My Mother the Genre Geek
My mom and her precious baby. I am also in the photo.
I learned a long time ago that if you have a parent or a family member that achieves a thing or exhibits a behavior, it makes that thing or behavior a reality to a young mind. It is attainable. It is possible. If your parent went to college, then you might believe you can. If a cousin made it as an artist, that could also seem possible. This is a roundabout way of explaining that my mother may very well have been a first-generation geek.
My life is full of nerdy shit and I’ve learned to accept it all. It makes me feel good. But I firmly believe that I grew up in a social vacuum, and other than the occasional superhero cartoon, I didn’t have much nerdy media. The thing no one talks about when they talk about their nerd cred is that to acquire the comic books, toys, action figures, plastic swords, Lego sets, video games, models, and other cultural horseshit, you need money. We had very little. I must have absorbed the idea somewhere. It had to be my mom.
I cornered her recently and sort-of interviewed her about what I thought, and she was a little surprised. But all of it was true. She had her time playing with Barbie as a little girl, but later it was much more of the stuff that would become mainstream in the 21st century. She read Spider-Man and Archie comics as a teenager. She worked at a record store and watched her share of scary movies. When I was little, she read romance novels, which I think was required by law in 1970s suburban homes. That evolved into horror novels with the popularity of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and whomever was the copycat of the month. My mom continues to like horror movies, although I never caught the bug. I got into the Twilight Zone, and I like creepy thrillers like The Shining, but straight up horror never became my thing, but that stuff was on all the time at home.
Mom also watched Star Trek, the original series. Before it got its second life in the movies of the 80’s, I only knew it as that cheap-ass looking show that my mom watched that was so not Star Wars that it made me sick just watching it. I never really liked it, but I did get into the movies when the crew was old and fat. I also enjoyed Star Trek TNG when I was older.
I got the idea somewhere when I was little that the good stuff had to be sought out. The standard offering of TV, movies and music was usually homogenized or outright ruined in the name of being family friendly. I enjoyed plenty of family friendly crap too, but you get tired of eating chicken every day. Sometimes, you want linguine with clam sauce.
Outside of Aliens, mom’s interest in sci-fi faded. Mine was overcharged with time travel and spaceships and everything about them. She read more horror and eventually segued into thriller novels as the 90’s ended. As far as movies go, she was and is onboard for the entire MCU. She is retired now, which also leaves her time to comb the internet for movie news like the rest of us dorks looking for a scoop on our next big-budget movie fix. It is a new thing to have my mother up-to-date on Tom Holland and Zendaya’s relationship on and off set.
All those years of buying me little Star Wars figures at Christmas, or dressing up as Luke Skywalker for Halloween, or watching her grandsons get into the prequels and buying them a bunch of plastic toys, she never cared about Star Wars at all. Not a damn thing. That is, until very recently, when a tiny green alien baby face exploded all over our culture. She finally acquiesced and watched The Mandalorian, and she loved it. Other than referring to the character Boba Fett as ‘Bubbafett’, she is locked in.
This piece is really a blueprint of how my current loves were indirectly and directly influenced by my mom. But, it’s also about that I’m thankful that I have a retired mom who is into news about the next Thor movie and not screaming about the flag or immigrants every day. Just thought I’d put that in there. Not every grandma and grandpa are batshit crazy.
If you have an origin story with something you love, make sure you’ve traced it back. It’s nice to recognize it as part of your own story, but if someone in your life made an impression on you, it would be cool to let them know about it. That’s what we all desire right? To make an impact?
And sometimes that impact is your mom’s media diet.