rushmore's ghosts: dead characters in film done right
When a character is dead in a movie and I did not bear witness to their death, I am typically one not to care. I’m talking mostly about dead mothers in film, an example being Disney mothers who exist for seemingly no reason other than to make me wonder as a child why my mother was still alive since, according to Disney, they were supposed to die shortly after my birth and render me a princess. Other examples include any and all films with the line “I miss when mother/father was still alive” within the first five minutes, along with any and all photographs, urns, embossed/engraved materials, and other dead parent memorabilia present in films where a woman was hired merely to smile in a framed photo on the mantelpiece or a man was hired merely to playfully toss a child for a few moments in a dear ol’ dead dad flashback. What I mean by saying all of this is that I do not care when people’s parents are dead in movies. And why should I? I’ve been trained by Disney to believe parents are dead by default, and my emotions to it have been all but turned off. Or so I thought, until I watched Rushmore.
To briefly introduce, Rushmore is Wes Anderson’s 1998 coming of age film about a headstrong boy named Max (Jason Schwartzman) attending a private school which he is not at all academically fit to attend. What he lacks in smarts he makes up for in smart-assedness and an abundance of exceedingly ridiculous extracurricular activities (Kite-Flying Society, Rushmore Beekeepers, the Bombardment Society, and his own thespian society to name a few). Max falls in love with Mrs. Cross (Olivia Williams), Rushmore’s new first grade teacher. She rejects his advances, but he is not slowed. His friend Herman (Bill Murray), a middle-aged man with a penchant for Max’s eccentricity and in desperate need of a distraction from his messy divorce, also falls in love with Mrs. Cross and the two engage in prank wars and other such acts of frenemy aggression to win her over. Both of them end up with girls on their arms (Max with a girl more his age, thank goddess) and the movie ends happily, if bitter-sweetly. What struck me most about Rushmore, however, is hardly mentioned in reviews or synopses of the film.
It is revealed early in the movie that Max’s mother is dead and he is raised solely by his father, Bert, a barber. A character having a dead mother in itself is nothing to write home about, as I’m sure you gleaned from my excessive ranting up above, but Max’s mother being dead is a point of reckoning with his character that is the ultimate reason he allows himself to be happy. Yet, the way this reckoning is portrayed is so silent, so subtle, you notice on a first watch how emotionally impactful it truly is. At school, Max lies that his dad is a surgeon. Bert doesn’t tell Max he knows, but it can be inferred he does. He knows Max is ashamed of his life, of his dead mom, of his lame dad, of his tiny house. When Max seems to have given up on his big dreams (plus all those extracurriculars) and stops going to school to spend time working in his dad’s barber shop, Bert remarks that he always thought Max would do something bigger with his life. Earlier in the film, Max visits his mother’s grave, and we are allowed a glance at the headstone. We read her name and the date. She died young. From this point onward, her ghost haunts the film. Max’s every move is made with the knowledge that he might be going against what his mother dreamed for him, that letting all his trying and hard work go to waste would be to waste the love his mother provided. When he talks about her, it’s as if we can feel her in the room. When he finally decides to try dreaming once again and write his "best play ever", it is with a typewriter with the engraving “Bravo, Max! Love, Mom” on its beaten case.
Just as Max carries the ghost of his mother throughout the film with him, Mrs. Cross carries a similar weight on her shoulders. She lives in the house of her deceased husband, Edward Appleby, and sleeps at night in his room, left untouched with blue walls and model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. As we initially understand it, she took the teaching job at Rushmore as a means of moving on, but found the task harder than anticipated. When Max finds her handwriting in a book from the library, he presents it to her in a romantic gesture, only for her to reveal the book was Edward’s, and that she donated it to the library because he went to Rushmore as a child. “Weren’t you in the Rushmore Beekeepers? He founded that club.” Edward Appleby not only haunts Mrs. Cross, but the school itself. A great deal of connections are made throughout the film (which I won’t harp on because it has been written about before) between Edward and Max, which to me signaled Max’s two ghosts, both of which carry the weight of who he was and wield the potential to remind him of who he can be.
Rushmore’s ghosts are different from other dead characters in film. Whereas dead characters in movies usually only function to serve as a stand-in for the main character’s backstory, both Max’s Mother and Edward Appleby are characters themselves. Their weight is felt and their presence is made palpable by the toll missing them takes on the living. Audiences will cry with Mrs. Cross when she talks about Edward, not because he is dead, but because he was so alive. He is felt in everything the film touches, his ghost inhabits the classrooms and breathes there like a living boy. Max’s mother likewise carries a human heaviness when she is remembered. When Max uses his typewriter and we read the message she lovingly had engraved into it, we feel her loss as though she were a loved one of ours. As the characters arc and resolve, so do their ghosts, and so does grief itself.
Disney, take notes. Or don’t, I don’t care.
Just watch Rushmore.
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