The Daniels’ multiverse epic is, at its heart, a story about a mother (Evelyn Wang) and her daughter. But the son (Joy’s boyfriend, but also the film’s relationship to a younger generation of male filmmakers) is present in the film’s critique of maternal expectation. More directly, the film engages with the Chinese immigrant mother’s dream of a successful son—and the crushing weight of that dream. The film argues that the mother-son bond can be healed not through sacrifice or separation, but through radical, absurdist acceptance: the mother learning to see her son’s failures as simply another version of success.

No novel has dissected the eroticized, suffocating mother-son bond with more psychological precision than D.H. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913). Gertrude Morel, a disappointed wife, transfers all her passion and ambition to her sons, particularly the artistically inclined Paul. Lawrence writes: “She was a woman of whims and moods, and yet he was tied to her by a bond that was as strong as life.” Paul cannot love Miriam or Clara fully because his emotional and sexual energies are already claimed by his mother. Her death at the novel’s end is not liberation but a shattering amputation. Lawrence crystallizes the central tragedy of this bond: the mother gives the son his creative fire, but the same fire prevents him from kindling any other intimate flame.

James L. Brooks’ film offers a corrective: the mother-son relationship is not the central conflict, but a vital subplot. Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) has a famously fraught bond with her daughter, but her relationship with her grandson (and later, her son) is one of clear-eyed tenderness. When her son Tommy struggles with school and rebellion, Aurora does not smother or abandon him; she negotiates. This represents a more mature literary and cinematic paradigm: the mother as ally, not adversary. The film suggests that the mother-son bond can evolve past the Oedipal swamp into a practical, loving friendship.

Of all the bonds that shape human experience, the relationship between a mother and her son is perhaps the most primal, the most fraught with contradiction, and the most enduringly fascinating for artists. It is a dyad built on absolute dependence that must evolve toward independence, on unconditional love that often curdles into suffocation, and on a unique psychological tension: the first woman a son ever loves, and the first man a mother must learn to let go.

The Gothic tradition amplified the figure of the tyrannical mother. In Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom , the mother is a hysterical obstacle to libertine freedom. More popularly, V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic (1979) gave the 20th century its most lurid version: Corrine Dollanganger, who locks her four children in an attic and slowly poisons them for inheritance. This melodramatic archetype—the beautiful, selfish mother who prioritizes male approval or wealth over her sons’ lives—became a cultural shorthand for maternal betrayal.

The thread between mother and son can be a rope that binds and strangles, or a line that tethers one to safety in a storm. In art, as in life, it is almost always both. And that paradox—the unbearable, beautiful, and unbreakable knot—is why storytellers will never stop trying to untie it. What are your most memorable depictions of this relationship? From the terrifying Mrs. Bates to the tender resilience of Ma Joad, the conversation continues.

Euripides’ Medea takes the logic one step further. When Jason betrays her, Medea murders their children. The act is not born of madness but of calculated revenge. By destroying her sons, Medea destroys the future of the man who wronged her. This horrific inversion—the mother as the agent of death rather than life—presents the ultimate fear embedded in the mother-son relationship: that a mother’s love, when wounded, can become a weapon of annihilation.

Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece presents a different pathology. Jim Stark (James Dean) is not a psychotic; he is a sensitive boy drowning in a world of weak men and hysterical women. His mother is not overtly monstrous—she is banal. She nags, she frets, she smoothes over his father’s cowardice. Jim cries out, “What do you do when you have to be a man?” The film’s tragedy is that his mother has no answer. The 1950s suburban mother, as depicted here, is a castrating force not through violence but through emotional emasculation. She has so successfully domesticated the family that there is no room for masculine rebellion, only tragedy.