As a devotee of the groundbreaking Mary Tyler Moore Show, I was grieved to hear of Moore’s recent death. But at news of her passing, what came to my mind most persistently about her was not her comically lovable role as Mary Richards (and before that Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show), but her performance as the narcissist mother in the award-winning 1980 film Ordinary People.
Robert Redford’s directorial debut, the movie earned several Oscars, including for Best Picture, and it showcased a stellar cast that included America’s iconic sweetheart in a breakout performance. The woman who had turned the world on with her smile showed a memorably dark side of motherhood rarely seen before on screen let alone acknowledged in society.
Moore must have recognized the risk she took on in the role but also in a very real sense that she was made for the part. There is always another side of the captivating smile, and Moore proved willing to subvert her adored celebrity status to show that truth, however ugly.
Attractive, capable, controlled, and status-driven, Moore’s narcissist mother character, Beth Jarrett, is comfortably ensconced in an upper crusty community on Chicago’s suburban North Shore. Beth keeps a perfectly appointed home, charms at parties, and travels extensively with her well-earning tax attorney husband, Calvin, a loving father but deluded and enabling husband played poignantly by Donald Sutherland.
Moore nails it as the perfect-on-the-outside/monster-on-the-inside narcissist mother and wife: competent, pretty, slim, clever, well-dressed, friendly, and fun-loving to the world; while callous, manipulative, angry, withholding, and unforgiving at home.
Tragedy Strains the Family System (Spoiler Alert)
Had it not been for a devastating family tragedy, Beth’s pathology might have gone unconfronted by Calvin and their teenage son Conrad, Timothy Hutton, who won Best Supporting Actor for the role.
Where the film’s storytelling begins, Conrad has just returned home from a four-month hospitalization after a suicide attempt, and he and his parents are trying to get back on track with a gaping loss in their midst. We learn through flashbacks that while sailing on Lake Michigan Conrad and his older brother Buck, an outgoing star athlete, ran afoul of a storm, and their boat capsized, in part because of Buck’s carelessness. Clinging to the boat in roiling waters, Buck succumbed to exhaustion and drowned, while Conrad survived.
Redford paces the film expertly, steadily unburying the family’s grief, brokenness, and harrowing interpersonal dynamics like shoveled-off layers of Midwestern snow.
In a role that no doubt inspired Robin Williams’ performance in Good Will Hunting, Judd Hirsch plays a rumpled, compassionate, straight-talking psychiatrist to the troubled Conrad, who gradually wakes up to his survivor’s guilt and his mother’s incapacity to love him.
Moore’s Beth Jarrett: The Quintessential Narcissist Mother
Through tellingly enacted family scenes, Moore’s Beth is revealed as a classic narcissist, scaffolding gaping emptiness with a persona of perfection, supported by denial, blame, rejection, and rage.
Beth never visited Conrad in the hospital and makes it known to him and her husband that she regards his depression and attempted suicide as a shameful family blemish. She is threatened that he is in therapy, angrily telling Calvin that the family’s affairs should be kept private. In flashbacks, she swoons over Buck’s attentions, basking in the glow of her favored golden child like an enamored school girl, a striking contrast to her aloof disregard for Conrad’s anguish and her brittle unresponsiveness when he repeatedly tries to reach out to her.
Conrad shows obvious symptoms of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—hypervigilance, depression, insomnia, nightmares, loss of appetite. His PTSD is emotional fallout from the boating tragedy but also common among scapegoated children and likely a condition that was developing before his brother’s death.
Moore portrays her character’s narcissism to a tee in turn after turn, from her subtle recoil at Conrad’s physical presence, to her coolly clipped speech and thinly masked punishing manner, to her disturbingly inappropriate infatuation with Buck, to her sexual and psychological manipulations of Calvin, to her trapped paralysis when Conrad gives her a conciliatory hug after she and his father return home from their New Year’s holiday vacation.
“Mothers Don’t Hate Their Sons”
When Conrad finally confronts his mother about not visiting him in the hospital, he shouts, “You would have visited Buck if he had been in the hospital,” to which she spits back, “Buck would have never been in the hospital!”
Beth’s and Calvin’s picture perfect marriage unravels as he increasingly questions her treatment of their son and her refusal to discuss difficult family truths, typical narcissistic stonewalling. Near the end of the film during a golf trip that Beth persuades Calvin to take without Conrad along, Beth picks a fight and bitterly expresses the narcissist’s defining cynicism and lack of empathy, qualities she projects onto others:
Calvin: “Can’t you see anything except in terms of how it affects you?!”
Beth: “No! I can’t! And neither can you and neither can anybody else, only maybe I’m just a little more honest about it.”
As Calvin recognizes his wife’s tragic inability to love, Moore’s character stands her ground on footing that will soon betray her, or, more to the point, collapse under her betrayal.
About Conrad, Calvin tells her, “All he wants is to know that you don’t hate him.”
“God!” Beth says, “How could I hate him? Mothers don’t hate their sons!”
Helpful? Buy me a coffee.Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books. She is working on a memoir (read excerpts) about life, and few near-deaths, in a narcissistic family.
Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.
Related Articles by Julie L. Hall
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18 Comments
Thank you so much for writing this. I loved this movie because it depicted the same dysfunctional dynamic between my mother and I. It was a relief to see I wasn’t the only person experiencing this.
NB:
I loved the movie too. It really hit home when I was young and still does. Mary Tyler Moore (RIP) deserved the Oscar.
When does your book come out?
Hi Janet. My book on the narcissistic family is scheduled for publication October 2019 through Da Capo Lifelong Books/Hachette Book Group.
I want to buy your book. My brother committed suicide because of our narc mother. She almost destroyed me too so I have go no contact.
