VERTIGO, reviewed by my mom

My mother did not want any arthouse shit.

"La Belle Noiseuse," I said. "It's French."

"Subtitles? Ehhhhhhh."

"It's also four hours."

"No."

This was the early 90s, by the way. And this was not a simple refusal. Her "no" involved laughing in my face. And her terms were final. No reading the movie. No abstraction. No weirdness. No depressing ambiguity. We went to see things like Sister Act. This is not me shit-talking Sister Act. This is me telling you we both enjoyed Sister Act.

Alonso has been my main moviegoing companion for 31 years. Before him, until her death in 2012, the other most consistent person was my mother. My earliest memories are of her taking me to see Santa and The Three Bears, 101 Dalmatians, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Doctor Dolittle at the Loew's Civic in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, all of it at my insistence. I would point out the ad in the newspaper and beg until she gave in. As I was not yet in first grade and therefore not quite an adult – by age seven I would demand to be dropped off at the theater and left happily on my own – she was my chaperone.

In my early teenage years, I needed rides to the theater and help getting into R-rated films. This is how I wrangled my mother into seeing Halloween on opening weekend in 1978. Stop reading and look at this right now. The YouTube link I just dropped here is quite literally representative of how our audience reacted to this film, which is not at all the point of my story, but it's two minutes long and accurate because we weren't ready for that film's little narrative twist in 1978. The next year she and I saw Alien. After that one she said, "No more horror movies. I need a cigarette."

After college, living in Texas, I became the chaperone. I lived in Fort Worth. She was in Garland, a northeastern suburb of Dallas. I wasn't enthusiastic about driving to her home and hanging around with my alcoholic stepfather, so I invented a better plan. Meet in the middle – the center of Dallas – at NorthPark Mall, have lunch at Luby's Cafeteria, walk through stores, and see a movie at the General Cinema NorthPark 1 & 2. She agreed to this plan as she, too, was no fan of hanging around my alcoholic stepfather.

This happened about once a month, almost always at that same location, and, while she loved going to the movies with me, she didn't care much about what was playing, as long as it was something more like Sister Act and less like a Jacques Rivette nudity marathon. We ate chicken-fried steak at Luby's, wandered around Neiman Marcus so she could look at purses and pretend she didn't want any of them, then see the movie.

We saw films with titles she would forget as soon as we left the theater, and she never bothered to remember which actors were in them unless they were so famous that their household-name status was clearly understood. Tom Cruise, yes. Julia Roberts, yes, with some assistance. ("That girl in that movie with Richard Gere. The girl with the hair.") Weeks later, back at the mall for another, standing outside Luby's so she could get in a pre-film smoke, she would tell me that she had told a friend about the most recent movie, but that she couldn't recall the relevant details.

Her: "Don't make fun of me."

Me: "Your memory is an ashtray overflowing with Merit 100s."

Earlier, at some point in the 1980s, a series of Alfred Hitchcock films were given a nationwide re-release. We saw Rear Window one Saturday afternoon at the Dallas Galleria. Eventually I would work at that ice-rink-level theater while at home on breaks from college, and we saw movies like Out of Africa for free. Before watching it she was very enthusiastic for the Robert Redford angle. After watching it, she said, "That was long."

I came out in the early 90s and from that moment going forward our mother-son lunches involved one topic: Gay. Before all that, she held the typical middle-aged Baptist viewpoint on the subject, revulsion. "Sick" was a word she once used in my presence. It was a go-to word for anything that bothered her and seemed morally suspect. But almost immediately after I dropped that bomb, she performed a shocking about-face, joined PFLAG, began marching in the Dallas Pride Parade with that organization, and became friendly with a group of gay men her own age. Through them she met lots of single guys, and she liked to tell me about the ones who would be perfect for me. Their qualities were usually being homosexual and employed.

"Please don't hit on men for me."

"You need a partner."

"I don't."

"I don't see you dating."

"I am, I just don't tell you anything about it."

"ARE YOU BEING SAFE?!"

"Never heard of it."

We saw Far and Away ("Boring."), we saw Four Weddings and a Funeral ("Cute," the highest compliment), we saw Bad Girls – enthusiastically endorsed because women had guns and used them – and then one afternoon we saw Vertigo. Another Hitchcock re-release. Those often dropped into the NorthPark because the house was big, the screen was big, the sound was big. Titanic was the kind of movie one saw at NorthPark, and we did. We went to Vertigo because she had liked Rear Window. During the pre-movie lunch, I learned that she had seen Psycho while pregnant with me. I said, "You traumatized your fetus. Hope you're happy."

Once, in the mid 1980s, we went to the Dallas Museum of Art to see a Picasso show. Too many lopsided tits. She was angry I had taken her. Her review: "He was sick! Do you like this? You're sick too!"

So as Jimmy Stewart became increasingly unhinged, treated Barbara Bel Geddes like an afterthought, and placed mounting, ugly, demands on Kim Novak, I could feel the rage simmering in my viewing companion. Scoffing laughter, a variety of small and not-so-small groans, at least one actual "harumph." When it was over, she was silent. Had a cigarette. Decided she did indeed want to use her for-very-special-occasions-only Neiman Marcus store credit card to buy an oversized sweater on the Last Call table.

When we parted at her vehicle – a teal Ford Ranger with a rainbow flag and a PFLAG sticker on the back, which, along with her late-middle-age-mom short haircut and smoking habit, made her the most disappointing lesbian catnip in the DFW area – she said, "No more Alfred Hitchcock."

"Well, he's dead, so it's unlikely you'll be having to see any more of his films."

"Good. That movie was sick, and he was a pervert."

"I liked it."

"Well..."

"Say it."

"You are too."