It hardly seems timely to write anything about Miley Cyrus’
performance at last month’s MTV Video Music Awards. The former child star, as
she has done for the past three years, put together an exhibition designed
primarily to wipe away the image that remains of her in the public as
television’s “Hannah Montana.” Her appearance, such as it was -tongue wagging
before a live audience, barely dressed in a flesh-colored costume, dancing with large stuffed animals –
was tiresomely familiar to anyone with their eye on popular culture. After so
long performing, her music might actually be more honest now while at the same
time being more artificial.
But Cyrus is by no means unique, which is one of the reasons
that even her MTV performance had a relatively short shelf life in the
storehouse of pop outrages. Both the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon have spent
the better part of a decade fashioning child stars and disposing of them. These
stars – usually female, possessing some vocal talent and in the netherworld
between child and teenager – usually figure prominently in television shows
with a protagonist on the edge of “stardom.” Then they and their zany friends
have relatively wholesome adventures, sing a few songs, and prepare themselves
and their audience for the pressures of impending adolescence. For every Miley,
there’s Selena Gomez, and iCarly, and Demi Lovato, and the Olson twins, and
Amanda Bynes, and so on. Each one is packaged in a similar fashion, making
their identities blur and their careers follow a familiar, depressing arc of
stardom, fascination, decline and floundering before …
I was reminded of this watching “Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane?” A 50-year-old movie starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, “Baby Jane”
is a fun-house grotesque; a meditation
on the corroding influence of fame, stardom, abandonment, and role-playing. It’s
the sort of movie that Hollywood does best when it wants to talk about how
terrible a place Hollywood can be. (They would know, wouldn’t they?) It also
offers a window into how terrible a place the world can be when we rely on
false images to save us from ourselves, and how little consolation we can find
within.
“Baby Jane” opens in the golden age of vaudeville in 1917,
with the sound of a crying child. Inside a theater, a crowd is watching “Baby”
Jane Hudson, a sweet, blonde child on a stage dancing and singing. The audience
can buy an exact replica doll in the lobby to take home for their very own.
Baby Jane sings her trademark song, “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” – a Victorian-era
weeper about a child writing a love letter to her dead father. But Baby Jane’s
father is at that moment alive, and we see that he is more or less managing her
career. We are not surprised later to find that for all her talent, Baby Jane
is a spoiled little girl. When she stages a tantrum after the show, a crowd of
mothers and children waiting for her autograph are also quick to pass judgment
on her and her parents.
Nor is she alone in the world – she has an older sister
named Blanche, and a mother. Mother makes her only appearance at the beginning,
when she tells the older sister that she’s “the lucky one” – presumably because
she isn’t on stage. “I want you to be nicer to Jane and your father than they
are to you,” she admonishes her. Implicit in the command is both the idea that
Jane will need someone in the future, and that the mother won’t be there. Lurking in the background is the idea that
Blanche is luckier because she isn’t the one on stage.
Then the scene shifts ahead to 1935, and we are aware that
the roles have reversed. Blanche Hudson is now an accomplished, sought-after
Hollywood actress. She has also taken her mother’s advice, because we learn
from two studio hacks that Blanche is “taking care” of Jane – making sure she
has roles, in spite of her lack of acting talent. But she’s “not doing Baby
Jane any favors” by doing so, one man says, before asking the question,
seemingly aimed at a large automobile – “Who do they make monsters like this
for?”
Is Baby Jane a monster, or is Blanche? We think we know the
answer when we see two anonymous figures – one standing at a gate, another
behind the wheel of a car, and we are led to believe that one has run over the
other on purpose. We know Jane is a drinker now, and we feel that these two
sisters will always be at each other’s throats. So we aren’t surprised later to
find what has happened – the two sisters are, years later, unmarried and living
in a forgotten Hollywood mansion. Blanche is crippled physically, unable to
walk and confined to a wheelchair. Jane is crippled emotionally, still comically
resembling the old child star, bitter and broken. Though it is the present, the
title card tells us that this is “Yesterday.”
“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is a question familiar to
us. We learn of and discover media personalities, and then lose track of them. What
happened to them? Why aren’t they still “around?” Did he or she die and I didn’t
notice? The obvious answer is “Baby” Jane grew up. But why don’t I know what
happened? How could someone with that much talent at an early age not go on to
do something even bigger? The answer is understandable. A child prodigy may be
a figure of immense talent who is capable of greater accomplishments as they
age – one thinks of Mozart – or a gifted youngster who masters a very narrow
skill at an exceptionally early age but is unable to progress beyond this. That
is why being a child prodigy can be a blessing – unlimited wealth and attention
that makes one “set for life,” or an impossible standard of achievement that
one is burdened with for the remainder of his life. Normal people live under the
sometimes mistaken impression that the best is yet to come. But what if it’s
already happened? What then? What if you’re never allowed to grow up?
One of the draws of “Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane?” is its two real-life stars, famously dismissive of each other but both
needing a hit to restore their careers in 1962. Joan Crawford will probably
always suffer under the burden of “Mommie Dearest,” which makes her performance
as the seemingly good-hearted Blanche that much more interesting. Bette Davis
does her best to make us loathe the self-loathing Baby Jane, so that we laugh
at her while at the same time being revolted as she serves up rats and
parakeets for her sister’s meals. Jane
is still performing – as Blanche, by copying her voice over the phone and
forging checks. Even then, she is nowhere near as gifted or as shrewd a performer
as her sister.
