The Things We Called Normal

Rewatching Drop Dead Fred as an Adult

Richard Hernandez | OUTPOST 27 | The Margins / Human Nature

Contains spoilers for the 1991 film.

I remembered Drop Dead Fred being funny.

Rik Mayall running around like a lunatic, insulting adults, breaking things, and making an absolute disaster of every room he entered. I watched it as a kid, and that was the movie as far as I was concerned. Fred could do everything a child wasn't supposed to do. He didn't care about getting in trouble. If anything, he seemed to enjoy it.

Watching it again as an adult, I nearly cried.

I wasn't prepared for that. The jokes were still there, and some of them were as ridiculous as I remembered. But I had trouble paying attention to the comedy once I began noticing the little girl at the center of it. I couldn't understand how I'd watched the same movie years ago and missed so much of what was happening to her.

Of course, I know how. I was a child. I understood the movie from where I was standing. Fred was the good part. The adults were the people trying to stop the fun.

Now those scenes are difficult to watch for entirely different reasons.

Elizabeth, or Lizzie, is an adult when we meet her. Her husband is leaving her for another woman. She loses her job after a miserable series of events, and with her life falling apart she returns to her childhood home. Her mother, Polly, takes her in and immediately begins managing her life. Polly has ideas about how Lizzie should look, behave, and win her husband back. Even his infidelity becomes something Lizzie is expected to fix.

Her mother gives her a hairstyle much like her own. It's played for a laugh, especially when Fred reacts to it. I found that small moment more disturbing than I expected. Lizzie has come home wounded, and one of the first things her mother does is begin making her over into someone more acceptable. More like herself.

There is little interest in asking Lizzie what she wants. The concern is getting her life back into a shape that looks respectable from the outside.

This is where Fred returns, emerging from the old jack-in-the-box in her childhood bedroom. As a kid, I remembered that scene as the setup for another round of chaos. Now I couldn't get past what it meant that he had been shut away in the first place.

Mayall is still hilarious in the role. Fred beheads Lizzie's old stuffed animals, tracks dog mess across Polly's freshly cleaned carpet, and insults her with an enthusiasm I can't help admiring. He's petty, filthy, and delighted with himself. Some of the jokes are genuinely stupid. I laughed anyway. I can understand why I loved this movie without having to defend every minute of it.

When Lizzie was young, her mother controlled much of her world through criticism and humiliation. Fred was the one person who seemed to be entirely on her side. He was obnoxious and reckless, and sometimes he made things worse for her. But he also said what she couldn't say. He made a joke out of the authority she was afraid of. He was willing to anger the person she spent her childhood trying not to upset.

That changes the way I see his behavior. A child who feels powerless might imagine a friend who answers to nobody. A child who has been taught to be quiet might find comfort in someone incapable of keeping his mouth shut. Fred is so excessive that he becomes difficult to tolerate, which is part of the joke. It may also be part of why Lizzie needed him.

I wouldn't diagnose Lizzie from a fantasy about imaginary friends. But the film understands something about a child who feels powerless. Fred makes sense as a response to an environment she could neither change nor escape. The one companion who refused to be frightened by her mother was the one nobody else could see.

And then her mother took him away.

The jack-in-the-box was just part of the story to me when I was young. Watching Polly seal it now, knowing what Fred meant to Lizzie, I saw an adult taking away something that had helped her daughter endure life in that house. There is a cruelty in that which doesn't need to be exaggerated.

Twenty-one years later, Lizzie returns to the same house, still unsure how to stand up for herself. Her husband has betrayed her, but she remains desperate to recover the marriage. Her mother encourages that desperation and treats Lizzie's independence almost as a problem to be corrected. The people and circumstances have changed, but the old pattern is still there. She is trying to become acceptable to people who have already shown how little care they have for her.

That doesn't mean every painful adult relationship begins in childhood. Lizzie's husband is responsible for his betrayal, and her mother for the way she treats her daughter. Lizzie still has decisions to make. What happened to her helps explain why those decisions are difficult; it doesn't make them for her.

What unsettled me was how familiar the expectation itself seemed.

I grew up in the eighties and nineties, when plenty of behavior was explained away as strict parenting. I don't want to pretend every rule, raised voice, or punishment was abuse. Children need correction, and parents are imperfect people trying to raise other imperfect people. But there is a difference between correcting a child and making that child feel that her existence is a constant irritation. There is a difference between asking for obedience and teaching someone that love depends on never upsetting the person in charge.

Those distinctions weren't always made clearly. Sometimes an adult's authority was treated as the end of the conversation. The child was expected to accept what happened, and afterward everyone went on as though nothing important had occurred.

I wonder how many of us learned to call that normal because we had nothing else to call it.

The strange thing about Drop Dead Fred is that Fred himself isn't an uncomplicated answer. He can be reckless and mean. He destroys property and embarrasses Lizzie. His behavior damages a friend's houseboat, and other people have to live with the consequences of his antics. There were moments when I wanted him to stop, even while I understood why Lizzie had clung to him.

That contradiction matters. Something can help a child survive a difficult situation and still cause trouble when carried into adulthood. Being loud when you've been silenced may feel like freedom. So can refusing to take anything seriously when seriousness has been used against you. But other people can be hurt by the ways you've learned to protect yourself. Pain can explain behavior without making every consequence acceptable.

I like that the film allows Fred to be both necessary and exhausting. I wouldn't have seen the contradiction when I was young.

Later, Lizzie is sent to a psychiatrist and given pills intended to rid her of her imaginary friend. The film plays this as part of its fantasy, and I wouldn't use it to draw conclusions about real psychiatric care or medication. What interested me was the situation Lizzie had been placed in. The people pressuring her to get rid of Fred are also the people asking her to return to the life that has made her so unhappy. Her distress is treated as the thing to remove, while the conditions contributing to it are allowed to remain.

There is something painfully recognizable about that, too. Sometimes the person who finally begins reacting to mistreatment becomes the problem everyone wants solved.

By the end, Lizzie has to confront the people she has spent so much of her life trying to please. The film takes her back through a strange version of her childhood home and brings her face to face with herself as a little girl. Those scenes have none of the restraint I usually want from a serious drama. They are broad, surreal, and completely in keeping with the movie we've been watching. Somehow, they still got to me.

I think it's because the ending asks Lizzie to do something she couldn't do when she was five. She has to recognize that what happened to her was not her fault, and she has to make choices for herself even when her mother and husband disapprove. Fred can help bring her to that point. He cannot make those choices for her.

And when she finally can, he leaves.

As a child, that ending was sad because the funny character was going away. As an adult, I found it sad for another reason. The little girl had needed him so badly. The grown woman was finally able to live without asking him to fight her battles. There is relief in that, but I couldn't stop thinking about the years between those two people. About how long it had taken for her to believe she had a right to her own life.

I don't know whether the filmmakers intended every implication I now see in their story. I doubt I understood even half of what they were doing when I watched it the first time. The film isn't subtle. It doesn't need to be. I still enjoy the ridiculous parts that made me love it as a kid.

I thought Fred was the one making all the trouble.

I barely noticed who had made him necessary.