Of Movies and Moms
An Underexposed Mother's Day Mix Tape featuring ROSS BARKAN 🌸 CHARLOTTE SIMMONS 🌸 CARSON LUND 🌸 MATT RUBY 🌸 JON STAHL 🌸 TAYLOR LEWIS 🌸 DOUG HESNEY 🌸 BREONN LYONS 🌸 JEFF RAUSEO and more.
What was the first movie you ever watched in a theater?
There’s a decent chance your mother was sitting next to you, bribing you with snacks, begging you to please, please be quiet.
One of my first was The Black Stallion. According to my mom, I terrorized the audience by galloping up and down the aisles. I deny the charges. (There’s no footage. She can’t prove anything.)
What I can confess to is subjecting my mom to a great many not-so-great films over the years: shrill kiddie flicks, a dismal string of early-nineties Stephen King adaptations, and later, punishing arthouse slogs. She bore it all with grace.
In exchange, she shared her favorites with me: To Kill a Mockingbird (she’s from the South), and Ronald Neame’s Scrooge - an unjustly forgotten Christmas musical masterpiece. Sometimes our tastes meet, like the time we saw John Sayles’s Lone Star at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis when I was in middle school. It remains a mutual favorite.
My mom is open-minded, but not easy to impress. When she likes something, it means something. Which is why, for as long as I’ve wanted to make movies, I’ve hoped to make one she might place alongside Atticus Finch and Albert Finney’s flying, singing Scrooge.
Last fall, I was reading in a park when I had a sudden urge to call her. We talked, as we often do, about politics, weather, movies. Then there was a pause. She said: “I don’t know if I should tell you this…”
The next few weeks were a blur of dread, tears, and Googling. I come from a family largely untouched by illness. Now: cancer. Pancreatic. One of the worst ones.
Then, because life sometimes insists on painfully unsubtle metaphor, Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville, where my parents had just bought a house. Power and communication were cut off for days. My parents, luckily in Minneapolis at the time, didn’t know if their home was still standing. I, miles away in New York, felt powerless. The sun was growing shy in the park, the leaves turning brittle. The world seemed to shrivel and darken.
But my mom never blinked. Maybe it was her long career in PR and speechwriting - she knew how to project composure, how to keep the messaging positive. Maybe it was growing up on a farm, or surviving years of bleak Minnesota winters. Or maybe that’s just who she is: tough, grounded, unflappable.
She set the tone. My dad, my sister, and I followed her lead, watching as she marched straight into chemo without complaint.
Word arrived from Asheville: the house was still there. Later came news from the hospital: the cancer hadn’t spread. A breath of relief. It turned out our family’s dumb luck hadn’t quite run out.
You grow up thinking your parents are unbreakable. You grow older, and that belief crumbles, mainly as you come to understand how easily you can be broken. But then something like this happens, and you wonder if maybe you were right all along.
Parents are the narrators of our young lives. The books they read to us and the movies they show us cast our earliest notions of the world, and our place in it. More important than that, though, is the story they tell us through their actions. That’s the real script we internalize, the germ of the characters we later become.
I’d never seen a health crisis up close, only in movies. I didn’t know how I’d respond when the time came. But now I do. I’ve seen one faced heroically.
So yeah, my mom has had a year. She has weathered a hurricane, cancer, and somehow still makes time for everyone and everything, even her son’s pesky newsletter - and I have her to thank for that. For everything, really. I can hear her now, telling me to wrap this up. So I will.
Thanks, Mom.
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🌸 It’s an Underexposed Mother’s Day Party 🌸
A tribute to the people who first took us to the movies.
It’s been a while since I’ve hosted some of my favorite writers for a “party,” as I did last Halloween and Xmas. This time, I wanted to bring in all new voices. I asked our guests two questions: “What’s the first movie you ever watched with your mom?” and “What’s a memorable movie experience with mom?” Here’s what they shared.
“This isn't the first movie I saw with my mom, but the most insane movie I saw with my mom was One Hour Photo with Robin Williams.”
is Editor-in-Chief of , a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and a columnist for New York Magazine. His new novel, Glass Century, is available now.
“Unthinkably, my first (and tenth, and 100th, and so on) mother-child movie was Bambi, the beloved Disney classic wherein the protagonist's mother gets shot in a scene that has traumatized generations of children. My mom always reflexively fast-forwarded through that scene, though; it just goes to show that sometimes, the best movie memories with your mom are the ones you don't make."
is a film critic and creator of here on Substack.
“Honestly, my mom didn't take us to see movies a lot as kids. She's French, she’s a visual artist who studied at the Sorbonne, and we grew up in the D.C. area, so we ended up visiting museums instead. HOWEVER. When I was a little older - I think I was in college - I was visiting home and my mom wouldn’t stop talking about this movie she saw. She kept going on and on about this thing, which she called: ‘Ow Aye.’ I had never heard of this before and I was racking my brain trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about. Eventually I realized she was saying How High - the stoner comedy starring Method Man and Redman from 2001. She thought that movie was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, that gives you a sense of my mother’s taste in movies.”
is a TV writer and creator of here on Substack.
