A Knocking at the Gates: I am Mother and the Lies of Authoritarianism
The 2019 Netflix feature I am Mother is a SciFi film set in an automated bunker during a post-apocalyptic timeline. The automated bunker hosts and nurtures human embryos. Once birthed, these humans are raised one at a time by a droid named “Mother.”
The film’s protagonist, Daughter, also known by her subject number APX03, is raised, educated, and protected by Mother. Daughter has been told by Mother that all other humans have died in an extinction event, and that she is the sole survivor of the human race. Daughter also believes that the facility is designed to keep her safe from the rampant toxic radiation and viruses outside.
These beliefs are called into question when a human woman from the outside world arrives at the front gate of the bunker seeking refuge and medical care for a gunshot wound. In separate discussions with this strange woman and Mother, conflicting accounts of the outside reality and the true intention of the droids force Daughter into a crisis in which her knowledge and her relationship with Mother are cast into doubt.
Throughout the film, the character of Mother displays a few glaring attitudes and behaviors that mirror or parallel narrative tactics which have been historically employed by authoritarian states.
One of these behaviors is the way in which Daughter is educated. Daughter is raised in an intensely insulated facility, and taught to mistrust the nature of humans. Mother restates to Daughter that she was designed to raise humanity and protect it “from itself,” suggesting that humans are inherently self-destructive.
In one sequence of her lessons with Mother, they discuss the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism in a hypothetical question about caring for others despite the consequence it would incur on one’s self. Daughter brings up Immanuel Kant’s obligation to humanity, which Kant states is an end in itself, as well as the positivist Auguste Comte. But Daughter, leveling this humanist obligation, questions the true nature of the people she would be hypothetically helping. She postulates whether they had been murderers or thieves during their lives, which she suggests would make them undeserving of care.
Another characteristic behavior that Mother displays is the way in which she coldly interacts with the outsider while administering care. Mother allows the stranger to stay in the medical ward of the facility, while at the same time sheltering Daughter and casting the outsider in a light that makes her seem dangerous and deceitful. At times, Mother’s medical care seems almost performative.
While treating the stranger’s gunshot wound, Mother attempts to give her a syringe of what she claims is penicillin. When the stranger demonstrates a vehement mistrust of Mother and the contents of the syringe, the stranger is left alone with the needle, and given the option to administer it to herself. When Mother and Daughter return, she has injected herself, but her infection seems to have worsened. Mother states out loud that the stranger has waited too long to take it, and now her body is going into shock. Mother, in a cold robotic monotone, says, “I gave you the means to prevent this.” After still refusing care from Mother, the droid retorts, “Perhaps when your major organs start failing, you’ll reconsider.” As the film later reveals, the stranger’s bullet wound was from an encounter with another droid, and not, as Mother tells Daughter, from her own gun.
This language of doling out calculated violence, then expecting a person directly affected by this violence to help themself, and doubly shaming their valid mistrust of the oppressor, is part and parcel with the framing of authoritarian regimes on disadvantaged people groups. Far too often we are shown media clips of impoverished members of society acting out of desperation, and blamed, despite a lack of resources or opportunity, for not “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” for not “helping” themselves in a way that is deemed appropriate.
Having been raised by Mother her entire life, Daughter’s worldview and frame with which to interpret her interactions with the outsider have been limited to what Mother says. While the stranger recounts the numerous atrocities she’s seen carried out by other droids, Daughter refutes this by naively claiming, “Mother’s not what you think. She’s taken care of me my whole life.”
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The film establishes these three characters into three distinct groups: Mother is representative of an autonomous and mechanical system that coldly rejects the outsider whilst coddling the insider. The stranger is representative of an outsider or disadvantaged group. Daughter is representative of a preferred and protected insider.
Between the instilling of anti-humanist attitudes through a curated education and an exclusion from the outside world, as well as the cold and mechanical attitude shown towards a member of that exact disaffected outside group, Mother exemplifies the patterns and objectives carried out by dominant groups of power to mislead and gain trust from the insider.
The film never fully reveals how humans came to be extinct, or which forces designed and implemented Mother and the droids, but the objective is clearly to steer humanity in such a way that it will “help” itself in the new post-apocalyptic era. Mother’s end goal is to initiate a “new world” with a “new order,” with Daughter as part of a chosen group that has been cultivated and raised to what Mother deems an “appropriate” standard. Inferiority and deviance from this standard is met with violence.
