Surround yourself with hearts, smiley face, and make beautiful things–that’s what my mom was trying to teach me all these years–and you will be smiley face.
– Maggie Lee, Mommy (2015)
“Here,” Eduardo explained, “life is pain. You’re supposed to endure, keep quiet, find God.”
– Fiona Alison Duncan, Exquisite Mariposa (2019)
Mommy by Maggie Lee comprises intimate views of suburban family life superimposed with motion graphics, animations, drawings and scrolling text, as well as notes and conversations between the filmmaker and her mother. These are frequently pensive, importuning, a parent desperate to give her apparently prodigal daughter the best start in life. Filmed after the death of her mother, Mommy is Lee’s attempt at preservation, and a project to be continued.
A third of the way into the film, three notes from the filmmaker’s mother appear on screen. These notes, and perhaps the narration as well, confront but also dispatch some of the thorny messaging around filial piety, love, and guilt.
Dear Maggie Call me 233-6600-385 Love Mommy !! I love you !!
Dearest Maggie I love you always. There is extra money. Buy Nick a ticket for movies. He is being nice to us. Love Mom
Dear Cold water in the pot I already Boiled it Love Mom
I’ve been immersed in these notes ever since I screened the movie on Vimeo. I think the nativeness has something to do with it: excepting the occasional lapse, my mother made a point to leave handwritten notes on the counter if she figured I’d be home from school before her.
Here, distance means giving, and I feel taken care of by a kind of extended embrace.
Halfway through the film, there’s a close-up of a handwritten letter Lee received from her mother. It’s dated February 20 2012, two months before she died.
My Dearest daughter Maggie,
it begins.
Thanks for showing me around MoMA on your day off. I like your class very much. I wish we could spend longer next time.
I instantly think: love. Later: melancholy, pleading.
I observed that you’re getting busier with your new job, also you incur a lot of monthly and daily expenses and time for traveling. I calculated that if you consider coming home, you can save $400 a month rent, plus save laundry, food and traveling. You can still enjoy in New York City with your friends every day. Hope you will consider this.
The love of her life, her soul mate, had moved on and she was doing all she could to get her back. Looking closely, I half expect to find crumple marks on the paper, but there are no signs of damage. The chapter ends with a portrait of Yei-Ping Mennor-Lee standing outside of MoMA, smiling.
In section two of the film, Lee returns to the suburban New Jersey home where she grew up. She’s scared of being home, of feeling vulnerable. Yet that vulnerability is precisely what puts her to work. On foot, atop a ladder, and hunched over, she readies the house for market, keeping a record and accumulating as much material as possible. I strongly suspect that Lee begins her film according to a principal described by Moyra Davey: ‘Writers chase stories because they serve as containers for the raw material.’
I also associate this footage with something Davey cites from Isak Dinesen, when she wrote her book Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest: ‘The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go. … All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’ No doubt it’s during the time Lee is preparing this film that her mother’s lesson about surrounding yourself with hearts engraves itself upon her psyche, and becomes something of an idée fixe.
Now I find myself on my own, walking out of the darkest cloud. There’s nothing to be afraid of because I know there’s always an angel watching over me.
Years later, there’s an explicit image of surrounding yourself with hearts in Hearts Mission (2022), another work that combines the personal and pop-cultural detritus of Lee’s life.
On a rainy night drive through New York, Lee holds her camera above the dash, pointing at the cars and traffic signals along the roads and expressways. In the blurry, rose-tinted images, the sky, the traffic, her friend in the driver’s seat, is mute, but the headlamps and traffic signals flare with holographic elements, a pair of heart-shaped lenses held in front of the camera. I spend hours streaming and restreaming it online, wrapped up in this montage of New York, a kaleidoscope of hearts, convinced of Lee’s appetite to dream.
Hearts Mission (2022) was first shown as part of Happy at Édouard Montassut, Paris, in 2022. But is currently included in CUTE at Somerset House and available to stream online. Also watch Maggie Lee’s Mommy (2015) online.
