbia. Note, though, no dreamy tints of a suburban afternoon, nor even the cold, isolated spectacle of a streetlamp’s white light amidst nightime darkness—what I’m deciding, just now, to mythologise as the Will o’ the Wisp to suburburbia’s wanderer on lone midnight stroll.

There are a few innocuous external shots of Jesse’s house, but all they establish is the white-slatted box to which she is confined. And then something more telling: a shot of Jesse parting the venetian blinds to look outside her box because she’s heard her mother arriving home.

Regarding setting alone, the point is this: the film takes place entirely within the home. And it’s a simple home, a home with a regular dining table, a readymade kitchen, plastic applicances, and sofa cushions so faded, so faded…

The following lyrics came into my head as I wrote those last words, so fuck it (you’re only dancing on this earth for a short while), I’ll quote them. Late, how late it is, but I’ve gone and put the song on (‘Oh Very Young’ by Cat Stevens):

You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while

And though your dreams may toss and turn you now

They will vanish away like your daddy’s best denim jeans

Denim blue, fading up to the sky

And though you want them to last forever

You know they never will

You know they never will…

There’s no allusion between film and song. It’s just me. But I’m struck that the sofa cushions in Jesse’s home have become so faded, so faded as the denim blue of ‘daddy’s best denim jeans’, and I’m sitting here wondering about dreams. What I wonder is whether Jesse knew the cushions would fade the way they did, the way Cat doubly assures the person he’s singing to their dreams will? Or, to put things the right way up, did Jesse really know her dreams would fade like the pillow cushions of her sitting room? Did she ever have any dreams to fade? Who is Jesse?

If you’re not catching my drift, it’s because I haven’t told you the essential (and, really, the only) element of the plot of ‘night Mother. I’ve reserved it till now for a cause, which is that the very reason it shocks and startles is because it emerges unannounced upon the dreariest scenery, this ambling suburban domestia.

I need add one last dab of paint to that pale canvas. It’s what’s happening on camera before Jesse looks through the blinds at mother’s return (and while the introductory credits role to the palatable spring-time tune of some string concerto): she’s doing housework.  

Once mother is through the door, there’s a round of innocuous dialogue for some fifteen minutes, but an undercurrent: Jesse is interested in locating where her deceased father’s old pistol is. Thelma isn’t fond of guns, and there’s a trivial back-and-forth of peristance in and dissuasion of the search.

We still don’t really know why the film’s begun this way.

It’s only once Jesse locates the pistol and retrieves it from the attic that what was dreary in the film’s opening shades into the dismal, and then something dark and darker yet. In the sitting room, Thelma finds Jesse cleaning the gun, and when she tries to make her stop that, Jesse enunciates the words that haunt me:

I’m gonna kill myself mama.

Of course, inexplicable as the idea is, Thelma takes it for a joke, and the film doesn’t plunge headlong into the black hole of death.

I hope the amalgamated metaphor of black holes and death doesn’t seem like trivial toy-physics. I want to use it for a short time for a small thing. Like a toy.

It’s this point: A black hole and death are the same thing in an essential way, and certainly the same thing to a filmmaker.

See, the nature of mass and the nature of gravity and the nature of the relationship between the two (a collective nature one contemplating suicide gives not the slightest fuck about) necessitates this cool-sounding thing we often hear about called an event horizon.

I’m no physicist, and this website is fair testimony that I’m not much more than a wandering dilettante (I’d love to say wandering in the sense that the figure of the Fool, the Jester, le Feu, wanders in the tarot… but my interest in Tarot is dilettantism manifest, and so Tarot reading or no Tarot reading, my manifest destiny seems fucked nonetheless).

But the event horizon is this concept I pretend not to understand, but pretend relevant all the same. Because basically what it is is this: that, in some physical locale, it’s possible that the pull of gravity is so strong that even light is drawn back towards gravity’s centre. The upshot of that is that, whatever’s there in that locale, it’s physically and logically impossible that you can glimpse it because no light falls upon what’s there, what’s happening. All of it, the event and the light that might have shined on it, is drawn beneath the possibility of perception, and so it’s the horizon beyond which we see nothing.