Something else is going on in a movie that is obsessed
with performances. Even in private, the lives of these two women are, at best, illusions.
Jane has a veneer of bitterness and brass that inadequately conceals her
vulnerability and insanity. One of the unintended legacies of this movie is its
appeal to camp, and that is partly because of Davis and Crawford and their
careers built on strong, independent women through over-the-top performances.
Baby Jane has not grown up, but she is Blanche’s caregiver.
And even though she resents the role, there is a theatricality about it. In
real life, for example, it would be ludicrous for Blanche to live on the second
story of a house when she is stuck in a wheelchair. (Of course, she’s up there
so Jane can presumably control her.) But by Blanche’s being above and set
apart, Jane can make a show of taking care of her, bringing up the elaborate
silver meal services to present her with food. And by doing so, she can
presumably assuage the grief she still feels over what she thinks she did to
Blanche in making her crippled. The only rule seems to be that Blanche never mentions
the accident, until she feels she needs to. And because Blanche knows the
truth, she will allow Jane to torture her.
But by the movie’s end, we know that Jane didn’t really do
anything to Blanche. Blanche has spent decades using the accident that ended
her career to make Jane live in guilt. So Blanche is also playing a role, and a
very sinister one at that. We now understand that the girl waiting in the
wings, watching her spoiled little sister bow for audiences, was silently nursing
her own grudges.
Jane’s role as a caretaker is interesting too, in that it
distinguishes the movie from that other Hollywood gothic, “Sunset Boulevard.”
In it, the insane silent film star Norma Desmond needs caretakers in order to
function in spite of the reality of her fading stardom. Here, Baby Jane need
only look in a mirror and compare her face to the ubiquitous doll with her
name, and she is fully aware of how far she has fallen. What good is fame, the
movie asks, when a grateful public can rediscover your performances on television,
only to have them interrupted unceremoniously by commercials for dog food? “All
that happened a long time ago,” one of the non-show business characters assures
her teenage daughter. The illusion of film makes the events of 30 years before
seem ancient.
Another facet of the movie is the act of “watching yourself.”
We see Blanche admiring her own work on television, and we imagine that Jane
doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, she has the dolls. One of the tragedies of
child stardom is the loss of fame, and the vain scratching and clawing that
results when someone tries to regain that attention. (In the act of former
child stars trying to distinguish themselves as adults, their striving
sometimes comes off as desperate, amateurish, and …childlike.) But why does a
former star watch herself? Because presumably, no one else is. When the
audience leaves after the performance, the performer has nothing left to do but
become part of the audience – a potentially unwilling and unsatisfied consumer
of the performance. The act of adoration was once reserved only for God –
because He is the only one worthy of receiving it, and the only figure who can
justify the need for it.
Within the movie’s internal theme of acting, we see both
sisters as not living up to their parents’ wishes – Jane, singing about her
father, knows she is no longer everybody’s baby doll and that she can’t get
that back, even if she goes out on the road again. Her talent, the one thing
her father assured her she would never lose, is worthless. Blanche, because of
her use of the accident against her sister, has betrayed the promise she
silently made to her mother.
The other characters share the stars’ marginality and
brokenness. Elvira, the housekeeper who sides with Blanche, is black. In 1962,
her race and her occupation make her somewhat disposable in society. In spite
of this, Elvira stands up to Jane, telling her, “You gotta act like a grown woman, just like the rest of us.” The pathetic
Edwin Flagg, played with wonderful pathos by Victor Buono, poses as an aspiring
entertainer who longs for show business because he is really a man-child living
at home with his mother. His character
gives Jane an outlet to resurrect her show business and romantic aspirations,
but she realizes nothing will come of them. Flagg reaches the same conclusion,
drunk when he thinks Jane has abandoned him, and running from the house when he
realizes what kind of people Jane and Blanche are.
What eventually happens to child stars? In the case of the
Hudson sisters, death and insanity, we assume, as the camera draws back from
the busy beach when the police at last discover what they’ve been witnessing. A
bewildered circle of sun worshippers stare at an old lady singing a forgotten
song, while a body lies nearby waiting for someone to notice it. With her last
words, Blanche has just told us that her greatest fear for her sister is that
Jane will be alone, with no one to look out for her. (That tells you what Blanche
considers to be her version of “caretaking.”) But for our own real-life stars, we
expect them to fall into lives of crime, drugs, failed marriages, loneliness
and neglect, unless their careers continue. Then we still expect the same, only
on a perhaps larger scale. We aren’t surprised when Michael Jackson orders his
physician to give him more of a drug than a human being can stand, presumably
because he is something more than mortal through the power of his voice. And we
aren’t surprised to see him carried out of his mansion in a body bag, as though
we knew that was where he was headed from the moment we first heard him sing.
We allow ourselves to be outraged by Miley Cyrus, or spellbound by her, but we
keep watching, because we expect something entertaining to follow – either a
song, or a morality tale, or maybe both. We have reached a stage as a society
when either one will serve to amuse us.
It is the forgotten Elvira who inspires “Baby Jane’s” ultimate
comment on fame. At the picture’s end, when a group of people at the beach -the
same crowd that will moments later be Jane’s final audience – learn that Elvira’s
body has been found, one of them remarks, “Sure is a rotten way to get your
picture in the papers.” I’m sure Miley Cyrus, and legions of child stars along
with her, would agree.
Set Your Fields on Fire
The award-winning novel by William Thornton
Available now
Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"
You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.
It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.
Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.
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