Modernist literature brought further nuance. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is arguably the definitive novel of this theme. Gertrude Morel, disappointed by her coarse husband, pours her emotional and intellectual energy into her sons, particularly Paul. The result is a ferocious, almost romantic bond that cripples Paul’s ability to love other women. Lawrence renders this not as pathology but as tragic necessity: the mother’s love is creative and destructive, a life-giving force that becomes a cage. In a different key, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Stephen Dedalus’s mother as a figure of pious, weeping Catholicism—her quiet pressure (“O, if I only had died!”) represents the pull of family, nation, and religion that Stephen must escape to become an artist. The famous line “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” is an invocation of a spiritual father, but the novel’s emotional weight rests on the son’s silent, guilty departure from the mother.
Italian neorealism and its heirs offered more tender but no less complex portraits. In Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), the mother, Maria, is a figure of quiet, pragmatic faith. She prays at the medium’s house, she supports her husband Antonio, and she holds the family together. But the film’s emotional core is between father and son. Yet in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), a mysterious visitor seduces every member of a bourgeois family, including the son. When the visitor leaves, the mother (played by Silvana Mangano) is the only one who achieves a kind of sublime transcendence—she gives herself to the earth, crawling naked and weeping. The son, by contrast, descends into artistic madness. Here, the mother’s response to abandonment is a raw, regressive reconnection with the maternal earth; the son’s is abstract alienation.
Cinema, with its visual and performative dimensions, has rendered this relationship even more viscerally. Perhaps the most iconic filmic treatment is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Norman Bates’s relationship with his mother is a ghostly, internalized possession. He has literally preserved her—taxidermied her, as it were—and speaks in her voice. The mother is dead but omnipotent, a shrill, punishing superego that murders any woman Norman desires. Hitchcock externalizes the Freudian drama: the son cannot separate, so he becomes the mother. It is the ultimate horror of the undifferentiated bond. Japanese Mom Son Incest Movie With English Subtitle
Ultimately, the mother-son relationship in cinema and literature endures because it is the first drama we all live through. It is the story of how we become ourselves in relation to the person who gave us life—and how that debt can never be fully repaid, only transformed into art. From Oedipus to Norman Bates, from Mrs. Morel to Dorothea Fields, these stories remind us that the mother’s love is not a simple good or evil. It is a force of nature, beautiful and terrible, and the son’s task—across every narrative—is to learn to see his mother as a separate person, and in doing so, finally become his own.
More recently, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) offers a devastating inversion. Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is a man paralyzed by guilt after accidentally causing a fire that killed his three children. His ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) is the children’s mother, but the film is interested in how a son relates to his own mother. Lee’s mother is an alcoholic whom he has long abandoned. When he is forced to care for his teenage nephew, the film circles the question: can a man who failed as a father (and a son) learn to be a surrogate father? The mother is absent, but her absence—like Norman Bates’s mother—is a haunting presence. In Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), the mother-son bond is pushed into horror territory again, but this time from the mother’s perspective. Annie (Toni Collette) has a fraught relationship with her son Peter, which escalates after the death of her own monstrous mother. The film literalizes the transmission of trauma: the son becomes the vessel for a demonic ritual, and the mother’s love turns into a desperate, failed attempt to save him. It is a brutal, supernatural rendering of the idea that a mother’s unresolved past devours her child. Modernist literature brought further nuance
Literature and cinema also explore cross-cultural variations. In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple , Celie’s relationship with her sons is mediated by abuse and separation—she loses them to adoption, and the pain is a silent river under the novel. In contrast, in Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose , the mother-son bond is barely present; the protagonist’s emotional world is shaped by a female friend, suggesting that the mother-son dyad, while universal, is not always central. Japanese cinema offers profound examples: in Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), a widowed father pretends to remarry so his adult daughter will leave home. But the mother’s absence is the film’s true subject. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018), a makeshift family includes a mother figure who “steals” a young boy from his abusive biological parents. The film asks: is a mother defined by biology or by care? The boy’s growing love for his surrogate mother, and his eventual forced return to his biological mother, is a wrenching comment on how the state and blood tie can destroy chosen bonds.
