|
|
Mommy Issues
December 2006
So I’m sitting around wondering what my next Home Film Fest is going to be between reading [some fairly insight-free] De Palma criticism and suddenly I thought about the movie The Baby and all of a sudden they all clicked together: Mommy Issues. Then as I was compiling my [considerable] list of movies that fall into this category, I noticed a number of thematic subcategories. Let's allow the healing to begin:
Overprotective Moms
Sometimes Moms just can’t bear to let their sons or daughters grow up get involved with someone else. And sometimes this causes deep pathology in their kids. And sometimes people make movies about that.
The Killing Kind
One of the more mother-issue-focused movies I know of, John Savage gets out of prison for rape and goes to stay with his mother, played by aging beauty Ann Sothern. John has a somewhat closer-than-normal relationship with his dear mom, and she in turn babies him and helps cover up his unfortunate deeds. This is one of my favorite discoveries, just for being so out there and disturbing.
Psycho
Do I even have to write about this? Irrefutable proof that you should never date men who still live with their mother comes in the form of Hitchcock’s big fat masterpiece. Norman wants his Mommy all to himself, so he imagines that she wants him all to herself. Except that she’s been dead ten years. Speaking of mothers wanting their sons all to themselves, Hitchcock’s next film was…
The Birds
It’s easy to miss the large amount of content about mothers in The Birds, as the ostensible storyline and bird attacks are so riveting, but behind everything is a mother who exerts a strange psychosexual hold over her son—and everyone who crosses his path. In addition to what’s happening on the surface, I am not alone in considering the bird attacks themselves the manifestation of the mother’s rage against anyone who threatens to become close to her son, making the mother issues THE driving force of the film.
I Walked With a Zombie
Val Lewton’s films succeed by throwing out a bunch of creepy portents, but never definitively resolving them one way or another. Here there is a very strong suggestion that Mom, seeing her family being torn apart by her sons fighting over the love of the same woman, decided the situation just might be solved by reducing the woman to a catatonic state.
Mommy Stunted My Emotional Growth
Moms usually want the best for their children. Only some of them don’t know what that is. So they end up turning their kids into nutjobs. It’s all too common…
The Baby
A woman keeps her 21-year-old son in the mental state of an infant with the help of her two daughters. A case worker with a few issues of her own takes an intense interest in the family, and we’re off! One of those films that will have you staring at the screen in open-mouthed shock, part of its fascination is just how close to the surface a lot of very charged issues are. Features a wonderfully menacing performance by Marianna Hill as the creepily witchy Germaine.
Grey Gardens
So I’m sitting there combing through the list of movies on my site picking out mother-issue movies, and Grey Gardens goes right by without me thinking a thing of it. One of THE most potent movies about extremely strong mother issues, this documentary simply shows footage of Little Edie and her mother Big Edie, delineating the circumstances that led up to Little Edie being trapped at her mother’s side, and mentally imprisoned in a personality permanently warped by that proximity. If you’ve never seen this you REALLY should make an effort… most people describe it as absolutely unforgettable.
May
May has a doll that she really likes, and she ends up making a doll of her own out of grisly materials. But at the core of all this is her mother’s constant criticizism and focus on physical beauty. It is the mother that gives her the doll that is May’s “best friend,” and is the voice May hears emanating from the doll. The mother’s influence sets the entire story in motion, but she curiously disappears from it after the first 15 minutes.
Carrie
So Mom’s a religious freak. You’re a latchkey kid because she’s out handing around religious pamphlets. Then she blames you for having a period. And she makes you read from “the sins of women.” Then she locks you in the closet with some terrifying Jesus. Yeah, there are some issues there. Ah well, a good Prom Night massacre could make real strides toward healing.
Unhinged
Hoo boy do Mother issues occupy a central place in this film, to a degree that you only come to understand after the massive [and massively successful, to me at least] twist right at the very end. Unfortunately, that twist is really about the only interesting thing about the movie, and it’s a pretty long and boring slog to get there.
What’s the Matter with Helen?
From the same director as The Killing Kind comes this movie, which interestingly follows the mothers that the kids have issues with. The fact that the sons of two leads, Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters, committed a notorious murder lurks in the background of the entire film, making us look at both of these women with a critical analytical distance. The Mommy issues also pop up in the form of a young girl being raised by her father not to “talk about my mommy. She’s bad,” and such touches as a random girl staring in fascination and horror at an overly made-up old woman.
Electra-complex fun
The Electra complex is Freud’s [not fully-formed or accepted] female counterpart to the male Opedipus complex, in which [among other things] the girl wants to off Mommy so she can take up with Daddy. Surprisingly, a far amount of horror movies contain stories in which Mommy is at least partly to blame for the bad stuff that happens and gets killed at the end, leaving the girl and her father together.
The Woods
From the same writer / director as May comes another, even better film about a girl’s issues with her mother. Heather has tried to burn her house down, so her parents send her to a private school. She exchanges her testy mother for a mother figure in the witchy headmistress of the school. SPOILERS > > > She ends up defeating the mother substitute at the same time the mother dies—and then her father sees her power and abilities for the first time, and they end up going off together. < < < SPOILERS END
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Oops, turns out the reason Nancy is troubled by Freddy Kreuger is becaue of something Mommy did years ago. Now Mom is a helpless, boozing harpy, and again, once she’s out of the way, Nancy’s dad, who dismissed and ignored her up until then, is suddenly quite attentive and protective.
Firestarter
Don’t you sometimes with you could just get rid of the old broad? That’s what little Drew Barrymore—who can start fires with her mind—did to Mommy. She did “the bad thing” to Mommy, and now the poor woman’s a cinder. And little Drew is on the run with Dad. And creepy George C. Scott is saying stuff like “She’s very beautiful. She’s very young. Yet inside her is the power of the Gods. We’re going to be close, she and I. Oh yes, very close.” Eeek.
I Just Wanted Mommy To Love Me
Sometimes a distant, hateful or unavailable mother can leave a big hole in the psyches of their children.
Breakfast on Pluto
Patrick was abandoned at birth by his mother and as a result maintains himself in a willful state of denial that he is a man, seething with terror and rage at the thought that he may in fact never find his real mother. Neil Jordan’s movie is perhaps a bit too oblique about the fact that Patrick is quite deeply mentally disturbed, leaving the impression that his pathological superficiality is just Patrick “being true to who he is inside.”
Myra Breckenridge
Gay man Myron transforms into a woman, Myra, in order to “live out his fantasies.” But in the background is scattered evidence of a mother fixation, and the implication that Myron is only gay because he could never win his mother’s love.
Curse of the Cat People
Poor Amy is a child who has an invisible friend—her father’s first wife, who died tragically in Cat People. But Amy’s real mother is not quite comfortable with this whole arrangement. Then there’s the old woman at the house down the lane, who takes a shine to Amy, but denies that her own daughter IS her daughter. So she starts to want to kill Amy. These people would have to appear on Dr. Phil at least twice to sort all this out.
Mother’s Day
So you’re a woman with a bedridden sick mother who’s always belittling you. Then you go camping, but encounter a woman who trains her sons to rape and kill women. There are some issues. I will note that this is the only film I have ever seem in which a woman is smothered to death by a set of inflatable breasts.
