Dissecting: Beau is Afraid, a psychological analysis of Ari Aster’s biggest horror movie…
This film analysis of “Beau is Afraid” is intended to be comprehensive, providing readers with a detailed and thoughtful examination of the film’s various elements. Having recently seen the film with my mother, I can attest to the power of its storytelling and the complexity of its themes.
Upon leaving the cinema, I found myself feeling unsettled by the experience. In my family, there has always been psychological awareness and open communication, so I immediately discussed the film’s many theories, potential meanings, and various interpretations with my mother.
In the following analysis, I will delve into the film’s plot, themes, and characters, providing my own insights along the way.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — SPOILERS AHEAD — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Following my initial viewing of “Beau is Afraid,” I was so captivated by the film’s storytelling and surrealistic cinematography that I immediately read the screenplay and began jotting down my thoughts. Although my initial article was more of a compliment than a proper review, I realized that the film deserved a more thorough and nuanced analysis.
In this comprehensive film analysis, I will go deeply into the film’s symbolic and psychological elements, analyzing the multiple levels of significance that are present throughout the movie.
To understand better you can check the articles at the end of the analysis.
A VERY PERSONAL STORY FROM ARI
This is my interpretation, please withstand hateful comments.
1. What is Beau afraid of?
To understand the fear of Beau, we first need to understand what it all means in the movie.
Beau: Whenever we see the titular character Beau he represents a physical embodiment of self-esteem and self-worth on screen.
Mother: His mother is both self-compassion and self-criticism within Beau himself.
Mona: is portrayed through Beau’s perception of her, highlighting how his guilt and sense of responsibility for past actions impact his view of her. Mona’s actions and thoughts are filtered through Beau’s lens, representing his perception of her as someone who holds his guilt and shortcomings against him. Mona is Beau’s perception of his mother.
Example: The ultimate scene where Beau has nowhere to run but to confront what he has done wrong in the past (even though he continues to utilize excuses to justify his actions) we can see memories of his actions on the screens and his mother “reacting” to them. This will never happen, this never has happened, this is all Beau and what he thinks his mother will feel and think of him if she knew. This is Guilt.
Mona being dead: Beau’s fear of being a disappointment to his mother.
Mona being alive: Beau’s opportunity to prove his honesty to his mother.
The building is Beau’s conscious mind: where he feels insecure, constantly persecuted, confused, and untrustworthy, here he can make up excuses or fabricate actions that he (physically) never would do because he is too afraid of doing those things.
Example: The notes under his door that ask to lower the music volume is what Beau wants to do with his neighbor that has loud music playing, but he will never do that because of his social anxiety won’t allow it.
The street and neighborhood are Beau’s unconscious mind: where the hoodlums: try to get to him.
The hoodlums and delinquents in his neighborhood: represent all his negative emotions, traumas, fears, and desires.
Example: When he’s having an anxiety attack because there is no water in his apartment, this makes him psychologically vulnerable, so he runs down to the store and finds himself with his credit card decline and stresses him even more this makes him unable to regulate the previous emotion and on top of that, he doesn’t have the money in cash to pay and his paranoic mind begins to panic and… there you go, all the negative emotions start to enter his mind.
Complications or Impediments: Everything that impedes Beau from going to his mother’s funeral or when she was alive is an excuse caused by the flight response in his emotion of fear.
So what is Beau afraid of? Simply …
Beau is Afraid of acceptance.
It’s easier to write it than to explain it.
If this is the whole plot, then why have we had to go on this wonderful and confusing Kafkaesque odyssey just to end up with a tumultuous confusion and eerie feeling of unease?
Well, to simply put it this way, this is a very personal story from Ari.
2. The meaning of the chaos
Let’s dive into the anxiety of Beau, the first part of the film reflects what would be like if all of someone’s anxiety-induced catastrophizing were correct. The decision to go and visit his mother causes grand anxiety within Beau, this speaks of two things: Trauma and Fear of Confrontation.
In a movie like this, it is extremely difficult to differentiate what is real from what is not, the problem here is that everything is real, just not in the way you think.
It is not physically real. It is mentally real.
In the first part of the movie, we see a paranoid and neurotic manchild with serious mummy issues living in a chaotic neighborhood filled with crime and apparent normalized manslaughter. This is all in Beau’s mind, this is how he perceives the world because this is how he feels inside, chaotic and fearful. Jumping quickly to the last scene where he is being judged (self-judgment, we’ll get to that part later on) there’s a specific comparison between helping an animal and not offering his compassion to another human being (the tattooed transeunt that chases after him when trying to get to his building) we can observe this as a Paranoid Personality Disorder accompanied with anthropophobia (fear of people) — Beau is afraid of people and their intentions.
