#passiveness

[zenwords]

When you're not used to being confident, confidence feels like arrogance. When you're used to being passive, assertiveness feels like aggression. When you're not used to getting your needs met, prioritizing yourself feels selfish. Your comfort zone is not a good benchmark. — Vassilia Binensztok #tinybuddha.com #confidence #arrogance #passiveness #assertiveness #aggression #prioritisingYourself @tinybuddhaofficial https://www.instagram.com/p/CXlpuu4Oe5-/?utm_medium=tumblr

[anxiolotl]

Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, performance at Studio Morra, Naples, 1974.

Photograph by Donatelli Sbarra.

[rogueonme]

If you feel unaccomplished by doing nothing, then try to do nothing with a passion and turn it into something amazing, turn it into an art. Doing nothing can be amazing and gives energy once you put your heart and soul in it. Look, here I did nothing, and I did it with a fucking passion, and I'm not done with it, I'll do it for as long as I want. It's your thoughts that make you feel unaccomplished, not what you are doing. Do not change what you are doing, change what you are thinking and watch the energy flow free.

r.iver

[earlgreythots-blog]

Y'all need a hoe model

[philosophybits]

Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.

Jean-Paul Sartre, "Preface", The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

[infpisme]

[kierkehaard]

Analysis of ‘mother!’

About a week ago, I went with a friend to watch Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller ‘mother!’. Truth be told, I’m still recovering. Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence themselves did mention that the show wasn’t for everyone, and I understand why they would say so; the show is prodding, uncomfortable, and excruciatingly persistent in discussing what it wants to discuss. But I’m not just saying this because of its controversial portrayal of religion and Christianity - I’m pretty sure the internet has already been flooded by discussions on the matter by now. Instead, I wanna talk about how it deals with one of the concepts I personally hold quite dear to my heart: pacifism. Spoilers ahead, of course, so I’d recommend you watch the movie before reading this post. 

Angel In The House

Let’s first talk about the portrayal of Jennifer Lawrence’s character, since she’s probably the most pacifistic and passive character in the movie (at least, in Act I). She represents an old Victorian literary trope that Darren Aronofsky revives in his movie, called the ‘Angel in the House’. This is basically the archetype of the domestic goddess, the pure and virtuous wife who brings life and beauty into the household, the compliant angel who glides through the house performing her domestic duties. Essentially, the Angel in the House is the Victorian ideal for everything a woman ought to be. We can see this being represented to the letter in Lawrence’s character (henceforth referred to as Jenny for the sake of brevity). When Jenny is by herself, she is often seen performing household chores like painting a room or washing the clothes. Even more telling is her lack of identity except in relation to her husband. He can be seen to have a job, and leaves the house multiple times. Jenny never does, and can be assumed to be a homemaker. She and the house are actually actively paralleled, with the house constantly mirroring her state of mind, especially during her breakdowns when the house itself shakes. The hole in the floor disappears once the domestic conflict that Adam and Eve bring about is resolved, and the house itself actually physically breaks when she finally loses it in Act II. In fact, the only times she actively requests to leave the house are when He puts her in uncomfortable, destructive situations: once when Cain had just left the house and was probably going to return, and when the house was invaded by cultists worshipping her husband, ‘Him’. Yet, every time, her requests are denied, and she readily complies. She never actually leaves the house. The notion of her being the Angel in the House itself already symbolises compliance, meekness and passivity. The fact that she actively keeps herself within that role from the instruction of her husband seals her identity as the representation of these values. She isn’t going to be a Nora or a Lady Windemere; instead, she remains, for the greater part of the movie, blindly compliant, blindly passive. 

Passivity to Pacifism

This is the part where we make the jump from her representing passiveness to her representing the values of pacifism. You can probably already see the links; pacifism in its garden variety is essentially a moral code based on passivity, but the jump requires moral conflict. Aronofsky provides Jenny with plenty of these, and often in explicitly violent terms. We see Cain beat his brother to death, we see Jenny forced to witness the death and gruesome consumption of her child. Even her rebirth involves the tearing out of her heart. In other words, Jenny is subject to violence throughout the movie. And for all the damage the various characters wrought on her house, for all the harm that came to her, she simply turns the other cheek. In fact, when Cain confronts her and aggressively justifies his innocence to her, she simply cries and nods. I’m not saying that this isn’t a reasonable action to take in that circumstance; hell, if some guy cupped my face in his blood-soaked hands and demanded if I understood the rationale behind his murder, I’d probably do the same thing. But the fact that this was explicitly slid into the scene rather than making Cain simply just leave there and then does more than to add realism. It characterises Jenny as one who is most comfortable sitting in the backlines, accepting and enduring all the wrong done to her and within her house; it characterises Jenny as both passive and pacifist. 

