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Postmodernism, Camp & Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: The Search for Identity in the Death of Hollywood Mythology and the Mass Audience
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The notion of the single mythic audience that Hollywood films still believed they could cater to began to disintegrate in the late 1950s. Audiences were becoming more hybridized and segmented and the mass, generalized conventions of Hollywood simply stopped working. The destruction of the homogenous, passive and largely gullible audience and Hollywood’s inability to reconcile this indicated the end of an era and the dawn of something new. Two emergent yet remarkably divergent movements made their way into the public domain at this time: postmodernism and camp. Postmodern objects are marked by overt self-awareness through stylistic modes of reflexivity and referentiality, a sense of dispersal and often somewhat abrasive nature. Camp is characterized by its opposite(s); its products are fun, lighthearted, ignorant of irony and blissfully innocent of the knowledge of their caustically horrendous quality. These striking binaries come together in Robert Aldrich’s 1962 film, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Not only does Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Contain postmodern and camp elements, at the same time, the film is emblematic of this moment of old Hollywood’s death. The film showcases two faded stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and makes no attempt to conceal the fact that they are, indeed, faded. Through presenting faded screen idols at their worst, Aldrich illuminates Hollywood’s fissures in its constructed mythologies and ultimately certain demise. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? is symbolic of the confused and turmoil-ridden era of 1950s Hollywood film. The film is largely self-reflexive in both its approach and subject matter, one of the key elements of postmodernism. Simultaneously, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? is the encapsulated picture of camp. It expresses exaggeration so awful, it is fabulous. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? is a prime example of camp and its sensibilities or flagrant lack thereof. Following the guidelines laid out by Susan Sontag in her seminal work on the subject, “Notes on Camp,” the film’s true colors are revealed in full force. Sontag describes camp as many things; it is modern, it is a sensibility, a love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration, it is a certain mode of aestheticism. Camp involves the conversion of the serious into the frivolous, maintaining a kitsch quality that rescues it from too much self-aggrandizement. Camp never becomes inaccessible because of its latent ‘junkiness.’ Camp is good because it is awful. The inherent contradictions of camp compliment its emergence in this confused time of shifting identities of both the producers and consumers of mass culture. As Sontag writes, “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but can’t be taken altogether seriously because it’s ‘too much’’ (284). Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? is unabashedly unselfconscious in its exaggeration in both the narrative and the actors’ performances. Watching the decaying golden screen goddesses is excruciating, yet oddly pleasurable. Joan Crawford falls victim to the naiveté the most, playing the tragic yet oddly comic figure of Blanche Hudson with a substantial amount of gravity, pathos and seriousness. Bette Davis has more fun with her role, embodying the sadistically nostalgic Baby Jane Hudson to the absolute limit of plausibility. The piano player, Edwin Flagg, played by Victor Buono, follows in similar suit, right down to his preposterously unconvincing British accent. They delight in the sheer dreadfulness of their characterizations. This kind of self-consciousness, claims Sontag, becomes false camp that loses its ‘originality’ and fabulousness. Yet, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane manages to prevail as truly divine camp in spite of this submission to acknowledgment. The film may not be innocent on all accounts, but it’s damn good. Unlike camp, the Hollywood system could not survive the decay of its own constructions and artifice. Being ‘off’ was not an option. The foundations of myth, of glamorous stars, collaborative, author-less efforts and strict regulation crumbled to reveal specific needs and characteristics of individuals they could no longer accommodate. There was a cultural dispersal in terms of the range of interest and expectation on the part of the audience. Viewers ceased to obediently suspend disbelief; they sought something new and outside of an organized and systematized order. In the spirit of the old Hollywood tradition, “Camp makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass produced object…camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica” (289). Both styles are guilty of appropriation, however camp feigns ignorance and rests on innocence. Hollywood film relies on structure, order and convention and while desirous to appear seamless, has no illusions about its intentions of mass appeal. Hollywood film is the mass-produced object; camp products are more on the fringe, yet they aspire to have the same pervasive qualities of glamour and ceremony. As camp borrows, it refers to other objects and moments, skewing them just enough to remove any sense of subtlety or decorum. In the Aldrich’s film, these alterations are clearly apparent. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? makes references to both the lives and careers of its stars as well as other films of the past, both distant and recent. The agonizing scene involving Blanche’s desperate attempt to notify her neighbor of her imprisonment by hasty and jumbled crumpled paper delivery manifests as a classic, yet ultimately failed Hitchcock moment, borrowed directly from his 1959 film, North by Northwest. The film is even more aggressive in making reference to itself. The self-referential elements in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? work on several levels. While both of the main characters, Blanche and Baby Jane long for their lost youth, glamour and fame in their own way, their yearning is indeed undeniable. Aldrich chooses to use actual screen footage from early Crawford and Davis films to highlight the reality and extremity of the actors; changes and decline. The audience bears witness to the aging process with the harsh and unwavering gaze of the camera. Seeing the two stars in their idealized and mythicized glory of youth and then to transition to their unpleasant middle age is a jarringly effective way to further emphasize the change in regard for Hollywood film as an institution. Not only is the first generation of Hollywood is aging at the time of the film’s release, but like the careers of Crawford and Davis, Hollywood’s moment has come and gone by the late 50s. The gimmick no longer works or sells. When Baby Jane decides to revive her childhood act, the audience shudders in horror at the thought of having to suffer through a new rendition of “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.” There is no way Baby Jane has maintained an appeal for the mass audience. They no longer like what she offers them. What is more, they no longer ‘get’ it. The old Hollywood-style film faces the same predicament. Because of its reliance on a sanitized version of the past that never really existed, classic Hollywood requires a nostalgic audience and in this time, that audience was not present. Aldrich’s film addresses this notion of nostalgia and its position in the public sphere. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane ? exhibits a perverse quality of paralysis in regard to Baby Jane’s unhealthy fixation and obsession with her lost youth and days of adoration. In her unrelenting desire and attempts to regain this passed moment of childhood, she becomes an infantalized adult, regressing into a state of fantasy and delusion, no longer operating within a realm of reason. The scene towards the film’s close emphasizes this process of mental deterioration as Blanche lays dying on the sand, Baby Jane skips off to get two strawberry ice cream cones that she undoubtedly believes will make everything all right. Hollywood becomes that same troubled figure, refusing to accept its loss of position and power, longing for a past that can no longer exist. By calling into question the validity of the star system, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? deconstructs and debunks the Hollywood myth. Showcasing the decline of the classical and the glamorous with horrifying clarity, Aldrich’s subtlety or lack thereof is not lost on the audience. With the advent of postmodernism and camp, films began to change in the late 50s, closing doors on tradition, convention and homogeneity and opening to the possibilities of innovation, experimentation and diversification. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? throws a dark shadow on the Hollywood institution with a contradictory sense of buoyancy in the great camp tradition. Hollywood, as the old generation knew it, was dead, and something new had been born.
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