That may, at long last, be changing. The past year has brought an exceptionally varied and thematically rich crop of movies exploring men and their — to use the proper scientific term — mommy issues. They range from the extremely dark comedies “Beau Is Afraid” and “Saltburn” to the more heartfelt and sincere “All of Us Strangers” to the coming-of-age period piece “The Holdovers” to the singular mash-up of character study and tabloid scandal excavation that is “May December.” The movies all showcase mothers and sons; many of them seek to untangle relationships knotted and gnarled by neediness, selfishness or cruelty. By the end of most of them, blood is on the floor, and the collateral damage is steep. But as different as their approaches are, what these films have in common is a questing, thoughtful desire not simply to return to an old trope but to complicate, undermine or even explode it. That said, old tropes die hard, and this one — the hapless son who’s been emotionally mangled by a monster mother — has been entrenched in movies and television for close to 75 years. Freud himself may not have been around to watch them emerge but, by the 1950s, references to psychiatry and analysis were ubiquitous in movies and on TV comedies and talk shows, and mothers, in the cultural parlance of that era, were a necessary evil — something for healthy and well-adjusted men to get past and get over. Men who couldn’t, or worse, didn’t want to, were portrayed as marionettes tied to and practically strangled by their mothers’ apron strings. They were labeled neurotic, and often implicitly labeled homosexual — an accusation that couldn’t then be made overtly in entertainment but could definitely be winked at. Doting mothers, not to mention distant or domineering or strong or fragile ones (for mothers, there was no winning path except quiet self-sacrifice), could make their sons timid, unstable, sexually dysfunctional, effeminate, perverse or outright mad. It became a kind of cruel, knowing joke: Think of Robert Walker’s simpering, coy, mommy-obsessed murderer in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951) or Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, whose macabre credo “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” earnestly stated to Mommy stand-in Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is the closest thing “Psycho” (1960) has to a punchline. Or in a more benign mode, consider the hanging-on-to-heterosexuality-by-a-thread beta male that Tony Randall used to play in all those Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies. “I’ve been talking to this psychiatrist about my mother for two years now,” his character says in “Pillow Talk” (1959), adding, “It’s perfectly healthy. He dislikes her as much as I do!”
By the dawn of the 1960s, Mike Nichols and Elaine May had gained national fame with a set of improv sketches, including an oft-repeated one in which a brilliant rocket scientist is reduced to a prelanguage babbling toddler by a single ill-timed phone call from his ruthlessly manipulative mama. Overbearing Jewish mothers — the archetype is the one insistently banging on her son’s bathroom door in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint” — were mostly comic at the time and have remained so. The true dramatic terrors were the WASPy ones, epitomized by Angela Lansbury as the parent who all but castrates Laurence Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). Here’s what mothers with too much aggression and ambition can do to their sons, the movie says — turn them into hollow-eyed zombies, sapped of the very autonomy that defines maleness.
Many of those stereotypes eventually evolved into something more self-aware, ironic and amused. The next decade brought Sian Phillips as Livia, the homicidal schemer in the popular 1976 mini-series adaptation of “I, Claudius,” plotting a path to power for her son while savagely minding her own interests. Some 20 years later, the character was drolly contemporized as Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand), who may not have made her son into a mobster but, far worse, made him into the kind of mobster who needed therapy. Although “The Sopranos” found several new big bads after its first seasons, none was as big or as bad as Livia, who was killed off after Marchand’s death early on but effectively haunted the show’s entire run. That long-shadow idea — the nightmarish threat that even in death, monster-mothers never go away — was literalized by Woody Allen in his comic “Oedipus Wrecks,” the director’s segment of the 1989 anthology film “New York Stories.” When a middle-aged attorney finally gets rid of his nagging, critical mother with the aid of a magician who makes her vanish, she soon reappears as a parade balloon-like ghost in the sky, humiliating him in front of all Manhattan. Filmmakers as different as Albert Brooks (in 1996) and Darren Aronofsky (in 2017) have used movies to explore the notion of the matriarch as creator-underminer-destroyer. Both movies are, naturally, titled “Mother”; Aronofsky’s is so scary, it comes with an exclamation mark.
Incidentally, it’s not a coincidence that this phenomenon has been, and continues to be, largely restricted to white mothers. Nonwhite family stories remain too much of a scarcity economy for many filmmakers of color to feel that they can afford to play games with the idea of terrible, son-wrecking moms.
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