Oh its torture this tortuousness, but I hope you’ll redeem me a little now for all that drivle I started out with, those pathetic little ironies about dark things being dark and how shining a light on them doesn’t make them less so.

The event horizon: it’s the horizon beyond which it matters not a fuck what does or does not happen, because a black hole’s gravitational stranglehold on light means that there’s no light to enlighten you about what did happen and what did not.

And so this is my whole point about a film I lost a while back—it’s a film called ‘night Mother.

Jesse is going to die. She’s going to commit suicide. And there’s an event horizon that precludes the film from depicting what all of that really is. I’m not talk about what’s after death. What I’m saying is that there’s an event horizon that stops the film from seeing Jesse’s death as an event—not the artifice of a gun to the heart, but the event itself: why she’s decided to die, what it means for her to do it, and of course what death means at all itself.

The brilliance of the film, like any aesthetic rendering of death, is that it knows its own event horizon. It sort of sketches out the line of that horizon in the very title it gives its story: ‘night Mother. It’s something like the figural line (event horizon) that separates what can and what cannot be known.

Why?

First, because one imagines that after some several years of cohabitation, mother and daughter have casually bid one another ‘gnight a thousand times.

Second, because now the platitude of those years becomes the inexplicable procolomation of death. What we see and know—these events of a domestic life in view—suddenly disappears over a horizon beyond which nothing can be reckoned, the event of death itself… and those words, ‘gnight Mother, fall upon and figurally form the line of division.

This is a movie about people, and it’s been almost (I hope note entirely) pure masturbation and toy-play to talk of physics I know naught about.

So, this movie about people.

It’s the absolute representation of the tragedy that is this phenomenon: a mother and daughter with no real issues between them, and then one day the daughter says goodbye.

The film’s excellence, of course, is not born of the conception of this simple plot. Indeed, the simplicity of this plot is what, in lesser directorial hands than Tom Moore (but infinitely more so, I think, the writerly hands of Marsha Norman’s, manifest in the original stageplay), would have rolled out as nothing more than some kind of quaint, shadowy novelty.

The difficulty of achieving storied genius lies, to my reckoning, in this plot-paradox: in the prophecy of an impending suicide, there appears to be a suspense quite implicit; but in confining the plot to this simplest of settings, there are scant resources of dramatic action to be drawn upon as might vitalise a suspense that is, in fact, already more than explicit.

So, herein lies the genius.

First, it is the dialogue. Like so much of the greatest dialogue in the history of stage and film, it attains a virtuosity most transcendent by way of a liturgy most ascetic.

I won’t bid you throw the first hypocritical stone at me for the hypocrisy of my use of a verbiage indulgent. Don’t bother. I tried, honestly, to throw the first stone at myself, but somehow I missed. I’ve no scripture left to believe in but my own: I’m a whore most holy; I prophesy I’ll go on whoring forever.

The simple dialogue. I quoted Jesse’s simple statement of her intention to commit suicide, and I don’t want to go much further.

But I few choice delights I mention to give some feint scent of smoke that scuds westward of the fire of Norman’s dialogue.

This, the justification Jesse gives her mother (not immediately) for her decision to die: ‘I’m tired, and I’m hurt, I’m sad, I feel used’. There’s all this anaysis you could do, but in essence she’s a prisoner. It’s obvious she’s kept in many ways, but she’s smart enough, tragically, to know that she, too, is her keeper.

No more quotes to give echoing resonance to that tragedy. It’s not a great reason to watch the film if your aim is to watch that philosophical rabbit chase its tail only to then blow its head off. And the dialogue would be nothing great, if that were all.

The dialogue is so wonderful, too, because it’s aware that this dark despair closing in is not some substance alien to life otherwise, but has lingered amongst our happenings all along. There’s this wretched beauty in the moment at which mother and daughter, so soon to depart, are drawn together in this, Jesse’s most tender irony: ‘Tonight’s private. It’s yours and mine. I don’t want anybody else to have any of it.’

No more on dialogue. If you’re not enchanted by what I’ve quoted, it’s my failure and not the film’s.

