Ben Lewis | She Raised Me / 2025

family ties

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Lewis (screenwriter and director) She Raised Me / 2025 [14 minutes]

 

We’re introduced to the rather sleazy Louie (Ben Lewis) in the very first scene of this film, when he tells a young teenager in a restaurant that he is so amazed and pleased that the young, good-looking skinny kid (Denny McAulifee) has chosen him as his lover. Yet, almost immediately he hints it’s time for the kid to leave as Louie’s current boyfriend, the truly handsome Xander (Zane Phillips) slips into the booth without noticing that his seat may be warmed up in his absence.

   Xander, to be fair, has other things on his mind. His mother keeps calling him, and he has committed to visiting her again for his upcoming birthday, although it’s quite clear that they have a rather contentious and complex relationship. He begs his boyfriend Louie to join him on his visit home where he will get a chance to meet her.

    Louie, a would-be-playwright, attempts to worm his way out of the meeting, wondering why this early in their relationship he is being taken home to Xander’s mother, while, of course, wondering also how he is now going to tell his hunk that he’s ready to dunk him for the skinny teen. Nonetheless, after some heavy pleading, he agrees. But even at the doorway to what appears to be the mansion in which Xander grew up, he consuls his boyfriend that he can still bow out if he’s not up to the encounter, suggesting that he is not really willing to support him in facing the ogre.

    The minute they enter the house, we hear the voice of the monster mother (Rosie O’Donnell’s) greeting her son home. She’s in the kitchen with her assistant (Wendy Benson-Landes) making lunch.

     As the camera reveals his mother, most of the film’s audience members surely suck in their breaths a bit in shock as they quickly come to perceive the total absurdity of this little comic farce, now ready for nearly anything that Canadian director Lewis throws our way: the mother, we discover, is a famous puppet named Marilyn Muff, known to children everywhere we are quickly convince, who has now become a sort of gay icon, just like Rosie.

     If we expected Louie to be completely taken aback, well he is in fact, but not for the reasons we might expect. Marilyn Muff apparently was his favorite childhood figure, whom he idolized, demanding his parents gift him with the notorious Marilyn Muff doll; but only his sister was awarded this prize, boys, so his parents argued, were not permitted to desire such things.

    In short, he gets along quite wonderfully with the mother without even bothering to wonder if someone on a string might not necessarily tie up her beautiful son in knots. Within minutes Louis is sharing a glass of wine with Marilyn while he recounts his childhood admiration and even suggests that he has a role for her in one of his plays which might be perfect to a retired film and TV star.

    Xander is almost unable to believe that his ridiculous puppet mother, who has never been there for him as we has growing up—how could she possibly feel any human empathy for him when she is simply a cartoonish figure who shouts out motherly platitudes?

    The point is that Louis, as Xander later puts it, is like nearly every other “fag,” finding his diva in this case in a thing with strings attached.

   In an interview with Joey Moser in The Contending, the author explains the metaphor of this short movie, reiterating that for him Rosie O’Donnell was one of his brassy favorites:   

   

 “When I was thinking what the movie was truly about, it’s really about loving the social relationship between young, queer kids and their divas. I don’t think anyone can claim to have raised more queen millennials than Rosie, especially given the platform she had with her show and how she brought us Broadway shows. She exposed a lot of queer culture to kids all over the world, and even though she wasn’t out, it was very queer-coded. Her show was such a safe space for so many kids, including myself. Rosie was the dream person to voice Marilyn–I never thought in a million years that she’d say yes.”

 

    Now suddenly the affable Xander becomes a kind of toxic gay guy who, having felt pushed aside as a child in respect to his mother’s career, is suffering meltdown after meltdown. The very fact that Louie so idolizes his puppet mother, given he’s so metaphorically tied up to her apron strings, is something that he can hardly suffer.

    And soon after, in the car as they head back home he is furious with his boyfriend for being yet another diva-stricken queer who has utterly no empathy with his feelings of having to stake out a new life free of her entanglements.

     What I haven’t even mentioned, moreover, is that Mrs. Muff is a Muppet-like puppet, who embodies an entirely different level of adoration in young adults who are of Louie’s (Lewis’) and Xander’s (Phillips’) age. “Before Rosie, I was a diehard Muppet kid,” Lewis explains in his interview with Moser.

      Is it any wonder that when Louie senses that his boyfriend is not at all about to allow him to revisit his mother, that he feels he has no choice in such a dark comic fantasy world but to kill off the perfect human companion, eviscerate his body and hack it up, burying it in bags a bit like the villain of Hitchcock’s Rear Window just so that he can get Marilyn to read his script.

     All right, he suffers for a while in a drunken stupor, but he soon comes out of it and speeds on off to Marilyn Muff’s mansion.

     From page one, she’s ready to rewrite his play for him, mentioning, when he brings up the fact that he hasn’t seen her son for some time, that he must just be in one of his funks but surely he’s okay since he’s been using her credit cards as usual, and called to say he was hiding out in the woods.

     I can’t wait for the revenge of the zombie gay hunk in part two of this “ridiculous theater”-like gay horror farce.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).