Beau Is Afraid Explained

A confusing, thrilling, emotional roller coaster of a film, Beau Is Afraid it’s worth every hour of sitting in an uncomfortable movie theater seat. Without providing a regurgitation of the plot, I will attempt to illustrate my interpretation of Ari Aster’s newest film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Beau.

Image from https://a24films.com/films/beau-is-afraid

Disclaimers: This article contains spoilers for the film. I am not a professionally trained movie critic, but I am a creative writer who loves a good reason to practice. My analysis of this motion picture is based mainly on my own personal experiences living with a mental illness.https://a24films.com/films/beau-is-afraid

Not a stranger to trauma and emotional strife, Phoenix has recently shown he can dig deep to offer a moving performance with his role as The Joker in the same-titled 2019 film. The heart-wrenching display shows he can take raw emotion and transfer it into a visual manifestation that the audience can feel through the screen.

To cut right to it, my theory is that Beau Is Afraid is ultimately about the abuse and trauma we pass on to each other. If I dare to open up about this, I might admit that I suspect this film introduces mainstream media to the horrors someone might face experiencing complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD. To find absolutely no meaning in this three-hour movie suggests a lack of imagination and literary analysis on the part of the viewer.

Diving right in, I caught a huge red flag when our main character speaks with his psychiatrist and is immediately offered a new drug to help cope with anxiety symptoms, which Beau dutifully accepts without question. As we follow him home, we take in the environment in which he lives. It’s enough to give anyone anxiety. Resembling post-apocalyptic anarchy, violence rules the streets, complete with homeless beggars who will follow people to their apartment buildings in the hope of finding room to slip inside behind them. I began to suspend belief when the camera panned to a body decomposing on the street with improperly uniformed police officers walking by and flirting with prostitutes. This sort of dystopian neighborhood could not exist alongside the otherwise modern and civilized experience we were shown in Beau’s doctor’s office.

From inside his apartment, chaos continued with constant domestic violence from neighboring units and emergency sirens outside. To further drive home Beau’s undesirable living situation, another neighbor woke him in the night with a knock on the door and a note shoved underneath to please turn down the loud music and bass. The scene continued to play out with skipped periods of time in which we assume Beau to be asleep. I wondered if our main character was losing bits of time and was in fact playing loud music between the lines of the film. Then, one of our impatient neighbor’s notes slides under Beau’s front door and across many yards of his apartment to come to rest next to his bed. That’s when I knew for certain that reality for Beau is not as it seems.

After oversleeping for a flight which we later learn was to visit his mother, Mona, his worst fears came true as he rushed back into his apartment for less than a minute to retrieve a forgotten item and returned to find his luggage and keys were stolen just outside his apartment, leaving him and his space “open to the public”. For anyone living in an area with a high crime rate, this series of events and subsequent anxiety makes a lot of sense. Folks next to me in the theater thought it was all quite comical, however.

Knowing all of this would surely cause him to miss his flight, he called his mother to break the news. It seems to me that he expected comfort and advice for what happened with his keys, but was disappointed, yet not surprised, that he received anger and blame instead. At one point, she accused him of making up the story about his keys being stolen just to avoid seeing her, which he assured her was not true. No matter what he said, he could not change her mind about this and he was met with judgment and guilt trips.

To dive in a bit deeper, and borrowing heavily from my own experiences, I recognize the confusion Beau felt when his mother assumed he would leave his luggage and with his apartment unlocked and unattended after he had already made the decision to stay locked safely inside and try to visit another time. When he asked for advice and received criticism for even that, he probably felt truly lost over the situation. I am overwhelmed with the feeling that Beau simply wanted to make his mother happy. At this point, I leaned over in the theater and told my husband just how familiar his mother is to me.

Returning to parts of the plot pertinent to my analysis, we jump to a scene where Beau took his new anxiety medicine to recover from the phone call with his mother. Also familiar to me, he found out the hard way that the water in his building had been turned off and he could not find any bottles of water with which to wash down his medicine. Anxiety and paranoia peak for our main character as he checks the prescription and the internet for the supposedly dangerous side effects of the drug when without water. Things didn’t look good. Of course, he could have risked running across the street for a bottle of water, leaving his building and apartment open to the public, or he could have just stayed safely inside where the side effects could possibly kill him instead. The former seemed a safer bet if he could only make it in time.

