What Ever Happened to Baby Jane with Angelica Jade Bastién

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the Bechdel Cast, the questions asked if movies have
women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and
husbands or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy. Zeph
and bast start changing with the Bechdel Cast.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Whatever happened to baby Jamie?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, whatever happened to you Jamie?

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Well, here's what I did. I locked you in a
room and started feeding your rats. That's what That's what happened.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
It's it's we're sort of two sister coded people who
live in Los Angeles. Maybe this could be maybe we
are you know, it's not aspirational, no, but it's nice
to have options. It's just nice to have options.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
You know. We might have to move in together. Someday.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
I could see. I think more likely I could see
like us, you know, doing more of a Gray Gardens situation. Yeah,
I would really enjoy it. I know we have never
really covered well, I guess we've covered a few documentaries
on the show over the years, but that would be
that would be an interesting one to talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Indeed, isn't that a mother daughter pairing? It is mommy?

Speaker 3 (01:12):
No, I guess I don't know which Edy I more
identify with. I'm sure it changes as you as you age.
I've got to revisit it. Anyways, speaking of two women
in a house having a difficult time, we are we
are doing a long awaited episode of the bechel Cast today,

(01:32):
another movie that I'm like, I can't believe it took
us nine years to get to it, but I'm so
glad that we're here. But first, what the hell is
this show? Caitlin?

Speaker 4 (01:41):
What is this?

Speaker 3 (01:41):
What are we doing here?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
I'll tell you well, first of all, my name is Caitlin,
my name is Jamie, Baby Jamie, you're baby Jamie, and I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Old, old Kaitlyn brutal.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
This is the Bechdel Cast, our podcast where we examine
movies through an intersectional feminist lens. Using the Bechdel test
simply is a jumping off point, just a way to
get the conversation going, a conversation among women, perhaps.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, And this movie really is a great example of
how women can talk about so many things. The Bechdel test,
of course, created by now friend of the show, Alison Bechdel,
originally as a one off joke in her comic strip
Likes to Watch Out For that has since become a
mainstreamified media metric. The version of the test we use

(02:32):
requires that two characters of a marginalized gender speak to
each other about something other than a man, which, as
becomes clear in this movie immediately, is.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Not a problem that this movie has not at all.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
But let's get our wonderful returning guests into the mix.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Absolutely. She is a pop culture critic for New York
Magazine's site Vulture. You can find her at her substack
Mad Women and Muses. And you remember her from our
episode on Miss Juneteenth. It's Angelica Jade Basti.

Speaker 4 (03:04):
Hey, go bye, Hey. I am so happy to be
here talking about some of my favorite dames. You know,
I love the classic Hollywood brads, what fascinating fascinating women actually, Like,
just watched Marty Supreme a screener of it the other day,
and so I've been thinking a little bit about like

(03:26):
the idea of a classic Hollywood star and the actual
reality of a classic Hollywood star, because obviously, in the movie,
which takes place in nineteen fifty two and stars everybody's
favorite young, very online man, Timothy Shallowy, Gwyneth Paltrow plays
a former Hollywood star who was really big in the thirties,

(03:50):
and it's like really interesting because it's like I was, like, Howl,
who would she be? Who would be like sort of
a reflection of the character she's playing, but like was
an actual star in the thirties, and I couldn't pinpoint
anyone it would make sense to compare her to. But
it sort of made me think that, like, Hollywood really

(04:11):
loves to terror form its own past and history in
a way that's very dishonest about it and like sort
of softens a lot of things and makes a lot
of the narratives around these people like simple and also
mythic in a way that doesn't recognize the complexity of
their humanity. And you know, a lot can be said

(04:34):
about whatever happened to Baby Jane, But I really do
feel both performers, Joan Crawford and Betty Davis are really
really keeping in mind the humanity of their characters and
the humanity underneath this like very arch, brutal, violent circumstance.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Absolutely, I'm well, I'm curious what your history with this
movie is as well, because it does feel like so
directly in conversation with the history and obviously with the
careers of its stars, and as we were talking about
before we started recording, there is a lot of misinformation
around this movie, around this production specifically, And I also

(05:13):
feel like the more I was sitting with it and
doing some reading, like with this genre in general, which
we've talked about on the show before. But I'm I'm
excited to hear your thoughts about it. Yeah, what's your
history with this movie?

Speaker 4 (05:27):
So I would say in high school, I went to
an art high school. They called it a strand, but
basically it's like a major, and my major was film.
And so in that time period, as I'm really starting
to get into feminism, like I remember reading Belle Hooks's
you know, book on Black feminism from like Margin to Center.

(05:48):
And I was also getting into Betty Davis at the time,
like she you know, because we're watching like a lot
of different films in film class, and so I got
into classic Holleywood that way. But the first time I
watched this movie was thanks to my college class star
a tour on Betty Davis. So it was a whole

(06:09):
class just on Betty Davis.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
That's really cool.

Speaker 4 (06:13):
Yeah, like those I really credit my college professor, Jeffrey
john Smith with sparking criticism as something that actually really
interests me because I never really thought about it. I
was going to college for screenwriting. It was a few
years after college I like genuinely gave criticism a shot.
And I think the classes I took with him, which

(06:34):
were year as a tour on Betty Davis, star as
a tour on Carrie Grant, and a whole class on
Gone with the Wind, which is crazy to do.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
I still have never seen that movie. It's like one
of my big.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
You know, I'm it's very complicated that movie where because
on one hand, I'm like, this is one of the
most racist movies to ever exist, that has really fueled
the Lost Cause, the mythology that exists in the South
about itself that's like very inaccurate and glorify. But also
Scarlett O'Hara is like you can draw a clear line

(07:13):
from Scarlett O'Hara and Vivian les Lee's performance of her
to like Rosamund Pike playing Amy Dunn and Gone Girl,
like I really think I see you kind of.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
She's Gone with the Wind girl.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Kind I mean, Scarlett O'Hara is a crazy woman, like
very intense, fascinating fucked up character. And if you look
at the movie Gone with the Wind as a movie
about white people telling on themselves, it becomes like very
interesting of a thing of a work to study. But yeah,
I got introduced to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in college,

(07:49):
and I was so struck by it and got really
into the exploitation or sometimes called psycho biddy genre that
really started or coalesced with this movie and then became
a thing where classic Hollywood actresses who had gotten a
little older, which is like really just their forties and fifties,

(08:09):
were now called to play these like very intense archetypal
like sometimes violent, deranged, usually completely mad women and horror
thrillers or like just intense psychological dramas, and like the
genre starts to form and like really coalesces with Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane, which was released in nineteen sixty two.

