The 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, has always been controversial and divisive. It has been praised as High Camp, and denounced as misogynistic caricature. Even for those of us who love it (myself included), the film is excruciating: it consists in more than two hours of aging, dueling divas Davis and Crawford tormenting and indeed torturing one another. Though it had some precursors, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pretty much invented the “hagssploitation” subgenre. It renewed the careers of both stars, but did this by portraying them as delusional and violent, pretty much erasing their earlier accomplishments as glamorous stars and Oscar-winning actors. While male Hollywood stars are presented in such a way that allows them to preserve their allure into middle age and even beyond, female stars are considered to br washed up and devalued once they hit the age of 35 or so. They can only continue developing their personas by resigning their sexuality and vigor, and instead embracing monstrosity. In this respect, Davis and Crawford were preceded by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950); the pattern continues even today, as witness Demi Moore in The Substance (2024).
Johanna Isaacson renews our understanding of all this with her brilliant short book on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. She deals head-on with the film itself, in terms of both content and form, as well as with the dilemma faced by women who are no longer young –a kind of entrapment that the movie at once dramatizes, exploits, and exemplifies. In Isaacson’s account, Baby Jane indeed “registers older women’s devaluation”; however, “instead of responding with dejection or grim realism,” it “retaliates with fabulousness, excess, and pitch-black humor”. The film, she cogently argues, is “a bold manifesto on how to fight back with theatrical flair rather than meek apology”.
Isaacson’s book is wonderful for several reasons. Most importantly, for me, is how powerfully it gets at a level of aesthetic feeling, or aesthetic response, that is very difficult to put into words. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? overtly invokes sensations of disgust, as well as self-reflexive shame at one’s own implication in enjoying such disgust at the expense of others. The movie even invokes a sort of hilarity, as we cannot help laughing as well as grimacing at the over-the-top absurdity of what is happening on screen. But beyond all this, the film draws us into a mood, or an atmosphere, that doesn’t fit neatly into any of our descriptive categories: a kind of ferocious partial identification with, and partial enjoyment at a detached distance of, the very wrongness of everything that is happening on screen, and everything that the protagonists are doing. Isaacson conveys this sensation that is almost impossible to pin down: a complicated feeling of complicity, distance, and anger, one that can partly be situated in the terms of ideology critique (the feminist analysis of how older women are mistreated and devalued), but that somehow pushes beyond such terms in order to express a kind of joyous but oxymoronic intensity.
Isaacson evokes this mood throughout, but her discussion is anything but vague. She analyzes the film in exquisite depth, both going through the action scene by scene, and also considering its various informing contexts. There are careful discussions of what was happening in Hollywood at the time Baby Jane was made — the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system with which both actresses were identified — as well as of the overall careers of Aldrich, Crawford, and Davis, and even of the infamous Davis/Crawford feud (which may have actually existed to a certain extent, but which was grossly inflated and exaggerated in the press and in other venues in order to help sell the film).
If you are in any sense a fan of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, you certainly need to read this book. But even if you are not particularly attached to the film, you will learn a lot from it about American popular culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and about how the position of women (and in particular of privileged, but still discriminated-against, white women) is both refracted though, and to an extent produced by, the Hollywood dream factory and the mainstream media more generally.