Is 'Mother Mary' Gay?

Let the lesbianism in

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Last month, a nasty rumor spread around the lawless social media platform known as X. According to a series of increasingly distraught posts, the new film Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, isn’t actually gay. “just found out from oomf mother mary isn’t even gay like the characters are supposed to be best friends and not exes. I’m gonna throw up. I’ve been waiting for this movie for YEARS this is the worst day of my life,” wrote one user.

Many folks responded to posts like this with outrage, claiming they felt “baited” because marketing materials made it seem as though the two protagonists had a romantic relationship. Several X users noted that the film’s official description seems to have changed over time, at one point referring to the characters as exes and later as former best friends. In one trailer for the film, their relationship is left ambiguous, though it does include a moment between Anne Hathaway and FKA Twigs where it looks like they’re about to kiss. To be fair to the marketing department and the film’s cast, it’s difficult to describe the film in a way that entices people without giving too much away — though what is there to give away, exactly?

In many ways, this discourse recalls the online discussion about Forbidden Fruits, which I wrote about several weeks ago. Notably, none of these indignant X users had actually seen the movie when they made these posts, and one user even rescinded their claim after watching the film themselves.

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These disapproving posts didn’t go unrefuted. “Every single person who said this wasn’t gay watched this movie with their eyes completely shut and with noise cancelling headphones on. #STOPMISINFORMATION,” one user wrote. “Mother Mary is a very gay film. This shit is subtext heaven,” wrote another.

Critics didn’t agree about the nature of Mother Mary (Hathaway) and Sam’s (Michaela Cole) relationship either. Writing in The Film Stage, Jourdain Searles calls Sam “a woman haunted by love, her passion fueled by sustained, aching heartbreak,” and notes that “Though it’s never spoken, the queerness of [Director David] Lowery’s film is unmistakable.” On the other hand, IndieWire’s David Ehrlich writes, “You get the sense that all of her songs [...] are fundamentally about her friend break-up with Sam, even if they resonate with her fans on much different and more romantic terms.” In Rolling Stone, David Fear describes Mother Mary as Sam’s “ex-employer and close companion.”

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So what is the truth? Mother Mary is a legendary pop diva returning to the stage after a breakdown of sorts. Sam is Mary’s ex-fashion designer and ex…something. Mary comes to Sam because she needs a new dress, and their years of history create a fraught environment filled with ghosts (literal and figurative) and hurt feelings. Most of the film is a two-hander, as Sam and Mary attempt to work it out on the remix through some extremely barbed words and a bloody seance. The intensity of their feelings is immediately apparent, and as one X user wrote, “The movie doesn’t even make sense if they’re not in love/hate with one another.”

Indeed, Mother Mary is a gay film, but not in a yaaas, queen! sort of way. It’s a gay in a demented, broody, lesbian sort of way. Their visceral emotional intensity, their deep wounds, their transcendence of the corporeal form, their shared haunting, even the unspoken nature of their relationship – these are all very lesbian-coded elements. The movie emphasizes queerness as a narrative framework, reveling in ambiguity and multiplicity, while lesbianism serves as an emotional anchor.

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Still, the film may have benefited from more specificity and detail. It would have been enriching to learn more about who Mother Mary is, as a person, and as an artist. What’s her relationship to fame, and to this persona she created? Why did she end things with Sam, and where does the music fit in? How does race factor into their dynamic? The metaphors are grand and evocative, but the characters could have used some fleshing out.

This back-and-forth on X reflects the increasingly literal, black-and-white way people discuss film and other media, particularly in online spaces. Using words like “canonically” and “explicitly” to describe a character’s identity or the nature of their feelings elides the nuance and allegory that many of the best films traffic in. Mother Mary is comprised almost entirely of metaphors, making those terms irrelevant. The movie is more interested in symbolism than it is in reflecting reality. Refraction, maybe, but not reflection.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that people want to experience films via their own experiences or understanding of the world. That’s a matter of human nature. But this film requires attention to symbols and metaphor, and a kind of surrender to ambiguity that can be hard to concede. Mother Mary leaves the viewer with much to chew on, and the gays are hungry.

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