By this fourth post in “Notes on Camp”, I assume you’ve noticed a recurring theme: 99% of my viewing, writing and research* process is done while I am drunk. That last 1% done while I’m sober is simply right clicking on all the red and green squiggly lines to correct the typos made by my boxed-red-wine engorged fingers. I tell you this because if you watch these “films” I’m writing about sober you might miss the point. Camp is a genre made FOR drunks, BY drunks. Which brings me to Mommie Dearest, a movie that is only tolerable if you are stone-cold-wasted.
When viewed as “serious drama” Mommie Dearest is basically Precious, but about rich white people. I sincerely doubt, however, that a single person has ever taken this shit seriously. In fact, roughly a week into its original theatrical run the studio rebranded it, selling it no longer as “serious drama” but as “Midnight Classic!!”. Based on the salacious tell-all autobiography by Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest is the “true” story of how Joan Crawford, star of the golden age of Hollywood, adopted and consequently tortured Christina until her death. It’s kind of a big “who cares?” in theory, because, really, who cares about the bad parenting of a star long dead by the time Mommie Dearest was released in 1981, let alone in 2011. But as future Notes on Camp inductee Black Swan recently pointed out – Bad Mommies never get old.
Joan Crawford adopted two children as a twice-divorced single woman in 1940 and 1942. Some speculate that she adopted them for good publicity, having been named “box office poison” (a recurring line in the film) after a string of flops had wreaked havoc on her career (perhaps Jennifer Aniston should think about adopting… I’m just saying). In retrospect, she was clearly mentally ill and probably psychically unable to raise a guinea pig, let alone two children. Mommie Dearest is the story of Joan’s relationship with Christina, her older daughter, with whom she is in near constant competition with from the time Christina was a baby.“No more wire hangers… EVER!” is the one thing people know about Mommie Dearest, even if they don’t know where the line comes from. It’s a good line too, coming at the mid-movie climax in which Joan showers an ungrateful Christina with Ajax and beats the crap out of her with a clothes hanger after discovering her beautiful dresses hanging on wire hangers instead of silken ones. But to reduce MD to that one line is to discount some of the most dynamic celluloid ever committed. Another scene has Joan in an evening gown, tears and makeup smeared all over her face, chopping down a rose bush in the middle of the night (“Christinaaaaa!? Bring me the AXE!”). Yet another has Christina screaming defiantly “I am not one of your FANS!” at her mother, right before Joan goes ahead and throws her through a glass coffee table. Child abuse has never been so glamorous, which is why I encourage you to be as intoxicated as possible and still somewhat conscious. What may be abominable sober is hysterical on your fifth gin & tonic.
Mommie Dearest covers roughly fifty years in the lives of these characters, and the result is a bit scattershot and episodic. There is a supporting cast of maids and lovers and studio heads, but they don’t really have any agency but to push Joan down her rabbit hole of crazy, or to tell Christina “…your mother’s under a lot of pressure right now!”, as though that excuses beating your daughter over the head with a hair brush.
Joan Crawford would have been a Camp icon without Mommie Dearest, having starred in The Ice Follies of 1939 (mentioned briefly in the opening scene of Mommie Dearest), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (coming soon to a blog post near you), and her unfortunate final film, Trog. Faye Dunaway, however, probably wouldn’t have. Even if you don’t agree with me the Bonnie and Clyde is the best movie of the 1960s, you can certainly admit that Dunaway as Bonnie has one of the most vibrant screen debuts ever – she emerged from Hollywood purgatory as a full blown STAR. Fourteen years later and after a string of modest commercial and critical successes, it was time for the all-important biopic. Choosing MD may have been her greatest mistake, because Dunaway so inhabits Crawford that the two became conflated in the popular imagination – Joan and Faye are one, forever and always. It’s hard to see one and not think of the other, and vice-versa. In his DVD commentary for MD, John Waters (yes, THAT John Waters and yes, I have watched Mommie Dearest with the DVD commentary turned on) compares Dunaway’s performance to Kabuki, drag, and opera – but never, notably, acting.I mentioned Black Swan and Precious earlier, both films that have their roots firmly planted in Camp, and that feature some of the best/worst mother/daughter pairings since Mommie Dearest. What all these films have in common is that the ostensible “villain”, the abusive mother, is actually sort of, dare I say it? …likeable. Frankly, Christina Crawford acts like a spoiled little bitch for most of the movie, throwing petulant hissy-fits when she has to give all of her toys to an orphanage or when she loses a swimming race. And while perhaps the Bad Mommies in Precious and Black Swan (among many I am overlooking) are slightly less defensible, they still seem like a lot more fun than their daughters – I’m just glad I’m not related to them.
-Ryan
*By “research” I mean, “I looked it up on Wikipedia, and did a Google Image search”.