(08:32):
My own mother wasn't even born yet.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Its kind crazy, that's yeah, there's I mean, I was
really struck by how I mean, obviously, especially the Betty
Davis character is played to look much older, but yeah,
they're in their fifties.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
They're in their like fifties. Yeah, it's kind of crazy
because you like, on one hand, we also have to
keep in mind, like people were drinking and smoking in
ways that people don't drink and smoke now. So I
also think people get way too obsessed with the idea
of what does it mean to like look your age,
what does it mean to look younger? We should value

(09:12):
looking younger and remaining forever youthful, which I think has
led to some weird phases in Hollywood where like now
everybody's face they can't move in the movies that they're
supposed to be emoting in, and it's like, I'm like,
I don't believe in like talking shit about individual people's
classic surgery. I do not think that's the move. But

(09:34):
there is like a very We're in a very interesting
place with the face of women in Hollywood, and it's
like nobody knows how to really talk about it because
it is a very sensitive thing to talk about and
like hardline to tread, where you're like, hey, this is
a thing that's just kind of like happening overall, and
it's also affecting the art, like for all of classic

(09:56):
Hollywood's BS, which I mean racist, sexist in ways that
are like violent and astounding. Yeah, and even with like
Arita Hayworth having such a transformation because of you know,
the studio system wanting to make her into a more
accessible star, you know, all those sort of and that's

(10:17):
also very racialized. They weren't doing the kind of work
we see today because that kind of work didn't wasn't refined,
didn't exist in the same way.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
They would have if they could have, but they couldn't.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Probably, But like what that means is that there is
an individuality to the beauty you see in classic college
or I think in Hollywood and just in general, before
like the you know, two thousand and twenty tens, people
look even the beautiful stars, they still look like people.
They still had some touching imperfections that in a way

(10:51):
kind of heightens oh, like the beauty elsewhere. Like I
always think of, like how Elizabeth Taylor's so gorgeous, but
she has such a high pitch like range voice when
you like listen to her. And I always thought that
like contradiction was so interesting. Now stars don't have contradictions.
They're very smooth and algorithmically perfect, and it's like that

(11:12):
really takes something away from the performances, you know, Betty
Davis would say, you need your characters to be larger
than life. But also she was very very keen on
like the psychology of her characters and adjusting how they
look to reflect that, which is why she She's the
one who decided upon the makeup for Baby Jane, which

(11:34):
is like really fascinating to me.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
She is I love with Betty Davis specifically. I know
that this has been said about her a lot, but
it's just like, I just love especially in that time
that she wasn't like she insisted on looking like shit
if that is what the character required, Like I think
of I think it's that like that scene that I
think it's dark Victory, where like starting you know, very

(11:59):
early her career, she's like, you know, no, I'm not
going to like make a performance pretty if that is
not what the performance requires, and you know, it's like
that's the job. But also even at the time like
that that was unusual to be doing and I just yeah,
it is not something that has improved with time, and

(12:22):
and I agree, I mean I don't I don't know
how to properly have the conversation around it, but it
but we've got to figure it out because it does,
I mean whatever. I mean even seeing period pieces, watching
period pieces is different now because you whatever, the expectations
in Hollywood require you have a face that could not

(12:42):
have existed past a certain year.

Speaker 4 (12:45):
Right exactly exactly. It just makes me like sad because
I think, like, honestly, expectations for women's looks have always
been bad, Like it's just always been bad, right, But
this is like a new level of like like self
optimizing to the point that you're almost superhuman, like you

(13:06):
look like modeled after a cyborg rather than like it's
like they made cyborg versions of these stars, And I'm like,
what's what's going on? I just find it. I think
I'm also feeling very affected because it's like I'm noticing
actresses who are like my age, you know, the Lindsay
Lohans and you know, well, Anne Hathaway's like a couple

(13:27):
of years she's in her early forties, but like in
my age range, doing very specific work like facelifts and
stuff like that. And I'm like, wait a minute, this
is way is this really what's expected of women at
like in their mid thirties early forties. That's like, also,
how are people's faces going to look in ten years,
I like really wonder that too, because it's like there's

(13:48):
trends in the plastic surgery too, And that's what I
find like most interesting is like people are getting like
work done that makes them all sort of blend in
more with each other, which I think is more like
it's the more like, well, I don't really know how
to take this and how am I you know, like
and you'll notice with like you know, when people get

(14:10):
like botox in their upper lip, it causes them to
kind of purse their lip in a certain way. And
Emma Stone was doing it so much in Begonia. I
was like, this is so this is so fascinating to me,
But how do we actually talk about this without like
putting a new expectation onto these actresses? Like and I don't.

(14:30):
I don't think we're there yet.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
It's complicated, it is.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
It is very complicated, particularly like the I think what
now that like I now that there's like working actors
ten fifteen years younger who are also like it just
concerns me. I think the first time I knew of
someone who is like a friend of mine, who is
not even an actor, getting like preventative botox beginning when

(14:55):
she was I think like twenty six or something like that.
Like I mean that is like unbelievably common now, is
like preventive work being marketed and sold.

Speaker 4 (15:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
And it just feels like the age where that is
expected keeps getting younger and younger and younger, and uh
and it I think, yeah, like echo your sentiment, Angilicay,
it makes me sad, like it makes me sad for everyone,
and that it even extends beyond entertainment now because of
like the culture of self surveillance exactly, we.

Speaker 4 (15:23):
See our faces so damn much now, like we're yeah,
like do I need to see my face that much?
My grandmother wasn't seeing her face that much.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
I'm looking at my face right now or it's like
zoom call.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
And I just like it. Yeah, like the culture that
we live in. It just like there are pictures I've
seen of myself that I didn't know I was being photographed,
And then I think those are the moments that I
was like, oh, should I should I think about it?
Should I? Because our moments where I wasn't even able
to like participate in you know, consenting or like whatever
it is. It's just I feel for especially you know,

(15:59):
like younger people whose brains are still developing and like having.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
That be locked in.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
All that to say, I mean, like I guess getting
back to this movie specifically, this movie feels I mean
in this genre, I like it interacts with these ideas
directly and with mixed results. So there's some shit in
this genre.

Speaker 4 (16:24):
I think a problem with the genre is one a
lot of male directors, and not all of them were
the kind of male directors that you know, like a
George Kukor who had like genuine intimate friendships with women
and saw them as people worthy of study and like care,
keyword study and care, because I think the exploitation genre

(16:47):
can really fall into gawking at these women. Yeah, and
even the performances by the actresses can sometimes seem like
brittle and ostentatious in a way that you can feel
they're remove from the character, like they look down upon
that character and her desires of being wanted and like Yeah,

(17:08):
and so it can be a really rough genre to
watch sometimes, but it's also it can be really really
interesting and I think says a lot about how we
think of women aging, and like I think a lot
of representations of womanhood in Hollywood believe that as a
woman ages, her life becomes less interesting and she has

(17:31):
less to live for, and that I think is very galling.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, definitely, This to me is like the ultimate example
of or one of the more interesting examples of whatever.
The thing that we're still told now, which is that
it is too risky to have a movie centered on
older women be released, and that is almost never true.
There's I mean, I think of it like spanning genres

(17:56):
of like what a surprise hit The First Wives Club was,
like all of these movies that feature older women that
you're told are you know, not supposed to be successful?
And then are this is another example of that, like there,
and I feel like the reason that we're told that
is because you're just being told how you know, Hollywood
as an industry feels about the target audience, which is

(18:16):
other women and queer people generally. So I was I
didn't actually know much about how successful this movie was
and it's time, but it makes total sense that it was.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
Yeah, it was pretty successful, Like it was made for
a little less than a million because like Robert Aldridge,
who it actually let let me give a little paint
a little picture because the getting this movie made was
very hard for people because no studio wanted to fund
this and they were like, these women are just some

