SERIAL MOM (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

It's rare that I don't mention the function of "the psychological" to a movie with a "perilous psycho" in the story. But this is because SERIAL MOM has no real psychological content. The character of serial killer Beverly Suthpen (Kathleen Turner) is just an excuse for writer-director John Waters to take aim at what he deems the foibles of American society. And this is an entirely legitimate target for a satire. But as much now as when I saw the film in 1993, Waters blows any chance for genuine critique for a collection of smarmy knee-jerk "gotcha" routines.

For MOM to have worked, Waters would have had to figured out a way to render an absurdist vision of American middle-class life, and to make every word, every phrase, sound like something that makes sense within that absurd world. But Waters' tone is never consistent. For the first half-hour of MOM, we're introduced to the family of the Suthpens (possibly named for one of William Faulkner's creations). There's dentist-father Eugene (Sam Waterson), teenaged kids Chip and Misty (Matthew Lillard, Ricki Lake), all of whom start out speaking entirely naturalistic dialogue for a middle-class suburban family. Only Beverly says quirky things that indicate her status as a burgeoning psychotic. But by the end of this phony-baloney psycho-flick, the kids are practically cheering for the phenomenon of "Serial Mom," as she becomes a celebrity for having killed six people, while the husband is perpetually befogged.

I won't explicate the plot, which is irredeemably sloppy, consisting of Beverly continually picking off various people who offend either her or someone in her family, until the climax. At that point, she's prosecuted for her crimes and gets off, though with a very slight reversal in the final moments. Again, though the suburban society has seemed naturalistic in many scenes, the court-scenes shift to wack-a-doodle, as everyone in the suburbs gets obsessed with the celebrity of their knowing a serial killer.

There have been any number of psycho-films in which a man or woman becomes obsessed with enacting some rigid societal role, as per the STEPFATHER films. But there's no consistency in the persona of Beverly Suthpen. Though she's obsessed with punctilious observation of social niceties, like insisting that Chip's friend Scotty always wear his seat-belt, she secretly admires and even corresponds with serial killers. She hasn't killed or even injured anyone at the film's start, but her "gateway" is the incongruous habit of crank-calling a neighbor. Somehow this spirals into Beverly committing aimless murders. At least one killing, bludgeoning a victim with a leg of lamb, is almost surely a homage to a famous ALFRED HITCHCOCK TV episode. I suppose Waters had some notion that all this carnage revealed the Hyde beneath society's Jekyll-disguise, but his treatment of this trope is entirely meretricious. Even when Beverly sets Scotty on fire, he doesn't take his own impending death seriously, swearing he'll wear his seat-belt if she spares him. Turner's performance is all over the place, but I think she could have rendered a good psycho if she'd been given a decent script.

I've liked a lot of Waters' films, both from his edgy period and his more commercial work. But MOM is better signified by another three letters: DOG. It failed at the box office, and some attempts have been made to style it as a "cult classic." My response: check out Waters' CRY BABY, his homage to fifties' juvenile delinquent flicks, if you want to see pop-cultural irony done right.