Fumbling with a declined credit card and not enough pocket change to cover the water he already chugged in the convenience store, Beau watched helplessly as the riff-raff from the street all noticed the propped-open apartment building and began filing inside to make a beeline for, you guessed it, our main character’s apartment specifically. At this point, I noticed that the inside of the store was free of chaos and showed no signs of doing business in the middle of a neighborhood run by its residents. With literally everyone that had originally been on the street now in Beau’s apartment, I make the simple connection that the violence and disorder depicted outside of his apartment building is a representation of his internal torment. At first, the dangers were kept outside of his home, locked safely away. When triggers from his mother sent his anxiety and paranoia into a full spin, the scare of negative side effects from his brand-new anxiety medicine didn’t help matters at all.

To keep you up to speed, Beau was too afraid (if you are catching a main theme here) to confront the intruders and slept locked outside for the night, which I have to point out was suddenly much safer than even the inside of his own apartment building. Perhaps the medicine had finally kicked in because he woke to peace and quiet both on the street and in his home. After finding the place empty, besides the body laying in the hall outside his open door, he snatched up his cell phone and locked himself back inside to try to reach his mother again. Things took a dark turn when we learned, in a lighthearted way, that Beau’s mother had suddenly and tragically lost her life. A UPS delivery driver found her body in her own home with a chandelier crashed down atop her head.

“There,” I thought, “this is a story about closure from childhood wounds and how many of us never get it.” But I couldn’t have been further from the truth. I love a story that keeps me guessing until the end and Ari Aster has done this masterfully with Pheonix’s performance as Beau.

Beau cried for hours after confirming the truth about his mother’s death before doing what I would have done in the situation – he hopped in the bath with some bubbles. That’s when he looked above him to find that, all of that time, a large man had been hiding Spider-Man style above his bathtub, and the intruder couldn’t hold on any longer.

The humorous tussle in the bath, during which the two men took turns drowning each other and trying not to drown themselves, I focused enough to consider the intruder’s presence in the apartment for all those hours. I will fill in that Beau actually left the water running in his bath for so long that it began to flood into the living room. I highly suggest that the intruder is just another one of Beau’s negative manifestations that returned to an emotional peak in his life. Perhaps we can compare the intruder to grief and depression that threatened to take him under, or “drown” him.

For more filler: Beau was violently hit by a car after running outside naked to try to get assistance from an unhelpful police officer. He woke up in what was clearly supposed to be a teenage girl’s bedroom all scratched up and stitched at the stomach from a stab wound from yet another maniac he encountered on his street. I think it’s low-hanging fruit to suggest that the serial stabber was yet another manifestation of Beau’s paranoia and the violence running rampant in his mind, but I have to include it in my analysis.

The film took a turn from a quirky dark comedy about a loner man with mommy issues into that of a broken family – complete with a dead son the parents (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) wanted to replace, a neglected daughter (Kylie Rogers) who could never fill the hole in her parents’ hearts and an injured man that might have just fit in. Did I mention that everyone was hooked on prescription pills? The daughter ultimately killed herself in a way that made Beau look suspicious to a hysterical mother. The woman had Beau hunted down like an animal by Jeeves, a disturbed war veteran who served with the family’s dead son as has been taken in and taken care of by the parents.

Either Beau got a good head start or Jeeves needed a moment to get ready because our main character woke up after being knocked out by a fallen tree as he fled. He soon found a gang of traveling performers who lived in tents in the woods. They called themselves orphans and shared in Beau’s recent loss of his mother. Someone even invited Beau to change into a costume, since they liked to “blur the lines” between performance and audience.

The film takes an even further artistic turn as we watch Beau get swept away into the scenery of the play. A woman, sounding much like his mother in my opinion, narrated a life in which he had a wife and children but lost his way in a terrible storm. After spending his entire life trying to find them, he was invited to a forest play much like the one Beau was watching previously. The realities merge together as Beau reunited with his children but found that his wife was never to be found.

