Veronica’s January Recommendations
MOMMY DEAREST: A collection of films exploring the complex relationship—ranging from fraught to melodramatic to deeply loving to codependent to silly, sometimes all at once—between mother and child.
THE MEDDLER (2015)
In this pseudo-autobiographical film about Lorene Scafaria’s own relationship with her overbearing mother, semi-recent widow Marnie (Susan Sarandon) moves to Los Angeles to be with her daughter Lori (Rose Byrne), a television screenwriter nursing a broken heart after a break-up with a prominent actor. Marnie is totally dependent, constantly clinging to Lori while her daughter tries her best to get her life on track. Lori is exhausted by her mother, but somehow also seems to frequently find release in her ability to be a hot mess around her. The Meddler attests to the ways in which an overly involved mother is both impossibly frustrating and so easily addictive, while being both charming and hopeful about the potential to grow into adult, loving relationships with your parents.
I LIKE MOVIES (2022)
High school senior Lawrence (Isaiah Lehtinen) has everything figured out—he’s going to be a famous filmmaker after a stint at NYU, and become rich and famous and not be trapped in the pits of suburban Canadian winters ever again. His mother, Terri (Krista Bridges) is pragmatic and hurting after the suicide of her husband, Lawrence’s father. To Lawrence, Terri seems like a lead balloon, constantly dampening his dreams. These dreams are, admittedly, delusions, but Terri’s willingness to burst Lawrence’s bubble is a striking characterization/complication of a motherly role. Lawrence and Terri fight almost like siblings at points, with Terri having a striking capacity to be, frankly, immature and cruel to Lawrence. But she is also the only person capable of calming him, a marker of a true “safe person” in the ways they know each other so intimately that it’s often painful.
PARIS, TEXAS (1984)
When Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) shows up in the middle-of-nowhere years after his disappearance, his young son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), is weary of him. His dad is not as much a father as his uncle is to him. Even more notably, Hunter’s mom is totally out of the picture, only a vague idea in home videos—until Travis learns of where she may be, and takes Hunter on a search for her. A meditation on love, loss, and the ache of parenthood, Paris, Texas is complex and deeply loving in its thoughts on the roles and expectations of the maternal, and the many forms unconditional motherly love may take.
TARNATION (2003)
Tarnation is director Jonathan Caouette’s twisted documentary love letter to his mother—as well as a eulogy to his “normal childhood”. Jonathan's mother has suffered from schizophrenia for decades, and Tarnation, notorious for its DIY nature (made from Super 8 footage from Cauotte’s adolescence, clips from cinema that made him fall in love with the form, and camcorder footage of his life now, and edited on his personal computer), Tarnation is raw chaos, an open wound, and centered totally on the deep love Jonathan has for his mother, as a son wounded by circumstance.
Alisha’s January Recommendations
ON SLEEP: I wonder if many people think about sleep as much as I do; I have a strange relationship with it. More than twenty-four hours without sleep, life comes to look, to quote Proust, illusory as a dream. The world becomes slippery, its edges seem to constantly threaten to slide out of view, of a steady grasp. A slimy film forms between the ego and the world, and it feels like one is at a remove, a bystander or audience to one’s life, encased within a shell within the body, slowly quivering up and down and sideways within one’s skin. Insomnia is painful, leaving the brain feeling as though it’s a toothy tumor. But too much sleep, and the world strikes down like a bolt of lightning, leaving one feeling frantic and panicky; everything seems simultaneously too vivid and foreign, and one feels as though one has committed a crime that the ego is unaware of. A sense of guilt comes with too much sleep, for having spent too much time away from the normal course of things; and a sense of indignation comes with too little of it, for not having easy access to something so sweet and natural.
I don't think I’ve ever spent a stretch of time during my adulthood regularly getting the proper amount of sleep. I deal in extremes when it comes to sleep — too much of it for a couple of days means going at least twenty-four hours without it later. Both lack and abundance of sleep leave me feeling isolated and alien, at a remove from, out of step with the normal cadence of the world.
