The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." For the son—whether in a novel by James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus’s tortured relationship with his mother in Ulysses ) or a film by Paul Thomas Anderson (the toxic, magnificent mother-son duo in The Master )—paradise and hell are often the same person.
Upon examining the portrayals of the mother-son relationship in cinema and literature, several themes and patterns emerge: