Melancholy Movie Moms, pt. 2
Joanna and Jessica discuss Poltergeist and International Women's Day
JPC: This morning I woke up and started texting you about how I give up. I can’t do it anymore. I have to go live in a trailer in my brother’s yard because I can’t do any of the things anymore. Then I realized it was International Women’s Day.
JMG: I know. I woke up to a Facebook Memory--isn’t that post apocalyptic enough?-- in which I’d posted excitedly about a Norwegian author who’d managed to win the Nobel while parenting six kids on her own. I used to feel triumphant about such things, but now it just pissed me off. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to move my two special needs kids AGAIN for work that I need. And all I could think was, I need a wife.
JPC: Lots of women online seemed pissed off about International Women’s Day. There seems to be this general feeling of not wanting to be celebrated in a token way as triumphant individuals. That hasn’t gotten us very far.
JMG: Yes, it all seems part of the international gaslighting project we are all living with. Women are important! Unless you want equal pay or rights to your actual body.
JPC: International gaslighting. Whoa. Yes. I’m thinking a lot about gaslighting. Something I learned in Psych 101 was that women tend to have an internal locus of control when things go wrong, and men have an external locus of control. Meaning that women blame themselves. I woke up in that state this morning. I blamed myself for wanting to be an English professor, blamed myself for staying in a failing relationship for so long. Happy International Women’s Day!
JMG: Oh yes. That is so true. I also woke up thinking, where did I go wrong? Was it thinking that I, too, deserved a college education, when really I should have just stayed my ass in Slidell, Louisiana, and tried to get a job writing obits for the local paper? Even that is a romanticization. I would have ended up working in my dad’s business, giving high interest loans to poor people. I never think to blame anyone else. But then I told you how I had to move into my dorm rooms with just my backpack and you’re like, where was your dad? And I realize that it was okay to think someone might….help.
JPC: You need to write the memoir about those years. You were a wayward teenager! But really just a grieving teenager who lost her mother, got depressed, was accused of being possessed by demons. It’s crazy! Write it down with your trademark style that will make the whole world cry and make us rich.
JMG: This makes me think of Prince Harry! We are all thinking of Harry and Meghan today after that big O interview. I have always identified with Harry because he was the younger grieving sibling who didn’t give a fuck and was constantly fucking up in public. Then he tried to do right by the family, and oops, even that wasn’t right. I love Harry for that reason. I stupidly feel like we have common ground. And yet, maybe there is a common ground. It’s grief. Oh God. This is Poltergeist again. The common ground is the burial ground.
JPC: Poor little Harry. The photos of Diana with her kids kill me. She loved those kids. My brother used to remind me a lot of William. But now I’m going to say Harry. I connect a lot to the figure of the orphaned child. It’s the fairy tale theme. What happens when you are thrust into the world motherless? It is not my story, but that orphan narrative is compelling. My ex used to joke with me that I was “in my orphan tower again.” The orphan tower is an image from one of my poems, from a dream I had.
Back to my trailer. You told me to get an Airstream trailer and be like the “Time After Time” video, and I said I already had a cute retro trailer in mind because of the Jane Campion movie about the writer Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table. She lives a life of struggle, including being institutionalized for a mental illness she didn’t have. But ends up seemingly content, writing in a trailer in a sibling’s backyard and listening to records.
JMG: As usual, your frame of reference was much higher brow. But that does seem like a good solution. We need to live communally. We have both been living in relative isolation with our high need children. It doesn’t work. Tonight my daughter had a meltdown and I facetimed Cassidy Hall and said, can you deal with your daughter?! Just to see what that would feel like. Cassidy was very confused. For some reason I don’t feel comfortable doing that with their dad, who is alive and like….right there.
JPC: I sometimes call my son’s dad to be like, “Make him stop picking on me.” Like we’re siblings. I was listening to a story by Lorrie Moore in the car recently, and she has a line about how the single mother and child relationship is like a buddy movie or a type of sibling relationship. Compromised in some ways but also with a humor and familiarity you don’t find in every family.
Yes, we need communal living. My friend Sara-Ethel keeps talking about that. She wants an Ethel commune. I’ve been thinking a lot about solitary women in movies. Movies about women who strike out on their own. Or lose their families and have to start over again … often as an assassin. What’s that about? But I’m also thinking about homes and spaces, about rooms of one’s own for marginalized women in film. Another space I think about a lot is the attic art studio overlooking the sea at the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Have you seen that?
