“I Am Not Invisible!”: The Mother-Daughter Wardrobes in ‘Mermaids’
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Winona Ryder and Cher’s routes to success couldn’t have been more different. By 1990, Cher had already weathered several iterations of her music career, overcoming the raised eyebrows of cinephiles and industry professionals to successfully claw her way into films. Winona had exploded overnight as a child actor, an emblem of late-80s teenager-hood; gothic, off-kilter, cynical and endlessly watchable. Yet their shared carefulness and caring-ness meld into one another by the time of Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids. With this filmic outing, the pair chose to refashion these meta-standings in the public to negotiate the intimacies of mothers and daughters, letting their star personas settle on their frames, guiding their movements into and around one another.
Through Cher, Mrs. Flax is a wondrously unpredictable figure, holding the actress and pop star’s celebrity standing up to a waiting audience, who were desperate to ground her in something recognisable without getting too close to her otherworldly glitz. While the film is mostly told through lead character’s Charlotte’s eyes, it has moments of following Mrs. Flax.
Alternating between these perspectives is a smart way of illuminating both women, seeing them as fully realised and wholly unknowable—as they were to each other. As daughters and mothers often are to each other. Costume designer Marit Allen, whose work on Little Shop of Horrors and The Witches before this had cemented her talent for channelling an eccentric vision into something indelible and near, filters these complicated dynamics into a coherent vision. The Flax daughters observe the space Mrs. Flax occupies and they position themselves around it accordingly.
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Armed with their matriarch’s colourful flightiness, we meet the Flaxes after years of moving around, from anonymous suburban house to anonymous suburban house. Within the opening monologue, Mrs. Flax hands over two plates of dinner to her daughters, scattered with finger food, shiny and processed: another way of skirting lengthy commitment. Charlotte responds to the portioning off and sizing down of her life by searching for solidity, ensuring her worldview is smooth and unwavering and positioned to serve a higher, consistent purpose. In preparing for her future as a nun, she drenches every surface in dark solemnity, sprinkling graphic Catholic artefacts across her room. With the combined impact of the Flax women, their house becomes a patchwork quilt of clashing personalities, any negative space aggressively filled, like chess pieces moving around the board while their players feign nonchalance.
Mrs. Flax is introduced holding up multi-coloured outfits, each decorated with a different pattern and silky sheen. She shimmies around her softly lit room to Peggy Lee’s “Fever”. Charlotte sits outside in her plain black dress and sensible black headband, invested in the chorus of nuns singing on TV. Clothing is immediately integral to the structure of this relationship, offering them easy ways of understanding themselves - familiar places to shelter in and call their own. Or as Charlotte admits after moving to their new house: “I don’t like waking up and not knowing where I am.”
“The movie is concerned with litigating which of the barriers between mother and daughter are necessary and which are superficial, which are natural, and which are man made.”
In Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart she details the tempestuous and devoted relationship with her own mother, Chongmi. After Chongmi exclaims, “You know what I realised? I’ve never met someone like you.” Zauner reflects that “we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities.” Mermaids lends this relationship physical weight in a similar way, tracing how these women tangibly overlap.
Late in the film, Charlotte has sex with neighbour Joe in the bell tower, leaving her beloved little sister Kate to almost die after tumbling into the river. Her mother arrives at the hospital to find Charlotte clad in her baby pink polka-dot dress, dishevelled and cold; a rude, ill-fitting imposition on the “psychic space” Mrs. Flax had endeavoured to isolate from her daughters.
Marit Allen goes to great lengths to embed each character’s distinct style into the story, leaving a trail of statement pieces to crop up unannounced, as clothes do in real life. By the time Charlotte and Mrs. Flax confront one another at the family home, they are dressed in loose-fitting cardigans—one white, one black. Such unidentifiable pieces mark a new chapter of these women’s relationship, one governed by obvious differences but less fraught with performed identity.
“If you’re smart, you’ll stay away from me!” Mrs. Flax warns as she stomps into Kate’s room, trailed by silently tortured Charlotte. As they wander through the space, their current home, with the armour of their clothes set aside, the objects they have assembled as extensions of themselves become reimagined as tripwires waiting to ensnare them. In the end, it is one of Kate’s storybooks which Charlotte tentatively hands over which reignites their anger and recontextualises this single fight to span the whole of their lives, stretching the fabric of their self-fashioned identities. “I am not invisible!” Charlotte yells across the porch. There is an urgency to this battle-cry, as she vows to no longer to only accept whatever space may be left over from her mother, and instead occupy her own.
While promoting the film adaptation of her semi-autobiographical Postcards From the Edge, Carrie Fisher once surmised in an MTV interview that “my mother is endlessly my mother.” Much like Mermaids, it is a sentiment both simple and hopelessly complex, belying the keenly felt imposition of such an emotional bond. The movie is concerned with litigating which of the barriers between mother and daughter are necessary and which are superficial, which are natural, and which are man made. Allen’s expertly crafted costuming is wielded to navigate the space stretching “endlessly” between them, fluctuating with every new appraisal of their dynamic.
In the end of the film, Charlotte grows out of her desire to become a nun, settling into an intellectual curiosity for Greek mythology. With it her wardrobe shifts into something more reflective of her mother’s multi-coloured taste: an unspoken ceasefire.
Neither Ryder nor Cher could be considered all-American girls, in fact they were loved for their innate rebelliousness and unwillingness to curb artistic expression, yet that final scene of the Flax women dancing wildly around the kitchen table is undeniably lovely. Captured like a dreamy snapshot, for a moment Charlotte and Mrs. Flax physically reflect one another entirely. Two onscreen icons briefly concerned only with their relationship to the space and one another, both in film and in the public sphere.
Words: Anna McKibbin