But remember, this is how Beau perceives the world, although his exteriors are shown as a low-class urban neighborhood, there are some exaggerations (Beau’s perceptions) where he clearly shows signs of agoraphobia which causes him excessive fear of certain situations, including leaving home alone (like when he needs water to take the pill), Beau is neurotic and thinks that all the hoodlums, vandals and delinquents want to enter his building and lastly his apartment.
Let’s rewind for a minute to when he is on the call with his mother, he claims (I will use the word claim because it could be an excuse) his baggage was stolen in addition to his keys (from the building and from his door).
Early in the text, I mentioned that Beau was unsure and anxious about the decision of visiting his mother. We all can agree that Beau had a traumatic childhood. So Beau, behind his anxiety, primarily fears visiting his mother because this would imply a confrontation of several emotions. This triggers the “fight or flight” response in his body, this prepares him to fight off danger or run away, so… what does Beau choose first?
Of course, he runs. Literally. And naked — which to my interpretation is the way Ari represents what is like to be vulnerable, in this context vulnerability refers to the state of being susceptible to negative outcomes or unprotected from harm. Emotional vulnerability involves acknowledging difficult emotions instead of acting on them right away…
But wait… visiting his mother didn’t trigger the RUN BEAU RUUUN!
At first, Beau dodged visiting his mother, on the promise that he would go to her later, but we come to understand later in the film that Beau usually disappoints his mother with false promises. The death of his mother is what triggers everything, this hits as a shocking surprise to Beau because it activates one of the movie’s main traits “GUILT”.
The guilt crushes Beau's self-esteem (represented as no tears but inaction) and makes him cataplexic for several minutes until the water makes him react. There’s also the credit card decline problem (is it?) but this as well can be interpreted as an excuse. The root of excuses (represented in the film as real-life situations) is the FLIGHT response in Beau to what is visiting his mother and later going to his mother’s funeral.
Going back to the death of his mother, to slowly cope with the fact that he feels that he failed his mother. Beau chooses to take a bath.
Taking a bath after a negative emotion help decrease stress hormones and improved serotonin levels, which help regulate mood.
Remembered I mentioned that the guilt crushes Beau?
Well… I meant it like real-life action represented in the film. This happens when Beau is inside the tub and tries to regulate his emotions… well his mind won’t let him, because he’ll enter into a panic attack when his guilt (the guy above him) falls on top of him and completes the flight response.
And here goes Beau! Running vulnerable (naked) out to the street.
Because Beau is highly indecisive he opts for self-destruction thoughts like “I got stabbed” so he is unable to get to his mother’s funeral (as he continues to self-criticize himself) or recurs to the idea of being held captive or being unable to take a decision for himself (as he knows he is undecisive) — and I could spoil the whole movie to you but I won’t be narrating the entire film.
As a said before, anything that impedes Beau from getting to his mother’s funeral is an excuse inside his mind. He constantly uses cognitive dissonance to act innocent and plays the victim role to soothe himself.
Please, remember, this is meant to be read as a mental reality, not a physical one.
3. The meaning of the theatre play
The play is a dream, the theatre play represents Beau’s core values which are family, honesty, and forgiveness. These are the fundamental beliefs and highest priorities that guide Beau throughout the film.
Family: the story of him being part of a community, having a family, and reuniting with his three sons.
Honesty: he is innocent when he is unfairly incarcerated and he questions how he came to engender three sons if he was supposed to die. He was a transparent individual with his family and the community.
Forgiveness: when he is taken to the ambulant theater community, where he is well received and immediately without judgments he is accepted.
Even though Beau has impediments to succeeding on his way home to his mother and does make it (family value reassured) he still looks for answers about his father because he’s always felt lied to (honesty value seeking reassurance) —this is represented physically when Beau has sex with Elaine and ejaculates without dying. Proving he’s probably been lied to, about what his father passed down to him and this sets out Beau’s anger against his mother (when Mona shows up not dead after all) this is the opportunity he now has to confront the truth (proving this honesty core value to this mother) Beau is motivated by honesty, he wants the truth… but what Beau misses, is that the truth is that his father died in very peculiar way… during sex.
