Hollywood hypocrisy

As a teenager and young adult, Barrymore's Bev is a caricature of a kid raising a kid, the kind of mother who has so many problems of her own that she can't be bothered to make the maternal sacrifices required to fit the definition of a "good" mother. As an adult, movie Bev is a controlling shrew, the worst kind of stage mother, who expects her child to live out the "dreams" (that word again) she had for herself.

Predictably, Bev's combination of malignant neglect and manipulative micromanaging turns her son into a resentful, overburdened martyr. From the moment the movie version kid can speak, he is his mother's keeper, a prissy, prudish tattletale and tyrant. "We're supposed to be a team, right?" says Bev (who by this point in the movie is exhausted from her schedule of night classes and the double-shift waitress job that Marshall has inflicted upon her, after taking away her scholarship, her man and the goodwill of her parents, friends and children -- at an age when Beverly Donofrio herself was graduating from an elite college, not working and living with socialists.) "No!" screams Jason. "You're supposed to be the mother and I'm supposed to be the kid!"

Beating this truth -- be a mother, not a kid -- into the brain of Barrymore's Bev is the theme of Marshall's movie. Which is why we are treated to over two hours of watching her character endure the punishments of a sadistic director until finally her son forces her to admit that he is not "normal," he is not in "one piece" and, in fact, Bev is pretty much to blame for every bad thing that has happened to her son.

But Donofrio's true story -- as she tells it in her book -- shows how much she and her son end up being alike as adults. Like his mother, Jason is an urban Manhattanite, who dresses in all black, hangs out in the pool hall and becomes something of a high-school slut himself -- nothing like the preppy, Eddie-Bauerish, judgmental prig in the movie version, whose sole goal is to move in with his true love (conveniently portrayed as the daughter of his mother's best friend, whom he protected as a child when they were both suffering from the bad parenting of their teenage mothers) in Indiana (which is especially funny, considering that real-life Jason is quoted as saying that the worst thing about going to school in Connecticut is that anyone who lives outside New York City must be stupid).

What, exactly, is so threatening about a teenage mother who goes to a good college and raises a good kid? What is the social value in refusing to tell any story of teenage motherhood that does not end with the lives of both mother and child in complete and total ruin? Do we really want to raise a generation of kids who believe that mistakes -- or conscious decisions -- cannot be revised and revisited, that "Life is really only four or five days that change everything"?

In 1991, I believed myself to be some sort of pioneer, the first teenager ever to carry Foucault in a diaper bag. I should have known better. Donofrio did it before me and many more did it after. How strange to find that the ordinary lives that we have led are considered to be so extraordinary, so radical, so unpalatable, that mainstream directors like Penny Marshall have to create outright lies about how we live because the truth still isn't acceptable.

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