Throughout mother! Jennifer Lawrence's character is seen drinking a mystery yellow powder but what exactly is it? While Darren Aronofsky has circled blockbusters like The Wolverine and the unmade Batman: Year One throughout his career, most of his output isn't exactly mainstream fare. From Requiem For A Dream to Black Swan, he tends to make intense and often disturbing character studies.
His most recent film was mother! which was seemingly designed to split opinions. This studio-backed horror movie cast Jennifer Lawrence as the supportive partner to an acclaimed poet (Javier Bardem), who is suffering from writer's block. The arrival of a stranger played by Ed Harris - swiftly followed by more trespassers - threatens to derail the peaceful life she's built in their isolated home. By design, mother! is positively dripping in subtext and metaphors, with Lawrence essentially playing Mother Earth, Bardem playing God, and the house itself representing the planet that God's followers are thoughtlessly destroying.
Supporting players in mother! are thinly disguised nods to biblical characters, mixed in with commentary on climate change and gender. The movie famously received polarized responses, with people either loving or hating it. Most of these symbols in the film are easy to decode, with Aronofsky being surprisingly open about the intentions behind the story during promotional interviews, but one element he steadfastly refused to explain is the yellow powder Jennifer Lawrence is seen drinking several times throughout the movie.
All the director would give up during an EW interview about the yellow powder in mother! is that it's linked to Victorian novels and the main character's connection to the house. In the story, mother is seen drinking the yellow powder whenever she's stressed or anxious, but when she becomes pregnant later in the film, she flushes what's left down the toilet. While Aronofsky has never revealed its meaning, many have taken the powder to be a nod towards 19th century short story The Yellow Wallpaper.
This Charlotte Perkins Gilman story follows a woman who is essentially imprisoned by her husband for being "hysterical" following the birth of her baby. She's forbidden from doing anything but resting, and soon becomes convinced another woman is living in the yellow wallpaper of her room that she must free. There are several parallels between mother! and The Yellow Wallpaper, including the relationship between her and Him and how the main character's technically become new women by the end. That said, yellow is a recurring theme through the movie, including mother literally painting the walls yellow and even one of the posters - which is a visual reference to Rosemary's Baby poster - is yellow too.