Fifty Shades of "Mommie Dearest"

Forty years on, the film continues to reveal hidden emotional depths that belie, and explain, its camp appeal.

With its histrionic performance by Faye Dunaway, its obtrusive camerawork and clunky dialogue, and its unabashedly melodramatic storyline of a toxic mother/daughter relationship, Mommie Dearest seems to have been reverse-engineered to become the very epitome of camp. Indeed, both at the time–and, particularly, in the years since–Mommie Dearest has become a true cult classic, beloved among both straight and especially gay audiences. Who among us, after all,  hasn’t bellowed “no wire hangers, ever!” or “bring me the axe?”

The film has become so synonymous with the camp label that it can be difficult to see outside of this frame.  However, a more sustained examination of the film and its performances reveals a remarkable number of hidden depths, many of which have long been unfairly obscured by its camp reception, which arguably began when its tagline was reframed by the studio as “meet the biggest mother of them all!” As undeniably hilarious as the film is at times, this shouldn’t blind us to the very real pain and anguish it reveals. 

Central to the film’s surprisingly emotional depth is Faye Dunaway, whose larger-than-life acting choices are by turns brilliant and inexplicable, sometimes at the same time in the same scene. It’s clear that she thought she was giving an Oscar-worthy performance, and by all accounts it was incredibly dismaying to her the extent to which it was met with either widespread derision or camp acclaim, neither of which, it must be said, are accolades most actors aspire to. There is, to be sure, an undeniable physical resemblance between Dunaway and Crawford, and there is evidence that the latter believed the former was one of the actresses of a caliber vaunted enough to portray her. 

Yet if Dunaway’s goal was to portray a Hollywood star both monstrous and vulnerable–rendered into an icon by the institution to which she gave her life and yet never able to shake the sense that it was all precarious, that it could all come tumbling down in a moment–then by that metric she succeeds. There’s no question that in the film’s imagination Crawford is a broken and fundamentally flawed human being, someone so beaten about, bruised, and misused by those around her that she often often can’t tell the difference between her life as an icon of the big screen and as a regular person with emotional responsibilities to those in her life.

There is, indeed, some ambiguity as to whether Joan herself is even aware of the fact that her entire life has become a performance. When one of her several male companions demands whether her recent outburst is just another act, her tearful insistence that it isn’t, that she is being genuine is, thanks to Dunaway’s performance, delightfully ambiguous, leaving us (and Joan herself) unclear as to what extent  In some ways, in fact, the film, perhaps despite itself, constructs a prison from which there is no escape for a woman like Joan, a star trapped in the studio system like a fly in amber. In its opening scenes, the camera focuses on various parts of Joan’s body as she undertakes her beauty regimen, and it only belatedly shows us her face, that long-awaited spectacle. As feminist film theorists have long held, one of the ways that classic Hollywood cinema objectifies women and renders them into spectacles for consumption is by imprisoning them in the camera’s gaze, breaking them into pieces in order to more fully and entirely be consumed.

This imprisonment also plays out at the level of the diegesis. In another of the film’s key scenes, we see Joan fired from MGM by none other than Louis B. Mayer himself. Not that he puts it that way himself, of course. He at least has enough respect for his star to let her go gently, to give her the chance to make an exit on her own terms. It’s clearly a crushing blow to her sense of self, given how much she has endured at the hands of the notoriously patriarchal and dictatorial studio system, taking whatever roles are offered. Fortunately for Joan, she soon returns to prominence thanks to her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce. For Joan, though, every victory is always tainted by its opposite, and it is the ever-present specter of her own encroaching obsolescence is, in the film’s own twisted logic, the explanation for the subsequent ghoulish outburst when she discovers Christina has been hanging her expensive clothes on the infamous wire hangers.

All of this isn’t to say that Crawford is anything like a passive victim of the patriarchy. In another of the film’s most notable moments, she confronts the men of the board of Pepsi who, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, want to give her the boot. “Don’t fuck with me, fellas,” she barks with obvious relish. While Joan is often a monster in Mommie Dearest, it’s hard not to cheer for her at this moment, when she seizes control, if only for a while, from the nefarious clutches of the men who refuse to take her seriously. 

And what of Christina, whose memoir of abuse at her mother’s hands was the source of this film? What’s clear from watching the film is that the younger and older versions of Christina are in two very different films. The younger is undoubtedly in a horror movie, one where the violence and torment inflicted on her seems to come without rhyme or reason, as when Joan viciously hacks away her hair after catching her imitating her mother in front of the mirror, or during the truly terrifying wire hanger scene. The abject looks of terror on the girl’s face are ample testament to just how bemused and frightened she is in this world.

The older version of the character, however, is clearly trapped in a tortured maternal melodrama, one with many uncanny similarities to Crawford’s own Mildred Pierce. Though Diana Scarwid gives an undeniably stilted and wooden performance as Christina as an adult–her delivery of the line “I’m not one of your fans! would have earned her a Razzy even if nothing else about the film did–there is also something genuinely moving about these portions of the film, as we see both Joan and Christina trying, and failing, to understand one another. Those moments when Christina tells her mother she loves her feel genuine, even if a bit forced. 

If, then, Mommie Dearest is a travesty of a film, it is also a deeply tragic one. This blending together of the bleakly comic with a deep well of pain helps to explain, I think, why the film remains so beloved among gay men of a certain age. If the gays are good at one thing, it’s at learning to laugh at their own pain, to take all of the abuse that the world has turned their way and transform it into art. Having just recently re-watched Mommie Dearest for my podcast, at first I felt sure that I would look at it with the same level of bemusement and condescension that I had when I first watched years ago. To be sure, there was still some of that but, as I thought about it more–and as I talked about it more with my boyfriend–I came to a more nuanced and mature appreciation of its many hidden depths. Hopefully you will, too.