Damage’s Top Ten Movie Moms

Boyhood’s Olivia Evans (Patricia Arquette)

In Boyhood's first scene between titular boy Mason, then six years old, and his mother Olivia, she is driving him home after a disciplinary meeting with his teacher. Here is a working single mother, who probably drove there straight from work, probably then straight home to feed two kids, and yet the after-school meeting over Mason's mischief is met with patience and curiosity.

As the years pass—Boyhood was filmed over the course of twelve years—Olivia juggles work, grad school, and childcare. She frets over bills at the kitchen table in multiple homes and instructs her daughter to sell tchotchkes over eBay “because we’re house-poor.” Mason's distant but also loving dad, on the other hand, enjoys the time and space to grow as a person, father, and actuary. He takes the kids bowling, camping, and running around outside, while Olivia’s mostly portrayed working in some capacity.

At one point, Olivia encounters someone she’d crossed paths with years earlier. Formerly a day laborer to whom she’d paid a compliment and suggested night school, now having blossomed into restaurant manager, the man thanks her profusely for changing his life. It’s an unsubtle reminder to her kids, and the audience, just how good she is.

Olivia is not without flaws, however. She subjects herself and her kids to a “parade of drunken assholes,” including an alcoholic husband whose abuse drives her to rescue her kids from their erstwhile step-family. In their final scene together, with Mason now leaving for college, Olivia's implausible grace toward her son finally cracks. "I knew this day was coming. I just... I didn't know you were going to be so fucking happy to be leaving."

Boyhood filmmaker Richard Linklater observes Olivia through the rose-colored glasses of a son who loves his mother, but with the understanding of a man who’s navigated parenthood himself. In short, it’s a movie for men who love their mothers.

Rosemary’s Baby’s Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) 

One theory of myth argues that its power lies in its capacity to turn the terrifying forces of nature and the unknown into names—if not to conquer nature’s sublime power, at least to make it identifiable. The horror genre works in the opposite direction. The anxieties, paranoid projections, and violence of social life metamorphose into forces of supernatural evil. If myth domesticates untrammeled nature outside and within the individual, then horror estranges the repressions required by civilization, casting a light on the hidden traumas that make it possible. 

Pregnancy is a powerful theme for a horror story because it embodies both sides of this complex: the back and forth between society and nature, the confusing pain of our biological inheritance as it spawns the weave of generations and perpetuates the doomed, fallen status of collective human endeavor. In Rosemary’s Baby, the anxieties of pregnancy, usually ironed out through images of the majesty of motherhood and the magic of birth, become monstrosities. In this world, meddlesome in-laws become members of a witch’s coven with terrible designs on the child’s future. The father is no longer a loving husband but a self-absorbed and untrustworthy yuppie, critical of Rosemary’s fears and abusive when she tests her autonomy. Instead of sex between a loving couple, Rosemary is drugged and raped, presumably by Satan, on the night the child is conceived. Then there are the constant worries about the mother’s health, the feelings of isolation. There are difficult pregnancies, but Rosemary’s is torture. She is force-fed disgusting concoctions to aid her pregnancy, but her lively glow becomes a sickly pallor. She becomes thin, frail, and gaunt, beset by unbearable convulsions. Her complaints fall on deaf ears—the doctor is also plying his trade in the name of Lucifer. 

But all these horrors are fundamentally in service of a much more basic one at the heart of the film: that the inevitable split between mother and child, necessary both for life and social reproduction, is a force of evil. The baby that has spent nine months growing inside the mother will become, at the moment of birth, not just an individual but a new member of society. From that moment on, Rosemary’s baby is never fully hers. 

In its famous final scene, the film depicts the terror of reproducing all sociality. The world will depend on the mother for her body and the care she provides the infant, but it will eventually demand her most prized possession for the service of its own designs. And its bonds are not the bonds of love, but of Satan. 

The Waterboy’s Helen Boucher (Kathy Bates)

In this classic coming of age tale, a thirty-one year old boy lives a clandestine life that is both an act of defiance against his overbearing mother and also made possible by her. For he is only able to secretly participate in a violent and devilish underworld by unleashing a lifetime of repressed aggression within it. He is not made for it (and can only participate in its rituals with a steady outpouring of terrified whimpering), but he is its master—an off worlder destined to rule. 

At first, his mother remains ignorant of his victories, and of their spoils. He has slapped hands. He has seen breasts. He has learned of the medulla oblongata. But she invented electricity, and when she discovers the truth, the lights go out.

So the boy stops. He cedes his reign for her love. And it is his demonstration of ultimate fidelity that enables her to finally embrace his violence and mastery. The film ends with the mother knocking the boy's father unconscious and ordering the boy to lose his virginity through the consummation of his marriage.