Part of my ‘job’ in exchange for living with relatives rent free to recoup the money I lost moving cross country and getting dumped is ‘for the love of god get your grandmother out of the house.’ I come from a long line of reclusive weirdos, and my grandmother’s mother had shut herself up in the dark in her house by the time she was 60. My grandma is 80 and in an attempt to keep her from getting Too Weird, I take her to various events around town.
And in town, there’s a beautiful old 1920s theater. My grandfather’s mother played piano at the silent movies there. My grandma was the popcorn girl in the late 50s and early 60s. And now, every Monday, they screen a vintage movie for the old people of rural Ohio. Today’s was Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, one of my grandmother’s favorite movies. She first saw it on a television screening in a tiny apartment as a newlywed, and it scared her so bad she stayed up until my grandpa got home from third shift. She told me this story while running a red light on the way to the theater.
So I didn’t know what to expect. Our tastes have always aligned, some of my fondest memories are staying up all night and watching Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents with her when I lived here in the summers. On the other hand, all I really know about this was that it’s a ‘camp classic’, the stars hated each other, and Joan Crawford is there.
So when I got a tense, borderline psychological thriller, I was surprised! Now admittedly I’m the kind of autistic who’s bad at parsing comedy, so when the rest of the audience laughed at bits I found chilling, or tense, or sympathy inducing, I was wondering if this was another case of audiences refusing to engage with the themes of the art they are experiencing. (I am not super into Ethel Caine’s music, but she is right about every single thing she writes about art criticism.)
I love stories about fucked up siblings. And I specifically love how a sibling drama can revert characters back into childhood dynamics, bickering, slapping at each other, vying for attention and affection. And that is on full display here. Jane, to me, seemed more than a straightforward tormentor of her saintly sister. There was something tragic there, in the baby-doll dresses, the childish demeanor, the shrines she had not just to her child-self, but specifically to her child-self at her father’s side. There is a deep unspoken wound in Jane, and I think we can infer that Blanche knows this. Not just because she worries about the drinking and the guilt from the accident, but because she interrupts Jane’s singing whenever she can, not out of the malice that Jane assumes but out of a desire to protect her.
And man. While I understand ‘melodrama’ is a genre term and not an insult, some of the abuse that Jane inflicted on Blanche felt very real to me. The confinement, the slow control of a disabled person by a resentful family member, the cutting off of all outside communication and anyone you could depend on that’s not them. The scaring you and telling you you’re crazy for being scared. The inherent vulnerability a disabled person has at the hands of their family members is something this movie really seems to understand. Blanche is the caged bird and her days are numbered the minute the bird goes missing.
Another interesting motif here was how someone can be living a nightmare next to cheerful obliviousness. The main arc of the film is bookended by this idea: the neighbors cheerfully watching Blanche’s old movies, discussing her and Jane, as mother scolds daughter about believing rumors. And the beachgoers at the end, playing around a totally broken with reality Jane and a dying Blanche, totally unaware they’re even there. Both of them had been the center of public attention, and crave, or at least miss, finding that acclaim again. But here they are, not pretty and preforming, but old and suffering, and no one can bare to look.
You can tell why this is a classic. I am not sure I am seeing the ‘camp’ here, but I also allow that I am bad at that sort of thing. And this movie sucked me into it’s world, and so I did not watch with a detached, ironic eye. The bits where Jane tries to sing her old song seemed unspeakably sad to me, not funny, though again, I’ll allow maybe I was just in a particular mood.
Tying things off: I had fun. Next month is Sunset Boulevard and I’ll try to get her out to that one too. I haven’t seen a lot of these old classics, because if I’m being honest a lot of them feel like being assigned homework, and also I hate being told I Should watch something, but Whatever Happened To Baby Jane reminded me that some classics are such for a reason, and old movies are only homework if you don’t let yourself have fun.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 