Of course, she isn’t ALWAYS passive. She finally snaps and turns violent at the sight of her child being eaten, massacring the cultists who engaged in the perversion of the Holy Communion. In fact, she refuses to allow Him to carry her baby out to the crowds in the first place, the first act of disobedience she actually makes in the movie. That’s where the importance of the baby comes in. The common idea of what the baby represents is that he’s supposed to be Jesus. And of course, that’s definitely the case. But evidently, using that definition alone doesn’t really do justice to what the baby means to Jenny. All her major character developments are done in relation to the baby; she flushes her painkillers down the toilet bowl after she becomes pregnant, a resolution to her inner conflict that arose from the intruders in her house; she takes a stand against Him when he demands her baby, and she finally descends to pure rage at her baby’s death. Ultimately, the baby is Jenny’s motivation. It is goodness, purity and innocence. And that’s exactly where Aronofsky’s critique of pacifism lies. 

What All This Means

What Aronofsky presents to us in mother! is the self-defeating and hypocritical nature of passive pacifism. It’s not just that you’ll eventually snap and get sick and tired of being kicked around; it is about justice. Think about it; if nobody is there to enforce right and wrong, who’s there to uphold the notion of rightness in the first place? In a morally bankrupt world where fans eat babies and the poet simply watches as his own son gets torn to shreds, how can one simply stand back and watch as the individual’s and the world’s purity becomes corrupted, and simply offer up your other cheek? I’ve read some complaints that the characters in the movie are unrealistic, but I frankly think those criticisms just show a lack of awareness of what mother! was trying to do; subverting reality is the whole point of the movie. In this world, everybody is compliant and everybody is passive: even God. There is no individuality among the cultists, and completely no objection to the consumption of the baby’s body. They even just stand there meekly like sheep as Jenny culls through the herd in her rage. ‘He’ himself says that ‘I don’t want them to leave’, demonstrating his wilful ignorance of the cultists’ evilness in his desire to be worshipped. Even the non-passive characters, like Cain and Eve, bring nothing but harm to the homestead when they act of their own volition. In a world like this, the supposedly moral act of letting evil acts pass unjudged ironically breeds more and more evil. Ultimately, pacifism ends up morally corrupting itself, just as Jenny, in her inability to assert her will, eventually burns down her own house in her fury. 

The idea of moral passiveness often has links to religion. God is the arbiter of the just and unjust, and men have no right to enact their own flawed moral compasses as the ethical standard. John 6:37 - Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Instead, what we should do, as Matthew 5:39 puts it, is simply ‘not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’. But if God himself is passive, if God himself lets injustices continue in the world without punishment, then who is left to make sure that goodness prevails? mother! is often interpreted as a religious allegory, and that’s of course the canon and mainstream reading of the movie. But through its treatment of the religious, I think Aronofsky might be getting at a more moral, more tragic message against sitting in the backlines and simply taking everything in stride. Because that doesn’t just hurt you. It hurts everyone around you too. 

This is not to say that pacifism or religion isn’t justified. The last thing I want this article to be seen as this edgy rant on the ‘inconsistencies of Christianity’ or ‘how Christianity makes you weak’ or whatever. I myself am a Christian and largely identify as a pacifist as well. But maybe that’s why this movie left such an impression on me. Of course, this isn’t exactly a matter of critiquing pacifism as a whole. You can still be against violence without being guilty of the hypocrisy that Aronofsky describes here. But what I think he’s really trying to get at is moral and personal passivity, the idea that standing back and letting things just run their course is somehow the right thing to do. And the justification for this is always that ‘my moral judgements may be wrong’, or that ‘it’s not my place to rock the boat’, or even ‘who am I to judge?’. Far too often, we simply dismiss our lack of courage to do something about injustice by hiding it under the guise of ‘simply wanting peace’ and ‘never resorting to violence’. But that really isn’t what being a good person, or even being a pacifist, is really about. And I think we all need to start acknowledging that - even though it isn’t always wrong - the fatalistic commitment to inaction itself is a conscious decision that we cannot shirk responsibility from.