Big meanies

So thinking about my stressful week got me thinking about Iris.
This 2001 movie recounts the life of Iris Murdoch, first in her youth (Kate Winslett) when she was rising as a celebrated British novelist, then in her dementia-clouded old age (Judi Densch). What makes it different from most movies (maybe any movie) dealing with mental or terminal illness is that her husband (Jim Broadbent in the senior years) starts acting like a creep. He resents that he’s dealing with a pain that she’s oblivious too; he’s pissed that he’s losing her; and sometimes his resentment shows. In one scene, for instance, he lets her act like a complete fool, then brushes off someone’s objections by asserting that the next day she’ll have forgotten it.
From most of what I’ve read and seen about dealing with a loved one’s illness, that’s pretty realistic (not that everyone does it, but I see how the resentment can get to that point). And it’s completely contradictory to the usual image of the noble loving spouse, as in A Beautiful Mind (also 2001). And, of course, rather unsettling to watch: I think Iris is the better movie, but I’m not surprised Beautiful Mind got the spotlight.
This in turn got me thinking about an episode of Wings, the sitcom with Tim Daly and Brian weber as sibling pilots operating out of Nantucket. In Mother Wore Stripes, Barbara Babcock shows up as the mother who walked out on the family years earlier—a determining incident for Joe (Daly), who found himself forced to run everything for his shell-shocked father and feckless brother (which he blamed in this episode for being so anal).
I’ve seen lots of sitcom episodes in which the adult child brings up the pain from his/her childhood about the dreadful thing Mom (or Dad, though it’s usually Mom) and the usual approach is that in the show’s emotional climax, the parent explains everything and it turns out it all makes sense and Mommy or Daddy was really doing the right thing and parent and child hug.
Not so in this one. Babcock (who’s passing through Nantucket on her way to a prison term for embezzling, IIRC) has no explanation other than waking up one mroning, realizing she hated being married, and that she didn’t want to go through a divorce, or counseling, or try to stay in her children’s lives, she just wanted out. So she left. And she didn’t love her kids enough to contact them again.
That’s some shitty behavior. And like Iris, atypical for the genre (and yes, films about mentally ill/emotionally tormented geniuses do make up a movie genre of sorts, though Iris doesn’t really fit the mold).
And atypical is a good thing.