Move
Mother Mary and Monsters: Week 3 of the April Writing Challenge
Let’s start out with something simple and naked and important, I hope with all my heart that you decide to see the new movie Mother Mary in theatres before it goes. I saw it on Friday in an empty theatre with my friend and with every gorgeous red flourish we stood up and screamed “where are you?” to a world that was missing out. We ate popcorn and howled at a movie so good I wanted to run laps around the empty seats.
Here’s the pitch: an iconic pop star in creative crisis, Anne Hathaway, visits their estranged oldest friend and former stylist, Michaela Coel, to craft a dress that will put whatever their demons are to rest. Chaos and beauty ensue.
And, y’all, Anne Hathaway is so tall. Michaela Coel is so razor sharp and cruelly stunning. David Lowery’s direction and script are doing such surgical, visceral work, that…just go see it. Please? Promise me.
There was such a potent physical eroticism to the film that I left briefly to ask my girlfriend to text me a picture of her hands. When I came back I noticed the way my friend crossed his legs and remembered, in the coiled springs of his calves, that he frequently, recreationally, lifts things that would herniate me to even look at.
Movies are magic. My friends are hot. I forget how strong things are.
Watching Anne Hathaway writhe on the floor of a barn dancing to only her own animalistic breath (SEE THIS MOVIE) made me realize something about a trend in my own art. It has become too still. The work of sitting. It is the work of kneeling. The quiet prayer. The ascetic desert.
No more. Fuck the desert. This piece is the ride into town. This is the donkey and palms. This is the march to Golgotha.
I ask now, right now, to all of you reading this:
Change your bodies.
Tense a muscle. Make a fist. Physically engage with me. With this. Remember you are strong. Hold onto that until I tell you to stop.
I spent so much of last year building hope. Hope was a shivering, wet, red rabbit I had to hold so gently. It would die if I looked at it wrong. I fed it milk. I sang it soft and gentle songs. I read books about Joan of Arc and Jesus and wrote very pretty things. Things that would keep the hope alive and comfortable as it limped on into life. I folded my hands. I whispered. I prayed.
In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, the saint is subject to a convoluted and absurd trial until she is finally burned alive. While the flames around her body rise, a riot breaks out. When I saw the movie at the Plaza last year, I was enamored with the still intensity of Maria Falconetti’s performance as Joan. I was lost in the quiet of her face during the trial. I guess I wasn’t ready for the riot.
Stay tensed in your bodies. Keep that fist clenched. If you can give your body to a song or a meditation, you can give it to this. This is the closest my work gets to a mosh pit. Indulge me.
Because art can do that. It is not always a still pool in which to see yourself. It is a current that moves you. I ask you to move. Labor movements have songs. Protests have a soundtrack that moves their bodies. To stay in rhythm a marching army requires a drum. Last Friday Mother Mary became a drum.
It’s also so important that I mention the movie is really fucking gay. Throughout the runtime Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel stare at each other with wet, volcanic eyes and talk about ghosts and hold hands and the whole thing is just…God. Just so gay.
In the way that all magic is gay. In the way that all faith is gay. In embracing my queerness, I give myself to a wanting that defies a narrow world view. I will never be the boy a doctor told me I was. I will never procreate by fucking someone in the ass. I will never have a baby after spreading my legs.
I will not be a mother except through magick. Through this. Through spells and drums and movement. My only womb is my heart. I am Echidna, nursing bad dreams with my blood. I can only give birth to monsters.
Unclench your fists. Relax your bodies. Feel the way the air changed as you all did it in unison. For as long as you’re here, readers, here you are my many-headed and monstrous child. You are the red rabbit of my hope bloomed into something many-limbed and capable. You are so much stronger than you realize, my blessed unnatural child.
When you finish this piece, I will release you unto a world in need. It needs a monster to eat its wickedness. Tonight I birth you in the dark of a theatre so that you can do terrible work. Strike. Protest. Boycott. Scream. Fight. Sing. Howl. Devour. Riot.
It took a movie last Friday to remind me of the riot in my body, the pregnant ache of my heart. The war that tumbled out of Joan of Arc’s many prayers. The crucifixion that followed the quiet garden. This is the time of blood. Of ministry. Of movement.
Listen to mother, child. Listen to your bodies, the hurt in your hands, the flames that rise from the funeral pyres of your bones. Listen to your mother.
Get on your motherfucking feet.
Move.