My Mom Jayne

To use the loathsome and wholly too broad "generational" tags, I am late-stage Generation X, which means my parents were Baby Boomers. From a pop culture standpoint, this meant that I grew up with lots of stories and worship of 50's and 60's icons. My mother was a huge Marilyn Monroe fan, but she didn't seem to have any particular feelings for Jayne Mansfield. What little I heard of her, she was considered a sort of budget knockoff of Monroe, one that leaned into the dumb blonde image a little too much. She was the Great Value sex symbol of the 60's. Marilyn Monroe had class and elegance. Jayne Mansfield was the dime-store clone. As it turned out, Mariska Hargitay, Mansfield's youngest daughter, didn't have the best mental image of her either. Mansfield died when Hargitay was three, so she had little in the way of memories of her mother. Just about everything she knew about her was the public image; the ditzy blonde with a big chest and an airy voice that had a slew of husbands and died young. As Hargitay explains in this documentary, this came to define a lot of how she lived her life; when she became an actress, she did everything possible to do the opposite of her mother. But she did so with a hole in her heart; her brothers and older sister all had memories of Jayne, and the tabloid stories and tawdry unauthorized biographies only focused on the poor decisions, turbulent love life, the late-career downward spiral, and the unfortunate end. They didn't focus on the woman. Over time, Hargitay felt compelled to fill that hole and get to know the woman as best she could. That quest became this documentary, directed by Hargitary herself. My Mom Jayne doesn't gloss over the well-known image of Jayne Mansfield, but it stands with both feet firmly planted and hands cupped around its mouth to shout its message: Jayne Mansfield was, first and foremost, a human being. She was a little girl who lost her father at the age of three (a heart attack while driving, for which Jayne was in the car while it happened), and it affected the rest of her life. She was fluent in almost half a dozen languages, and was an accomplished pianist and violinist. Like Marilyn Monroe, she came to Hollywood looking to be a serious actress, and like Monroe, the studios took one look at her, decided her best assets lay between her neck and her hips, and marketed her thusly. She was a mother, and a doting one at that, but also troubled by depression, dissatisfaction with how her image boxed in her career opportunities, and was unable to keep a relationship going. A lot of biographies of famous people seek to humanize their subject. The Kurt Cobain biographical movie failed utterly, as it regurgitated every fact we already knew and wallowed in idol worship. The Paul Reubens toes the line between humanizing and mythologizing. My Mom Jayne succeeds, largely because we are going on the journey at the same time as Hargitay does. We hear her reactions to discovering old footage from TV interviews, home movies, and pictures that show the human side to the matinee idol. As it fills in the blanks for her, it fills in those blanks for us. And as she comes to learn more about her famous mother and respect the woman behind the image, so do we, and it's hard not to feel for Hargitay as she now has to reassess herself and her feelings about her mom in light of this new information. My Mom Jayne is the definition of bittersweet; by the end, Hargitay is still sad that she never got to have a connection to her mom while she was alive, but she understands her mom so much more, and she feels better for it. Healed. Whole. There's a line in The Crow: "'Mother' is the name of a god on the lips and hearts of children everywhere." For a long time, Mariska Hargitay was denied this universal experience by cruel chance. The journey she undertakes in My Mom Jayne is about how she comes to a place where she is comfortable being able to feel the sentiment in that line. It doesn't try to reinvent the documentary format. It just wants to be honest and real. That's all Hargitay is after -- the reality behind the public image -- so the documentary about it shouldn't be any different.