(18:46):
old bras. No one cares about these women, and it
was actually surprisingly Joan Crawford came to Betty Davis with
the book Yes, and was like, I think you would
be really fireing this, and I think we need to
do it to get and that's why this movie has
so many meta layers, and it's very like if you
know the actual history of these women, there's like a

(19:08):
humor about playing with the image you expect of them
as stars. So it was really hard for Robert Aldrich
to get it made, but it eventually was picked up
for distribution by Betty Davis's former studio, Warner Brothers, and
it made back its entire budget the first weekend over
that so like it was in the black very quickly,

(19:30):
and both Joan Crawford and Betty Davis had points on
the back end. They got paid very little for the
actual movie, like fifty thousand dollars or something. I was
rereading Betty Davis's This and That, her second memoir, but
the points on the back end many meant they actually
ended up making a nice coin from the movie, but

(19:52):
it shows how much they had faith in the project,
even though these women did not get along, but were
very professional in a lot of on the set, even
though and that's sort of nice nasty, like I'm being cordial,
but I actually don't like you. But we both know
this is a good project, so let's like not let's
not rock the boat. Let's try to like make this

(20:13):
work as much as possible.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's like the end of Chicago when the women approach
each other and they're like, we don't like each other,
but what if we work together and people will love
it exactly?

Speaker 4 (20:23):
That's yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
It really is just a powerful link up between two
women who probably hate each other. I liked, I mean,
I really enjoyed going back through history and that. There
is also a great two part series that be kind
Rewinded on YouTube that sort of like recaps this whole
story that I think she released in response to how

(20:45):
much misinformation was in the Ryan Murphy feud show. That's
good a show that, yeah, like we were talking about
before we started recording, has a ton of misinformation but
does have Alfred Molina. So it's challenging for me.

Speaker 4 (20:57):
It is I think he's really good in that role,
and like I think the you know, Jessica Lang as
Joan Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Betty Davis is like
good casting. But it's like, I think the show has
such a limited imagination about these women, and I have
like kind of a really big rant that have gotten

(21:21):
me a lot of heat when I like published a
piece on this, like in twenty sixteen or so like
a while ago on Vulture, where I like, I get
really angry when like actresses like Joan Crawford and Betty
Davis are looked at as primarily camp figures, because I
think in some ways, looking at women as these sort

(21:41):
of like glorious divas with all these like specific like
vocal and physical tics who are just so arched they're
meant to be parodied by or beloved by a drag
queen figure is so limiting to their artistry and story,
and it like can sometimes be backhanded praise. And I

(22:03):
think it's very important to like keep in mind, like
they weren't always looked at like this. This is something
very late, like late in their career they started being
looked at like this, especially Betty in the eighties, like
has like, you know, she has a huge gay following.
Joan did too. But I sometimes worry about the way
we talk about the legacy of women like this through camp.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, it's true. I mean I think John Crawford is
a particularly interesting example. And like we'll do a separate
episode on Mommy Dearest, another movie you think we would
have covered by now, but we haven't.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
But you know how you know.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Mommy dearist is a camp movie versus what the subject
matter is. I don't know, I've only seen the movie once,
but I feel like, yeah, particularly kind of the further
you go back in Hollywood history. It's in one sense,
like with one hand, I'm like, yeah, like, you know,
the drag performances are great, and they are intended to
honor them. But in the other sense, it's like, well,

(23:05):
there's more to these women that isn't really discussed or
thought about. And both, I mean Joan and Betty were
both and I know that the Mommy Dearest conversation is
a very, very very complex one, but they were sort
of accused of similar behavior by their respective daughters. And
Betty Davis's daughter is in Baby Jane.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, yeah, she plays the neighbor woman's daughter, I believe. Yeah,
And speaking of Mommy Dearest. To get into my history
with this movie, with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, I
had never seen it before prepping for this episode, but
I knew some imagery from it, particularly the image of

(23:48):
Betty Davis in her like vaudeville makeup that just looks
kind of weird in the context of nineteen sixty two.
Had that image in my head, and I associated that
image with Mommy Dearest because there's an image from that

(24:10):
movie where the Joan Crawford character, because it's a movie
about Joan Crawford, who is in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,
But there's that image of her with like the colon. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
And so I just associated these two movies together. But
point is, I had never seen Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,

(24:33):
and there's so much to talk about. I liked it
as much as my brain allows me to enjoy a
very stressful movie. But yeah, I can't wait to dive
in further. Jamie, what is your history with this movie?

Speaker 3 (24:51):
It had been a few years since I've seen this,
but I've seen it many times over the years. I
was as as many of us were. It was TMC child.
I was a child of the or TCM TCM. I
was a child of the TCM channel. I was later
to appreciate Betty and Joan. They weren't my favorite those
kids I was. I was a Judy Garland girl. That

(25:13):
was where my bread was buttered at the time. But
I do remember seeing this as a kid and enjoying it,
maybe closer to the way it was intended to be
enjoyed at the time, in a gawky like scary kind
of way, and so then returning to it years later,
and just like how frequently this movie comes up in

(25:34):
feminist circles and how it you know, inspired a very
trouble genre. It feels like such a I'm trying to
think of, Like I've been struggling all morning to connect
like what I want to compare this to. But for
a movie that has sort of set off this genre
that is still with us, the Substance came out last year.
I thought your piece about it was very, very interesting,

(25:57):
but like, this is a genre that's been with us
for you know, over half a cent now, But it
feels like a case of like when you watch the
movie that inspired it. You're like, oh, and then, as
happens so frequently, all of the wrong lessons were learned
from What makes this movie work? Because I really like
this movie. I think that the you know, it doesn't

(26:18):
work without the two leads, like there is a very
bad version of this movie that could have existed. But I, yeah,
I have a lot of love for this movie. The
performances are just like unreal and it was.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
I hadn't watched it in a few years, and I
feel like every time I rewatch it, I remember the
importance of how how many side characters there are. I
think I think of this as like two women in
a house, which it mostly is, but I don't know,
like every performance and every new character that's introduced is important.
So I'm excited to get into it.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back
for the recap. Cool, and we're back, and we'll place
a content warning here for all of it domestic and

(27:17):
familial abuse and violence. This is not a tonally light movie.
We'll say, Okay. The story opens in nineteen seventeen. We
meet Baby Jane Hudson, a child vaudeville performer who is
a big star, she's doing sold out shows.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
She's singing in a damn earworm that I also remembered
every time. I'm like, great letter to Daddy's gonna be
stuck in my head.

Speaker 4 (27:47):
For this song.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
It's creepy.

Speaker 4 (27:53):
So I just this is like not a great association.
But I just like watched the Demi film Donkey Skin,
which of course made me think more about the fairy
tale because the movie doesn't really deal with the center
of that fairy tale, which is like basically a king
who is married to a wonderful queen. She gets sick

(28:15):
before she dies. She's like, yeah, you can only marry
someone who's more beautiful than me. Then he's like distraught
and terrible, and then he looks at his daughter and
is like, hmm, what if I marry It's yeah, So
it's that, And so I kept thinking, like, does she
want to screw her dad? Like like Betty Davis, Like,
especially when you see her older singing it, You're like,

(28:36):
this is some weird psycho sexual, obsessive weirdness.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
But I think that that is what we're supposed to
because feel like that's almost like mirrored with Edwin Flagg
and his mom, where it's like dacine and what's going
on here? Who? Also, I always kind of forget about
Evan Flagg and not to be slept on such a
weird performance. But yeah, anyways, Letter to Daddy two thousand

(29:04):
down but made very catchy, very catchy. I like that,
you know whatever. She sings it much later in the movie,
and we're supposed to be like, oh my gosh, she's
such a bad siggert. I'll say that the kid didn't
have the sauce either. No, that kid couldn't.

