My Mother, the Movies, and Me

Some reflections on times spent at the movies long ago, in remembrance..

My mom took me to Star Wars and fell asleep. I couldn’t believe it. How could anyone fall asleep watching Star Wars? And during the best part, too, the trash compactor scene where the film’s heroes end up swimming in a bunch of Death Star refuse and are almost flattened by the collapsing walls! And yet, there she was, eyes closed. I’d seen it two or three times at this point and I was rapt. How could she not be?

In sorting through memories of my mother after her death last week at the age of 91, I found movies played a role in many of them. In some ways, this makes sense. I’ve always tied memories and movies together. I don’t think I could tell you what I did to celebrate my 27th birthday or name of my kid’s kindergarten teacher, but I can tell you I saw Critters at a mall with my best friend and his sister in 1986 and that we were the only ones in the theater and that my friend’s mom got mad at us because his sister found the experience traumatic. (Critters, not the mostly empty theater.) But in other ways, it makes no sense at all. 

My mom was, at best, neutral on the subject of movies. I know there were some she liked, but I can only recall her expressing a strong opinion about two she did not: Psycho and M*A*S*H. The first terrified her and made her afraid of taking showers. The second scandalized her. They allowed movies to show that? And be that vulgar? It’s easy to chuckle at that reaction, but consider this: my mom was born in Kentucky in 1932 in a rural area miles away from any movie theaters. I don’t know if she went to movies with any kind of regularity as a child or with any frequency as an adult, after she moved to Ohio. Movies changed radically in content and permissiveness in years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and M*A*S*H in 1970. Blink, or at least stay away from theaters for a year or two, and you would have unwittingly found yourself on the other side of a revolution. (Another moment of cultural outrage: The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, a bizarre and upsetting moment that sent her calling similarly shocked friends to ask if they could believe what they were seeing. Years later, she admitted that they did have “some pretty songs.”)

Did my mom even ever see The Godfather in 1972? I’m guessing not. But my arrival that same year would turn her, if only briefly in the scope of a nine-decade lifetime, into a regular moviegoer. I couldn’t get enough, and my mom, putting her baseline indifference to the form aside, became my most frequent movie companion. (My dad would take me too, but with less patience. I think his struggle to match my enthusiasm for The Aristocats was one of the first times I realized grown-ups sometimes say one thing out of politeness but mean another.) 

We saw Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We arrived early for The Cat from Outer Space, and a friendly theater worker took me up to the projection booth to show me how it worked, which made a deep impression. We saw Mountain Family Robinson, The Man from Snowy River, Savannah Smiles, and various movies featuring Benji. We saw War Games and Tootsie. (I think the latter didn’t sit right with my mom for reasons that went over my head at the time.) We saw E.T., Superman, and Superman II. We saw Places in the Heart, The Secret of NIMH, The Fox and the Hound, and Max Dugan Returns. We didn’t see Raiders of the Lost Ark because I’d heard about the face-melting scene. And we didn’t see Animal House, though my mom said she was going to take me, to my puzzlement. I think the title and cartoony poster made her mistake it for a kids movie. When I pointed out the R rating, it was off the table. In retrospect, that’s for the best. I wouldn’t have known what to make of it at five and my mom might never have taken me to the movies again.

We saw a lot together in a run that stretched from roughly 1976 until sometime in 1983. And then we didn’t. I started going to movies without parental accompaniment at ten, a development my mom probably saw as a relief. 

Looking back I wonder what she made of Tron or how she suffered through the now lost-to-time Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. (Star Wars wasn’t the only movie that put her to sleep, which might have helped.) It was as if once I didn’t need her to go with me, she didn’t need movies anymore, apart from the occasional TV movie about brave frontier families, preferably with a tinge of piousness. If a tight-knit clan survived a harsh winter and thanked Jesus at the end of their ordeal, that checked all the required boxes. In retrospect, she was probably grateful I’d found something that interested me that seemed pretty harmless, so long as I didn’t watch anything I shouldn’t. But I think, after a while, she turned a blind eye to that.

That doesn’t mean she ever really understood, or approved of, my attempts to turn my movie appreciation into a career, even when presented with evidence the attempt was finding traction. When I told her, during a trip to a mall while visiting over Christmas, that the bookstore had copies of The Tenacity of the Cockroach, The A.V. Club’s then-new interview collection, she wondered aloud who would buy it and never went to see it for herself. I think after a while she accepted my choices, particularly after it became clear I wasn’t going to end up on the street. Toward the end of her life, much of that had fallen away. As her dementia deepened, she’d ask me what I was doing for work whenever I visited her at her apartment in the memory care unit of a nearby assisted-living facility. When I said I was writing, mostly about movies, she asked if I liked it. When I said I did, she smiled.

I’d probably need only two, maybe three, hands to count the number of movies I saw with my mom after I turned ten, but the outings were usually pleasant. Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women went over well and I think she liked Titanic, apart from the dirty scenes. When my father died in 2009, I had no idea what would happen next or whether she’d be able to make it on her own and, in truth, the years that followed would not be easy. But when mom settled in next to me to watch The Princess and the Frog on her first Christmas as a widow, it felt, for a couple of hours, that everything was as it should be, that nothing had really changed even though everything had.

Flash forward a few years to the mid ‘10s: Now I’m the parent of a kid who likes going to the movies. And, of course, I do, too, and with more enthusiasm than my mom. It’s one of our favorite things to do together. But being a parent of a young child is also exhausting. Did you know you’re supposed to keep your kids alive and on the right track and do all the stuff you were doing before like earning money and taking out the trash? I have treasured memories of seeing films like Inside Out and Big Hero 6 and many others but essentially no recall of Smallfoot or The Secret Life of Pets 2 or at least a half-dozen other films released between the years 2014 and 2019. They may be wonderful. My kid was certainly enthusiastic about them at the time and I wanted to make her happy, because that’s what parents are supposed to do even when we don’t want to, even when we don’t understand. Me? I was tired. I fell asleep.

Dedicated with love to Marie Phipps (1932 - 2024)