{"id":8122,"date":"2019-06-04T16:55:24","date_gmt":"2019-06-04T23:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-proxy.atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/?p=8122"},"modified":"2019-06-06T13:50:25","modified_gmt":"2019-06-06T20:50:25","slug":"experiencing-the-munchausen-by-proxy-of-ma-as-a-person-with-disabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/ma-munchausen-by-proxy\/","title":{"rendered":"Experiencing The Munchausen By Proxy Of ‘Ma’ As A Person With Disabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an interesting trend of late (if we can call a movie and a television show a trend) with Hollywood and its interest in the \u201cMunchausen mom.\u201d Hulu\u2019s new series\u00a0<\/span>The Act\u00a0<\/span><\/i>and the recent trashy thriller\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0have both devoted time to mothers with Munchausen by proxy, the disorder wherein a caregiver keeps a person sick in order to garner attention for themselves. In both\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>The Act\u00a0<\/span><\/i>the caregiver is a mother in a highly codependent and sickening relationship with a disabled daughter. As a woman with disabilities, these relationships – and they\u2019re almost always presented as being of the mother\/daughter variety – are fascinating to me as they tap into my own unique relationship with my mom.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(WARNING: Spoilers from this point forward.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear, Munchausen by proxy is a highly specific disorder that is traumatizing to those affected. In no way is my relationship with my mother the same thing but there are slight commonalities in the nature of codependency. In Tate Taylor\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>, Octavia Spencer\u2019s Sue Ann becomes obsessed with a group of local teens who request her help to buy them beer. As the kids soon discover, not only is Sue Ann involved with them as a means of seeking revenge on their parents but she\u2019s also holding her own daughter hostage in her house. The teenage girl, who uses a wheelchair, is seen to be healthy but is being kept sick by Sue Ann to curb the unstable woman\u2019s loneliness and possibly to alleviate the psychological scars Sue Ann still bears from high school.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>\u00a0there\u2019s an unspoken (and ill-defined) air of protectiveness between Sue Ann and her daughter. The woman\u2019s own past ends up being her excuse to nearly kill her daughter, but it moves toward the near-symbiotic relationship that\u2019s often perceived in cinema between mothers and daughters. As Laura Linney\u2019s character says in\u00a0<\/span>Nocturnal Animals<\/span><\/i>, \u201cWe all become our mothers.\u201d Growing up as a disabled woman this idea of maternal protection is incredibly clear. My own mother, for all her good intentions, certainly has heard me wax on about the regrets I have, the things she wouldn\u2019t let me attempt for fear that I would be hurt.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Movies equate maternal protection as being extreme but necessary. And in popular culture when children of \u201csmothers\u201d are shown, the movies are usually about the horrors their mothers have inflicted on them. There is no middle ground. I understand why my mother was so protective, but I can still be irritated about it. There are shades of gray where movies only see black and white. Where movies show the nature of codependency as a life\/death struggle between mothers and daughters – the Munchausen angle – for disabled audiences it\u2019s easy to see it with an additional layer of metaphor. With the lack of true disabled representation in cinema, finding hidden subtext – mainly unintentional between directors and screenwriters – happens often, as it does here. Watching\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>, there\u2019s nothing literal between Sue Ann\u2019s relationship with her daughter and my own with my mother, but the struggle for freedom versus a seemingly well-intentioned mother who makes her daughter feel claustrophobic resonates with me as I\u2019m sure it does with many people with disabilities or chronic illnesses.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Munchausen plotline isn\u2019t a big element of\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>, but for disabled audiences, the sympathy for her daughter is heightened. The girl finds herself locked up in her house and has few friends. If anything, her mother is presented as her only friend, an element that takes on added poignancy for disabled mothers and daughters. Having someone advocate for you who understands what you\u2019re going through, like your mother, provides comfort. And yet Sue Ann\u2019s relationship with her daughter is toxic and all-consuming, parasitic and codependent. Having a close relationship with my own mother has produced its own level of toxicity, mainly through our mutual overreliance on each other. Where the Munchausen mom in movies is often framed to focus attention on the mother, for those watching with disabilities there\u2019s an equal give and take there. I\u2019ll be the first to admit I need my mother as much as she needs me, and that\u2019s problematic in its own right. To think about that relationship being severed is anxiety inducing, which is why it\u2019s often difficult to accept where these Munchausen-based movie relationships end up: with the mother usually dying to spare the child.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet it\u2019s fascinating that these emotions are generated from what amounts to Hollywood\u2019s myopic presentation of a deadly mental illness. Movies like\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>\u00a0and television shows like\u00a0<\/span>The Act<\/span><\/i>\u00a0utilize Munchausen by proxy both for dramatic effect and to present the mother\/daughter relationship to an extreme degree, but watching movies like this while disabled adds unexpected emotional components. A film like\u00a0<\/span>Ma<\/span><\/i>\u00a0certainly uses the Munchausen conceit to its inevitable conclusion, with Sue Ann attempting to kill her daughter, but it does conjure up the ways disabled children often feel emotionally smothered and controlled by their parents.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ma<\/em> is in theaters now.<\/p>\n

\"get<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an interesting trend of late (if we can call a movie and a television show a trend) with Hollywood and its interest in the \u201cMunchausen mom.\u201d Hulu\u2019s new series\u00a0The Act\u00a0and the recent trashy thriller\u00a0Ma\u00a0have both devoted time to mothers with Munchausen by proxy, the disorder wherein a caregiver keeps a person sick in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[50,58],"tags":[39,37],"class_list":["post-8122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","category-horror","tag-featuredtop","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8127,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8122\/revisions\/8127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}