LIVING IN THE DARK
My Life and the Influence of Film
CHAPTER ONE: MOM - (PART ONE)
Memories are like a film you can never watch again. There’s no way to fact check: how do you investigate a feeling? All you have are the gauzy initial images that grow more amorphous with each passing day.
I remember seeing “My Geisha”, a ridiculous Shirley MacLaine movie on the late show when I was a kid and for years I was certain that her co-star had been Sean Connery. I would’ve bet money on it. Turns out it was Yves Montand all along.
But whereas it’s easy to fact check a 60’s movie through IMDB or Wiki, when it comes to recalling the distant past from the POV of a five year old mind, impressions have about as much credibility and heft as a blown dandelion.
Having said all that, I’m pretty sure that my first memory, the one that separated itself from the primordial soup of my infancy and crawled on shore to flag down my attention, was waking up in my bed — which was wet, as per usual back in those days — and hearing my mother’s voice talking on the phone.
I seem to recall — though this is impossible given the layout of our house — leaning out from my upper bunk, peering around the corner of my bedroom door and actually seeing my mother in the kitchen, hunched over the avocado green formica countertop, phone clutched anxiously in her hand, sounding absolutely terrified.
It was encountering this palpable fear — as it emanated from her like waves of radioactive fallout — that woke me from the banal regularity of my early childhood and brought my developing mind into sharp focus.
Mom was talking to a nurse because apparently she’d had hit my brother over the head with the phone receiver and split his scalp open, and was now trying to convince the nurse that this assault was either accidental or somehow justified.
Much later my brother’s frequent sociopathic provocations would push everyone in the house to the verge of clocking him with whatever heavy object was handy. But, at the time, he was eight and my mother was a deeply depressed rageaholic with a hair trigger. Cleary, he didn’t deserve such a violent response no matter what he’d done to piss her off.
And yet this episode did nothing to alert my mother or father or the neighbors or the authorities that something was seriously amiss in our household.
The strongest physical images I have of my mother during these grim, abusive years are not of the woman herself, but of movie characters from the same period that I began to identify with her.
Geraldine Page, for instance, became the perfect stand in for my mom’s violent, twisted nature due to a couple of movies that were shown on late night TV in the early 70’s.
The first was “Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?” in which Page plays Claire Marrable, a broke widow living in the Arizona Desert who makes ends meet by hiring older women as paid companions, then murdering them and burying them under a row of pine trees in her garden.
Though there was a certain physical resemblance between Page and my mom, what really stood out were the sarcastic comments and violent shifts of mood Claire Marrable displayed, going from kindly to monstrous in the blink of an eye.
And the scenes between Marrable and two of her victims — Mildred Natwick as Edna Tinsley and Ruth Gordon as ‘Aunt Alice’ — reminded me of how my mom treated my grandmother Ruby who’d come to live with us for that Summer, derisively referring to her as ‘Trixie’ and putting down her cooking skills — Ruby’d famously made a pumpkin pie with salt instead of sugar.
But I always had the feeling that what mom really wanted to do to Grandma was back hand her or something worse.
Five minutes into “Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?”, Page uses a shovel to cave a seventy year old woman’s head in. Seeing this image acted out in total clarity on a TV in my living room was like having a personal nightmare come to life before my eyes.
The other movie was Don Siegel’s “The Beguiled” and here was Page again, with her silken voice, tight, terrifying smile, and haughty demeanor, making cruel-eyed threats of violence and then horrifically carrying them out.
Later, I was able to reassess the great Geraldine Page and come to relish her warmth and vulnerability — especially in “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Sweet Bird of Youth.”
But for decades I couldn’t look at her onscreen without a shudder of anticipatory dread. As if she was just waiting for me to drop my guard so she could whack me upside the head.