In one sequence of discovery in the film, Daughter learns about the disposal of the second test subject, APX02, whose annual test scores were insufficient. The film reveals that this test subject subsequently “aborted” and incinerated when Daughter finds a jawbone in the incinerators ashtray.
The method of disposal that Mother employs is no accident, either. The use of an incinerator recalls the application of the ovens in Nazi extermination camps. We see this first used on a rat, a classically employed representation of “vermin,” which Mother promptly disposes of, to the horror and ineffective protest of Daughter. The film positions anything from outside the facility, as well as inferior subjects in an “other” status that Mother is programmed to exterminate.
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In the past few years, and especially during the presidency of Donald Trump, we’ve seen images and stories of the brutalization of minority groups and people of color. In particular, Trump campaigned on a fear mongering aimed toward undocumented immigrants and a promise to round them up and throw them out. During his presidency, citizens and non-citizens alike have been nabbed from their homes by plainclothes agents and kept in detention centers.
Reports from these facilities detail children being sold into trafficking, sexually abused by agents, or dying from inhumane conditions and a lack of care. During the COVID-19 pandemic which prompted facial coverings and maintaining 6 feet of distance from other people, detained immigrants have been kept in close quarters beyond the maximum capacity in these centers. As a result, the disease has ravaged inmates.
As of this past week, reports from whistleblowers are being picked up about forced hysterectomies that ICE agents operated on detained women. Forced hysterectomy is a form of compulsory sterilization, and is formally recognized as a form of genocide. Forced hysterectomies were used by the Nazis on women in concentration camps. Compulsory sterilization was carried out by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs on some several hundred native women in the 20th century, as late as the 1970s. Beyond just the United States and Nazi Germany, forced sterilization has also been inflicted on Uighur women in China.
Despite the glaring examples and atrocities that the Trump administration and the U.S. government at large has carried out which mirror the Third Reich and other brutal state apparatuses, a good number of U.S. citizens deny these comparisons and deny the reality.
Authoritarian states are enabled largely by the complicit attitudes and outlook that it instills in its preferred citizens. If that complicity were to be compromised or even reversed, the validity and power of authoritarianism is diminished, and potentially overthrown. In I am Mother, it is only when Daughter realizes the true nature of Mother’s agenda and stands up to her that Mother finally stands down.
But for us in the real world, how much more will it take? What other examples do people need to recognize the gruesome nature of the current state we find ourselves in?
The in-group today has been recognized as lower-to-upper-middle class whites, who have bought into the narrative that they are the “true” Americans, for whom much stands to be lost or taken away from. Despite the constant imagery and evidence of a mechanical cruelty towards undocumented peooples and their children, or of rampant unchecked state brutality towards people of color, there is still a denial of the reality for the sake of maintaining a sense of normalcy or just for the fear of implicating one’s self in this system. To acknowledge it would bring on the acknowledgement that this in-group directly benefits from not opposing this system of violence, and makes them complicit and worthy of some degree of guilt.
The question should be: at what point does the status quo become so unpalatable that the group that benefits from it most will be willing to revoke their complicity? At what point does it grow so uncomfortable in their bunkers that they will be brave enough to stand up?
In the film, Daughter is shown to display compassion and empathy even for the incinerated rat, despite her education. The challenge for the real world is we have been desensitized and numbed by a constant barrage of the reality. Ours is a generation tasked with first overcoming the sense of hopelessness and apathy that prevents action, as well as organizing against a fiercely anti-opposition state.
The glimmer of hope, here, is there is a never-ending frenzy of shared stories, practices and theories on how to disarm and dismantle authoritarianism. Since the rise and fall of the Nazi Third Reich, alarmists have kept a vigilinat eye for patterns that would signal the rise of authoritarian states, and have been constantly vocal throughout the last few years. Plato’s parable of the cave tells us that it was the duty of those who had seen past the shadows to unshackle those left behind and bring them into the sun. More and more people are knocking at our gates, helping us better understand the reality that we face.
- image courtesy of TV Guide
Tyler Faurot 