That is the truth, what is not the truth is the fear he faces in the attic, his sexual fear is merely a gargantuous pathological phobia of reproducing an insufficient individual as he perceives himself. This perception was caused by his mother’s constant demeaning attitudes and a deep-rooted hatred towards him.
4. Deep-rooted hatred: Mother to Son
Some mothers have children to meet their own needs for love and feel entitled to it, this is because they didn’t receive it growing up.
Mona said it very explicitly… she didn’t receive love and affection from her mother, so her expectation of Beau was that he needed to be the one, the son that will receive all the love and affection Mona didn’t receive. But… there was a flaw in Mona’s plan, and this is subconscious, she is not aware of this — When Mona gave Beau her love and affection, she expected him to react and respond in the same way that she would if she were the one receiving it. And when Beau doesn’t match this expected response, Mona becomes jealous because he keeps receiving what she never received and she becomes enraged at Beau because she feels unappreciated at the same time.
Mona’s apparent good intentions towards Beau were actually rooted in her own selfish need to prove herself to her own mother. As a result, the love and affection Mona gave to Beau were never sincere, and he was essentially used to prove a point rather than being truly loved. This lack of genuine love and affection had a profound impact on Beau’s emotional well-being, leading him to develop a fear of intimacy long before he learned about the circumstances of his father’s death.
To cope with the effects of his mother’s behavior and the resulting emotional trauma, Beau adopted various tactics, such as being distrustful, engaging in paranoid thoughts, and displaying evasive behavior. He also developed a fear of sexual intimacy and ejaculation.
As a child, Beau may not have fully understood the reasons behind certain behaviors of her mother, but he eventually sought therapy to work on himself and improve his mental health. While the effectiveness of his therapist may be debatable, we can infer that Beau started to become more psychologically aware and although he never admitted it … he knew he had a deep-rooted hatred towards her mother.
5. Deep-rooted hatred: Son to Mother
Mona was controlling over Beau for several reasons, the point here is that Beau develops insecure attachment and emotional invalidation as an outcome of his relationship with his mother.
But how does this relate to hatred? Well, you just have to go back to Beau’s core values. His core values were constantly invalidated by his mother’s coercive raising and empty love.
Family: shattered by exploitation and emotional manipulation.
Honesty: his raising was never sincere, for Mona it was just one more task.
Forgiveness: in Beau’s mind Mona never forgave him for his mistakes and felt an immense self-judgment and crushing guilt constantly (this was partially caused by Mona’s expectations)
When Beau is constantly invalidated this causes many things in the long-term… feelings of insecurity, unwantedness, or distrust, and let me ask you, if all these negative outcomes were either potentiated or caused by someone’s behavior or unresolved issues… how would you feel about that person? I don’t you’d fancy that person very much.
Ergo, Beau hated his mother.
6. Self-judgment feelings & Acceptance
After Beau reveals her anger and clenches his grip on her mother’s neck he leaves the house to sail away, sail away from the fact that he hates his mother.
As you view the film you get bedazzled by the story, but the most important scenes are the beginning and ending. In the beginning, we have a bland confrontation of Beau’s feelings about going to see his mother, and he is evasive.
Beau is afraid of accepting he wishes her mother is dead, this was a very important line at the very beginning, the therapist asked the question to Beau.
And at the end, we get Beau confronting himself, his mother is dead (that is a tangible fact, not a symbol), and now that she is actually dead, Beau wants his core values to be aligned not only in his dream but in reality.
The problem? His evasive behavior will not allow him to accept the fact (honesty not aligned) that he wished his mother dead, and he was never able to forgive either his mother or himself (forgiveness not aligned).
He cannot escape this cruel self-judgment and once again the immense guilt, so he opts for autodestructive behavior and EXPLODES!
CONCLUSION
The movie is about how regret in the face of death causes emotional dysregulation through several traumas and fears inside the mind of an individual with a history of social anxiety along with paranoid tendencies, and how this individual comes to cope with his self-judgment and guilt.
If we now can describe the film as a physically real story then it goes like this: Beau doesn’t want to visit his mother so he makes up an excuse, following this his mother kills herself and Beau enters a dilemma filled with guilt, regret, and self-judgment. He delays his assistance to the funeral and refuses to accept the fact that he wished her mother dead and now she is actually dead. Finally, he decides to go to his mother’s home and pay his respects, but here, the memories, fears, and trauma overwhelm him to a point where the guilt, regret a self-judgment that was already present becomes unbearable and kills himself.
Oh! almost forgot to write it again… BEAU IS AFRAID of ACCEPTANCE
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!
