The Forsaken Son: My Journey with Beau
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” | Matthew 11: 28–30
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” | Psalm 23: 1–4
This was something I had not originally decided to do, chronicle my thoughts here on my Medium page, but rather keep them regulated to my Letterboxd diaries instead. However, I changed my mind as I felt that the long form nature of this material would be difficult to read and digest appropriately on Letterboxd’s limited platform. The reason why I was formally hesitant to share on here is because this review is going to be part analysis, part Gospel message, and part personal story. I know I am very open and honest on what perspective I am coming from on this blog, I am unabashedly Christian, but this is going to be very personal. I am doing this, in part, for my own catharsis, but also hopefully for others as well who may find themselves lost in the dark and entirely alone on a road they do not recognize — who might see themselves in Beau and who may find hope in my words and story. God knows, Ari Aster gives us none. (Is Ari okay? I feel like we need to check in on him. Maybe give him a hug, or something.)
So, damn, that was truly a trip to hell and back. I don’t mean just for Beau, but specifically for myself. I saw this film in April and from that time I saw it until this passed July, I have suffered a major relapse in my health. I am currently recovering — thank the Lord — getting stronger every day, but I am sad to say that this film was a catalyst for my relapse. Perhaps this film should come with a trigger warning, although I don’t regret seeing it. Even many times in my worst and darkest moments, I did not regret it.
To begin, I suffer from Lyme disease. It is something I discovered last year when I had a major health crisis and mental breakdown. Lyme is a complicated infection, and I won’t go into it all, but the basic Western medical understanding of what it is and where it comes from is only the tip of the iceberg. What you need to know is that it is a chronic illness, and it attacks your weakest areas, physically, mentally, and emotionally. So, the symptoms not only include just anxiety and just depression, but it can make you feel like you are literally going insane. It attacks your cognitive functions and plays havoc with your nervous system, hormones, and immune system. It is a smart disease that adapts and transforms to its environment making it a formidable foe. It can manifest in extreme nerve pain, which it did for me, or it can manifest in bizarre symptoms, like weird, unsettling sensations and tremors that spread throughout your body. I am still dealing with some of those inexplicable sensations even today. Your body’s immune system and drainage system basically becomes overwhelmed and cannot deal with the influx of infections and co-infections. In other words, it absolutely sucks. This illness is a beast. It brings you to the very end of yourself, leaving you desperate for comfort and relief. It feels like you are being crushed to the darkest pit of despair. Thanks be to God I was not alone! This illness could have, like Beau in the final act of the film, obliterated me and sunk me into the darkest watery depths never to rise again. But it didn’t.
This film is undoubtedly a phenomenal piece of art unlike anything that has been done before. Construction wise, it is everything I would want to see in cinema. It is a film expressing a director’s unabashed and unique vision without restraint, a character story told through an immersive journey, a quasi-hero’s journey, which is entirely expressed through metaphor. It is unbelievably visceral, terrifying, and brutal. The imagery and symbols are used like a battering ram to your heart as Ari lays bear the suffering of a man who has the emotional maturity of a child struggling through severe complexes, traumas, and anxieties. I cannot help but admit it, the craftmanship is immaculate and the depth of understanding of the human condition surprisingly profound. It puts you inside of Beau and the director wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted us to go through “his guts and come out of his butt.” (Ari needs to go to the Tarkovsky school of how to talk about cinema, though.) It is an epic, surreal odyssey of absurdity and horror made ever more potent by a frightening psychosomatic experience.
With that being said, it plumbs the depths of darkness in a way that is alarming and perhaps disastrous. The fact that the film is talked about as a “comedy” (obviously a dark one) makes things very problematic, in my opinion. If you are thinking this stuff is funny, you might need some help, my friend. This isn’t hilarity — this is trauma. This story is about a person walking through complete and utter darkness to only to never find his way home. This is an unfiltered examination of both depravity and evil, of Man chained to his body of Death, never before more accurately depicted and yet so dangerously ignored. This film traumatized me, and I say that without hyperbole, but quite sincerely. For this reason the following analysis is not going to be as cohesive and in-depth as I would have liked it to be (yet another reason I was hesitant to post on Medium) because it would require repeated viewings and a more in-depth study of this film, but I’m never setting eyes on it again. Walking with Beau once was quite enough for me.
