When my parents would fight, and that was quite often, my mother would threaten my father that she was going to take the kids and never come back. So instead of leaving for good, she would take me (and sometimes my brother) to the movies. This happened often, and it was a way for me to see movies, lots of movies, late at night. Like an 11:30 showing of Mask or a midnight showing of The Right Stuff. But the one that sticks out the most is Mommie Dearest. If you have never seen this movies please run out and get it. If you think you’re a bad parent, watch this movie. Chances are you’re not, but that’s your shit to deal with if you are.
That night my parents had a huge blowout over what I don’t remember, but they always fought about something that made no sense to me as a child. It was 1981, I was almost 11 years old and have become used to leaving late at night and watching a movie to help my mother get her point across to my father. We were going to see Mommie Dearest, if I remember correctly it was a 10pm-ish movie time. Mind you I had no idea who Joan Crawford was, and was told she was an actress from the past. With popcorn and soda in hand, we enter the near empty theater.
While watching this movie I learn that Joan Crawford was a great actress, she adopted a daughter (I’m adopted!) and then proceeded to be an uber bitch to everyone around her (quite like my mother, in my 11 year old mind). It was the first movie I saw in the theater that used the work “fuck”. Now mind you I have heard that word my whole life, I even used it when I was about 5 or 6 and subsiquently ate a bar of Ivory soap, but to hear the f word coming from a movie, that was just awesome! Joan was just shitty to everyone around her. Her daughter in particular. Beating her with wire hangers, making her scrub the bathroom floor and an onslaught of other abuses children should not have to go through. Little did I know that I was going through one of them just by sitting there watching a movie. But that’s a whole other story.
I’m getting very tired, struggling to stay up and watch the ending, because all movies have happy endings when you’re 11. Well it really depends on what you consider a happy ending at this point, the daughter is all sorts of fucked up later on in life. Drugs, sex, getting kicked out of school and anything else she could do to make her mother’s life miserable. So, the end of the movie finally gets here and she is now giving a speech for her mother, who ended up in a pretty shitty situation herself, alone, almost broke and all used up. Which at the time made me feel happy, sick that an 11 year old should feel happy about someone else’s misery, but in my opinion she deserved everything she got. Think I had some unresolved issues?
The movies ends, I’m exhausted full of buttered popcorn and soda and as we are leaving my mom turns to me and says “see I’m not that bad”. I responded, “no you’re not”.
Brain Vomit 