Well, I've got to write about this because of the HDTGM controversy about Drop Dead Fred(1991), where at least half of the audience were on the side of Team Mom, opposite Team Fred. The argument for Team Fred is that Fred is Elizabeth's imaginary friend who allows Elizabeth to examine all the unseemly parts of her life and society so that she can process them, learn, develop and grow into an adult, but is stunted developmentally by her mom, who tapes Fred into a Jack-in-the-Box, halting Elizabeth's personal development into her adulthood. Elizabeth is pushed around and spoken to as a child for the next twenty-one years/ by her boyfriend and mother as an adult, until Elizabeth releases Fred from the Jack-in-the-Box, who encourages her to behave wildly in order to break free of the authoritarian strictures imposed upon her by, largely, her abusive mother. Team Mom's argument is that the Mom is a good mother and Fred is annoying and/or creepy, so the movie is bad. The Mom controls Elizabeth through fear, by telling Elizabeth that if she isn't a good girl, boys will run away from her, and that it is Elizabeth's fault her father left them both. According to Mom, everything that goes wrong is Elizabeth's fault and the way to being a good girl is to do everything her mother tells her to do. When Elizabeth tells her mother plainly what she wants, her mother ignores her wishes and compels her to do what Mom wants instead. To "help" Phoebe, Mom's solution is to dress her just like Mom and make her hair and make up like Mom's, then to give her drugs that stunt her emotionally by removing her capacity to deal with problems completely, firmly ensnaring Elizabeth into a less independent and more easily influenced state. A necessary tenet of Team Mom is the support of deliberate child abuse meant to perpetually blame and hobble a child emotionally so that they are easily controlled. Which is abominable. Team Fred all the way.