Yet even with all of that being true, I believe my journey with Beau through the valley of the shadow of death was essential, perhaps even in a way that I as of yet do not fully understand myself. The fact that Ari Aster leaves us and Beau drowned and condemned forever beneath the watery grave is a state of hopelessness that is unacceptable to me. Thus, here I write.
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what do not see, we await for it with patience.” | Romans 8:23–25
I would like to begin in the middle of the film for two reasons:
- It is actually my favorite part of the film. It is the most metaphorically nuanced section and the most artful in its presentation. Surreal and abstract in its beautiful construction, it speaks to the soul of the story in the most succinct and emotionally resonate way possible. If this had been the movie I would have adored it unabashedly, despite its oppressive and dark themes. To me, tonally, it struck the right balance between poetry and horror, and was both sorrowful and meaningful, with not one bit of crude irreverence or ruthless grotesquery that plagues the rest of the film.
- I believe this middle section is the linchpin of the entire film and in order to understand this 3 hour epic, which is multi-layered and complex in its imagery, we must first understand this part.
Beau, after enduring an onslaught of absurdly terrifying events, finds himself lost in the woods. For context, Beau has learned that his mother has died and all his endeavors up until this point has been just to make it to her funeral. Yet plagued by outrageous circumstances out of his control, Beau finds himself bereft of livelihood, home, possessions, and friends. He’s even endured an almost fatal truck accident. Yet what drives him forward on this insane odyssey is not a love for his mother, but the guilt that she has chained him with since childhood. Persecuted by inexplicable nightmare scenarios from without and psychological damage from within, Beau pushes forward on his quest regardless of the fact that he is destroying himself for a woman who emotionally and mentally abused him, essentially leaving him an orphan — a child trapped in an aging body who is unable to live any kind of normal life outside of his anxieties and fears.
Then, in the woods, he happens upon a theater troupe and meets a young woman who is pregnant (Remember this point, as I will come back to it later). She is quite literally the only character in the film who shows Beau any kindness, respect, and compassion; treating him with dignity with no ulterior motives of her own. She leads him into the audience and explains that they are all orphans here in the forest and that they are about to put on a play. With Beau in the audience, the play opens to a man chained to the floor of the stage who cries out,
“O God…Fate has burned my house to cinders and launched me into exile. I once thought I knew despair, and that I could master it — but now that I know this pain, I can’t fathom relief. When I reach out for answers, I grasp cold air. O, with my mother and father gone, I have lost my whole self!”
