Acidemic Mother's Day

I recently re-read a 2004 popmatters review I did on ORCA (1977) and it's definitely the wellspring from which my 70s Dad series flowed. You should read it but wait, tis Mother's Day, I need to do a sequel to my Cinematic Blonde Moms of Death!

There's lots of theories of the "gaze" or viewer perspective in the mise-en-scene; are we masochists unable to control the stimulus we feel (unbearable suspense in Hithcock, for example) or sadists dominating and controlling through our masterful stare of covetous ownership? I think of it in Buddhist reincarantion terms, as if we've spent countless hours in between past lives surfing through the wormholes of the world, scoping out future wombs suitable to our karmic needs the way we scope out new apartments in "waking" life. At any rate, I get a glimmer of such a feeling during certain movies, such as MULHOLLAND DR., PERSONA and SPECIES, as I've written about. In all these the mother isn't yet a mom, in that sense, but the specter of an unborn child seems to hover around her, literally in PERSONA with the cut-aways to the kid waking up in the morgue; with the momentum of an unborn child's urgent need to be born into SPECIES, raging at the CGI bastard who takes our place; or with the camera as fearful, hesitant child approaching depressed mom in bathrobe in MULHOLLAND.

I talked to my own mom today and can attest that she's actually a pretty sweet and a nice lady, despite all the cold, Nordic things I write. Moms understand that their writer sons need to push them back/elevate them up into larger archetypal symbolic realms to add extra textural resonance to their emotional outpourings into the ether's vast unknowable net. My dad also read where I called him Orson Wellesian and thought I was ribbing him about his weight. Man oh man, some parents just don't understand that to a film lover, Orson Welles is like Shakespeare, Zeus, the devil, Daniel Webster and Colonel Kurz all rolled into one, and if their story is really a confession, then so is mine. Dad, Mom, I love ya.