JMG: Was Molly Ringwald in it?
JPC: Ha! No, Streep and Irons. Jeremy Irons always freaks me out. Anyway. We had planned to talk about Poltergeist. In that movie, Diane Freeling provides her family with a degree of comfort by being a housewife who is apparently happy with her role at the beginning of the movie. She creates comfortable spaces for them, until a poltergeist starts rearranging the chairs and her daughter gets sucked into the TV.
In this blog post from 2019, you discuss the importance of Poltergeist-- and Diane Freeling as movie mom-- for you, writing:
I watched it so many times as a kid that the Freelings’ house felt more like home to me than the house I live in now. And Williams as Diane Freeling IS my mother, playfully thrilled by the possibility of a supernatural disturbance in her home until it threatens to take from her every person she loves…. Diane has to persist against an unstoppable supernatural force that wants to take everything she loves from her. And she conquers it. She saves her family. And in the first movie, she even saves the monsters. She helps the troubled souls who have tortured her family to pass on to the other side. Wolfe [from the She Kills podcast] pretty much explained to me my own deep affection for Diane Freeling, my favorite Horror Movie Mom.
JMG: Poltergeist is my comfort movie. I put it on whenever I’m feeling really anxious. It really does feel like home to me--even though that house is way nicer than the house I grew up in. Diane is so much like my own mother, even down to the trauma-induced gray streaks in her hair. Except my mother didn’t win. The monsters won. So often the monsters win. Watching Diane save her daughter is really cathartic for me and strangely empowering. I honestly think it’s one of the best performances of motherhood in film, and I’m not being facetious.
JPC: It’s fascinating how foundational she was for you. That movie is stuck in the consciousness of many of us who were kids in the ‘80s. As a kid, I connected more with the kids and their anxieties. As an adult, I see the appeal of Diane Freeling as a character (and of JoBeth Williams’s performance). Watching it recently, I was struck by how much it seems to be about the return of the repressed-- the Baby Boomers try to have it all, both the easygoing sensibilities of their youth (as evidenced by the “parents smoke a joint” scene) and the suburban American Dream. But Diane and Steve have a reckoning coming because their happiness is built on unsustainable systems-- greed, capitalism, colonization. Patriarchy?
JMG: Isn’t it kind of amazing how Spielberg seemed to understand the horrific implications of colonialism and the threat of recognizing that horror--what it would mean to white suburban life--even if he didn’t really? Was Spielberg smarter than we thought? “You only moved the headstones!” We moved the obvious markers so aspirational white families could enjoy their prosperity. But the people who recognize the real trauma are cast as “crazy.” He also understood the luxury of drying your hair. That’s like the one bathtub scene of a mom that isn’t sexual. It’s about her taking care of herself, restoring the normal order.
JPC: Focusing on the hair-drying scene is such a Leo move. But, yes. It’s important. She’s climbing the rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy and taking care of herself after saving everyone else. Until she has to do it again. In thinking about it now, I’m also struck by how much the movie is about the intersection between women’s care and heroism. There’s the central “birth” scene, where Diane saves Carol Anne, of course, but also a network of women’s service and compassion that goes into coming up with a solution to the problem. This includes the leadership of the female paranormal investigator and of the medium.
JMG: Yes, this is why I want to get Tangina’s words cross-stitched: “This house has many hearts.” That is my favorite line in the movie. There is more than just this family’s drama, there is the history of the land and the loss that they’ve parked their American Dream on. But there is also the paranormal investigator, who is the only one who seems to really connect with Diane and understand the gravity of what she’s encountered, the cost of it. There’s something strangely flirtatious about how that scene is played. There’s an erotic connection between those two, born of knowing that they are the only ones who really get it.
JPC: Wow-- that’s amazing. I was thinking about that spark between them earlier and wondering what that was. It’s similar to Tangina’s teasing challenge to Diane, how she communicates, “Now you have to give up the role of the innocent white housewife and step into harsher realities. Become a badass.”
JMG: That’s actually inspiring. I feel inspired. #InternationalWomensDay
JPC: Oh, good! I feel like we’ve hit upon the jouissance of the melancholy mom. You access your pleasure and delight by allowing in your grief over the fucked up systems you’re working under. And then acting from a more authentic place, with the help and advice of other women. There’s your delight, fuckers. #InternationalWomensDay