Mother pushes nose job, daughter gets revenge on film

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff

It’s almost like an episode of the Jerry Springer show: A mom nags her daughter for years to get a nose job. “Doesn’t that look like a snoozola? Fix your nose!” the mother yells at her. The daughter refuses but decides to make an award-winning short film featuring mommie dearest as the star. (All we need is a fist fight between the two of them.)

But there’s complexity that overcomes the cartoonishness: Mom is a willing participant, not a hidden-camera victim, in Emmy award-winning filmmaker Gayle Kirschenbaum’s 13-minute ode to her nose and comeuppance of her mother who’s trying to slice the bump off of it.

In fact, Kirschenbaum’s nose -- though featured prominently in pore-revealing closeups -- is the sideshow to the main event: a mother who’s cruel enough to tell her daughter that her nose has kept her from finding a husband and who constantly reminds her daughter of other perceived flaws: her too-curly hair, washed-out blue eyes, and ultra-heavy New York accent that she hones in on while watching her daughter on the Today show.

Yet this mother is hardly alone in the universe of ridiculously critical moms. A young mother points to her preschooler’s nose in the film and announces, “This is a nose job in the making.” (Kirschenbaum told me that the woman was her sister-in-law -- since divorced from her brother -- and the little girl, her niece.)

Even moms who don’t push plastic surgery tear down their daughters’ self esteem by parroting the same insults about body weight, intelligence, and dressing style that their own mothers heaved at them.

What makes the short film so compelling is that Kirschenbaum’s mother agreed to star in a project that’s branding her with a scarlet B for bad mother.

I’m dying to know more about their relationship. Clearly they have a close one.

“She was my torturer, but now we’re friends and traveling companions,” Kirschenbaum said. “We just came back from India.”

The transformation of their relationship is the subject of a full-length documentary, which the filmmaker is now working on and trying to fund via this website.

After Kirschenbaum’s father died five years ago, she said her mother opened up about her own childhood and the troubles she went through. “It was a eureka moment when I realized that my mother was still partly a wounded child, that she’d always used me as a scapegoat for her own pain.”

That knowledge gave her the power to change her reactions to her mother’s criticisms -- which she still hurls at angry moments. “I’ve rendered her powerless by allowing the comments to roll off of me,” Kirschenbaum said. And that, in turn, has led her mother to treat her with more respect.

She still, though, wishes her daughter would get a nose job and never fails to make those wishes known.