Here are a few movies that delineate the irregular rhythm and confusion of the psyche after a lack of sleep or too much sleep.
THE HUNGER (1983)
Tony Scott’s feature debut follows Catherine Deneuve’s Miriam, an ancient vampire who needs a companion — she turns her human lovers into vampires after promising them eternal life. David Bowie plays John, who begins the film finding that Miriam’s promise of eternal life was hollow: Miriam promised immortality, but John finds his body aging. It comes to be that John can’t sleep, and no matter how much he feeds on human blood, he can’t seem to keep his body from wrinkling, his beautiful golden hair from coming out in strands every time he runs a hand through it. He turns to Susan Sarandon’s Sarah, a doctor studying the effects of sleep on the process of aging, hoping that she might hold the key to youth. In The Hunger, sleep becomes something salutary, like a fountain of youth — those who live long lives report getting at least six hours of sleep every night. This film is a visual and sonic feast, delineating the dangerous contours of beauty, especially of sleep, a healthy dose of which feels as sweet as milk, and a lack of which becomes a harbinger of unease and decay, confinement and loneliness.
INSOMNIA (2002)
Christopher Nolan directs Al Pacino, who plays Will Dormer, an L.A. detective with a guilty conscience who is sent to an isolated town in Alaska to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. It just so happens that the town is experiencing its white nights — the sun never sets, even when it’s nighttime. Will can’t seem to keep the light out of his hotel room, the brightness is everywhere, and every time he is on the brink of sleep, it jolts him back into consciousness. Doggedly working the case, Will finds himself losing his rationality, a grasp on reality, his sense of right and wrong, his sense of self. This film is shrewd and preternatural in its visual understanding of what it feels like to not have slept in a while. As the days and nights sunnily skip by, Nolan shows the world around Will as becoming increasingly febrile, it in turn morphs like melting glass and becomes abbreviated like a diary with crucial pages torn out. Will becomes hazy, his movements and words drawn and syrupy, or he becomes irritable, bursting out in anger at the slightest provocation. This film will leave your head feeling as though it’s being gnawed upon by toothless gums, which is what insomnia often feels like — an acute awareness of and helplessness in the face of the loudness of light. A guilty conscience, a busy conscience can’t escape the probing watch of light, this film seems to truthfully assert.
TULLY (2018)
Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody and Charlize Theron join forces once again for Tully, a film about Marlo, a woman nearing 40 and expecting her third child. After giving birth, Marlo finds herself suffocating under the demands of motherhood, which requires so much work she often goes without sleep, and so she chooses to enlist the help of night nanny Tully (Mackenzie Davis). With Tully’s help, Marlo finds time to sleep, finds her world coming back into focus, finds joy once again sprouting amongst the labor of motherhood. This film is delicate in its exploration of both the effects of sleep and sleeplessness. But more than anything, this film is searing in its depiction of the loneliness not only of motherhood, but also of the night, of being awake when everyone else is asleep. Tully is simultaneously tender as a bruise and as a hug, and I hope you’ll watch it.
SLEEPING BEAUTY (2011)
Julia Leigh’s film is bold, for it asks not merely what happens to us when we sleep, but specifically, what happens to women when they sleep. Emily Browning plays Lucy, a college student who takes on more and more jobs to be able to afford the ability to live. One of the jobs she takes on is a unique kind of sex worker: every trick requires that she consume a mysterious drug that puts her to sleep, at which point the customer, the john, has access to her, is allowed to live out his desires with, on, her body, with the only rule being that he not penetrate her. Lucy wakes from each of these jobs with only her body holding on to the memory of what occurred — the scab from a cigarette burn, a particular muscle pain. This film is at times tough to watch for the questions it raises about access to women’s bodies, specifically bodies without their linked consciousnesses; but it’s also incredibly revelatory, for as it shows us a kind of lack of consciousness, it also depicts a kind of feminine agency. But whether this agency is something hopeful is left up for debate, as it is shown moving within deeply patriarchal capitalist binds, which find a way to monetize even the moment when we ought to have respite from laboring: the moment of sleep.