Having thus cried, the man shatters his chains and embarks on his journey of exile to wander the earth. From here it is now Beau who is on the stage, as the narrator continues the narrative. This play is now Beau’s story. We see him pass through many lands and through seasons of sun, wind, rain, and snow — searching for home and community, searching for wife and family. Beau is essentially searching for identity. “O, with my mother and father gone, I have lost my whole self!” This perilous journey, which takes on a beautiful, almost idyllic aesthetic of a child’s illustrated fairytale book, painterly and whimsical in style, is one that weaves and winds through pain, terror, and loneliness. It becomes analogous to being cast out of Eden. When Adam and Eve sinned against their holy God, they were cursed and cut off from His presence, “. . .for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Left to toil in their futility, one of the most tragic things that they had lost was their confidence in their identity in their Creator, a sense of belonging, a sense of home. “. . .therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
We see that not only is Beau’s mother critical to this loss, but his father as well. The Father and Mother — Man and Woman in the image of God — completes the picture of one’s sense of self, of origin, and of home. So to be made an orphan is to declare one as having no identity at all. This is what Man lost when his sin caused him to be cast out from the Garden, and this legacy of the curse and the loss of self is now Beau’s inheritance. He is an orphan amongst orphans who begets yet more orphans, as the story of the play shows how a great storm and flood separated him from his family (which had pushed him to continue his tiresome journey once again), only for him to be united with his sons when he is an old man, and they are grown. They had grown up without a father or mother just as he. It is the most heartbreaking and anguishing part of the film for me, as I found myself crying in the theater, as the elderly Beau embraces his sons whom he had thought he had lost forever, all of them weeping on one another’s shoulders. They wept for themselves, they wept for one another. Lit against the inky black background of the stage that becomes like an empty void all around them, they seemed to be the only ones left in the world. They are far off from any homeland, nowhere to belong, no one to call them by name, no one to know them, and no one to love them. Like it says, “. . . you who once were far off. . .” and “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” This is the state of a Godless man, he is like one without a father and mother, left to his own devices, left to struggle without end — he is formless.
This theme of being a forsaken son is the crux of Beau’s story. You see, the main reoccurring element of the film, the source of Beau’s brokenness, is based in the fact that he has been told, by his mother, that his father died while in the act of coitus due to a heart murmur and at the moment of his conception. She tells Beau that this is a genetic disorder passed down through the men of his family, making him absolutely terrified of ever having an orgasm — although he still dreams of and longs for his childhood sweetheart. This toxic and abusive lie, for we are, quite shockingly and gruesomely, shown it to be a lie, is something that his mother used as a way of controlling him. Beau’s penis, which connotates a man’s vitality and strength, becomes the main imagery used to represent his identity, and his mother has made sure that he has been stunted. Beau’s mother has emotionally and spiritually castrated him, which only furthers his lack in the sense of self and completely incapacitates him as an individual, held in bondage by fear and death. Yet not does she only castrate him, but she castrates his father and his father’s fathers before him, essentially terminating any and all legacy and strength that Beau would find in a father’s love.
What happens next is that when Old Beau in the play tells his sons of this infirmity in the males of his family, one of his sons asks, “Then how did you have us?” In this moment Beau’s whole reality begins to collapse and he is swept back into the audience where things begin to blow up in chaos all around him. You see, up until now, Beau has been chased by a psychotic PTSD-rattled veteran named Jeeves (Don’t ask. This film is insane). He is the one who is causing all the carnage, yet while he is originally set to destroy Beau, I believe that what he represents is our mind’s ability to protect itself when we have experienced severe trauma. In this moment where Beau is being confronted with a terrible truth of his mother’s cruel deception, which also happens to be the moment where a man, who is implied to be Beau’s real father, comes from out of the audience to have a random encounter with Beau only to be lost to him again, the veteran blows up the entire stage, shooting and killing everyone, and laying waste to the forest. He is protecting Beau from what his mind and heart cannot process thus forcing him to flee once more. His merciless journey must continue.
It is here that the play gives us the key to understanding what we are watching. It is revealed to us that it is Old Beau who is the creator behind the play, it is Beau who is in the audience, and it is Beau’s story that is the play itself. Then in the course of the play, that Beau ends up meeting a theatre troupe as well which also puts on a play, in which that Beau becomes a part of that play. This story within a story within a story structure exemplifies the cycle of futility that is a life without identity, without family, and without love. Never have I seen a more accurate representation of a life without the Light of the World, to be utterly cast out from His presence and left to your own devices; left to make sense of a world that gives you no answers. It is a life lived forever in complete darkness until you die, only for your children to continue the cycle all over again. This feeling of hopelessness and captivity to a life that promises only suffering is probably what terrified me the most of this film. And just as Beau — in the audience — cries out, “This is me! This is my story!” to the Beau on stage, fiction and reality merging, so too we who are watching this film in our own audience are to cry out the same, “Beau is me! He is my story!”