The 19th-century novel deepened the psychological interiority of this bond. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Pulkheria Alexandrovna, Raskolnikov’s mother, writes letters of such aching devotion that they become instruments of guilt. Her love is unconditional, almost suffocating, and Raskolnikov’s crime is as much against her image of him as against the pawnbroker. He cannot bear her goodness; it magnifies his own moral failure. Conversely, in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin , the mother-son relationship turns monstrous: Madame Raquin’s paralytic devotion to her son Camille (whom she infantilizes) indirectly enables his murder. Here, maternal love is a form of blindness, a refusal to see the son’s inadequacy or the danger around him. Gertrude Morel, disappointed by her coarse husband, pours
In classical literature, the mother-son relationship often serves as a moral or psychological anchor. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex remains the archetypal touchstone—not merely for Freudian theory, but for its raw depiction of how a son’s fate remains tragically intertwined with his mother’s. Jocasta is both nurturer and unwitting object of transgression; Oedipus’s journey to self-knowledge destroys her, and her suicide marks the collapse of his world. Here, the mother is not a separate subject but a mirror of the son’s destiny. In a quieter but equally profound vein, Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents Gertrude as a source of Hamlet’s torment. His obsession with her sexuality—“Frailty, thy name is woman!”—reveals a son’s horrified disappointment. Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius fractures Hamlet’s sense of reality, and his cruelty toward her (the closet scene) is a brutal attempt to reclaim moral authority over the woman who gave him life. The tragedy is that he never fully resolves his love for her; her death by poison—intended for him—is a final, accidental act of maternal sacrifice.
In contrast, independent and art-house films have given us more ambivalent, unresolved portraits. In Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), the young son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) idolizes his narcissistic father and rejects his mother’s (Laura Linney) intellectual ambitions. When he plagiarizes a song (“Hey, You” by Pink Floyd) and is caught, his mother’s quiet disappointment is more devastating than his father’s bluster. The film ends with Walt watching the giant squid and whale diorama at the Museum of Natural History—a metaphor for the monstrous, beautiful, incomprehensible struggle between his parents. The mother, finally, is the one who sees him clearly.
The mother-son relationship is one of the most emotionally charged and psychologically complex dynamics in both cinema and literature. Unlike the father-son bond, which often orbits around legacy, rivalry, and the Oedipal struggle for authority, or the mother-daughter relationship, frequently framed through mirroring, identity, and inherited trauma, the mother-son dyad occupies a unique space: it is the first bond, the primary source of nurturing and identity formation, yet it is also laden with expectations of separation, guilt, and silent devotion. Across genres, cultures, and eras, artists have returned to this relationship to explore themes of sacrifice, control, desire, independence, and the haunting persistence of early love.
So what unites these portrayals across two thousand years of art? First, the mother-son relationship is often a crucible for the son’s identity. Unlike the father, who represents law and entry into the symbolic order, the mother represents the pre-verbal, the body, the first home. To become an adult, the son must symbolically leave her—but that departure is never clean. Second, mothers in these works are frequently denied their own full subjectivity; they are seen through the son’s eyes, as either saints or monsters, nurturers or devourers. The rare works that give the mother her own voice—like Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline trilogy, or the film 20th Century Women (2016) directed by Mike Mills—are revolutionary precisely because they let the mother speak her own ambivalence. In 20th Century Women , Dorothea (Annette Bening) is a single mother in 1979 Santa Barbara, raising her teenage son Jamie. She enlists two younger women to help teach him about life. The film is tender and unsentimental: Dorothea knows she cannot give Jamie everything, that her love is partial, that he will inevitably reject her. She tells him, “I want you to have a life that doesn’t have me in it.” That is the most loving and painful thing a mother can say.