Throughout this time, the audience finally gets a view of what childhood was like for Beau. It is depicted on screen with a young Beau (Arman Nahapetian) on a cruise ship with his mother as an adolescent. He seemed obviously interested in the only other teen on board the vessel near his age named Elaine, which gained a strange jealous response from his mother. We also learned about Beau’s mother’s trauma of having lost her husband, Beau’s father, on the night of their wedding after just finishing having sex for the first time. She assured her son that his father passed on a deadly disease that he got from his father and so on – some sort of heart murmur that would surely kill him if and when he ejaculated. This was a strange storyline to go on, so I immediately suspected the mother of lying, but there was only one way for me to find out. Beau really believed this tale and lived his life by it, assuring everyone that he never had sex with anyone ever in his life.

Therefore, it was strange for him to accept the new reality from the play that he had three children. When this came to light, Beau found himself years younger again, still healing from the car accident and stab wound, watching a cute little play in the forest. When he sat down again, trying to catch his bearings, he was approached by an older man that seemed to be familiar with him but also mentioned something about Beau’s father. Now even Beau started suspecting that his mother wasn’t telling the truth about his father’s death, and possibly his heart condition. We didn’t have time to dwell on this because Jeeves finally found his way to Beau and went on a killing spree of the peaceful people in the forest. Beau ran off to safety again, hitching a ride to his mother’s house in the hopes of catching her funeral.

Although he was assured that the funeral could not commence until he was present, everything was just ending as Beau arrived at his mother’s immaculate mansion. For some reason, the casket was still open in the living room with a recording of the funeral service available for Beau to listen to and mourn on his own. The theater burst out with laughter when the camera panned to the headless body of Beau’s mother. It was too wacky to be true.

Beau strolled around his mother’s home remembering her and feeling the space in her new absence. The biggest thing to pick up from this is that she seemed to be the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company and that Beau her son was the face of many of her products growing up. Posters on the walls promised her many products to be “completely safe”. Most notable is the bone-chilling realization that Beau was dressed in the same outfit as many of her trial patients pictured in her office. One of them could be recognized as the homeless person chasing Beau into his apartment building at the beginning of the film.

Aster tricked me into thinking that Beau might never get his closure but he could possibly get his vindication. Conveniently enough, an attractive woman with dark hair arrived many hours too late at Mona’s house to pay her respects. Leaving flowers, she quickly offered to order a cab back home to get out of Beau’s hair, but he stopped her and asked if she remembered meeting him on a cruise many years ago. Although too good to be true, I accepted and even enjoyed the sense of conquest when Beau finally ejaculated for the first time and found that he would not die. Morbidly enough, I even enjoyed the roller coaster dive my stomach took when I found out that Elaine actually died upon orgasm instead. What can I say? I’m a fan of dark movies with many twists and turns.

Because I had already decided that I couldn’t trust Beau’s reality, I wasn’t sure what to believe when the audience was shown Beau’s mother returned from the dead to judge his performance in bed as well as the way he handled her death. The entire hoax was a plan to get back at him, to test him and teach him a lesson for missing a flight to be with his mother on the anniversary of the day her husband died.

I finally accepted the fact that Mona faked her death when I realized how much power she had over everything around her, including her son who believed himself to be living independently from his mother. Elaine’s stiff body, if she was ever a real person, was carried away by expressionless staff members, and Beau’s smiling psychiatrist happily visits that night to show his allegiance to Mona. Beau and I began to wonder just how much of his life has been set up by his mother to test him and to gain ammo to use against him in the future.

Mona went into a long spiel about how much she hated being pregnant, especially dealing with the loss of her husband in such a traumatic way. Having had a hard childhood with her own mother, she didn’t seem to have much support raising Beau and she resented him for that. Mona even mentions that her mother would never touch her and that she never felt worthy enough. To me, this was an ample explanation of the film’s underlying theme that we pass on abuse, shame, and emotional trauma to our children and even to those around us. Not a lot of analysis was needed to reach that conclusion.

We do need analysis to attempt to figure out the monster in the attic of Mona’s house and Beau’s childhood home. It is obvious to me that Beau saw some of his childhood abuse through the eyes of a third person, perhaps a brother. This is known as dissociation in the psychology world and is a common way for folks with trauma to remember difficult experiences in their lives. We quickly learned that it was Beau getting locked up in the attic all along, and not some non-existent brother. Once locked up there in the present day, we are shown again what might be Beau’s dad, perhaps locked upstairs all these years by Mona. He begs for food. The audience feels a swell of relief.