In an extremely visceral way Ari Aster draws us into the loneliness, emptiness, and pain unending. He makes us become Beau, and Beau’s journey is not done.
“Beau is me! This is my story!”
I am going to pause here for a moment to discuss what I believe to be a mustard seed of light and hope in this film, albeit pitiful and more like a cry of desperation. You will recall the pregnant woman whom Beau met in the forest? Well, because of her kindness Beau ends up gifting her a little statue of a mother holding her child. The statue was introduced to us at the beginning of the film. Before Beau learns of his mother’s death, he was planning on visiting her. This is something that he dreaded, but as Beau tells his therapist, he loves his mother. Beau is a good son, isn’t he? However, Beau, in his indecision, decides on the spur of the moment to purchase and send the statue in his place, apologizing to his mother that he cannot make it. Yet due to the series of nightmarishly outlandish events that lays waste to his life, as well as the alleged death of his mother, Beau just keeps the statue which ends up shattering through the course of all the chaos. Later, when he is able, he poorly glues it back together again and this is his gift to the pregnant woman. I see this simple gesture as a cry to be saved from the vicious, self-destructive cycle that Beau finds himself in. The pregnant woman represents that new life, that hopeful potential of the restoration of the bond between mother and son. With Beau’s gifting her this broken statue (symbolic of his broken relationship with his own mother) it is Beau crying out to be saved. Even more so I believe it is Ari Aster crying out to a seemingly indifferent universe — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Ari does not end up giving us any hope that there could be freedom from this pain, that Anyone would answer, but still he cries.
“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” | John 16:33
We now come to the climax of the film, which literally includes a climax, as Beau reunites with his childhood sweetheart, Elaine. He has finally made it to his mother’s home where they’ve held the funeral and the wake, but he was too late. It has already concluded. It is here amongst his mother’s legacy decorated with accolades and photos of the organization she had built, her business career symbolic of the fear she has manufactured in his life (There are framed advertisements and posters that ominously read, “Perfectly Safe” on various drugs, foods, and products, many of them featuring a young Beau as part of the ads), that Beau finally comes face to face with the truth. It is also the most gruesome and cruel part of the film, the part I was beginning to wonder if I should have followed Beau on his journey after all. I can understand, though, from an artistic point of view that this encounter should be graphically shocking. Beau’s whole sense of self has been built around the delusions and illusions of his mother’s world and to shine light on how much it has rotted him to the core would and should be grotesque.
We discover that she is, in fact, not dead, but faked her own death as a means of manipulating her son to visit her. She coerced their family housekeeper to die in her place, the one woman in his life who genuinely loved and cared for him and whom his mother resented and was jealous of. It is also revealed that his therapist (who he had been seeing at the beginning of the film) has been working in the employ of his mother as well, and all his sessions with him have been recorded and monitored by his mother the entire time (which she uses as leverage over Beau). And, as mentioned previously, Beau’s childhood sweetheart Elaine — whom his mother had manipulated to make sure she remained out of Beau’s life even while under his mother’s employ all these years — arrives late to the funeral and they end up having sex in his mother’s room. Beau’s mother’s appearance happens just after they orgasm and Beau finally discovers he did not die, but horrifically Elaine has. Reeling from the shock and horror, his mother materializes to reveal this too was a test of Beau’s love for her, as she still held resentment against her son for even having any affection for another female. She tends to cleaning up the scene of yet another of Beau’s humiliations.