I remember discussing this movie many years ago, before I understood my family dynamic and my parents narcissism. I don’t even recall who I was talking to or how it came up. But I do remember saying that the mother character was a very bad person. Perhaps I subconsciously saw my mother in her. Now, of course, I have more insight about the topic of narcissism. And I can see how this film is dead-on accurate in its depiction of the narcissistic parent.
Yes, when I saw the film “Ordinary People” with Mary Tyler Moore, it sent chills up and down my spine because that character reminded me do much of my mother. Years later my stepbrother told me the same thing and he committed suicide.
Ordinary People was a movie I am glad to have seen once. It disturbed me at the same time because it was my life as a child in many ways. The scenes are burnt into my memory more than any other movie has done.
I’m 61 now and looking back I think my father made a decision unconsciously or not to avoid confronting my mother about her hatred and anger toward me. I don’t hate him for that although there is some disappointment because my mother would have destroyed the family rather than to stop her constant attacks.
Thank you for writing this because it probably will help others early on instead of healing over decades of time.
I sobbed when I saw this movie. MTM was my mother.
I saw Ordinary People when I was 16 years old, and I was disappointed that Mary Tyler Moore’s Outstanding great performance as Beth Jarret lost to Sissy Spacek’s great performance as Loretta Lynn at the 1981 Oscars.
Spacek was (As Always!) amazing but Moore’s subtle, powerful, and complex portrayal of a mother unwilling or unable to love her mentally ill son Conrad left me with a question I still have to this day:
Was Beth Jarret evil?
I would have LOVED to ask Moore that, had I the opportunity when she was alive. (I’ll bet director Robert Redford could provide considerable insight on that question too.)
I don’t think the answer is as simple as labeling her a narcissist. Yes, Beth displays the shocking lack of empathy and self involvement of a narcissist, but we need to take into consideration the situation: she has just lost her other son to a tragic accident. Perhaps she favored one son over the other, but not to the extent a narcissist might.
Beth might indeed be a deep well of emotional coldness. On the other hand, she might be an Ordinary Person confronting (or not confronting) an unimaginably painful event by avoiding or fighting her grief for the fear if she gave in to intense emotions such as mourning (or love, for that matter) she would be utterly and permanently lost and overwhelmed.
So the alternative here is that Beth was fighting for her own emotional survival. Selfish behavior undoubtedly, but not necessarily indicative of narcissism. Her relationship with Conrad before the tragic accident might have been affectionate but not as loving as with her older son. We just don’t know.
Mary Tyler Moore’s performance was so pitch perfect and nuanced that we really can’t be sure about Beth Jarret. Moore may have intended either characterization in her career’s greatest performance. She has taken that secret to her grave.
Would we judge Beth so harshly had she been Conrad’s father? Had Beth been a man, her lack of affection and emotional distance would have seemed normal…or ordinary.
Yes. Both my brother and i had the same response as you to that movie.
She was rage in a cage. Certain lines in the movie demonstrate that rage/anger. Like the son relating that she was upset they had to regrout tile and clean a rug because he bled on the floor during his attempted suicide. She was mad about him trying to commit suicide, not because it would be another tragedy but that it didn’t look good to the outside world…image.
I actually rented this movie because I read your book. It’s definitely like what’s going on with my mother. Thank you for opening my eyes to this.
Steven, there is an interview with Moore where she says that she saw the character Beth as a victim and tried to play her as such. Of course Beth IS a victim of the devastating loss of one of her two children, her obvious favorite, but then so is Calvin who ostensibly does a much better job of carrying on with life and being a good father to Conrad.
I think there is a lot of evidence that Beth is a narcissist, or at least a very cold person and perfectionist for whom Conrad doesn’t measure up to her standards. But unless someone has experienced the loss of a child, she cannot possibly judge — or condemn — the behavior of a parent who has suffered that trauma. My father lost his sister at a young age and no one in his immediate family was ever the same. He bore a lifetime scar from that event and its aftermath and transmitted the effects of the trauma onto his children.
In the scene near the end of the movie where Calvin is crying and telling Beth that he no longer loves her, he says something like, “it’s as if a part of you died with Buck”. Well, yes, that is exactly how it is when a parent loses her child.
I’ve seen this movie twice and MTM’s character IS my older sister. I often wonder why her friends and doting boyfriend cannot see who she really is. I’ve had enough abuse to last a lifetime and have thankfully gone no contact. It took me too many years of hoping she would change. I need to see “Ordinary People” again.
I can relate to this movie so much. In 2015, my younger sister and I both had different forms of cancer. I survived. My sister did not. My mother acted like she hated me. She actually asked my brother why would God leave me here and take my sister. Of course, this hurt me to my core. I never talked to my mother about it, because she developed congestive heart failure soon after. Who did she call on to manage her care? I did what I could for her, sometimes to the point of being exhausted, because I felt I needed to “do my duty as a daughter”. She is deceased now, and I finally have some peace. I have this movie on my DVD shelf at home. I knew my relationship with my mother was strained at times, but clarity came forth when she projected her anger onto me after my sister’s death. I realize now that she was not capable of loving me in a healthy way. I need to grieve the fact that a healthy relationship with her was not possible.
I still think Robert Redford, who directed Moore to an Oscar nomination in this masterpiece, could give considerable insight into this question:
‘Was Beth Jarret evil, or was she traumatized by one son’s death and the other’s suicide attempt?’
We know nothing of what Beth was like before the two tragedies. Maybe she was a very nice person and then she was changed irrevocably.
I agree with you so much. I was reading this and did not consider Beth to be a narcissist. She is what they call avoidant. She suppresses her emotions because that is how she knows how to cope.