But It's Just a Horror Movie!: "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?"
In his book about Katharine Hepburn, the critic Andrew Britton writes that there are tendencies in American cinema – he's talking here about the way genre functions, as well as a certain cultural conservatism in Hollywood movies – that work to "discourage any process of generalisation from the dramatic world to the reality inhabited by the spectator which fails to conduce to intimations of the rightness of the status quo."
You might be tempted to ask what the hell that means. The language is indeed a bit abstruse (as is so much of the language of academics, for better and worse), but his point is a worthwhile one. It's also a point that we – as lovers of movies and of throwing around ideas (if I may be so bold as to include you in this tribe) – should spend a moment thinking about:
What, exactly, is the connection between movies and the real world? How do these two realms interact? How do they influence and inform each other? And why is this relationship so complicated?
One of Britton's primary claims, here and elsewhere, is that there are deep and necessary linkages between what we see on screen and the way the world around us is constructed. He traces these linkages to the fact that our society (like any society) is a place defined by conflicting interests. Different people and groups believe different things, need different things, and struggle for the power to enforce their beliefs and fulfill their needs, often at the cost of other people. And in large part, these struggles are fought on the level of meaning.
In his words, competing people and groups tend to assign "conflicting meanings to a single term or set of terms." That is to say, when we all look at something – say a cowboy, or a woman being berated by a man, or a bemonocled rich fellow stepping in a pothole – we assign different meanings to it, depending on who we are, what kind of life we've lived, and our material interests. The white guy from Montana might (or might not) see cowboys differently than the black woman from Mississippi; men and women might (or might not) see scenes of domestic conflict differently; and rich people who wear monocles might (or might not) see a scene in which one of their fellow sophisticates takes a pratfall differently than does a plumber from Akron or a recent immigrant from Thailand.
These differences play out, of course, most importantly here in the real world: they are the basis for all kinds of political and social battles. But it's on the screen that we see a kind of symbolic enacting of the struggles between these visions. This is vitally important because of the depth to which our cinema both represents and influences popular culture and ideas.
When he looks at movies in this way, Britton sees two paradoxical trends. On the one hand, he thinks they provide a forum for some of these conflicts to be articulated, bringing to light that which might otherwise never be seen; on the other hand, he thinks they also provide a way for these conflicts to be suppressed, for the dominant forces of society to ensure that it's their viewpoint that remains supreme.
As an example of this (and here I'm moving away from Britton) we might think of the way movies can work to pull society in a certain (perhaps liberal, or "liberal") direction. One thinks of Hollywood's "social uplift" stories – from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to Transparent – which have the function at least in part of greasing the wheels for changing cultural mores. Interracial couples and transgender folks, to take these examples, have been frowned on (and acted violently upon) by the mainstream, and these stories work to change the cultural view of them. The effect of this is that the "conflicting meanings" assigned by different people to something like a black man dating a white woman are massaged away over time.
For Britton, however, the way movies are made, marketed, and in particular talked about more frequently functions to suppress conflict by urging belief in – or even obedience to – a rather conservative status quo.
The point he makes about genre is a good way of understanding this. He notes that when we say something is "just a horror movie" (for example) we are at least in part saying that it is no more than a horror movie. Even if it depicts some of our deepest and most terrible fears, or some disturbing element of our society, as most good horror flicks do, by saying it's "just a horror movie" we reduce it from something that might actually be integrated with our world to a set of tropes on the screen, just a thing we pay money to watch because it's fun. This works to neuter the movie by reassuring us that it's not really about us at all.
Britton's final point in this regard is that this reduction – this casting of cinema as nothing more than a thing we pay for to distract ourselves from real life – is itself a way of suppressing conflict. This is because it's not a value-free action, but instead a way of reinforcing some of our culture's deepest norms: that everything around us is a commodity to be bought and sold, and that disturbing things on the screen – expressions of deep social discord or contradiction – are all just so much fun (in the smallest, slightest sense of that word).
Don’t think too much about it, in other words. That stuff up there on the screen is just "fiction," just a movie. It's just product, just content. Eat your popcorn and have a laugh – everything around you out here in the real world is fine.
To return to our original quote, this is what he means when he says a lot of aspects of Hollywood cinema "discourage any process of generalisation from the dramatic world to the reality inhabited by the spectator [it's just a movie, not connected to our world in meaningful ways] which fails to conduce to intimations of the rightness of the status quo [don't think about it too much – everything is fine!]."
This is, as I said, pretty abstruse stuff. So let's see if I can convince you that it's worth thinking about by taking as a specific example a glorious piece of cinema.
The story Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) tells is a fundamentally terrifying one. "Baby Jane" Hudson (Bette Davis) was a child vaudeville star in the second decade of, as the kids say, "the 1900s." She was managed by her father, and was so famous that there was a line of dolls that looked exactly like her. Her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) was almost completely erased by her sister's celebrity, ignored by their father and denigrated by Jane herself.
A decade later, though, the sisters' position had been almost completely reversed. Blanche had become a revered actress, while Jane had developed a drinking problem and failed as an adult to be able to capture the magic that had informed her youthful career. This all came to an end with a mysterious car accident in which Blanche was paralyzed from the waist down, apparently because a drunken Jane tried to run her over out of jealousy.
Now, the women are old and isolated. They live together in a decaying Beverly Hills mansion. Blanche is confined to a wheelchair and Jane is her drunken, abusive caretaker. And they're bound together in a twisted, co-dependent relationship: sisters who despise each other because of their successes and failures and the things they've done to each other, but who at the same time can't manage to separate themselves, because of those exact same things. When Jane finds out that Blanche is going to sell the mansion – the money they've been living on is finally gone – she descends into madness.
