Jennifer Horgan: How come Hollywood kills off mothers so fathers can shine?

Disappointing then that Krasinski starts this otherwise benign film with the death of the protagonist’s mother. Yawn. As is so often the case, this swiftly axed woman never speaks. She appears in a magical montage in the opening few minutes — impossibly beautiful, kind, heroic — the perfect mother, made even more perfect (in terms of driving the plot) by her truncated illness and death.

I take some comfort in the fact that I’ve trained my three children to spot the ‘dead mother’ trope. At the first flash of the mum looking suddenly pale in a headscarf, my eldest daughter eyed me across the room. Here we go again, we communicated, me with an eyeroll, her with a half smile, knowing how much it would irritate me.

It really does irritate me. I have had my fill of dead mothers. Bambi, Finding Nemo, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Into the West, My Girl, Beauty and the Beast, Fly Away Home, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy: dead mothers pattern our media landscape. For a good, heroic storyline — kill off the mother.

But why? As all these narratives would have it, the death of the mother grants the hero immediate independence. It allows for action and adventure in a world wherein the protagonist has nothing to lose. “Many filmmakers must share the perception that having a living mother makes for a boring life. Surely no adventure or challenge can take place where there’s a secure mum at home fixing peanut butter sandwiches,” writes Mark Silver in The Los Angeles Times. Killing the mother cuts ties. It is the ultimate cutting of the ultimate tie, the umbilical cord — that tie that marks our bodies for life, that soft little worm-curl right at our centre, the tie that eventually tucks into itself and becomes world-ready.

And what does world-ready mean exactly? Well, it means productive, doesn’t it? It means useful and self-sufficient. The mother must die to deny that humans are connected and fluid and blurry and messy, and in need of care and caring. The mother must die because the mother signifies dependence, something Western society seeks to minimise. The underlying message in all these films seems to be that although the death of the mother is tough, it ultimately makes you stronger. It is anti-socialist, anti-humanitarian messaging at its loudest and most manipulative, sneakily perpetuating the myth that we can go through life untethered to other people.

This capitalist messaging is as clever as it is untrue. I know this from my own upbringing 

My mother’s childhood could have been a Disney film. Both of her parents had died by the time she was thirteen, first her father, and then her mother, at which point she was cared for by her aunt. Maybe it’s one of the reasons I notice the death of the mother in films. I grew up with a dead mother, albeit not my own mother.

My mother wasn’t there when her mum was taken to hospital that last time. She and her two sisters were sent to a neighbour’s birthday party. While they played in a nearby garden, an ambulance arrived and left. It’s not something she talks about too often, but I sometimes imagine her as a little girl, waiting for her mum to come home, waiting in the centre of the town, watching the horizon.

She is there in my imagination on a Waterford road, in sunshine, wearing a white dress, small white bow in her dark hair, side-parted. The details are taken from a photograph, from before her mother died. Maybe her hair should not be so perfect, her dress not so well pressed. Maybe those small things would have changed with her mother gone. Or maybe her aunt still pressed her dresses, combed her hair. I don’t know.

What I do know from growing up with my mother is that losing parents is not as neat or easy as Hollywood films would have us believe. The truth is that the death of a mother, of either parent, is devastating. Depriving people of care at a young age is never good for them. It does not make them stronger. Quite the opposite in fact; it makes them extremely vulnerable. And yet Hollywood keeps churning out these films about mother’s dying and children consequently becoming heroic and independent.

In truth, we spend our whole lives in need of mothering. Initially, hopefully, from our own living mothers, biological or found mothers, but on and on into adulthood, whatever our gender. We need to be caring but also cared for by the systems around us too, within the tiny interactions we have in our neighbourhoods, in our schools, and workplaces.

Films that celebrate this fact are far more compelling — at least to me, and often, they concentrate on the complex entanglement that is being a child of a parent in the world. Films like Dumplin’, The Holdovers , and Ladybird to name but a few.

Recent scholars point to a new element to the dead mother film — it’s a handy little plot device that gives the father a chance to become everything all at once. “He is protector and playmate, comforter and buddy, mother and father,” writes Sarah Boxer in The Atlantic.

Mothers are killed so the father can take over. This is not necessarily new.

One must only look at the dreamy Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, but the daddy hero films do seem to be coming in quick and fast. In If, Krasinski plays the little girl’s father and promises to be the perfect solo parent having mended his broken heart. It’s interesting too that he has described his film as being for all the ‘girl dads’ out there. We could see this as a positive step in gender politics, a sign that men are eager to do more of the emotional parenting. Or, we could view it as concerning, that to get dads involved requires the death of the mothers, in lieu of a more mature negotiation of shifting gender roles.

The death of the mother isn’t just a problem in narrative fiction of course; the mother is most powerfully executed by the world’s main religions, and those narratives are far less likely to evolve. Holy Mary, a central figure in Catholicism, has a child without the sin of sex. The physical act, central in becoming a mother, becomes an unmentionable.

This denial of the mother’s body is not particular to Catholicism of course. Buddha’s mother Maha Maya dies seven days after his birth and is reborn again in the Heaven of the Thirty-three Gods. A Hollywood ending. Or rather, a Hollywood beginning, because the mother must die. She must die for the actual story to begin.

It’s interesting to think about why we like to kill the mother so very often. Is it plain old misogyny or plain old economics? Is it fundamental to our current world (dis)order?

I can’t help but think of that moment back in 2007 when American broadcaster Fox famously cut Sally Field’s acceptance speech for an Emmy. Most people didn’t hear her message: “If mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamn wars.” Maybe this should be John Krasinski’s next film project, courtesy of Sally Field? From If to What if mothers ruled the world?

Now, there’s a family film I wouldn’t mind seeing.