Speaker 4 (29:19):
Sing at all, And like, yeah, we'll obviously get into
the sequence of her singing it as an adult, because
I think there's multiple ways we're supposed to like take
her singing this and like her obsession with that damn
doll she gets in the nineteen seventeen her my.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Sized Barbie very yep, yeah, yeah, because the venue that
she performs at sells these lifelike they're so large, two
big dolls of baby Jane. And because of all this,
because of her child's stardom and the doting that she receives,
she's quite spoiled and entitled, because children do not know

(30:01):
how to navigate this type of fame and child stardom
should be not allowed. But anyway, we get all this
information established. We meet her father as well. He is
her manager and fellow performer sometimes. And then we meet
Baby Jane's sister Blanche, who is not in the spotlight

(30:21):
and perhaps resents this or at least resents that her sister,
Baby Jane is a spoiled brat. We cut to I
think like eighteen years later. It's nineteen thirty five. The
tables have turned. Blanche is now the successful movie star,
and Jane is also an actor. But the Hollywood big

(30:45):
wigs think that she stinks and she only gets cast
in movies because Blanche's contract states that for every film
she stars in, her sister Jane also gets a film role.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
I forgot to look this up. This is like actual
older footage of the actresses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, because
I recognized the John Crawford when I didn't recognize the Betty.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
Yeah, I was trying to figure it out. Let me
bring up.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
They pull footage from So for Betty Davis's younger roles,
they're from a movie called Parachute Jumper and Ex Lady
they're both from nineteen thirty three.

Speaker 4 (31:28):
Ex Lady, I have seen, Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Then the Joan Crawford footage they pull from a movie
called Sadie McKee from nineteen thirty four.

Speaker 4 (31:39):
I love that dress she wears in that, but that's
how I always recognize it. Yeah, it's interesting thinking about
where their careers were actually at at the time, because
like Betty Davis was in her blonde phase in the
thirties where like nobody really knew exactly what to do
with her yet. But as you get like deeper into

(32:03):
the decade, especially with like of human bondage, she's like
the thing about Betty is she was known as being
an actor's actor versus Joan Crawford was considered like the
glamour girl who's very beautiful and has a loure, but
she's not. You don't go to her movies for acting.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Right sure?

Speaker 3 (32:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And John, I mean I feel like
speaking to and be kind every one, like sort of
makes this point repeatedly in her video essay about it.
Like Joan played the game, yeah, and played it well,
And Betty Davis was more known for resisting the game
and suing the studio and like pushing forward in a
very different way. But like Joan Crawford for her many faults,

(32:43):
she was really good at being famous, and like I
mean the fact that she she's a good producer for
getting this movie made in the first place and seeing
that there was both an advantage for both of these
actors and that people wanted it in a way that like,
of course every man around them would not believe.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Right. So yeah, so it's the nineteen thirties, Blanche is
now the famous star and Jane is kind of like
riding her coattails. One night, we see someone driving Blanche's car,
we see another woman in a driveway of a house,
and the woman driving the car seems to deliberately speed

(33:25):
toward the woman in the driveway and mow her down.
But we never see anyone's face, so we don't know
who has done what, but we can assume that it
was Jane who drove into Blanche because we cut too
many years later. Blanche, played by Joan Crawford, is disabled

(33:48):
and uses a wheelchair. She and Jane played by Buddy
Davis live together in a house and Jane takes care
of Blanche. However, they're really relationship is very contentious, and
they seem to deeply resent each other. We meet a
woman named Elvira played by Madie Norman, who comes to

(34:10):
the house a couple times a week to help with
housekeeping and caring for Blanche, and Elvira shows Blanche fan
mail that she's received that Jane apparently intercepted, opened, and
then threw away, and this is only the beginning of
Jane's bad deeds.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Well, it also felt like, just like with the parallels
between these two women and their characters, my understanding is
this was also something that was happening for about these
actors at the time because movies were televised now, and
like older movies were being televised, and so there was
sort of this researched interest in both of these actors
and just I don't know, I I generally really like

(34:55):
the kind of mirror images that are introduced between them,
because that would have been happening for, you know, a
new generation of John Crawford fans at the time.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Right, Because I think when we cut to years later,
it's like contemporary for the time, like the movies shot
in nineteen sixty two, and I think it's also taking
place in the early sixties.

Speaker 4 (35:14):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, So we start to get a sense that Jane
is maybe not behaving well, especially because the next thing
she does is let Blanche's pet bird escape from its cage.
She like does this on purpose. Alvirah senses this. Alvira

(35:35):
does not trust Jane at all. Then Jane calls a
liquor store to place an order and they refuse to
fill the order at first, So Jane pretends to be Blanche,
and we find out that Jane is able to do
a spot on impression of her sister, and we'll put
a pin in that because that's basically like Chekhov's vocal impression.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I also forgot to I kept I like wrote down
look this up, and then didn't. Was that Betty Davis
doing that? Or was she lip syncing Crawford?

Speaker 4 (36:08):
I think she's lip synching Crawford because it just sounds
so the first time she does it, it looks like,
straight up like she's just doing I mean, maybe she's
just the best lip syncer, which could be the truth,
because it does sound like it just sounds like Crawford's
manner of speaking is very light. But I'm also like

(36:29):
it's Betty Davis. Maybe she just has practiced making fun.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Of John Crawford was like, yeah, she might have had
a lot of know thy enemy sort of reps before.
I okay, yeah, I was curious either way.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
I couldn't tell one way or the other. But yeah,
but we the audience are to understand that Jane can
do a spot on impression of Blanche. Meanwhile, we learn
that Blanche intends to call a doctor about Jane because
because Jane has been a bit mentally unstable recently. And

(37:07):
we learned that Blanche intends to sell the house they
live in and Blanche will move out and live with Elvira,
seemingly to distance herself from Jane. And Blanche tries to
talk to Jane about this about you know, like selling
the house, but she's not honest about why, and she

(37:28):
like kind of puts the blame on their business manager.
But Jane sees right through this, and she realizes that
Blanche is trying to get rid of her, So things
like kind of escalate from here. Jane retaliates by taking
away the phone that Blanche has access to. So Blanche
lives in the like second story of the house, and

(37:51):
her limited mobility means that she can't go downstairs. There's
no sort of like elevator or anything that gives her
access to the first floor, So she's kind of trapped
on the second floor.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Which does appear to be by design, ye, Jane, so
that Jane remains in control exactly.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah. And so Jane takes away Blanche's phone, and then
Jane serves Blanche the dead bird that she let escape
and then apparently killed for lunch.

Speaker 4 (38:23):
Yeah, she just killed that bird and was like, she
killed that bird. Oh, this is gonna be perfect for
her lunch.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
It's like so so she's like, here's a dead bird,
and we're like, uh oh.

