Shower Thoughts: Old
When I take a shower, my mind tends to wander to different subjects. Some are interesting. Some are irritable things bothering me. Some are silly or weird little thoughts that fall apart when you really consider the feasibility. And some are thoughts that follow me out of the shower and linger in my brain afterward.
And that’s what this post is about. A shower thought about the movie "Old."
Sometimes I watch the movie reviews of Amanda the Jedi on YouTube, which means when I finish watching a video and the next one auto-starts, sometimes it will be an Amanda the Jedi video. And yesterday it was "A Knock at the Cabin," which today had my brain segue into thoughts about the movie "Old" while I was showering. Mostly because I was thinking about "Flowers In the Attic" and "My Sweet Audrina."
"Flowers in the Attic" was a societal phenomenon back in the day. There were the books, trashy novels that you would find on the coffee tables of some of the people you would least suspect of reading such things. And then later there was a TV mini-series starring a pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer Kristy Swanson.
And that grandma? She completely terrified me.
It was because of watching reruns of that mini-series that I ended up reading V.C. Andrews novels at much too young of an age. Like, I didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but it’s all been stored up in the ol’ memory vault.
I started with "Flowers in the Attic," then followed it up with her other novels. Just delving way too deep into the fucked up drama of the Dollanganger family. It’s been YEARS since I’ve read those books, and maybe I don’t remember things clearly, but what I do remember? Stuck in my brain forever.
Like, I was scared of the grandmother in "Flowers In the Attic." Then I read her story and I couldn’t help empathizing with her. Like, she had a bad marriage but didn’t think she had any other choices. And she was raising a daughter that wasn’t her own? So she had all this resentment toward the girl she was expected to raise and love, which translated into her anger and resentment toward her husband being focused on the spoiled young girl. And that the girl grew up to be worse and worse of a person? A beautiful but poisonous flower? It was like proof that her dislike was always justified.
And I’m pretty sure, if I remember correctly, that while the grandmother was the terrifying figure in the children’s life, it was actually their own mother that was the worst one.
It was their mother that brought them the arsenic-laced donuts. As a treat. That they were grateful to receive because they thought it was proof their mother still loved and cared for them.
It was their mother that brought them into that house. That told them they would have to live in the attic "For a little while. Just until my father forgives me. Just until he dies. Just until…" Then her father died and she didn’t tell the children. Then she was getting remarried and she was worried her new husband wouldn’t like that she was bringing children into the marriage. Then she was married and it was "too late." And the whole time, the children were withering away in that attic, mentally and physically warped by their confinement.
And then Cory died. And it was tragic because he was the sweetest of the children. Their heart and soul.
And that was just the START of the fucked upness of the Dollanganger family drama.
And my mind drifted to "My Sweet Audrina" and the ephemeral nature of memory. She was assaulted and forgot herself and her parents let her, thinking that it would be better for her. And her cruel cousin who was jealous of her tormenting her when she was "seven," telling her that she would never be as good as the first Audrina, the real Audrina.
And that Audrina married her rapist. Oh, sorry, he didn’t rape her. He just watched and didn’t stop it. But he’d had a crush on her and he loved her and he’d made sure to run into her and wiggle his way into her life when she didn’t remember him and they’d fallen in love and they’d gotten married and they had a happy life together and…
Everyone around Audrina knew what had happened to her except Audrina. They tried to use the excuse that they were protecting her. Which meant that it was okay that they lied to her and gaslit her and manipulated her memories and entire sense of being into becoming the person they wanted her to be. It was okay because it was for her own good.
And she spent her whole life envious and jealous of "the real" Audrina. That perfect beautiful girl everyone spoke about and that she could never be even close to being as good as.
A beautiful girl. A flawed girl. A girl with her own thoughts and feelings, but who now only exists in the memories of the people around her. A girl Audrina could never even think of becoming, because she was made out of starlight and memberberries, sweetly poisonous to the Audrina left behind. An idol with all the rough bits scraped off, retaining only the perfections and none of the flaws and uniqueness of the real girl she was.
The "real Audrina" never existed. And "the sweet Audrina" was actually someone terrified of not being good enough for the people that had loved the real Audrina.
Which made me think of the movie "Old."
The doctor who shows all the signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s, but who the movie makers decided to give schizophrenia instead, when he clearly has Alzheimer’s, a disease of the memory.
Alzheimer’s would have made so much more sense. But I guess there are some things that terrify even people that make horror movies. Forgetting. Remembering. Losing yourself in the past while the present and the future become dark and terrifying places to be.
Alzheimer’s is a frightening disease. And that it can effect anyone? That it can suddenly start and there’s nothing you can do about it? That you might not even realize that you’ve been effected, and that it will be the people around you that notice your oddities first?
Alzheimer’s is not a disease of forgetting. It’s a disease of remembering. Of your mind going back to places and times you want to remember or that you want to forget while your body continues to exist in the present. And everything around you becomes terrifying because your mind was in one place, and then suddenly you find yourself somewhere else surrounded by unfamiliar people.
It’s why "50 First Dates" isn’t really a romantic story. It is the description of one woman’s nightmare.
A man fell in love with her and decided that he was going to make a life with her. And she’s meeting him for the first time every single day with only his accounts of their life together to tell her that she’s happy. That she chose to be with him. And her family corroborate his stories.
And her father and brother and her friends are all getting older and older as the years pass. And she remembers herself as a young woman with a bright future ahead of her. Only to wake up every day to see herself in the mirror, changed and changing. And that she woke up suddenly pregnant. That she woke up suddenly a mother. A grandmother. An orphan. A widow. An old woman in a care facility.
Alzheimer’s can take anyone. And I can understand why that might be a concept too terrifying for even a horror movie maker to face.
Before the vaccine, there was a 19-year-old girl that had early-onset Alzheimer’s as a sequela of COVID. I didn’t see any follow-ups of her story, but I assume that her family is trying their best and want to retain some privacy. They simply wanted the world to know that Alzheimer’s is a possible result of COVID.
And thinking about her, I have to wonder how it must be like to have Alzheimer’s when you’re so young. To only have 19-years worth of memories to sink back into.
People that are 90 years old with Alzheimer’s have 90 years worth of history to re-experience. But what do you have when you’re only 19?
Do the years of infancy come back to you, sharp and present? Do you mentally return to being a baby in your mother’s arms only to find yourself in an adult body in a cold cruel world? Or do those early life memories still remain dark and you only have the memories from when you’re like 5 and older? So you only have 14 years of memories to live in?
Do you forget how to read and write? Are you sad because you suddenly go from having childhood friends to being in an adult body?
I can understand why the movie makers were too afraid to have the doctor suffer from Alzheimer’s in the movie "Old." Because at our core, memories are what make us who we are. They are the strands holding our consciousness together. And without them, we are vulnerable to the world and people around us, forced to accept the person we are told we are supposed to be.
And then I let those thoughts be washed down the drain. And I got out of the shower. And here I am. And writing down the memory of those thoughts isn’t as horrifying and disquieting as when those thoughts lived in my head.
And I can’t imagine being stuck in that moment with those thoughts forever vivid and fresh in my mind. Trapped in a recursive loop with no way to break free.
~Harper Kingsley
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