- Joined
- Jan 29, 2025
Jack's mother appeared on camera a few times that I know of, and each time she honestly seemed to detest her son.
Mama Scalfani Probably Hated Jack
- Once she was in the supermarket with him, being pushed in a wheelchair by Jack's step-father. I've seen this video a couple times but can't find it now, argh. She was visibly annoyed with him, completely unamused, and asked him to stop filming her but he wouldn't (which he thought was so funny).
- Another time was here: Jack filmed a birthday dinner for Tammy at a restaurant called Maggiano's, which was attended by a real who's who of the lore. I'd recommend watching the whole video because it's short and pretty remarkable. You see Garrett and Junior together, which is rare. You see Jack's step-father, whom he calls Dad. A wild Tammy Friend also appears, never to be seen again (probably due to the embarrassment of this encounter).
And you see Jack antagonizing his mother -- whom he strongly favors in the face -- from the start. She says, "Get me off that" multiple times to him once he reveals he's filming her, he ignores her request, and it only gets worse from there, culminating in Jack filming his mom as she sits at the head of table, pretending to squish her head between his fingers (TS 2:10). He goes, "Squiiiiiish, squish, squish, squish," as she gets more and more upset, so he lies to her by saying he has stopped filming. The children are amused by this, because they're children. The waitress smiles nervously and flees. Tammy Friend starts drinking. Garrett, the only person who calls out what Jack is doing, tells his father he is currently being "retarded" in a hushed tone, and when Jack says no he isn't, Garrett insists, yes, you are.
Altogether it is 3.6 roentgen on the cringe-o-meter, and the cringe-o-meter only goes that high.
- Mama Scalfani also made at least one audio appearance: In a very early Jack, he phones his mother for advice on how to make a tomato salad with olive oil and water (lol). She gives him some measurements but basically, as any mama or nonna or wizened recipe-holder would for a non-baking matter, tells him to eyeball it and not be dumb. She gets annoyed with him in about one minute, a Guinness record for phone calls that begin with a recipe question; Jack mocks her for ... talking? to answer his question? ... by doing the "yapping" thing with his hands; and he proves once again he thinks it gives him personality or makes him interesting when he does not honor someone's explicit request to not put them in a video. (Being an asshole isn't cute or funny. Most people figure this out in their teens. Not Jack.)
All of that said, I don't think Jack was raised in a loving home. How he and his mother interacted on camera points to that, of course, but it's also hard to ignore how shitty Jack's own parenting was.
It's not a hard and fast rule, but people tend to parent the way they were parented -- it takes a sincere critical thinker to be the opposite of your "model," and Jack is not that. So if his mom raised him the way he raised his sons, then she was hypercritical and excuse-making when it came to her children's behavior; hated it when they expressed opinions that were different from her own; never taught them useful skills (Jack didn't teach Junior how to ride a bike, and has given various reasons [see: lies] as to why he didn't); and was liable to become physically violent.
That combination would give any kid a complex. So for me it's not a coincidence both Jack and Charles turned out the same way. Lords of their own fantasy empires. Always blustering to mask their insecurity. Persecuted members of the intelligentsia.
But the biggest clue Jack's childhood sucked is how insistent he is that it didn't. If you watch enough livestreams, it's inevitable you'll hear him say how "cool" his mom was. I am too lazy to source this right now, but I've read this is something typical of adult children who were raised badly, and that it's especially true for sons and mothers. The sons are almost magnetically drawn to describing their mothers as "nice," for example, even though when prodded by a professional they give details that make it obvious they were poorly parented. It's just that it can feel blasphemous for a man to badmouth his mother, and no one wants to imagine themselves as 'someone who didn't have a happy childhood.'
One example Jack gave to prove he had "such a cool mom" was the tradition she started of putting a cardboard box out on Christmas morning, so she could give away all the gifts her sons didn't like. Maybe that's a cool idea in theory but in practice (IMO) it's somewhere between kind of sad and highly fucked up. Just hard for me not to read that move as preemptively resentful... feels like turning the most special day of the year for kids into an audit session.