Speaker 4 (38:35):
I mean she has it on a silver tray. She
like serves tea and she hides it, so like she
doesn't know immediately that her lunch is her dead pet bird,
which also means like it cues you in early on, like, oh,
Jane isn't just a little kookie. She's actually violent and
diaball with dangerous and she has the capability to kill

(38:57):
a bird just to get under her sister's skin.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:02):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Then Jane leaves the house for a bit to place
an advertisement in the newspaper looking for a musical accompanist.
I can never say this word. A companies melt it
for performances that she wants to put on, and while

(39:23):
Jane is running this errand Blanche takes this opportunity to
try to ask her neighbor, missus Bates, for help. So
Blanche writes a note instructing the neighbor to call the doctor.
And Blanche throws this note out the window, but before
missus Bates can pick it up and see it, Jane

(39:44):
comes back home and sees the note, reads it, and
then taunts Blanche about it, being like, oh, you want
me to see a doctor? Huh, well, screwed.

Speaker 4 (39:55):
You get it.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
I think something that is done. I again like I
because I sort of I don't think about the side
characters in this movie as much is whatever in a
movie that can be very over the top. I thought that,
like in this abusive, clearly abusive relationship, the ways in
which everyone around them is sort of aware of it,

(40:20):
but no one knows, either doesn't know what to do,
or worries about seeming impolite or like socially inappropriate by
drawing attention to it. I thought was like, because we
see that in certainly in Elvira's character, but also in
the neighbors repeatedly, like everyone knows something is off, and

(40:42):
they're also like unsure or unwilling to do something about it,
and that that I don't know just like rang very true.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, yeah, they're like, I can't disrupt social etiquette even
if someone is trapped in their house and being abused
by a family member.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
And to some extent Blanche as well. I mean, like
one of the scenes that really broke my heart this
time that's coming up in a bit is that when
there is another person in the house with Jane, when
Edwin is in the house, like a part of you
is like scream Blanche, Like, but I think she's so

(41:21):
afraid of her sister, and I also think, I don't know.
I guess this was just my read of it this time,
the social fear of like not being believed or looking vulnerable,
and that would you know, she values how she's perceived
by others, and I don't know it just like it
broke my heart on this view of like definitely, because

(41:43):
she's holding herself back from getting the help that she
needs as well.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
For sure. So now Blanche is horrified, she's afraid to
eat the food Jane brings her, especially because the ars
to meal has a dead rat in it, and it's uge.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
It is so funny because it's like, okay, So she
gets a pepper for lunch and then Jane like, you
know something's up, because Jane was like.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Do you know we have rat rats in the basement.

Speaker 4 (42:13):
You know we're dealing with rats, and you know, I
remember when I first watched it, I was like, oh, laurd,
how's a rat gonna pop up?

Speaker 3 (42:19):
And it popped up for dinner, it popped up. I
do love how Betty Davis's Din Din very funny.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
He didn't eat to Din Din. Okay, So Blanche again,
she's trapped upstairs with no way of calling for help,
no way of leaving the house. Meanwhile, we meet Edwin
Flagg played by Victor Rubuano, who is a musician who
sees Jane's ad in the paper, so he and his

(42:52):
mother contact Jane to set up an audition of sorts,
kind of like a meeting in interview, and he shows
up at the house. He's desperate for work and income,
so he flatters Jane and pretends to know who she
is and does all this stuff to kind of patronize

(43:14):
and humor her, and she gladly accepts it and she
really likes Edwin as a result, and she's super excited
about working with him. So we find out that she's
hoping to revive her vaudeville act, and she's dressed in
a similar outfit and hairdoo as when she was a
little girl performing in nineteen seventeen. And while they're meeting,

(43:40):
Blanche rings her buzzer to alert Jane that she needs something,
and Jane is furious that Blanche is interrupting this meeting.
She strikes Blanche and accuses her of preventing Jane from
ever having any friends. Blanche is desperately pleading with Jane,

(44:01):
but Jane storms out and the two of them. Jane
and Edwin leave a short time later, so Blanche once
again takes this opportunity to try to get help. She
climbs out of her wheelchair and slowly makes her way
down the stairs and to the telephone that's down there,
where she manages to call doctor Shelby, saying that Jane

(44:24):
is very unwell and he needs to come over right
away to tend to the situation. But Jane walks in
on this phone conversation. She starts beating Blanche and then
calls doctor shelby back, imitating Blanche's voice saying never mind,
we don't need you after all. Jane actually went to

(44:46):
another doctor, so Blanche's plans are thwarted. Then Elvira shows
up and Jane is like, we don't need you today
or ever again. Actually you're fired. Then Jane leaves again,
but Elvira is very skeptical of this situation, so she

(45:07):
sneaks into the house and discovers that Jane has locked
Blanche in her room and Blanche is not responsive on
the other side. So when Jane returns home, Elvira is like,
what have you done, you monster? Give me the key
to the door, and she does so. Elvira unlocks the
door and sees that Jane has tied Blanche up in

(45:30):
her bed, so Elvira goes to help, but then Jane strikes,
and I believe kills Elvira.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
She kicks a hammer hammer to the head. It's also
pretty clear when you see Blanche is like, oh, she's
probably not getting any food or water. This woman is
literally starving to death. And there's actually something very very
interesting to me about the exchange between Elvira and Jane.
When Elvira confronts her because you're like, okay, so how

(46:01):
is this going to go? Because Jane is obviously unwell,
there's going to be some sort of violence, but like
how quick are they going to go to the violence?
And I thought it was interesting because Elvira is a
black woman and like this you know maid who comes
in and cleans and all this stuff. But what happens
in their argument is that Jane revers to being very

(46:23):
girlishly immature and child like and kind of cowering, while
Elvira says something that I thought was super fascinating, which is,
you've got to be a grown woman like everyone else.
And there was something about that that I don't think
the movie's like aware, but on a racial level, there's
something very interesting about a black woman telling this white

(46:44):
woman so lost in her own past you have to
grow the fuck up.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:48):
There's something just so rich and meaty in that moment.
And I think the Elvira character like really stood out
to me on this watch.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
Yeah, she also has so much more discernment than any
other character, where she's the one who's like, hey, Blanche,
your sister's acting really weird, and don't you think it's
weird that you've never seen this fan mail. She's throwing
it away. She's the one to realize that. When Jane's like, oops,
the bird flew out of its cage, sorry about it,

(47:19):
Elvira is like she let that bird go on purpose,
Like that was no accident. Like she's able to read
Jane for exactly who she is and what she's doing.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
The Madie Norman performance is really cool. I mean, just
like how this movie. I mean, it's good on its
own terms, but like the performances really make it where
you know, there are sometimes where Elvira is sent away
basically for plot reasons. Yeah, but you can see, like
I believe it because of Madie Norman's performance where you
can see her thinking in a way that actually like

(47:51):
does make sense, where she's like, ooh, is this do
I want to get involved with this right now? Is
this something that I okay, I'll come back next week,
Like she keeps coming back. She is concerned, but it
takes a little bit of time, as I feel like
it very often does in these situations, and that there
is I mean, I hate that she dies via Betty