“As far as my most memorable movie I've watched with my mother, I definitely would say Brave, the Disney movie, because it mirrors some of the challenging aspects of a mother-daughter relationship that I experienced growing up, but what's so beautiful about it is the message of legacy, unconditional love, and sentiment.”
Breonn Lyons is a multi-talented artist - actor, photographer, and author of the poetry book Where My Mind Was, available here.
“I have a memorable experience of watching The Ring with my mom, the American version. When that came out on DVD we were getting DVDs through the mail via Netflix, and she watched it one afternoon. I was probably too young (10) to see it, but I kind of stuck around and pretended not to watch, asleep on the couch, but I loved it. That closet scene still scares me! She was always into horror movies and it definitely formed my love for them today.”
is a Substacker who amplifies the importance of physical media in a digital age.
“The mother of my youth was the daughter of a militant man and so affection was not a language she had ever known. This translated into her ‘maternal instinct’ with one exception. Any time I was sick when I was little, my mother would push play on a VHS of The Little Mermaid, wrap me up in a blanket, and hold me in her arms. And for brief moments, when Arielle sang ‘Part of Your World’ where she wanted to see people dancing and wandering free, she was singing it for both my mother and me.”
advocates for moviegoing and film community on her Substack .
“I begged her to take me to see Eddie Murphy Raw in the movie theater for my birthday. As we entered the theater, the usher said, ‘He’s too young to see this.’ She didn’t say anything and we entered. After eight minutes of Eddie talking about p***y, she turned to me, told me we were leaving, and we walked out. She also took me to see When Harry Met Sally. When the movie ended, she sat there as the credits rolled and said, ‘Characters. That’s what makes a great story. Great characters. If you care about the people, you’ll follow them anywhere’.”
is an NYC comedian/writer. You can watch his comedy special “Bolo” here.
“My most cherished cinematic memory is our Yom Kippur tradition of watching Radio Days together. The film’s 1940s Brooklyn, was so similar to her own 1950s childhood. The scene where Uncle Abe goes over to their communist neighbors’ house for a forbidden holiday feast, only to return home clutching his chest, is easily one of my mom’s favorite comedic moments. That was my introduction to Woody Allen (all controversies long ahead of him), who really helped me understand the Brooklyn of my mother’s childhood - and opened a lot of other cinematic doors.”
is a cinema enthusiast and curator of the Cognitive Film Society.
What was your first movie with your mom? How about the most memorable?
Tell us in the comments.
News Reel
The film world is reeling from all this tariff talk, but I won’t harsh the vibe with that - not this week. It deserves more room than I’ve got here. For now: how about some potentially great news on the antitrust front? Here’s
: “I haven’t had time to write about the latest antitrust loss for Google, so let me be clear: I think it’s a big deal. If Google’s monopoly gets properly broken up, and the remedies actually return competition, media publishers stand to win HUGE gains.”The Comfortable Life is Killing You, writes Erik Rittenberry in
: “To truly live—rather than merely exist—one must reject the illusion of safety and embrace the uncertainty that defines life. Growth, passion, and fulfillment lie beyond the walls of comfort, in the unpredictable terrain of risk and self-discovery. When we prioritize security above all else, we sever ourselves from our deepest instincts, reducing life to a mechanical routine devoid of vitality.”- gives us 30 Ways to Revitalize Arts & Culture.
This week’s Underexposed Movie Pick has been selected by a special guest - my mother-in-law, Christina! She is Brazilian, so selfishly I was hoping for a great lesser-known Brazilian movie, but she surprised me with an American movie by one of the most American directors ever -
You Can’t Take it With You (1938, dir. Frank Capra)
“My dear uncle loved this movie. He was a very special person, very calm and with an intelligent sense of humor. The film reminds me of him, but I haven't seen it in a long time.”
A Depression-era screwball romance with champagne in its veins and sparks in its tap-dancing shoes, You Can’t Take It With You spins the yarn of a man born to money and manners who falls, quite helplessly, for a girl whose home is a madhouse of free spirits. A critical and commercial darling of its day - it won Best Picture and Best Director - the popularity of You Can’t Take It With You has not endured like other Capra films. You can help rectify that by streaming it now.
Where to watch You Can’t Take It With You
You can rent it here.
BONUS VIDEO: Mother’s Day Picks with Carson Lund
The director of Eephus on good movies to watch with your mom.
That’s all for this week’s Underexposed. Thanks for reading. See you next Friday,
Alex
Beautifully done, Alex. This piece made me remember all the movies I saw with my mother as a child. My Mom loved musicals, so she took me to see my first movie, "Mary Poppins" and then films like "The Sound of Music," "Dr. Doolittle," "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Scrooge." Afterwards, we would buy the soundtrack albums and sing along to the records at home. She enjoyed that as much as seeing the films.
Not sure any of us plan how we’d react in a medical emergency, happy for all how well you did. Can’t remember the first movie I saw with my late mother but the most memorable has to be Don’t Look Now. Shown late one evening on TV she allowed both me & my late brother to watch with her (neither of us yet teenagers, our parents never age restricted our consumption of movies, books, TV). Needless to say both of us were terrified by the final murder and murderer. After going to bed she called us downstairs where we were again terrified by the sight of her with her back to us on her knees in the hallway with a red anorak on!