In every way possible, every aspect of Beau’s life, has been orchestrated, controlled, and manipulated by his mother to maximize dominance, humiliation, and devastation over Beau. There is no part of it that can be called his own. There is no part of it that allows for his voice or for his freedom. She is and will always remain the only Woman in his life. She brings up every aspect of the past, laying burdens on Beau the child, every moment that she had felt Beau had wronged her. Even innocuous behaviors like his forgetting he had purchased the same CD for her birthday on a couple occasions, become a grievous and unforgiveable offense. She plays the victim to Beau’s every attempt at trying to defend himself. She lays guilt after guilt upon him. Her wickedness is profound, stripping him of all dignity and manhood. This all becomes too much for Beau to bear, and in the moment of desperation and rage, Beau finds the assertiveness that has been long buried deep and shut away inside of him to demand that she finally tell him the truth about his father and why she had lied to him all these years about the heart murmur. Resentful and ruthless, his mother says that she will — that if he goes up into the attic he will learn the truth about his father.
The attic here represents Beau’s subconscious. It is the place where he had banished the part of himself that had any will to fight back, and it is the place that Beau is most terrified of going. Yet he consents and climbs into the darkened space. Nearly petrified by fear, it is there that Beau encounters a giant monster penis. Yes, you read that correctly. The grotesque beast roars in attack and just in that moment Jeeves (the veteran suffering PTSD from before) jumps through the window guerilla-style (again this is his mind’s defense mechanism) and begins to savagely attacking the monster. Beau ends up surviving the graphic carnage only for his mother to shout a terrible revelation to him, “That was your father! Do you have any idea what I had to go through to bring you into this world?!”
This monster represents the decades of fear and anxiety afflicted by his mother. It is all that sin and depravity instilled into him, all that ugliness, all that broken self-worth, all his feelings of inadequacy, and the lack of value for himself as a human being — all of it has become his identity now, his father. The monster is his legacy of trauma manifested through that hideous and gross form. Reeling once more at the utter devastation that his mother had laid waste in his soul, he ends up killing her in their altercation. It was his mother’s funeral after all.
We now enter the final act of the film. At this point, I was feeling every minute of the three-hour runtime quite vividly. The exhaustion that Beau is feeling is palpable, as Beau leaves his mother’s home. Here the imagery of that forest play returns as Beau finds himself at the edge of a calm and serene lake, an impossibly large night sky unfolds around him with stars hovering close. There is suddenly a sense of peace that washes over Beau as he steps into the boat that awaits him there and pushes out onto the water. We believe with Beau that upon facing the terrible truth and breaking the chains of his mother’s power, i.e. her death, that Beau could find some sense of inner peace now. However, this is not the case.
Suddenly reality collapses all around him once again and Beau finds himself in a large auditorium surrounded by a laughing and jeering audience, a Judge who stands high above him, and next to him is his mother glowering down at him! Beau is now on trial. He is not free, but his mother’s influence and damage in him remains! The Judge begins blaring at maximum volume all of Beau’s “sins.” Accusation after accusation is leveled against him, dredging up the minutia of his past, every perceived inadequacy and failure. Every aspect of Beau’s life is eaten up and corroded by guilt so much so that no matter what choice he has made, it was always the wrong one, even if the circumstances are blown so irrationally out of proportion. Like for example, he is condemned for feeding the fish in his therapist’s office, because later he walks past his fellow man, the homeless outside of his apartment building. (Even though these same homeless people were the deranged lunatics who bombarded his apartment at the beginning of the film and took over everything he owned, defecating and destroying his home and threatening his very life!)
No matter what Beau has done or not done, he is always in the wrong. The decibels of judgement from the Judge and his mother are a weight of condemnation that Beau has no defense against. Even though he has an advocate that appears on the stage of this trial, the rational voice and the compassionate voice, this voice can be barely heard over the Judge’s. Beau’s advocate cannot overcome the voice of accusation built up through years of his mother’s abuse. At this point the voice of the Judge becomes so loud that it vibrates throughout the auditorium, dislodging some of it which brutally crushes Beau’s advocate upon the rocks.