(48:12):
Davis Hammer, but that the again just like the we
you know, the reason that Jane is caught is because
Elvira's family is looking for her, which in movies that
I expect loose ends. This movie doesn't really have very many.
And yeah, Elvia is such a great character, and to.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Your point, Jamie about Elvira's family looking for her. A
short time after this, Jane gets a call from the
police about Alvira because her cousin had reported her missing.
So Jane freaks out. She runs into Blanche's room. She's crying,
She's saying that everything is falling apart and no, she

(48:52):
didn't mean to hurt anyone. Yeah, she can't believe that
she ran her own sister over with the car all
those years ago, and Blanche is like, hmmm, actually I
have something to tell you about that accident, but Jane
is like, shut up, I don't want to talk about it,
and then they're interrupted when Edwin shows up. He has

(49:12):
found out from his mother that his new employer, baby
Jane Hudson, had tried to murder her sister many years prior.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Or so people say, or so people say. Uh.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Then he comes into the house and he discovers Blanche upstairs,
tied up and trapped by Jane. So he's like, oh
my god, my mom was right, So he runs out
looking for help. Presumably.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, the second Edwin sequence this movie does very much
stick to the fact that men don't know anything and
can into it absolutely nothing for the entire runtime, because
Edwin has to be told by his mother like, hey,
maybe this is not a safe environment, even though she
has bad info.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
You know, he's not I don't know.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
I mean, I guess he is picking up red flags.
But Edwin carrying himself through the world like I can
fuck anyone I want. I walk into room and she's mine,
Like he fully intends to go and do the same
exact thing to Blanche.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
And well, there's also a class thing happening where he's
desperate for income, so he's just willing to kind of
look the other way when it comes to red flags
he might be picking up on. But he's just like this,
you know, these rich women, this rich woman or this
woman I perceived to be rich, is going to pay me,

(50:29):
and I desperately need income. But anyway, that whole.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
Scene between him and Jane, where for very different reasons,
they are just lying to each other.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
The entire scene, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
Is so good. It's so good.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
They're lying to each other, they're also interrupting each other
because they just are not literally want to talk about themselves.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
They're not listening to each other's I that was another
scene that really stuck out to me on this on
this watch, because I feel like that the whatever cultural
takeaway is her performing you know, Daddy again, which is
an important part of the scene, but like not even
in kind of like the top parts of what I
think is interesting about it.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Yeah, for sure. Okay, So now the jig is up, basically,
and Jane is like, I need to flee from the law.
So she puts Blanche in the car and they drive
to the beach because that's their hiding spot, I guess,
and they just think hang out there for a while.

Speaker 4 (51:29):
I think it's a safe place for Jane because there's
like a little exchange where she's like, Oh, we'll just
go away and then we can get ice cream and
then we can be in the suchon row. Oh, and
then the sun is gonna come up and it's gonna
be so nice. And I was like, oh, she's like
degrading into being pure child like yeah, and so it's

(51:50):
like she it's very interesting her crackup is drifting further
further into childhood and like making these very rash, like
nonsensical decisions that you can see is like her reaching
for some sort of comfort, but she doesn't really know
how to get it properly.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Right, record, right, So they're hanging out on the beach,
Blanche is baking in the sun and lightly dying.

Speaker 3 (52:16):
It's dire. Yeah, yeah, that's how I feel at the
beach though. I was like, I called grant of her.
I was like, this is what we look like when
we go to the beach in the trenches.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah. So Blanche confesses to Jane that during that fateful
night with the car and the collision, it was actually
Blanche who was driving. She was the one who tried
to hit Jane with the car, but Jane dove out
of the way and instead Blanche hit a gate and

(52:51):
that's what caused the injury that disabled her. And then
Blanche crawled out of the car and framed Jane for
running Blanche over. And Jane was very drunk that night,
so she apparently had no recollection of what actually happened,
so she believed that it must have been her who
was driving and caused the collision, and so after hearing

(53:15):
this this like confession of what actually happened, Jane fully dissociates.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
Well. Right before then, though, she says like the most
banger line of the ending, which is, you mean all
this time we could have because been in France. Like
She's like like this dawning realization, like oh, like there
was a moment where like we could have gone in
an actually different direction as sisters and like had a
much more stable relationship. And I thought it was interesting

(53:46):
that Blanche said I made you waste your whole life
thinking you know, you did this to me and like that, Yeah,
was like the first step into her becoming so childlike
and like reverting to a past self that she felt
had some control and happiness.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
Right, it's yeah that that conversation is so loaded, Betty
Davi is so good. It's like it's ridiculous.

Speaker 4 (54:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
A good it's a good to I almost I almost
like that moment as an ending more than the actual ending,
which felt very similar to Sunset Boulevard to me in
a way that I feel like undercut what we just saw.

Speaker 4 (54:25):
I don't know, I I agree like the twirling just completely.
I'm fully mad, like I think what Betty is doing
is interesting. But the flip side is it, like you
have the ending between the sisters, you know, and Blanche
also says you weren't ugly, then I made you that
way and it's just so, and then like you know,
she's obviously dead. But then it's like, oh if you

(54:47):
end there like and you could end just like on
Betty's face and we could like read like both the confusion,
the sorrow and the eventual just I'm going to retreat
into myself so far that I'm just completely I think
that sort of ending would have been more intelligent and
more caring towards the characters. By having the like twirling

(55:09):
while the police and everyone is looking at her and
she's holding these ice cream cones and thinking like people
are really interested in her, it turns her into a
spectacle again. So it undercuts the emotional resonance of that
exchange between the sisters in a way totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
So basically what happens is she's like, I'm gonna go
get us ice cream. As she's doing that, a couple
of cops find her because I guess Edwin had reported
what was happening to the police.

Speaker 4 (55:39):
Yeah, because it's on. It's on like the ratio. Yeah,
And they're like looking for her specific car, and that's
what like cues the cops in because someone mentions, oh,
like there's like this car that's like kind of in
the way. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
I also, like, I think it's really like another just
little thing that I never noticed before. That Jane would
have maybe ben happier to be arrested if at least
someone recognized her. But they recognize her car, it's not her.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Oh yeah, right right, So the cops approach Jane and
this causes a crowd to gather. In the crowd thrills Jane.
You know, she's finally back in the spotlight. So she
starts twirling and dancing around, you know, very child like.
And then the movie ends with the cops seeing Blanche

(56:29):
and running over to her, unclear if she's alive or not.
But that is the end of the movie. So let's
take another break and we'll come back to discuss.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
And we're back where to begin?

