Free Spirits

In 1983, JoBeth Williams appeared in the ensemble of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, thus immortalizing herself as an avatar for white baby boomery. As emotionally dissatisfied, professionally stunted Karen, the effortless Williams brings a breeze to Chill that helps offset Kasdan’s at-times strenuous attempts at defining the transition from liberal ’60s rebellion to calcified ’80s bourgeoisie. Yet just one year earlier, Williams appeared in a scene that more handily and humorously encapsulated the ’60s hangover identity crisis, communicating it all in one simple tracking shot. Early in Poltergeist, Williams’s suburban mom Diane Freeling is shown sitting up in bed, smoking a joint, musing on her 5-year-old daughter Carol Anne’s possibly genetic propensity for sleepwalking; meanwhile in the foreground, her husband, everydad Steven (Craig T. Nelson), lies on his stomach reading Reagan: The Man, The President, the title of the book shoved into the camera lens as an unmissable punch line. With their three kids tucked into bed, Diane and Steve, obvious from their incessant giggling, are high as kites, leaving it teasingly unclear whether Steve is reading the biography as a private joke or not. Nevertheless, as the camera slowly tracks left at the foot of the bed, the intrinsic divide in their characters is instantly communicated: these are former pot-smoking California hippies, now a real-estate agent and homemaker, firmly ensconced in suburbia.

It’s a suburbia that will threaten to quite literally swallow them whole. Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper and produced and written by Steven Spielberg, is likely remembered first and foremost as the quintessential 1980s haunted-house movie, the tale of a modern middle-class family swept up in supernatural horror that represents a meeting of two unlikely filmmaking sensibilities, both of them emotionally merciless in their own ways. It’s less acknowledged for creating such finely etched characters before letting them loose in a strobe-addled fun house. Most memorable among these is Diane, who, as played by Williams, is an eccentric free spirit trapped in the body of a normie American mom. Early in the film, when the family has begun to see signs of alarming and inexplicable irregularities—bedroom-shaking night tremors, furniture that appears to move around by itself—Diane’s initial response is not fear but a kind of exhilaration. She all but welcomes what she calls “another side of nature” and even willingly uses Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) as a ghost-world guinea pig, letting an unseen force carry her across the kitchen floor as though she were just another chair or drinking glass. When Steven reacts with growing horror, she scoffs, impressing upon him the need to “remember back into our past when you used to have an open mind.”

Diane will have a change of heart, of course, once Carol Anne is spirited away to another dimension, kidnapped by vengeful ghosts and stuck somewhere inside the house, her voice, crying out for her mother, lost and terrified, as though from the bottom of an invisible well. Diane’s determination to rescue her daughter forms the emotional crux of Poltergeist. Despite the sensitivity and warmth of Williams’s performance and the fierce, single-minded determination of Diane’s character, Poltergeist is rarely remembered in such human terms, thought of perhaps first for its state-of-the-art Industrial Light & Magic special effects, its expert jump scares, and gallery of monsters and skeletons, created practically. Yet in American cinema’s last great era of female-driven studio productions, and in a decade when movies specifically and profoundly interrogating aspects and challenges of motherhood still captured the attention of audiences and the consideration of studio executives (Terms of Endearment, The Color Purple, Country, ’night Mother, Baby Boom, and Steel Magnolias, to name just a few), Diane Freeling’s mission should be remembered as one of the era’s most potent depictions of a mother’s desperate, all-encompassing love for her child.