You’re familiar with the movie My Girl, right? Anna Chlumsky as Vada. Kevin from Home Alone plays a supporting role as Thomas J. Dan Aykroyd as the widowed mortician dad. Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s sweet, funny, and emotionally devastating all at once. The scene with the bees… unforgettable.
My Girl was released on November 27, 1991. The film grossed nearly $60 million at the box office in the United States. It received mixed reviews from critics because it ultimately destroyed the childhood innocence of a generation. Our invincibility snuffed out in an hour and forty two minutes of run time.
Sent everyone from the ages of 8-11 into a mild state of terror when they were with their friends in the woods and ran across a hornet’s nest. Thought your friend or potential love interest was going to die any minute from a bee sting.
Hornets. Wasps. Bees. The winged grim reapers of spring and summer they became. What Jaws was to great white sharks in the late 70s, My Girl was to bees in the early 90s. Not their best publicity moment.
“Don’t be Thomas J,” we’d said.
“Turn back. Finding the mood ring isn’t worth it.”
The emotionally devastating angle is where I’m going with this. The bees. Macaulay Culkin’s character Thomas J. The mood ring that was found with the body. Vada’s ring she’d lost that Thomas J. returned to the willow tree to retrieve. Pushing his hands through leaf matter on the forest floor.
I’m having trouble remembering the finer details because my wife won’t allow this movie to be played in our house.
Prohibited.
Been trying for years now.
I’ve wanted to watch My Girl on family movie night for a while now. My wife won’t have it. The movie completely wrecked her when she saw it as a kid in the theater. She’d gone to the movies as part of a birthday party get together for her friend Lacy Mason.
No one knew what was coming.
Probably like unsuspecting parents and children nowadays who bought a ticket for the Wild Robot but haven’t read the book prior to hitting the cinema.
My Girl sets you up with the warm and fuzzies about friendship. There’s deep material, too: coming to grips with the loss of a parent. Morbid humor. But it’s mainly, from what I remember, about friendship. Young love. Innocence.
Bike rides, childhood, and naïveté.
Then it grabs you by the throat and eyes and crushes your soul with a swarm of bees while searching for a lost mood ring. A ring once black, now blue.
Forever blue.
My Girl used two different movie posters in its marketing. One includes Vada and Thomas J in close-up laughing. The other poster shows them, standing, back to back against one another, grinning. The tagline reads:
When your dad’s an undertaker, your mom’s in heaven, and your grandma’s got a screw loose… it’s good to have a friend who understands you.
Even if he is a boy.
My Girl
It’s forthcoming enough to say there’s an element of death in the film. Grief. Coping. Trying to wrap your head around the aftermath and the afterlife. The dad works with the dead. The mom is gone. Complications from childbirth. Vada believing she was the cause of her mom’s end.
What it fails to mention, however, is that friend who understands you, the boy, will suddenly die while you’re eating buttery popcorn or the delectable milk chocolate and dry roasted peanuts combo from a box of Goobers.
That’s where it unraveled for my wife when she was 10 years old at a movie theater in Farmville, Virginia.
Despite my pleas to introduce our kids to My Girl for a while now, my wife stands pat. She won’t have it. Not on family movie night. Not ever, it seems.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
No discussion.
The bud has been nipped. I repeat: the bud has been nipped.
Allow me to explain.
When my wife was a child, she and a group of friends went to the movies as part of a birthday party. Good vibes. Good times. Popcorn tubs bigger than their heads in their laps. Large fountain sodas at the ready.
Trailers start. Trailers end.
Then My Girl happened.
If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t, I guess a “spoiler alert” would’ve been fair at the beginning of this — but My Girl debuted nearly 35 years ago, so I feel like the expiration for spoiler alerts has passed.
I’m not going to give a runback of the entire movie here. Thomas J. Macaulay’s character. He was “allergic to everything.” Not long after the scene below, we learn he is definitely allergic to bees. No OCD exaggeration on his part here. Fatally allergic.
Vada: Have you ever kissed anyone?
Thomas J: Like they do on TV?
Vada: Mm hmm.
Thomas J: No.
Vada: Well, maybe we should. Just to see what’s the big deal.
When Thomas J returns to the woods to retrieve Vada’s mood ring she’d dropped, well… you remember. Then, after.
Vada crying.
“Where are his glasses? He can’t see without his glasses!”
It’s a gut punch. Sneaks up on you because the movie pretends to be safe and sweet until — BAM! — childhood trauma in Dolby Surround Sound.
But it’s not the bee scene alone. The entire movie sets you up to fall apart. By design.
Thomas J: Vada.
Vada: What?
Thomas J: Would you think of me?
Vada: For what?
Thomas J: Well, if you don’t get to marry Mr. Bixler.
Vada: I guess.
