I Would Like to See It: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

What’s under the lid of the dinner tray? A leg of lamb? Salmon on a bed of rice? Perhaps a dead rat, plated like diner eggs on top of layers of sliced tomato. It’s the not knowing that matters, that generates the psychological tension so instrumental to the form of abuse known as coercive control. By exposing a victim to erratically spaced traumatic events, one conditions them to remain in a reactive, vigilant state, perhaps one of fawning obedience or deference to the abuser. It’s that fundamental tension which animates so much of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Robert Aldrich’s classic drama of studio exploitation, curdled child stardom, and violent codependence. Who’s on the other end of that phone? Who’s driving that car as it roars toward a defenseless woman opening an auto gate? What’s behind the locked door at the top of the stairs? Will you get the salmon, or the rat?

Even something as elemental as voice becomes uncertain, with Baby Jane Hudson’s (Bette Davis) eerily expert imitation of her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) further blurring the line between the self-loathing and codependent siblings. Davis is ghoulish as the alcoholic and badly damaged former child star, a creature rooting through the ruins of her own life with a strange mixture of self-pity and willful ignorance, decrying her circumstances even as she denies they exist. Her nails are ragged claws, her ravaged face slathered in makeup so different from her neck’s skin tone it looks like someone has stitched her head to an unrelated body. She has a marvelously raunchy physicality to her, a sense of sexuality that came to fruit and then spent thirty long, slow years rotting on the wine, fed on by wasps and worms. The flashes of her skinny, pasty legs as she kicks her skirts up in a grotesque rendition of her childhood standards, the sad little beauty mark she draws on her cheek when she leaves the house — there’s an innocence to it, almost.

Crawford is more restrained but no less masterful as the wheelchair-bound Blanche, whose beaten-down submissiveness is as much a mask as Jane’s aggressive cultivation of her own grotesquerie. The film is intimately concerned with the condition of celebrity in American media, the distortions to the spirit it produces not just in the performer but in their audience, who witness tremendous cruelty up to and including the exploitation of child stars with no more than an “I’m really so disappointed.” Its ending, a conscious echoing of Sunset Boulevard’s famous “close-up” sequence, invites us to consider our own culpability in these practices as Jane dances childishly on the beach before a staring crowd while her sister lies dying of internal injuries a few yards away, both of them as completely abandoned and dehumanized in their lowest moments as they were as helpless children. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is a rancid, incestuous parade of cruelties and nightmares, rubbing its viewers’ faces in shit, and every second of it fucking rules.