Vignette: the borderline mother and son
The scene uploaded below is from the 1997 movie Boogie Nights. I have not watched the movie; I just saw this clip for the first time today.
It is so close to the reality of my past at home that I found it difficult to watch. They got it right, how it is with a borderline mother and a son. Some of the parallels are uncanny. Mother sits in the darkest corner of the room, lying in wait like a spider.
She starts the barbed comments. When she gets a reaction, she ramps them up. The son feels the shame and the fear; she reacts to it as a vampire reacts to blood and pushes harder.
He’s angry, but he’s also scared and humiliated. She loves it. The more he cries, the more he begs her to stop being cruel, the louder she screams. It’s almost like a twisted form of sex, the build up to a climax of rage that gives the dysregulated mother the feeling of release.
Finally, she starts to destroy the things he loves, and they weren’t his anyway because she bought them. Nothing belongs to him. Nothing was ever his own.
When you’re done here, please read
’s latest piece, When Feminism Is Child Abuse. She is a former academic feminist turned critic. She expertly describes the largely unaddressed (my words) soul damage that feminist mothers (frequently they have Cluster B tendencies) can do to their sons.
’The bruises, they will fade away
you hit so hard with the things you say
I will not stay to watch your hate as it grows’
-Madonna, ‘Til Death Do Us Part’
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I had forgotten all about this scene! Wow. That father just hiding in the bedroom while all of this occurs in the next room. Says it all really.
The mom is reacting like an insane, jealous lover. I have 3 sons. I cannot wrap my mind around how a person could have sexual tendencies toward their kids. The sadism and cruelty alone is not comprehensible to me, let alone the sexual element. Lord have Mercy.