It’s been tough watching movies in 2020 and not projecting our frustrations and anxieties onto the screen. Perhaps the extravagant wedding streak of “The Godfather” suddenly felt garish compared to all of Zoom “I Dos” this year. Or maybe you put on “Elf” to go through a quarantine period, and the crowded mall scenes have put you in a cold sweat, because everyone is inside and no one is wearing a mask.
When I watched the classic “A Christmas Story” recently for the 20th time (at least), my pandemic-exhausted brain focused on something I had never really noticed. I looked past the cute kids, the foot lamp, and the famous tongue stuck on the pole scene, and became laser focused on mum. One look at her tousled hair and shabby dress and exasperated gaze and I thought: This woman is one hell of a hero.
“A Christmas Story,” which TBS has played on repeat every holiday season for over a decade, takes place in the early 1940s in Indiana, and follows a young boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB pistol for Christmas, even though her mom (Melinda Dillon, called “Mother” in credits) says her dream gift is too dangerous. That’s pretty much the plot, but director Bob Clark and writer Jean Shepherd have somehow created a weird and timeless Christmas flick that manages to be both dark and mellow at the same time. Every year I watch this movie assuming Ralphie is the protagonist. Now I am not so sure.
When we meet mom, she’s exhausted, serving food, and wearing old-fashioned clothes that look like rags alongside her husband’s relatively high fashion suit. While The Old Man (Darren McGavin) reads the newspaper or complains about the faulty oven, Mother cooks, cleans, wrestles the kids in their gigantic snow suits and worries about everyone’s well-being, even if no one cares. of his.
Normally I wouldn’t find her plight so thrilling, but on this viewing, as soon as her husband and kids left for the day, I desperately wanted to know what this woman was doing with her alone. She wasn’t juggling home schooling and work during a global crisis, so did she keep cleaning? Maybe she mixed in with an underground Tom Collins and took a bubble bath. Where were the scenes where she celebrated her freedom dancing in an empty house, like Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman”? Was I projecting?
Something told me that she wasn’t sipping cocktails and doing pirouettes from room to room.
Instead, we see Mother serving cabbage and meatloaf, which makes her practically a saint in my book. I’ve given my toddler Goldfish and grapes for dinner occasionally over the past year (toddlers are picky!), So at least his uninspired meals are home cooked. We also see her washing Ralphie’s mouth with a huge bar of red soap after he says ‘the queen mother dirty words’. My son said his first curse word this year too, only he is 3 instead of 9 like Ralphie. Rather than stick soap in his mouth, I looked away to hide my laughter and avoid paying attention to the word. The mother didn’t have the luxury of reading fancy books from child psychologists telling her what to do when children cursed. What she had was a big bar of soap.
The mother may not be treated like a superstar, but Dillon received the number one spot in “A Christmas Story.” She came to the film with a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, As well as two Oscar nominations, for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice”. Dillon started out as the first girl in the locker room at The Second City improv theater in Chicago, but when her career quickly took off, she was overwhelmed by the prospect of fame. She diverted her energy from comedy to marriage and children. However, the role of the real suburban mom quickly lost its appeal.
“I was buried alive,” Ms. Dillon said of her stay at the house in a 1976 interview with The Times. She went back to work.
Reading this, it’s hard not to imagine that Ms. Dillon brought some of those feelings to the role of a woman who, as Ralphie puts it at the start of the film, “hadn’t had a hot meal for herself. for 15 years”.
But it’s not just meatloaf. Mother has mastered the art of outwitting her husband. She uses stealth tactics to convince him not to turn on the hideous leg lamp he won in a contest, such as suggesting that he keep it off so as not to waste electricity (this is a stealth tactic to me. eyes). Later, she not so subtly asserts her authority by destroying the foot lamp in a fit of rage. I cheered her on with every off-camera smash. Deprived of hot meals and locked away at home, she needs them.
At the end of “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie and Randy tear up their many presents, and The Old Man opens a gift from Mother, a shiny blue bowling ball. As I watched her observe her husband and son’s delights around the Christmas tree, I noticed that she was holding something that could be a golden spatula or a fly swatter. I hoped whatever his gift was, it wasn’t either of those things. Suddenly, during the umpteenth viewing of this film, I needed to know if this woman, the saint of the film, had a Christmas present.
The frantic Google searches for “mother” “Christmas story” “gift” and “spatula” came up nothing, so I emailed A Christmas Story House & Museum in Cleveland, the site of the house of the movie, hoping to get some answers.
“Who cares what mom gets for Christmas,” museum owner Brian Jones replied. It turned out he was kidding, but again. “No one has ever asked me this for nearly two decades in the business,” he wrote.
According to Jones, the mother is indeed holding a fly swatter. If she receives gifts, we never see them. Is her Christmas present that her husband and sons are all happy and fulfilled? Where’s her payoff for multitasking and keeping everyone fed, dressed and protected from blizzards, while sacrificing their time and energy to whip up another cabbage stew? They could at least have given him a card!
From now on, when I watch the end of “A Christmas Story”, I won’t be focusing on Ralphie’s BB gun or Old Man Parker’s bowling ball. I’m going to cheer on mum and imagine a deleted scene where she gets up her feet, has this Tom Collins and gets a moment of calm for herself.
Dina Gachman is an Austin-based writer and the author of “Brokenomics”.