Scene from My Girl. Source: YouTube
It’s innocent and awkward and real. There’s morbid humor, albeit harmless, like the scene from the funeral home when Dan Aykroyd’s character, Harry Sultenfuss, explains to his young daughter the process of embalming a dead person. Vada, trying to wrap her head around mortality, watches wide-eyed, curious, trying to make sense of it all.
That’s what you think the movie is about when you first walk into it: making sense of it all.
Then, bees.
The death of innocence.
Which is why My Girl is prohibited from family movie night at our house. My wife Allison never recovered from that scene. Doesn’t want to inflict it on our children — even though they are now both older than she was in 1991.
While she was in bed this morning, I nudged her in the side and said, “I need to ask you some questions about My Girl.”
“Huh, what?” she said. “What time is it?”
“6:30,” I said. “I’ve been writing for an hour about how seeing My Girl in the theater was a traumatic childhood experience for you.”
“I’m going back to sleep,” she said.
An hour and a half later, after she roused from bed, I conducted a short interview with her in our living room while she told me to hold on three or four times. That she was still waking up. Here is our conversation verbatim:
Me: Tell me about the night you went to see My Girl for a birthday party.
Allison: I think we were in fourth grade, maybe.
Me: You were 10. It was 1991 when it was released. November. Fourth grade sounds about right.
Allison: And we went to Farmville to watch the movie. Small group of girls. Some parents. Lacy’s birthday.
Me: Did you start crying in the theater?
Allison: Yes.
Me: Did you get up and walk out?
Allison: No.
Me: Like go to the bathroom or anything?
Allison: No, I probably should have. But no, I stayed there in the theater. In the viewing room. And cried hysterically.
Me: Did others cry? The other girls.
Allison: Yeah, but not like me. I hit another level. There were five of us. Five girls. Five or six. Something like that. Kitty Mason [Lacy’s mom] had to come and sit with me. And I’m sure she was thinking, “Oh, no. What have I done?” So yeah, she had to come and sit next to me and put her arms around me. Hug me. Console me. I was bawling. Completely lost it. I felt so embarrassed.
The way she tells it, her entire friend group left the theater in stunned silence. Red eyes. Nobody spoke on the ride home. Just the hum of the mini-van’s engine. The occasional sniffle. A birthday party shook to its core by a movie marketed as a coming-of-age story. Of childhood friendship.
Of innocence.
Of making sense of it all.
False advertising.
And this is why My Girl is banned from family movie night at our house.
Because my girl, aka my wife, doesn’t want our kids to stumble into the same emotional ambush she once did in 1991.
I’ve assured her they’ll be fine. They’re old enough now. They’ve seen Lion King and Coco. They can handle a little sadness.
“It’s different,” Allison said. “My Girl tricks you.”
And she’s right — from what I can remember of the movie. I haven’t seen it since the early 90s myself, 1992, when it came out on VHS. No theater for me on that one. And the trick is the thing which makes that movie so much more different than the others. In Disney movies, it’s always the adults who meet their maker. In My Girl, you think it’s about the adults who’ve passed. It is, somewhat. But the script gets flipped when Thomas J meets his end. He’s a kid. And, in 1991, he was roughly my age and my wife’s.
My Girl didn’t release with a heads up to viewers that you’d be crushed by movie’s end. No warning label you’d be embarking on an emotional rollercoaster of sadness in under two hours flat. It was marketed the opposite. There was no ominous score. No villain, save for the Grim Reaper himself.
It lulls you into bike rides and sunshine. Hanging out with your bud. Willow trees. They talk about life and death, yeah. But they talk about the future. They talk about love, even marriage. There was a relatable innocence.
The truth is My Girl was the first movie that made me cry. I’d never cried watching a movie before. But there I am, in 1992 once it was released on VHS, sitting in my living room. Entire family in front of the television screen. Tears welling up then seeping out of my eyes. Wiping my cheeks so no one can see. Throat tightening. Feeling sore. Vagus nerve fully activated.
Thinking, “What? You can’t kill Thomas J.”
So maybe my wife is right. Maybe certain movies are best left in the past. There’s a reason we never streamed Bambi when the kids were younger. I was a hard no on that one. Flashbacks to Ms. Blanton’s first grade class coming at me in real-time.
“We watched that movie in first grade,” I’d said to my wife. “Who thought that was a good idea? Half the class had to be picked up early from school.”
And so it is with My Girl, a movie prohibited from family movie night in our household — and perhaps for all eternity.
Archived with the likes of Bambi and Old Yeller. As my sister said in a text reply to me this evening:
My Girl, I feel, is equivalent to Old Yeller. Such a sad movie. Why was it even allowed in childhood? However, truth be told, I can’t remember who died: the girl or the boy [in My Girl]. But either way, I’m always nervous when someone tells me they are allergic to bees.
RIP Thomas J. Gone but not forgotten.
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