She locks Blanche in her room and begins tormenting her psychologically, eventually starving her nearly to death. She also attempts to resurrect her own career by hiring a wayward pianist named Edwin (Victor Buono) to play for her while she capers around in the living room performing her child-star numbers. When the maid (Maidie Norman) tries to rescue Blanche, Jane kills her with a hammer. When Edwin finds out what's going on, Jane kidnaps the near-death Blanche and drives her to the beach, in a mad attempt to return them to the innocence they lost long ago. It's then that Blanche finally reveals the truth: she was the one who caused the car accident all those years ago.
She tried to run down Jane, furious because Jane had been making fun of her at a party, and was paralyzed in the crash. Jane, who escaped unharmed, was too drunk to remember what happened. Blanche let her take the blame, saddling her with a terrible guilt. "You mean we could have been friends all these years?" Jane asks, completely withdrawn into a childlike state. The film ends there on the beach, with Jane bringing strawberry ice cream to Blanche, surrounded by a gaggle of curious onlookers.
The film is a campy, vampy, extraordinary joy. It's not without flaws – there are perhaps too many long expositional sequences, and Blanche's character is so helpless at times as to raise troubling questions – but in the main it succeeds wonderfully as a horror film (there are echoes of movies like Psycho and Eyes Without a Face here) and as a thriller (evoking things as different as Sisters and Misery). Beyond this, though, it has the kind of magnetic energy that often attends movies that end up as so-called "cult classics." There are a number of reasons for this – the gonzo story, the intense psychological twisting of the characters, the gothic atmosphere – but I suspect that the main one is the performance Bette Davis delivers as Jane.
This performance is also the place where I think we can best work through the question from above about the ways movies and the world interact.
To say that Davis' acting in the film is phenomenal is to understate the case. Her inhabiting of Jane Hudson is complete, from the physical to the emotional. She walks in a hunch-shouldered foot-shuffling way, throwing her body this way and that, and she uses this physicality to chart a huge range of emotional states, from anger to fear to childlike vulnerability.
At the same time, she gives the character an intimidating force and malicious deceit, particularly in the sequences when she has to pretend to be Blanche on the telephone to get what she wants. In these moments, Davis pulls herself erect and shifts from a low-diction growl into a smooth, polished purr that’s an eerie and devastating imitation of the Hollywood high-tones Crawford has given to Blanche. The effect of all of this is to create a truly scary character, a portrait of both calculation and madness.
In doing this, Davis manages something monumental: she makes her character so degraded that her human dignity becomes inarguable. That is to say, Jane Hudson is so deeply exposed, her fundamental drives – those things we must hide from one another so as not to draw condemnation and disgust – so clearly on display that we cannot help but see her as a human being, rather than as a character put on by an actor.
And this is precisely where the questions of the movie's connection with the world, and of the tendency to suppress the conflicts it articulates, arise.
To call Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? a horror film is to tempt ourselves, if we are not careful, into reduction. It is to risk walling ourselves off from the real emotional force of the proceedings, and from the down-to-the-bone conflicts in American society it gives voice to. If it's "just a horror film" then it's only about monsters, only about abstract airy questions of "good and evil" or "madness," rather than about human beings. Rather than about you and me, and the reasons we do what we do.
This is analogous to the way that calling something "just a Western" can reduce it to being about men on horses in a time totally discontinuous from ours, rather than about deep strains in American thought, or calling something an "LGBTQ film" can reduce it to being about "those people's" issues rather than human issues.
Or take the notion of a "thriller." One of the most dominant forms of thrillers is that of the "crazy woman" story. In this story – think Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction – a woman becomes crazy and violent, putting other characters at threat for the fun and titillation of the audience. Lurking beneath this designation, of course, is the temptation to reduce women's actions to some set of unknowable, mysterious causes. Oh, those women. They're so emotional. So irrational. And isn't it scary and thrilling when we think of that fundamental unhingedness turning violent?
One doesn't have to have memorized "The Yellow Wallpaper" to see that sometimes these stories themselves work to suppress social conflict by acting as if the actual reasons for women's actions are somehow un-understandable. And sometimes it's not the stories themselves that do this, but the way we conceptualize them.
The way we think about movies, the terms we apply to them, the way we discuss them – all of this can take movies that actually give voice to real human conflict, and turn them into unthreatening assertions that everything is actually okay. (Note, if you haven't, the anodizing effect of my own description of Aldrich's film above as "campy, vampy." It is, I think, these things. But this language can also tempt one into minimization.)
None of this is to say that terms like "horror film" or "thriller" or "campy" do not have meaning, or are not useful. They do and they are. It is simply to say that we should never let them leading us into thinking that what's on the screen isn't intimately connected to our own social world. We should never let them reduce what's on the screen to being "just a movie."
It is this reduction that Davis' performance – if we open ourselves to its magnificence – works to prevent. She will not allow the film to be the story of someone who just went crazy and started killing people; nor will she allow it to be the story of the irrational madness of women. She instead grounds it in the specific experiences of being human that we all share. Our reactions to humiliation. Our greed. The pain we feel over things that have gone terribly wrong, the guilt we cannot let go of. The times we are clever and the times we are terrified and the times we wish the world were different than it is.
These are the elements out of which madness arises, and violence, and tragedy. They have reasons. They are grounded in history. In the ways people treat each other, and the ways that different groups exert and attempt to exert power over one another. They are grounded, that is, in actual, existing conflicts in our society.
One doesn’t have to obsess over these kinds of things to enjoy a film like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. But at the same time, one can’t truly understand it without acknowledging them, and without acknowledging that it’s far more than "just a horror movie."
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