Next to the frail skeletal figure of what could have been Beau’s dad is a giant phallus with eyes, a mouth, and sharp pointy arms. This, surely, is what Mona referred to when she assured Beau that she was protecting him from some horrible truth. It is my analysis that the mega penis monster is a visual representation of Mona’s trauma of losing her husband before giving birth to her son, and quite possibly at the moment of sexual climax during their very first time sharing intercourse. That sort of trauma can cause a woman to have long-term problems with intimacy and even trouble disconnecting pleasant thoughts of her son from horrific memories of losing her husband.

The film reached a climax when Mona screamed in her son’s face that she hated him. That’s when Beau couldn’t take it anymore and shut his mother up with two hands to the throat. He tried to stop choking her before it was too late but she took one raspy gasp before falling into a glass display that would have probably killed her if she wasn’t dead already.

Beau was afraid yet again. Unsure what to do, he fled by foot to the large body of water behind his mother’s house. He somehow brought an old motorboat to life and sputtered away to what the audience hoped is freedom. But, in a way that reminds me of The Truman Show, Beau’s progress is halted and a bunch of overhead lights flicker on to reveal that he is in a dome-type enclosure, still surrounded by deep water. All around Beau, a darkened audience, not much different than the one in which I sat in the theater, watched on as his mother put him on trial for all the wrongs he had done his mother in his life. That included some of the more stupid things he did as a child.

No matter how much he tried to explain, the lawyer overspoke him. No matter how much he pled, his mother wouldn’t reason with him, much less forgive him. Beau’s only representation couldn’t yell loud enough to defend him and was eventually shut up by a great beast that smacked him down to drown in the black water below. No one in the court’s audience would speak up for him, of course.

I watched on in the audience as well as the boat dragged Beau under the water and holds him there despite his kicking and pleading. We watched in silence as the water came to rest and the credits faded onto the screen, leaving us to watch the court audience filter out of the stands, much like the audience in my theater began wandering out to continue their lives.

As a new mother, and as someone with CPTSD, this film spoke to me so much. I couldn’t get the words out quickly enough on the ride home with my husband yesterday afternoon.

CPTSD is much like PTSD in that it develops in the mind when someone reacts negatively to and is having trouble healing from past traumas in their life. PTSD refers to a type of trauma that happened once and could be easily connected to a specific memory. CPTSD refers to a host of traumas that someone couldn’t reasonably avoid, such as child abuse. The complex version of PTSD can be triggered by many different factors in life, and it might take time to pinpoint the source. The emotionally abusive relationship Beau has with his mother is a prime example of how someone can develop CPTSD.

My brand of CPTSD is eerily similar to our beloved main character’s. Mona’s manipulation runs to such an exaggerated extent that it is comical to the audience of Beau Is Afraid. But even a fraction of that sort of narcissism and controlling behavior from a parent can cause many children to develop in a way that makes it difficult to make big decisions, which is something that Mona criticizes Beau for only furthering his confusion and distrust in himself. From the outside looking in, it’s hard to make sense of the sequence of events. But for me, this is just another weekend in my life.

In 2023 America, especially considering changes to our economy and working conditions due to COVID, parents are still among the most neglected demographic. Expected to make ends meet on the same salaries as our peers and with more mouths to feed and backs to clothe (that’s not to mention the cost of childcare), and to perform just as well if not better than those around us despite the greater use of energy, a higher call of responsibility, and less downtime, parents are run ragged every day. We joke about how difficult it is to raise kids but we don’t seriously address it. I hope Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid is the beginning of a further look at the unique challenge of parenting in a capitalist society in art and film. Until we spread awareness and gain more support for programs that support parents and families, we can expect the cycles of abuse to continue in our society.

Hurt people hurt people. And parents struggle more than society allows them to show. Let’s squash the stigma of healing from childhood abuse and spread the word about owning our mental health. It’s never too late to foster healthier relationships with people.

Don’t agree? I’d love to discuss it! Please leave a respectful comment 🙂 Peace ❤