This blog post examines the twisted nature of maternal love through the film ‘Mother’ and explores how far such feelings can be forgiven.
The concept of ‘maternal love’ is often associated with warm words like unconditional love and devotion. However, describing the feelings Mother (played by Kim Hye-ja) has for her son in the film ‘Mother’ simply as devotion falls short. This is because director Bong Joon-ho did not portray Mother’s emotional arc so simplistically. Furthermore, the relationships between other characters are also intertwined with director Bong’s signature metaphors, making them difficult to understand from a single perspective. After watching the film, I’d like to discuss this work based on my understanding.
The film unfolds around a murder case. Ajeong, a high school girl who supports herself through prostitution, is killed, and Do-jun, who has an intellectual disability, is named as the suspect. His mother, ‘Mother,’ refuses to believe her son is the culprit and strives to uncover the truth behind the incident. However, the real culprit turns out to be none other than her son. After realizing that what she firmly believed was not the truth, Mother chooses to cover her eyes and kills the sole witness to the murder.
Perhaps, from the start, who the real culprit was didn’t matter to Mother. Driven by a distorted maternal love that only cared that it wasn’t her son, she sought a solution. What’s intriguing is how the film portrays this mother’s maternal instinct. Her motherhood is depicted as if attempting to wash away her guilt. While the film doesn’t explicitly state it, it implies that the pesticide she fed Do-jun during their attempted suicide when he was five caused his intellectual disability. Mother appears to feel guilty about this fact, and she suffers deeply whenever Do-jun occasionally recalls it. In this context, her overprotectiveness of Do-jun and her attempts to prove his innocence are depicted as a desperate struggle to escape the original sin of being a flawed mother. Yet most of her efforts prove futile. Her efforts, up until the dramatic final scene where she commits murder, resemble swimming in a tidal flat: the more she tries to escape the tragic situation her son is trapped in, the deeper she sinks, ultimately committing an even greater sin. Nevertheless, she ultimately succeeds in rescuing her son.
Regarding Do-jun’s intellectual disability, there is something Mother always told him. She tells him not to tolerate being called a ‘fool’. As mentioned earlier, this likely stems from her guilt over having made her son a fool. Mother’s admonition acts almost like brainwashing on Do-jun, making the word ‘fool’ a trigger for him. When Do-jun hears ‘fool’, he either assaults the person or stares at them as if he might kill them. These accumulated triggers culminate in the murder of Ajeong, the ‘Rice Cake Girl’. Interestingly, Ajeong also had her own trigger. Driven by poverty, she turned to prostitution to survive. To her, men were nothing more than slaves to lust, fitting the derogatory label ‘the girl who makes rice cakes for rice’. When Do-jun asks her, “Do you hate men?”, he unintentionally presses the trigger that makes her lose her reason. Enraged, A-jeong calls Do-jun a ‘fool’ and throws a rock at him. Do-jun responds by throwing a rock back, killing A-jeong. The mother’s plea, “Don’t hold back,” made out of guilt, ultimately becomes the motive for murder. The fight that erupts when Do-jun’s inadequacy and A-jeong’s poverty—each person’s vulnerability—are exposed is depicted as the desperate struggle among the underclass that director Bong Joon-ho often portrays.
As mentioned earlier, Mother also ends up killing someone, just like Do-jun. When she committed an act as shocking as giving Do-jun the drug, the coping mechanism she chose was ‘forgetting’. In the film’s opening, Mother performs a bizarre dance. The location appears identical to where she murdered the witness. She dances as if in agony, shuddering as if trying to forget what she’s done. Beyond this, Mother strives to forget the memories tormenting her, even administering memory-erasing injections. Yet her efforts prove futile. In the end, Do-jun hands her the syringe she left at the murder scene, saying, “What if you leave something like this lying around?” implying he knows about her killing. Thus begins the uneasy coexistence between a mother who knows her son committed murder and a son who knows his mother committed murder. In the finale, Mother dances again on the bus. This time, she dances amidst a vast crowd, becoming indistinguishable as ‘Mother’. It feels like witnessing the painful farce of countless Mothers.
Beyond this, the film features numerous sexual metaphors. While there are direct depictions like the rice cake girl and the scene of Mina and Jin-tae’s sexual encounter being peeped at, there are also suggestive depictions like the golf club and white blood. Alongside the central murder case driving the film, these sexual metaphors persistently appear, reminding us of the connection between sex, life, and death.
This film demonstrates how extreme motherhood can become. The dance of the numerous ‘Mothers’ appearing in the finale reveals the painful existence of countless mothers living under the shackles of maternal emotion, connecting the film’s ‘Mother’ to reality. It is a distorted image of a mother, far from the idealized mother figure. After glimpsing the slightly misaligned reality of motherhood, different from the expected image of a mother, the knotted emotions in one’s heart do not easily fade even after watching the film.
