The Mother (2023) – Jennifer Lopez, American Anti-Abortion Law and the Beauty of the State’s Violence

The Mother (2023) – Jennifer Lopez, American Anti-Abortion Law and the Beauty of the State’s Violence

19.06.23

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

When I was a youngster, I had a poster of Jennifer Lopez on the wall of my bedroom which I shared with my brother. Like most males at the time, I thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world. As someone who has a loyalty to beauty, I have watched several films and music videos of hers over the years, just to look at her. She is not the best actress in the world. She is not a good singer, although she has had some catchy songs. But she is beautiful. So, when I was in the rare position of having the TV to myself yesterday, I watched a movie that Jennifer was in now.

The film was a piece of propaganda for the current Anti-Abortion Law of the American state. Jennifer is fighting against someone that tried to kill her child in her womb with a knife to protect her daughter who is called ‘Zoe’, which means ‘Life’, as we are told in the film. The film is about ‘pro-life’ (although the paradox is that it is not about ‘pro-life’ because Jennifer kills many people in the film). I am an anti-abortionist myself. Before the charges of misogyny and so on begin, I will state that I am descended from the Indian villagers that murder girl children in the womb just for being girls. That is the reality of ‘choice’ and ‘women’s bodily autonomy’ in favour of, in the West, its fictitious ‘independence’ (subjection to the capitalist order and its ‘career’ structure). And although I am against abortion in principle, I am not going to side with the presentation of the Law in the form of Jennifer Lopez as an anti-abortionist. Because what we see with Jennifer Lopez’s character – this body of almost superhuman beauty – is the face of absolute fascism. The face of Law’s fascism and its control of violence.

Why is it that women’s right to abortion is a problem for the American law at the moment? It is not to safeguard children’s rights, however much the law tries to present a face of benevolence. On the contrary, the law’s rights in these unborn children are predicated on absolute selfishness and ruthlessness and violence. The point is that only the law can control violence. So the villains that try to abort Jennifer Lopez’s baby are seen as having illegitimate violence. But Jennifer Lopez herself, as the face of the Law and ‘legitimate’ violence, is able to kill anyone that competes against her for the monopoly of violence. She is the state. She is the law. She is absolute legitimised violence. She has fought in Afghanistan in the movie and works in the Secret Services. The American law is anti-abortionist because no one except the law is allowed to kill (especially not ‘powerless’ women as others). That is the privilege of the law.

Even when Jennifer Lopez saves her child who has grown up and force feeds her, in a controlling, facist relationship, after having butchered several animals to do so, she tells her daughter that everything that she eats comes from violence. This is our relationship to the state in a nutshell. And to law itself, which is founded on violence, propels violence into the core of our being and attaches beauty to this violence, as in the face of Jennifer Lopez. We are being seduced into this violence in the aesthetic of an action movie.

As a vehicle for ‘pro-life’ Law, the film reveals that absolute violence is directed against any critic of the law or anyone that has a difference of opinion, such as as the people that think abortion should be legitimate. I am not siding with the abortionists. I think that they are wrong and they are justifying murder. However, the point is that most of the would be abortionists are women. The film as a whole has to be seen as directed against women. This is the face of facism.

The proof is in the ending of the film. First of all, mother and daughter have to be separated as per the usual construction of Western law which replies on an Oedipal subjectivity in which the son/daughter is separated from the mother through misogyny (I have written about this a lot, I will not go into it again). Secondly, in the final scene, the daughter pretends to shoot her mother from a distance – as they are separated – and Jennifer Lopez as mother feigns death in order to receive the ‘wound of (Western) love’. The ending of the film is in violence directed at the mother’s and woman’s body, a legitimate violence that is seen as ‘love’. This is the ‘love of the law’ that the West has – it is founded in violence against women as other (let us remember also that Jennifer Lopez is an ethnic minority in America – the violence is also founded in racism).

This is the beauty, benevolence and the seduction of the law – absolute violence against the other, against the critic, against the dissident, against anyone else such as the feminist and abortionist that wants a different order and being. If the law is the most beautiful woman in this state and law-loving culture, then she is a cold-blooded killer.