When Mother’s Day rolls around, you might choose to watch a classic tear-jerker like “The Joy Luck Club” or “Steel Magnolias.” If you’re not up for an ugly cry, maybe you opt for a frothy musical like “Mamma Mia!” Then there is, or course, the most obvious choice of all, Garry Marshall’s 2016 ensemble “Mother’s Day.” In this era when women’s rights are under threat, I choose to watch Kathleen Turner as the murderess suburban mama Beverly Sutphin in John Waters’s classic 1994 dark comedy “Serial Mom.”
During a time when shiny-haired tradwives in flowy dresses are attempting to turn motherhood into some sort of sacred blessing devoid of challenges, Beverly feels pretty relatable. She’s a matriarch who has had it, which is an emotional state that many of us can relate to. She is done playing nice and adhering to the role of the perfect perky housewife. Existing in a pre-internet world, Beverly didn’t have access to mom groups that meet to let out primal screams. There were no Reddit threads to assure her that mom rage is real, and even OK (as long as you’re not actually killing anyone). Like so many of our mothers and grandmothers, Beverly was expected to tidy her painfully perfect bob, dust off her apron and deal with whatever life threw at her. Instead of keeping her mouth shut, though, this little lady becomes a homicidal Parent Teacher Association mom who murders when she’s mad.
If you’re not familiar with the film (available on demand), it’s a parody of the true-crime genre. Beverly is a pearl-clutching, fruitcake-baking pillar of motherhood, but if you chew gum, wear white shoes after Labor Day or say anything bad about her husband or children, she might just beat you to death with a leg of lamb or skewer your liver with a fireplace poker. When hubby leaves for work and the kids head to school, Beverly entertains herself by making obscene prank calls to her neighbor Dottie Hinkle (the Waters regular Mink Stole). The calls are hysterical, but I also felt bad for poor Dottie until a flashback reveals that Beverly has a reason for torturing the woman. One day at the supermarket, Dottie steals a parking spot just as Beverly is about to pull in. If a neighbor did that to me, I wouldn’t go into full-on harassment mode, but it’s fun to live vicariously through Beverly. Sure, she’s committing a misdemeanor through these calls, but blatantly stealing a parking spot is rude! Give the woman some slack.
Beverly’s earnest, clueless dentist husband is played by Sam Waterston, an actor with one of the most sincere and sympathetic visages in cinema. Her kids, the boy-crazy Misty (Ricki Lake) and the horror movie obsessive Chip (Matthew Lillard), playfully roll their eyes at their mom’s fastidiousness, but they do find it a little creepy that she has no problem violently smashing a fly on the breakfast table and leaving the blood and guts exposed. Beverly teaches her children manners like, “Don’t say hate, dear.” She views recycling as a pious activity. She’s acting a little strange lately, but a serial killer? Their mother? Never.
Waters (“Pink Flamingos, “Hairspray,” “Cry Baby”) thinks “Serial Mom” is his best film, and when I spoke to him on the phone in April, he said his mother agreed. My own mom, who happened to be a blonde suburban housewife herself, also loved “Serial Mom.” Maybe it’s because she liked to read true-crime stories and watch the crime show personality Nancy Grace on TV, and Beverly’s fictional rampage provided a humorous alternative to the depravity surrounding actual serial killers. Or maybe my mom related to Beverly. She did cart four children to doctor’s appointments and dance class and soccer practice, while still managing to cook dinner every night. She probably got fed up from time to time too. The character reminds me a little of Elizabeth Olsen’s portrayal of Candy Montgomery, who was accused of killing a woman with an ax, in “Love & Death.” The two have similar blonde bobs helmeting their deeply disturbed heads. Despite their acts, you’re meant to feel for both women, at least a little bit. There’s only so much a multitasking a mother living in a patriarchal society can take some days. You make enough snacks, you might snap.
Were Waters to direct a sequel set in the present, he said that Beverly would be a hacker, exacting her revenge online.
“If anybody didn’t treat her daughter properly, Beverly would find their porno searches and send them to their parents,” he said.
In the movie, Waters pokes fun at the overlap between criminality and celebrity. A nosy neighbor might be horrified by what Beverly has done, but in the culture at large she becomes a symbol of women asserting themselves and raining hellfire on the systems that oppress them. When Beverly is finally arrested, Chip and Misty go full Hollywood, talking to agents about a mini-series (starring Suzanne Somers, who plays herself), and selling Serial Mom merch outside the courthouse. When Somers talks to reporters during the trial, she hails Beverly as a “feminist heroine.” If Beverly were a real person, you can bet that Netflix and HBO Max would feverishly churn out riveting documentaries about her bloodthirsty, salacious ways.
I’m not condoning murder as a means to push back on repression, but I do relate to one of the Serial Mom stans at the courthouse merch table who asks the author of a tell-all book about Beverly, “Could you sign it to a future serial mom?” Or the one who adds, “I feel like killing a couple people myself.” Unlike Beverly, I’m pretty sure that they don’t mean it literally. When her well-intentioned but dopey husband tries to uncover the reason for his wife’s sudden thirst for revenge, he says, “Beverly I’ve read all about this. Is it … menopause?” He whispers the M-word as if saying it too loud will unleash an army of meat cleaver-wielding middle-age moms. It’s a line that I didn’t get as a teenager, when I first saw “Serial Mom,” but watching it again it suddenly became the funniest moment in the movie. I like to think that it was lines like this that my own mom related to as well.
Some of Beverly’s crimes are so realistic that it might be hard to find the humor, which was Roger Ebert’s main gripe about the film. It’s over-the-top to grab a leg of lamb and kill a woman who was rude to your kid, but maybe a little too close to home to watch her running over Chip’s math teacher with her car. In Beverly’s defense, though, the teacher said that Chip’s horror movie fixation was unhealthy, and asked if there were problems at home. When Beverly clutches her pearls, the teacher says, “Well you’re doing something wrong.” Tell me that wouldn’t make you feel just a little bit murderous.
“She was a really protective mother, and she stuck up for all the right things,” Waters said. “She just went too far. I mean, you wish your mother would stick up for you, but maybe not that much.”
Beverly Sutphin isn’t real. Rooting for her doesn’t mean you’re a depraved lunatic. It just means you deeply understand that moms in this country need a freaking break, and not just once a year on Mother’s Day.
The post ‘Serial Mom’: The Mother’s Day Movie for Our Times appeared first on New York Times.