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Where, Angelica? Do you have any place you want to
We've already I mean we've already started the discussion.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
Yeah no, no, no, and demands discussion. I guess I mean,
just to sort of close the loop on, and I
would love to hear other thoughts. And I know you
very likely know far more about it than we do,
with the whole idea of the feud and how these
characters were very intentionally meant to mirror the careers of

(57:30):
the lead actors. Just speaking to like, if you're a
listener that's like not super familiar with the actual history
behind it, or like maybe watch the Ryan Murphy series,
like you know in twenty seventeen, and I don't know,
I think it is very funny objectively that you know,
now in twenty twenty five we know for a fact
we are not to trust Ryan Murphy with history, but

(57:52):
in twenty seventeen people were still like, I don't know,
should we let him do it again? And now he
you know, is doing something completely different, But that there
were it's from what I was able to gather, these
two actors didn't like each other, but it like yours
saying Angelica, it wasn't she. She may not have even
cracked Betty Davis's top five of actors that actors or

(58:16):
institutions like. Betty Davis was famously in conflict with institutions
and I always think it's interesting when the feud with
the institution is like, well, we don't talk about that
because we want to celebrate and monetize Betty Davis's image,
So we shouldn't say that she really had an ax
to grind with Warner Brothers for years, but that like, yeah,

(58:39):
these women didn't like each other. There are false narratives
that date back to production that have been mostly debunked,
but are persistent about them, you know, getting into physical
altercations on set, them had like steal, like fucking the direct,
like doing all like seducing to get back at the other,

(59:00):
and you know all this stuff that like you know,
plays into a lot of you know, negative tropes around
women in general. And also was I think intended to
some extent to sell the movie. Selling the feud also
sold the movie. So I don't know, I mean, I
would be curious. I know that certainly Betty Davis commented

(59:22):
on this repeatedly throughout her career, and she's like a
famously very dynamic interview subject who kind of sometimes will
repeat rumors as fact. And but yeah, there by by
all accounts, including the director and other people close to
the production, there was you know that over the top
thing wasn't happening. It seems like it was a psychological

(59:44):
or I love the I was just like, ooh, that
is that is diabolical, the oscars it is.

Speaker 4 (59:53):
It is so fucked up what Joan did, and it's
like really dark. Okay, just for some interesting context, if
you've watched Feud, you would think that like Betty and
Joan like were really competing as actors in a way,
they weren't at the height of their career. At the
height of their career, you know, first of all, Joan
Crawford came to the industry before Betty. She was established

(01:00:16):
before Betty came to the scene. And Joan was like
the queen of MGM, while Betty was considered like the
like another Warner Brother That's how important she was to
Warner Brothers bottom line. And she you know, she was
a performer who liked to play old. She like played

(01:00:38):
you know, characters that most people would find unsympathetic. She
like really pushed limits of female representation on screen. While
Joan really craved a sense of glamour, beauty and admiration.
Betty almost liked people to not like her character in
a way that's like she's she was a very abrasive woman.

(01:01:00):
But what's like interesting about also them coming into the
making of this movie, Like I said earlier, like Joan
Crawford brought her the project, and I think like they
you know, eventually Joan Crawford did go to Warner Brothers
and like did like Mildred Peers, which she won, like
her Oscar Force. So like there there's like professional issues,

(01:01:23):
But there's something Betty Davis says and her memoir This
and That that I think kind of exemplifies the differences
between these women. And like I think issues they had
on set were as much these women come to acting
in a very different way as it was oh this,
Oh she's so much better than me, or actually I'm
better than I think. It was like like a professional

(01:01:47):
mismatch in a way, they like create in a very
different way. And like one issue Betty had with Joan
was like why is she making her character look so
pretty like and and her and Robert Aldrich were like
telling Joan, like, hey, don't wear this beautiful red nail polish,
but obviously it's in black and white, which, by the way,

(01:02:07):
they were originally going to shoot in color. Betty convinced
the producers to shoot it in black and white. Queen auteur,
I would say, anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
I'm gonna say that is the right choice for this.

Speaker 4 (01:02:19):
So the right choice. But Betty and Joan just had
like just a very different approach to things, and like
Joan really wanted to still look glamorous because that's like
very important to her to look good. So they had
to like really encourage her to, like, hey, like let's
pare down the glamour and play up the vulnerability. And
I do think Joan eventually did that well. But there's

(01:02:41):
this passage that I'm gonna read from this and that
Betty Davis the second memoir that I think is really
useful for how she sees herself and how she sees Joan,
which she's actually like she admits, like, yeah, there are
things about this woman I didn't like. Like Joan tends
to give gifts to like win people, and she was
giving gifts to Betty and Betty Kip like sending them back,

(01:03:01):
and like Betty was like, I don't want to be
friends with you, Like what we?

Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
What do?

Speaker 4 (01:03:05):
Are we? Is this a joke? But Davis writes in
her memoir quote where the producers were uneasy about how
outrageous I wanted Jane to look. They had a problem
of another kind with Joan. It was a constant battle
to get her not to look gorgeous. She wanted her
hair well dressed, her gowns beautiful, and her fingernails with
red nail polish. For the part of an invalid who

(01:03:27):
had been cooped up in a room for almost twenty years.
She wanted to look attractive. She was wrong, like Betty,
and she continues, I understood why she did not want
to look unattractive. She had been famous for her glamour
all through the years, and there's no question that the
glamour actresses made Hollywood the famous place it is today.

(01:03:47):
The glamour's actresses at that time were Geene Harlow, Rita Hayworth,
Joan Crawford, Lona Turner, Hetty Lamar, and of course, eventually
Marilyn Monroe. The non glamorous types in which I group
myself were Hepburn, Tracy Cagney, Fonda Bogart. The non glamorous
group were all from theater and had been brought to

(01:04:08):
Hollywood at the beginning of talking pictures. At present Hollywood
made lament the lack of stars as glamorous as those
I have just listed, So it's like sort of backhanded,
but also like she's like, no, I admit, it's the
women like Joan who built the image of Hollywood that
we continue to kind of chase. And she talks about
throughout the chapter that she finds Joan like very professional,

(01:04:31):
She's always on time, she knows her lines, like she
cares about the picture like very very much. But a
big problem was the Oscar thing. So Betty gets nominated
for Best Actress for her role and whatever happened to
baby Jane, Joan ain't having that, so this.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
Was all her idea.

Speaker 4 (01:04:54):
I was like, I, you know, yes, which is cuckoo bananas. So,
like Joan decided to base basically okay, I'm just gonna
read it. She reached out to all the other Oscar
nominees and offered, if you can't come to the ceremony,
I will gladly pick up your Oscar for you, dampholic.

(01:05:15):
I will accept on your behalf, and then Betty kind
of sets the scene. That year, each nominee sat in
a separate dressing room backstage, equipped with a TV monitor.
I was with my publicity man and Michael and b
d her children were out front. When Anne Bancroft's name
was announced. I am sure I turned white. Moments later,

(01:05:36):
Crawford floated down the hole past my door. I will
never forget the look she gave me. It was triumphant.
The look clearly said you didn't win. And I am elated.
And like, you know, Betty like really valued the Oscar.
She's one of the most nominated actors in Oscar history
U ten nominations.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
Yeah, so she's like she would have been the first to.

Speaker 4 (01:06:00):
Three can Yeah okay, And so she really wanted that,
And like I firmly believe she should have won for
all about Eve or whatever happened to Baby Jane, and
that caused like genuine animosity between them. So I find
it interesting that so much a feud and the reputation
of their like animosity is born from like Betty wasn't

(01:06:21):
glamorous and no one wanted to fuck her, but everyone
wanted to fuck Joan. But Joan was jealous of this
and did it, and they like rooted in like the
male relationships they had sometimes like them trying to curry
favor with men. But I really think a lot of
their issues were like these are very different women and
professional things, where it's like now they are in a

(01:06:42):
more of a competitive thing they previously were, because now
they're like this woman is actually affecting her Oscar chances,
and like Joan was like actively helping other people's campaigns,
so she really really did not want Betty to win,
and like Betty says in her memoir, like, hey, I
actually think this was really dumb because it's like we
have points on the back end if I won the Oscar,

(01:07:05):
that would have like raised the profile of the movie exactly.
But she so petty and so like venomous towards Betty
that like she old Trump what would actually be useful
for her in the long run, which is really sad.
I think what's very interesting about reading about women in

(01:07:25):
classic Hollywood is like how they had to navigate other
women because the world around you is putting you in
competition with other women. And like Betty was always told
you're not attractive, you don't have sex appeal, Da da
da da da, And of course that would affect any
woman hearing that like consistently, and like Betty was sometimes

(01:07:47):
like she had, you know, friendships with people like Olivia
de Haviland, who ends up taking on Joan Crawford's role
in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, another Hackstation movie that Robert
Aldridge directed that was supposed to re teem her and Joan,
but Joan pretended to be sick to get out.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Of her contract. Oh wow.

