Running with Scissors

As reward for the longest weekend on record, I watched the film Running with Scissors on Saturday night. I read the book ages ago but felt the movie version was so much more palatable and amusing.

The mother character, played brilliantly by Annette Benning, was a heap more sympathetic and familiar in film than in prose. Somehow the mother comes off as psychotic and joyless on page but on screen, Benning brings so much humanity to the role.

Truly, my admiration for the actors’ performances aside, the movie made me feel sooo much better about my own failures as a parent.

How one measures up on the mothering scale is all relative. Relative to what? Well, I prefer relative to the marginally insane drug user, because I come out on top.

Benning is a frustrated poet who slowly unravels in the care of an eccentric and unethical psychiatrist who takes her money, her sanity and eventually her adolescent son.

Despite the melancholy, desperate undertones of the story (which is memoir and therefore, Augusten Burrough’s true account of his miserable childhood) the movie is at once hilarious and honest and likable.

Some very memorable moments follow:

Benning has received a litany of rejections from literary magazines declining to publish her poems. Her son catches her cutting them up and working intently on gluing them to the top of the kitchen table.

When he asks her what she’s doing, she replies, “Oh, I’m decoupaging my rejection letters to the top of this table here. I want to be reminded of my artistic journey when I become famous. This’ll keep me humble.”

This strikes a chord with me as I am waiting for my own rejection letter from a creative writing workshop I was silly and hopeful enough to apply to this month. I do not anticipate acceptance. I am considering making a great fuss over the rejection letter. Perhaps I’ll have it copied several thousand times and use it to paper the dining room walls.

Another terrific scene has the son lamenting his failure of a mother. He’s finally coming to realizing she’s pathetic and negligent. The mother’s girlfriend takes the son aside and says, acerbically, “If it’s Hamburger Helper you want, Cupcake, you better find yourself another mother.”

I tried it on my own son today. He was having his usual homework-time hissy fit, insisting that I wasn’t offering sufficient assistance which, in his mind, means I wasn’t actually completing the assignment for him. I took great pleasure in my reply. “If it’s Homework Helper you want, Cupcake, you better find yourself another mother.” He just looked at me blankly while I giggled and then he began to cry. I was definitely the only one on the inside of that joke.

Last but not least in scenes that speak to me in this movie is the moment when six women are sitting in Benning’s living room where she is conducting a poetry gathering. They are there to share their latest verse with one another, a sort of ad hoc, amateur workshop in progress.

An unfortunate, perky blond woman reads her ode to a daffodil and sits silently waiting for reactions when Benning delivers the blow:

“It’s shit, Fern. It’s sentimental, emotionally dishonest. It implodes into nothing. I was bored….You didn’t tap into your creative unconscious, Fern…If Anne Sexton writes about flowers it’s not about the damn flowers. The flowers wilt and rot. Sexton uses metaphor to explore her dead marriage, her pain. You understand? Recover by expressing your anger. Get the rage on the page, women.”

They all just look back at her, blank with fear, suffering her reproach. They sip their coffee, pinky fingers to the sky as she slumps down in her chair and smokes like a dragon. It’s hilarious.

It reminds me that what we do as bloggers, congregate and write and comment and critique one another in cyberspace, isn’t all that different from a living room poetry club except no one gets to see what the other is wearing and we don’t know who smokes like dragons and who sips coffee with her pinky finger extended.