Well, I’ve got to write about this because of the HDTGM controversy about Drop Dead Fred(1991), where at least half of the audience were on the side of Team Mom, opposite Team Fred. The argument for Team Fred is that Fred is Elizabeth’s imaginary friend who allows Elizabeth to examine all the unseemly parts of her life and society so that she can process them, learn, develop and grow into an adult, but is stunted developmentally by her mom, who tapes Fred into a Jack-in-the-Box, halting Elizabeth’s personal development into her adulthood. Elizabeth is pushed around and spoken to as a child for the next twenty-one years/ by her boyfriend and mother as an adult, until Elizabeth releases Fred from the Jack-in-the-Box, who encourages her to behave wildly in order to break free of the authoritarian strictures imposed upon her by, largely, her abusive mother. Team Mom’s argument is that the Mom is a good mother and Fred is annoying and/or creepy, so the movie is bad. The Mom controls Elizabeth through fear, by telling Elizabeth that if she isn’t a good girl, boys will run away from her, and that it is Elizabeth’s fault her father left them both. According to Mom, everything that goes wrong is Elizabeth’s fault and the way to being a good girl is to do everything her mother tells her to do. When Elizabeth tells her mother plainly what she wants, her mother ignores her wishes and compels her to do what Mom wants instead. To “help” Phoebe, Mom’s solution is to dress her just like Mom and make her hair and make up like Mom’s, then to give her drugs that stunt her emotionally by removing her capacity to deal with problems completely, firmly ensnaring Elizabeth into a less independent and more easily influenced state. A necessary tenet of Team Mom is the support of deliberate child abuse meant to perpetually blame and hobble a child emotionally so that they are easily controlled. Which is abominable. Team Fred all the way.
Fred is not Elizabeth’s imaginary friend. He’s her mental illness. He made her assault a random person, smear shit all over her mother’s living room, and destroy a friends home. I’m not team mom though because she played a big part in causing and/or exacerbating elizabeths priblems.This is a tragedy or a horror movie.
Fred is very clearly Elizabeth’s imaginary friend, and depending on how you perceive developmental progress, he is also her mental illness. Those two diagnoses don’t seem at all mutually exclusive.
If Fred was only a mental illness,he would not have been able to help Elizabeth escape the prison she was being held inside against her will. Fred inarguably made things temporarily more difficult for Elizabeth and equally inarguably allowed her to process past trauma, accept and reconcile said trauma, and reassert control over her own life.
Team Mom, that is a crazy team to be on. The team mom reactions on that podcast were pretty shocking, except I don’t think the team Mom hosts wete being entirely genuine, I feel like they were hamming it up for the audience and keeping their arguments and considerations purposefully shallow, and June was so invested in Elizabeth’s developmental progress that it was difficult for team Fred to pick apart or discard the insignificant or populist arguments team Mom made.
You’re absolutely right, it was an ex’s favourite movie … all I saw was a struggle with abuse and destructive mental health, and I could never stand it.
That ex also had raging bipolar disorder, and my life improved dramatically after the break up.
