Hollywood and Its Dead Mommy Syndrome

The mommies are dropping like flies in Hollywood these days. First it was just Disney’s plucky characters who were drawn motherless. All the classic cartoon ingenues--Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle and Jasmin--are motherless. The same goes for Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Mowgli and Bambi. Simba, the young Lion King, joins Dumbo and Sleeping Beauty in being functionally orphaned by a mother who is largely absent.

The dead and absent mommies are not just the purview of animated features. These days, the newest story-line stooge, on big screen and small, is the perfect mommy, whose preternatural funeral sets the story in motion.

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The moms are nudged off screen with a virtual medical manual of deadly maladies. “A” is for the aneurysm that felled the mommy in last season’s “To My Daughter With Love,” tragically leaving Rick Schroeder’s character wifeless and his TV daughter motherless. “C” is for the cancer that widowed Tom Hanks’ character in the hit movie “Sleepless in Seattle,” causing him to be, touchingly, both mother and father to his young son and to endear himself to the lovely Meg Ryan. “H” is for the heart attack that did in the 38-year-old wife of James Woods’ character in the highly rated CBS movie, “Jane’s House,” leaving him to sensitively struggle with his two motherless children and make engagingly shy advances toward Anne Archer’s character. (We’re nearly half-way through the alphabet. Look for an out-of-the-blue case of Legionnaire’s disease to knock off some future on-screen mom.)

“There was no way they could know it was going to happen,” Rick Schroeder’s character says to his daughter about her mommy’s untimely death. Well, actually, there were a couple of ways to suspect that her days, and the days of the other mommies, were numbered. These women were all just too perfect for this life. These were not mommies for the long haul. Type-A perfection will finish off a mother faster than any other disease.

It is not a coincidence that Roseanne and Grace, the most smart-mouthed of the on-screen moms, are also the most physically robust. These imperfect mothers will survive to see their prime-time grandchildren, unlike Schroeder’s TV wife who didn’t even make it to her daughter’s 6th birthday. I myself knew she was at risk the moment I saw her in her impossibly tiny jeans, designing her own dream house, and hesitating to take money from her parents. She was wise and empathetic when her husband came grousing in at 1:30 in the morning after bowling with the guys on a work night. She had gorgeous waist-length dark hair and clear blue eyes, and she was dead as a doornail before the first commercial break.

The mommy in “Sleepless in Seattle” was not only a flawless apple peeler, but she also, the little motherless Jonah tells us, “never yelled at me.” This is astonishing. The mother of a 7-year-old boy, a boy who is the type to fly to New York City without permission, “never” yelled at him. This, in my book, moves “Sleepless” right off the Romantic Comedy shelf and across the video store to the Fantasy/SciFi section. And the Tom Hanks character says, just to complete the portrait of the Mommy Who Never Yelled, “she always made everything beautiful” at Christmas. The patience of Job and the nesting artistry of Martha Stewart. And, it goes without saying, when she appears to Hanks in a melancholy vision, she is a radiant angel, and not just due to her otherworldly circumstances, but mostly due to her exceeding perfection of face and form.

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When James Woods’ character gazes at the photo of his departed wife in last season’s “Jane’s House,” she is also luminous. Woods’ TV wife probably had the most advanced case of the deadly Perfect Mommy syndrome. This mommy kept a schedule to ensure that, as long as she was alive, she never duplicated her children’s sack lunch entrees. They got something different every single day.

I mean, no wonder these women are dead. Those of us left standing--the yellers, the slobs, the imperfect peanut butter-and-jelly-sandwich-every day-of-your-life mommies--could teach them a thing or two about surviving the Darwinian demands of real motherhood. If you waste all your strength dieting down to a size 2 and devising different menus for sack lunches, of course you are not going to have anything left to fight off those chest pains and headaches with when they come.

The trend shows no sign of letting up. More recently, Whoopi Goldberg’s spunky Corrina says, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” of Ray Liotta’s dead wife in “Corrina, Corrina.” Don’t you believe it. She was a ‘50s mom, with “the bluest, bluest eyes,” and “a real sweetness about her,” who makes one posthumous appearance in a flickering family movie, radiantly frolicking with her family in a red polka-dot dress. I haven’t been able to get out to see every one of the slew of new motherless movies, including “Lassie,” “Angels in the Outfield,” “My Girl 2,” and, most recently, Melanie Griffith’s “Milk Money,” but I’ll wager that if the departed mommies get any mention, it will be to sing their praises.

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This isn’t even considering the missing mommies on series television, from “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” to “Who’s the Boss?,” from Valerie to Blossom, from “Nanny and the Professor” to just “The Nanny.” On last season’s “Byrds of Paradise,” Timothy Busfield’s character says his late wife was “the most unselfish person I ever met.” Well, of course she was, to make her graceful exit and let the family high-tail it to Hawaii.

There was serious talk of marrying off Bob Saget’s widowed-father character on the long-running series “Full House,” but the people in charge of the show nixed the idea. Good thinking. Why tamper with a winning concept?

Still, Lori Laughlin, the petite brunette who plays the perfect wife of Uncle Jessie and the perfect mommy of the newest twins on the show, should watch out for falling objects. A wedding episode might have been a one-time ratings bonanza, but a funeral could mean a spin-off series.

In Hollywood, it’s much better for the ratings and the box office to have all the mommies off-off-off camera, languishing somewhere near the junction of Heaven and Stepford.