And anyway, it's so very late as I write these words, and soon it must be said, ‘gnight. So I will tidy up.

Tidy up—that is exactly, and so tragically, what Jesse does in those last hours of her life. And so, having dealt with dialogue, let me give brief comment to the action.

After she has announced her intention to soon die, mother and daughter obviously have to get through some dialogue; but in terms of action, Jesse potters about the house, getting things in order, as though carrying out the domestic rituals the audience presumes has preceded every evening in the home prior to this plot’s inception.

And that’s so very fitting. I won’t degrade the film or you with further comment.

Apologies for an aside here, though, but I think it will lead to a point of substance. I can’t go past referencing the tragic final scene of Louis Malle’s masterpiece Le Feu Follet (1963), as the protagonist Alain (Maurice Ronet) sets his belongings in order, as though preparing to leave the clinic at which he has been residing to be cured of alcoholism, only to then sit comfortably on his bed, shooting himself in the heart, just as he has, for some time now, planned.

I can’t help but think it was an inspiration for Norman’s stageplay, but ‘night Mother has a brilliance refreshingly unburdened of the baggage Nouvelle Vague films seem duty-bound to lug wherever they venture: baggage ridiculously weighed down by the trappings of a French existentialism, which is somehow serious, but in order to remain serious, needs to keep up the pretense the nothing, really, is serious at all.

I can’t stress enough the virtue of ‘night Mother in its true disdain for such pretended disdain. This film of Moore’s is serious. It knows it’s serious. But it feels no need to prove it to you, one way or the other.

To reiterate an importance, the film shows you that domestic life—how trivial and unserious it’s often assumed to be—is no refuge from the darkness so often imagined lingering at the end of some terrible waterway that wends its way through a savage Congo or a war-torn Vietnam. In fact, what Conrad’s novel and Coppola’s film are both apt to show, is that the heart of darkness is not an organ peculiar to the anatomy of the savage but rather is the genetic endowment of the human condition (because it’s always already beating in the white breast of a soldier-man on a false quest of civilisation). And what ‘night Mother so beautifully reflects is that the heart of darkness Kurtz found in that dark jungle—in himself—holds to the same cardiac rhythm that is the humdrum beat that gives suburban domesticity the ordered tempo of civilisation.

Unlike Jesse, I don’t quite want yet to say ‘gnight. And I want to say something conclusive about the film’s beauty, and the redemptive power it holds as such. Because I don’t think ‘night Mother wants Jesse or any of us to say ‘gnight at all. I’ve struggled so much in this butcherous work to make that ultimate point is that it requires true aesthetic grace for the film to make such an advocation, and it takes some yet humbler grace of review to don the juridical garb and judge the advocation true. Shoot me, not Jesse.

This is a beautiful film, and it’s beauty is what, paradoxically, make it so little known. Released just two years in the wake of its Pulitzer-winning stageplay, and with a cast of proven brilliance in Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft, it would seem, on paper, that the film had the makings of a classic (director Tom Moore did no disservice to any of what’s good in the film, either). I think the simple reason the film was never given higher honours and is now so little remembered as that the public, the jury, just couldn’t stomach its tragedy.

I feel I’ve said it again and again and still not made the point, but here: I think what makes the film hard to stomach (and what also is its brilliance) is that it stood before dakness, true darkness, and festooned it not with pretty lights, nor glimpsed it as a fashionable passing shadow.

And still I struggle to say it, but here: ‘night Mother stood before that darkness and represented it to us (as best it can, event horizon abiding) in graceful simplicity. At one level, the simplicity is the plot. But the darkness is not the property of the plot’s simplicity, rather the property of the simplicity of life itself. Living alone with one’s mother, household chores, cleaning, and ironing, and vacuuming—all the things that Jesse chooses to spend her last hours alive doing, because what else is there to life anyway?

