Memories of my Mom and the Movies

My mom shared a lot of things with me. She imparted and nurtured my sarcastic sense of humor, and made sure even though we moved to America I had a steady stream of British comedy tapes growing up. She loved music (she even sang in an early punk band), and took me to my first rock shows. She also started my deep love of action, sci-fi, and horror movies.

Most media didn’t portray women or mothers like my mom. She studied English Lit, but also got into weightlifting when she went back to school to become a teacher. She was loving and sensitive, but I knew she was tougher than most of my friends’ dads. One Halloween when I was a kid, she dressed as Rambo. The next year she tweaked it into a Tank Girl costume. Other kids and parents were baffled. It took a double dose of James Cameron to give me characters I could relate to her. We loved The Terminator and Alien, but Terminator 2 and Aliens were something special. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley both survive trauma and come back stronger and tougher, fighting for their child (surrogate in Ripley’s case) against worlds that don’t believe or understand them. I’m also pretty sure Linda Hamilton in T2 influenced my mom’s interest in weightlifting. Milla Jovovich earned a place at the table with The Fifth Element, and my mom followed her through Ultraviolet and everyone of those damn Resident Evil movies (she would also want me to give honorable mention to Michelle Rodriguez, the Vasquez of the 21st century). The Matrix’s Trinity jump kicked her way into my mom’s heart. One of the last movies we watched and enjoyed together was the extended cut of Sucker Punch, and we both adored Jena Malone’s Rocket. My mom enjoyed everything from great sci-fi movies to bad SyFy movies, and a tough or stylish heroine went a long way (I couldn’t make it through the Underworld series, but she did!). As much as she appreciated strong women, though, they weren’t a requirement. She enjoyed anything with a rich world and a bad-ass protagonist. The Mad Max movies made a big impact on her in her twenties. We saw Blade in theaters around my 13th birthday and both agreed it was the coolest thing ever. She also spent many a lazy Sunday watching dumb people get menaced by shoddy creatures in crappy monster movies, laughing and talking shit the whole time.

It’s been ten years since my mom passed away. I don’t think about her every day anymore, but I always feel her absence. Sometimes I think about her when I am sad, and I wish she was there to comfort me. But more frequently I think about her when I enjoy something I know she would have loved. The first movie I saw in theaters a few months after she passed was Guardians of the Galaxy. I wanted an escapist sci-fi adventure to distract me from my feelings about mom dying of cancer and ended up getting a movie about a kid who goes on a sci-fi adventure to escape his feelings about his mom dying from cancer. I was glad the rest of my party went to get snacks so I could cry my way through that opening sequence in peace. By the end of the movie, all I could think was how much my mom would have loved it. The irreverent humor, the sci-fi action, the soundtrack (the Bowie needle drop would have been her favorite), and Gamora would have joined her Mount Rushmore of bad-ass women. Gravity came out before she passed, but I did not see it until after. She would have had all kinds of technical questions for me about the effects after that one. Mom would have loved the John Wick movies, if she could make it past the puppy death (she loved animals deeply). There were plenty of other sci-fi and horror flicks she would have enjoyed, but there is one character in particular that captured her spirit.

When I walked out of the theater after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road, my first thought was, “That might have been the best movie I have ever seen.” My second thought was, “Goddamn, I wish mom was here for this!” She loved the original Mad Max movies and would have been plenty excited for more of that, but the female-centered narrative and environmental and feminist themes of Fury Road would have been a huge deal to her (she made both her children, and her students care about the environment). Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is one of the few characters/performances since Ripley and Sarah Connor that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and she is definitely the only one who might actually transcend them. Mom was smart but focused on literary analysis, so sometimes she would ask me about themes or stories in movies. I was also a nerd for behind-the-scenes stuff from an early age (watching Movie Magic on TV before DVDs with special features existed). I could have told her about how they pulled off Fury Road’s technical feats and pointed out the many brilliant moments of visual storytelling. I think she would have loved Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga even more, and I would have been the one with questions for her after that one. In addition to classic literature, my mom was an avid reader of mythology. That was another thing she shared with me, giving me mythology books to read alongside my comics and saying “Hey, these were the superheroes of ancient Greece!” long before Grant Morrison was making a whole thing of it. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga moves the series and character firmly into the mythical realm, and I wish I had my mom’s insights on it. And despite her brief screen time, Furiosa’s mother Mary is another all-time bad ass she would have loved. 

We just passed what would have been my mom’s 64th birthday. Now it’s Halloween, one of our favorite days. She’s not here, but I carry on her spirit. Today that means watching a terrible horror movie. Hopefully tomorrow it will mean discovering a new woman kicking ass and taking names.