Finally watched the 2019 sci-fi movie I Am Mother, which I had been wanting to watch since 2019. Back then I attended only the last 10 minutes of the session “Mothers! In! Space!” at the 58th Australian National Science Fiction Convention, but what I managed to capture in those short moments was highly inspiring. Here are some of the things I wrote afterwards:
“Do mothers have to be ‘good’? Who are some of our favourite ‘bad’ mothers? What about stepmothers and grandmothers? And what about mother figures, birth mothers vs. adopted mothers, and even surrogate mothers? Dare I mention forced motherhood? Or (in)voluntarily abandoned motherhood? How do we define and depict motherhood if a mother loves other aspects of her life much more than her children?”
“What’s clear is that bringing a life to this world does not necessarily make one a mother. Perhaps more importantly, motherhood is not the same as womanhood and should never be seen as the equivalence or essence of it.”
“With that said, I have always felt that the second half of Aliens (1986) is basically a battle between two mothers. While the Alien Queen witnessed her children being massacred and is now determined to seek revenge on their behalf, Ellen Ripley fights for a child that is not even hers. This is perhaps why the ghost of the Alien Queen gets to play an upper hand throughout the next movie, Alien 3 (1992), forcing Ripley to become a surrogate mother. Ripley is able to fight back by killing the Alien Queen’s ‘child’ that Ripley ‘gives birth to’. Nonetheless, in Alien Resurrection (1997), the ‘reincarnation’ of Ripley is still haunted by the ghost of the Alien Queen. Indeed, that Ripley 8 has to murder her own ‘child’ can be seen as the ultimate revenge of the Alien Queen as a wronged mother.”
“As more science fiction novels get written and movies made, there is no doubt that conventional notions of motherhood will continue to be challenged. Perhaps it is now time for some of our sci-fi artists to start deconstructing fatherhood as well?”
(Day 77 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 