But my opinion is that the film asks no such vaccuous question, and wouldn’t have ever been made in the first place, if its purpose was to ask the question. I’ve said that I don’t think ‘night Mother wants Jesse or any of us to say ‘gnight at all, and I think this because it’s a film that seems to know that even if household chores were all that were left in life to do, life would still be worth living. Why? It’s difficult to answer without being trite, but for a start I’ll say this: if life were just household chores, a mother and daughter living in domestic banality, dogged by the shadow of a true darkness that, one day, from nowhere, one of them would tell the other that tonight she intends on dying—if life were nothing more than that, then, by the film’s own manifest testament, it is a life in which true beauty can yet be found (and worked for) in the art of films like ‘night Mother.

POSTSCRIPT

I’d like to leave the article on the note I’ve left it; it holds, for me, a truer pitch than the strangled strands of violinery that seem to everything else. But there’s something not quite in the back of my mind, but somewhere nearer the front, that a lot of this comes from—I feel I should say it, but it’s such a wank, I’m putting it as postscript.

There’s this scribble in the diary of the great artist Leo Tolstoy, dated February 29, 1897. Why mention? You’ll see, at the dismal least, some kind of relevance (cleaning, or whatever) in a pretty innocuous passage:

I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot - that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.

What I would first say is that Jesse’s life (like so many others’)—the life of habitually and unconsciously keeping house might, without ‘night Mother, be one of those lives that go and amount not more than to lives lived ‘as if they never had been’.

But I’ve never trawled through Tolstoy’s diaries, and I didn’t pull this odd entry from nowhere. I came across it in an important document most haven’t heard of called ‘Art as Technique’, written by a Russian literary theorist called Viktor Shklovsky, in 1917.

Shklovsky’s first words after quoting Tolstoy are the very brutal: ‘And so life is reckoned as nothing’. But it’s so crucial to be clear that this is not his, Shklovsky’s, opinion, it’s an idea he’s summarising from Tolstoy’s whole thing about doing things unconsciouslly, deducing that, if they’re done that way, they might as well be nothing.

But Shklovsky is no dull pessismist, certainly not the voguish French existentialist director who says life’s all dull and boring, so let’s make it look cool, anyway, because looking good doing nothing might make doing nothing seem cooler than it is. ‘night Mother doesn’t try to make domestic life seem any cooler than it is.

Shklovsky doesn’t leave Tolstoy at the conclusion  that lives like Jesse’s—lives lived unconsciously in habitual domesticity—are lived as much as though they were never lived at all.

Because here is the redemption of art: ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things’. He goes on to declare that, ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’.

To draw the two Russians together: Tolstoy is saying some life is lived without much feeling, as though it might as well not have been lived at all. Shklovsky is saying that all that nothingness is redeemed by art because art lets us feel life once more, even once we get to the point where we’ve done it so much, and for so long, there’s nothing left to feel.

I’ll tell you this. At the end of the movie, Jesse says ‘gnight to her mother and she shuts the door and she shoots herself. I’ve said this haunts me because I think she might not have gone that way if she knew that there was art out there (like the film made about her) that might make her feel again what she thinks she’s lost in the drudgery of domesticity.

To repeat my main point: even if chores are all that’s left to life, there’s still art, and there’s still beauty.

Probably the most quoted line of Shklovsky’s, which I’ve purposefully left here for the last, is this: ‘And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’.

I do love that idea—to make the stony. It’s simple, baffling, and, I think, redemptive.

I’ve said again and again throughout this piece that this film ‘night Mother, knows what darkness is. The genius of the film, I think, is that it makes the darkness dark.

Everyone knows what a stone is, more or less, just as everyone knows the darkness, more or less: it’s the grief of loss, the reality of mortality, and it’s the possible meaninglessness of it all—and, as the art of this great film reveals to us—that meaninglessness lies right at home, in all the drudgery of domestic life we so often unconsciously think no more of than we do a stone.

That darkness is dark, and it’s dark films like this that give it its due testament. But it’s films like this, brave and beautiful in their testimony of that darness, that show us darkness could never be such a thing as darkness if there were not such a thing as light.

And so here ends my article of a film that ends in mourning,

It’s a review written in a style most glib, and far too often trite,

Late being the hour, fitting it would seem, for me to end with a ‘gnight,

But late enough it is, and ife worth living, that instead I say good morning.