In honor of our mothers, I thought I’d do a post devoted to Hollywood films that deal with the institution of motherhood–not necessarily films that speak for and to womankind, but films that…well, have interesting mothers in them. One of my all time favorites is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas, one of the finest melodramas of the era, and certainly one of the finest performances by Babara Stanwyck.
I teach this film all the time, and I have yet to screen it without getting choked up watching the scene in the sleeping car. It’s a compelling film–infuriating, confusing, punishing, liberating. Three Hitchcock films worth noting, one of which doesn’t even have a mother in it, just the rotting corpse of a mother: North by Northwest, The Birds, and Psycho. In the first, we have one of the strangest depictions of motherhood in all of cinema.
Mrs. Thornhill, played by Jessie Royce Landis, is less of a parent (Cary Grant doesn’t look all that much younger than her) than a partner. There’s an uncomfortable, competitive chuminess between them. She threatens Roger’s already shaky claim to masculinity and power at every turn, even ridiculing his belief that he is important enough to be in any real danger. He is, as she knows (and he later admits), nothing: “You’re not really trying to kill my son, are you?”
Jessica tandy’s character in The Birds isn’t as interesting as Landis’s but is much more significant to the plot.
Lydia stands between Melanie and Mitch, and her quiet hostility towards the former is enough to make us think that it is somehow Melanie’s fault that everyone is being assaulted. But it is just as easy to say that it is Lydia, in all her efforts to sort things out and straighten things up, who is the real menace. In the scene that follows the one in which the sparrows come through the chimney, the camera follows her around the room, which is an absolute wreck, as she picks up broken tea cups from off the floor. When the sheriff insists that birds don’t go around attacking children for no reason, she goes to straightens a painting on the wall–another meaningless gesture. A dead bird falls out from behind it, startling her. No one notices but Melanie, who has been silently judging her all along. In another scene, Lydia catches a glimpse of a man whose eyes have been plucked out. And although this may be symbolic of the Oedipal scenario to which Melanie’s presence calls uncomfortable attention, it may also be symbolic of Lydia’s fear of abandonment. She sees herself in this neglected and forgotten corpse (the self-exiled Oedipus is abandoned by everyone but his daughter, Antigone).
Psycho is another film about a punished mother, and once again it is the mother who is associated with Oedipus, whose eyes are emptied from their sockets.
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Hitchock complicates the Oedipal myth just enough to leave room for readings that see the mother as the inevitible victim of male desire. It’s true, as Tania Modleski points out, that a fear of the voracious, devouring mother is central to Hitchcock’s work. The devouring mother is always to blame, and the male is always the victim of a mother’s dependecy. In The Birds and, to a greater extent, Psycho, the punishment meted out to mothers seems entirely misplaced. Really, it is the threat of the devouring mother, a threat not present but perceived, that is to blame. [SPOILER] In Psycho, the mother isn’t the real killer, Norman is. The violence against women in the film is by Norman’s hand, but the blame is put upon the mother, who was killed so that she may carry this blame. In Psycho, the mother becomes the Oedipal corpse. In other words, the great secret–the one that must be hidden in the basement where one can find it–is that the mother is the victim of male dependency.
Mrs. Robinson is probably one of the most famous mothers in cinema, so I’ll include in this list Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. But I’ve always been disappointed with this character–she’s actually pretty likeable up until the end, when she becomes a shrieking, voiceless image of rage. And how about Joan Crawford–the coolest mother around in Mildred Pierce, and the cruelest in Mommie Dearest. There’s the flawless Evelyn Ryan in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.
Then there’s the ship’s computer from Alien and the mother ship from Close Encounters–the former is bad, the latter is good (although its motherly love goes a bit too far when it takes Barry).
Alien
Close Encounters
Anyone else want to chime in?
I don’t have time–or wit–to be as smart as John about these suggestions, but:
Susan Sarandon (in Lorenzo’s Oil) and Cher (in Mask) are about the fiercest non-violent loving mothers–furiously seeking to protect their ailing children–in cinema history.
My absolute favorite–and no Oedipal subtext here, it’s all right up front: Angela Lansbury’s astounding performance in The Manchurian Candidate, leaning over to kiss son and sniper patsy Laurence Harvey on the lips.
And a close second or third, but in a goofy category of her own: Ruth Gordon as George Segal’s addled mother in Where’s Poppa?, endlessly and loonily denigrating her son’s sexual and general life prowess–a lovely bit of ‘seventies insanity, back when Segal was wonderful and comedies could be simultaneously vicious and sweet.
I’ll second Angela Lansbury and also give props to Shirley MacLaine’s Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment. This is certainly one of the most complex portraits of a woman in her fifties (mother, grandmother, lover, diva). And Geraldine Page isn’t really playing motherhood so much as she is running away from it in A Trip to Bountiful, sentimental but also one of the great performances by an actor on film. And we can’t forget the sad, haunted eyes of Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice.
this is a lovely post, john. honorable mention to jodie foster in little man tate. a nice, breezy take on the harried single-working-class-mother motif.
Let’s not forget Lea Massari’s Clara Chevalier in Louis Malle’s lovely comedy of manners (and incest) Le Souffle au Coeur.
i raise a toast to jack’s mother in brokeback mountain, and to all the film and real-life mothers who quietly and lovingly rescue their children, grandchildren, husbands and younger siblings from loneliness, despair, and oblivion.
i also toast to laura brown, richard’s mother in the hours, who, unlike edna pontellier, has an option that is better than death to leave behind a life that’s killing her, and takes it, along with the consequences. (line from the movie i’m quoting by memory: “i chose to live)”.
finally, here’s to maria, who goes from the convent to a really busy step-motherhood in the sound of music, the sexiest virgin mother in the history of cinema, gay & lesbian icon, luminous model of androgyny, and a heck of singer, too.
I’ll toast Laura Linney in You Can Count On Me. In Squid she’s perhaps self-involved (‘though that view may be very slanted by the film’s perspective, focused as it is on the boys). But in Count she is realistically, heart-breakingly, heroically a self, struggling with career and single-motherhood and sexual desires and a painfully immature brother and… She’s luminous and yet never that “symbol” of idealized motherhood–instead, she gets to be a mother, and a woman, a person in certain roles but not wholly defined nor determined by them.
And who can forget these mothers?
great mothers: Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce (“Get out, get out before I kill you!), Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (I’m with you, Joan–why can’t the goddamn kid get it through her head that wire hangars ruin good clothes!), Shelley Winters in Bloody Mama and Angie Dickinson in Big Bad Mama (unless it’s the other way around)and of course the egg-loving mother Edie in Pink Flamingoes. And, of course, John Shaft who’s one mean mother–shut your mouth!
john, who are the mothers in your picture?
frank zappa and the mothers (of invention).