This scene not only represents the way our own voice is drowned out amidst the destruction of trauma in our lives. How we can come to believe the lies about ourselves and to be shaped by the shame and anxiety it leaves, even if it is over such little things, things our mind has been conditioned to repeat and filter through toxic and abusive narratives about ourselves. This interpretation is completely valid, but I believe that it could give us a deeper insight and a fuller understanding of the devastation Ari Aster has wreaked, if we view it from a more spiritual context. The final act reminded me acutely of this scene in heaven described in Zechariah 3. It says,
“Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right to accuse him. And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him. “ And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.” And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD was standing by.” | Zechariah 3:1–5
Satan is known and called the Accuser of the Brethren, who “accuses them day and night before God”. He is also the father of lies. He was the Serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the Fall, and he is the great Enemy who seeks the destruction of God’s people, stealing, deceiving, and persecuting wherever he goes. He tried to incite God against His righteous servant Job, and delights in the suffering of the righteous, seeking to devour them. The Judge in this scene behaves more like the Accuser than a judge, as he relentlessly lays out Beau’s sins. Even though the accusations against Beau aren’t genuinely sins, and the sins Satan tries to accuse us with are often genuinely our own, the imagery is equivalent because in Christ, who bore our sins for us, we are no longer identified by those transgressions. We are fully righteous before God, our sin taken from us as far as the east is from the west. Satan, like the Judge here, is not only lying but seeking to crush and destroy the one he is accusing through guilt and shame. This is what the scene in Zechariah shows us, the imagery of what Christ would do on the Cross. By removing Joshua’s iniquity, his filthy garments, and giving him pure vestments and a clean turban, Satan is rebuked. He is rendered utterly powerless against the ultimate grace and love of God who has claimed Joshua as His own.
This is what Beau was lacking in this final scene, a true Advocate that could save him from the crushing weight of these accusations. Beau could not combat the voice on his own, the weight of this voice that tore him apart, that had been given power through his mother’s transgressions and the weight of his fear and shame. It became so heavy, so all consuming, that it tore the boat beneath him asunder and crushed him into the watery black depths below. The credits rolled solemnly and dreadfully over the empty auditorium and the sloshing murky water that had consumed him. The drama of Beau’s journey was complete, and he was undone. His mother, symbolically manifested here as the Accuser, had won.
“Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.” | Psalm 49:7–9
Beau, of his own strength, clearly cannot save himself. He is a man stripped of all humanity and identity; forsaken and cast out into eternal exile, unloved. He is the “Old” Adam. His journey was doomed from the beginning, held captive by generational trauma and sin. The depravity of this world, the chains that bind us to this sinful flesh prevent us from ever escaping of our own will or volition. It necessitates a supernatural intervention. It necessitates the “New” Adam.
The Cross is this supernatural event, Christ is the New Adam, the saving grace that overcomes all Sin and Death. When Christ came to this world in the flesh, He poured Himself out as a sin offering, taking the condemnation that was rightfully ours and bearing the wrath of God upon Himself. He did this for us in order that whoever believes unto Him would be saved to eternal life, thus rendering Satan, that great Serpent, utterly powerless. As God says to the Serpent in the Garden, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Christ was the fulfillment of this prophecy in order that the Apostle Paul may say later, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. . .” Christ has overcome the world and the ruler of this world, which gives us the power to overcome and endure all things. It is the Accuser (Satan), not Beau, who is crushed in the end. It is the Accuser, not the Advocate, who is obliterated on the stone (the Cross). And it is the Accuser who will be exiled and condemned forever to the depths of that pit of destruction.
So, ‘Beau is Afraid’, becomes ‘Beau is Redeemed’, ‘Beau is Found’, ‘Beau is Loved’. He has found both a father and a mother, he is the son that has been restored. Christ would lay waste to that auditorium of guilt and shame, drawing Beau to Himself, taking him in His arms, clothing him with pure clothes, healing him with abundant mercy, and lavishing him with everlasting love. That monster of Sin and Death, that giant, ugly penis is not his father. The Lord God of the Heavens, our Lord Jesus Christ, is His Father.
“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” | Romans 8:14–15
