A Few Mother's Day Thoughts

When I think of my mom, I think of movies

My mother was a fascinating movie buddy when I was a kid.

To be clear, both of my parents enjoyed movies, and movies were an easy way to relate to both of them. Just a few weeks ago, Warner dropped three new Clint Eastwood 4K upgrades, and when I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales, I was flooded with thoughts of my father, who raised me on Eastwood’s movies. There are films I saw with both of them, and many of my movie memories were of watching things at home with them in the burgeoning days of home video in the early ‘80s.

But my mom was the one who took me to the weirder films, the films she was interested in seeing, the movies that I might not have been ready for but that she decided to show me anyway. My mom was the astronaut. If not for her, I would not be who I am today. Thinking about this also makes me think about my own sons and the wild relationship they have to movies and their mother, who consumes them in a 100% different way than I do. We all pass things down to our children, who internalize them either as something to model or something to defy. There are things we show them that we’re sure are going to become their new favorites and they just bounce off, and there are things we watch with them that stick in ways we could never predict. I’ve been on both sides of this equation now, and it continues to be one of the most interesting things about our relationship to movies.

I mean, I know it’s not the same for everyone. There are people who don’t have any real relationship to movies. They watch them. They have a momentary surface reaction to them. And then they pretty much never think of them again. They see three or four movies a year in a theater, and that’s if they really make an effort. It just doesn’t matter to them, and that’s fine. I assume if you’re here and reading this, you are not one of those people. You’re probably more like me. I am very much the end result of all the media I have poured into myself, but not in a vacuum. The context in which I saw those things… who I saw them with, how old I was, where I was in my own emotional journey… all play a big part in how I think about them. And when I think about the movies I saw with my mom and the different experiences we had, I feel overwhelmingly lucky to have had such a weirdo calling the shots.

Both my parents were voracious readers, so there were always stacks of books in the house, and you could tell whose stack was whose based on the types of books in them. Mack Bolan? Zane Grey? John D. McDonald? Mickey Spillane? Old Bond reprints? That’s my dad’s stack, for sure. Harlequin romances? Erma Bombeck? Stephen King? Science-fiction and fantasy from every decade? My mom’s stack. Absolutely. I read off both stacks, everything I could get my hands on, so I got a real strong sense of who they were through books, and movies were just an extension of that. My mom’s appetites were wider-ranging than my dad’s. She would take me to see films like Fame or Arthur, even though I was ten and eleven when they came out, because she was interested in those movies and didn’t feel like seeing them alone. I had already made it clear that my interest was not in particular movies, but in movies as a whole. I would watch anything. I was a weird kid, smart but also perpetually uncomfortable in my skin, and my mom would take me to movies when she saw I was blue, knowing full well that I could lose myself in the experience and that I was endlessly curious about the way movies worked.