Speaker 4 (01:08:10):
Like they started filming and Joan was like, I can't
be and Betty was like, you can't be around me.
You cost me the Oscar and I was getting over
it to do this movie and you can't even do
the movie. And so Betty reached out to Olivia to
havelind and like convinced her to take on like this
very villainous role that isn't typical for Olivia to havelin.
Actually like Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte because it is very

(01:08:34):
Southern Gothic, so it has a very different energy to
Baby Jane, which feels like such a Hollywood movie steeped
in Hollywood ideas and Hollywood as a sort of landscape.
But yeah, that's a big reason why Joan and Betty
don't get along. And like Betty, just like I think,
also was tired of people always associating them together, because like,

(01:08:57):
if you read about both of their lives, there's like
far more important figures that were like instrumental to them
or they had feuds with. Like Betty Davis was like
a lot of the directors in classic Hollywood feared her
because she would take control over projects and was like,
this line is bad, your shot setup sucks. I can

(01:09:17):
direct this better than you. The thing is she was
typically right, So like our instincts as an artist are
really really sharp and fascinating, Betty was also far more
politically engaged. Like one of the most interesting things I
like to tell people about her is that she was

(01:09:39):
the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, and that was all the way back
in nineteen forty one. But they just wanted her to
be a figurehead. She wanted to make actual changes for
the industry, and she ended up leaving because the men
did not want to listen to her. And the next
person who who took up that position implemented the same

(01:10:03):
thing she was trying to implement, So it was like, Oh,
you don't have a problem with what she was trying
to do to make this industry better. You had a
problem with her actually saying anything, because she's a woman
who's very abrasive. Someone like There was an interesting article
that's quoted in sam Stad's book All About Eve, which

(01:10:26):
at the end says Betty's bluntness and impatience, her refusal
to compromise surely helped alienate many whom she might later
have persuaded. She's kind of like a force to be
reckoned with. I think she's very interesting. Both her and
Joan Crawford are also aries women's so I don't know
why I find that. So I think, like, you know,

(01:10:51):
in a lot of ways, like Betty did it her way,
which some people saw is the hard way, But I
actually like, for all her faults, I actually think she
was a really really fascinating, dynamic woman who holds a
lot of very interesting contradictions because this on one hand,
you hear some of her relationships with women were like

(01:11:13):
good and she had respect for them. But then on
the other hand, you hear how she treated like Marilyn
Monroe on the set of All About Eve, and you're like, oh,
but Marilyn Monroe was treated like shit by so many
women in the industry, like Joan Crawford was like notably
nasty towards Marilyn and was publicly saying some really horrid

(01:11:33):
things about her. And so that's something Betty and Joan share,
like a sort of discomfort with the industry moving past them,
and so they turned towards animosity that like builds towards
younger women who actually are just as brutalized as they are.
An interesting contrast would be Lana Turner, who, while Joan Crawford,

(01:11:58):
you know, had this whole to give you advice, Marylyn
come over my place, but then she just sort of
read her to filth like and like was completely disrespectful
to her. Lana Turner when she like when Marilyn was
coming up, she invited her to her house and gave
her genuinely, really good and caring professional advice both about

(01:12:18):
how you should carry yourself, how you should dress, how
you need to move, how you need to navigate a
lot of these men in the industry. And it's like
Lana Turner was someone who dealt with a lot of
shit that Marilyn also dealt with. There's an interesting story
a friend of mine was talking about about, like Lana
Turner on the set of a movie and she had
just dealt with a miscarriage and was back on set

(01:12:42):
like two weeks later, and she was having trouble working
up emotions for a scene when the director got so
angry with her he decided keep the camera just on
her face and I'm gonna be twisting her arm till
it almost breaks to force her to cry. This is
the kind of shit that women were dealing with in
classic Hollywood. Things have never been like great for actors,

(01:13:06):
but like now, it's like you can't imagine like someone
treating a star of like Lana Turner's stature, who was
like a huge important start at MGM, Like you can't
imagine like her like contemporary being treated in that same
way because that's like a labor violate. This is happening

(01:13:26):
on you know what I mean. So it's like these
women were like so unprotected. And what makes me sad
with how we talk about the feud between Betty and
Joan is we totally miss out on the more structural
issues around them that would lead women to kind of
feel uneasy with each other.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean, from what I understand about
this feud, this alleged.

Speaker 4 (01:13:51):
You know it exists.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
It exists, but it was blown so out of proportion
exactly by the media, and it's.

Speaker 4 (01:13:59):
Less of feud and more like, oh, I just don't
really care for you, and we're just professionally different, Like
you cannot like somebody and it not be a few.
There are people I don't like and I just don't
think about them.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Right, But like journalists would grasp at straws and then
like print stuff about, oh, this big feud between these
two actors just to pit women against each other basically.

Speaker 3 (01:14:26):
And of course that that's something that the studio is
never gonna fight with because it sells tickets, it sells
the movie if it like all plays into it. I feel, yeah,
I thank you for that background, Angelica, because I just
I everything I've learned about Betty Davis as a labor figure, specifically,
like that area of her life, it just feels very

(01:14:49):
intentionally removed from how we talk about her and talk
about her as a political figure, which you know, on
the Joan Crawford side, Joan Crawford is is playing the
game and the game involves not getting very political, and I, yeah,
I just I wish that there were elements, especially because

(01:15:11):
I don't know. Yeah, Feud a show that is well
casted but ultimately just pisses me off, where it's it's also.

Speaker 4 (01:15:16):
Not fun to watch, Like it's not like a fun
interesting watch. It's more like you get frustrated, like this
is the story you're telling about these like titans of
the industry. Can you imagine like a similar work about
like a Laurence Olivier, you know, like he you know
Betty Davis, she used to say, I was Brando before Brando,

(01:15:38):
Like she's an actor's actor. Why are we forgetting about
that or forgetting about like really interesting political things like
her starting the Hollywood Canteen with people like John Garfield
during World War Two that allowed white and black servicemen
to hang out with each other, like black people were welcome.
That's like very interesting how cool she was with like

(01:16:00):
certain racial things that you would expect her not to be,
but she was. She was very liberal Democrat, but like
she really had like a genuine care for the world
that I find interesting and politically was like it doesn't
make sense to like be entertaining only white servicemen. They're
not the only people who are dying for this country

(01:16:21):
right now, and I'm like, I start doing that in
the nineteen forties is pretty notable.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
Yeah, for sure, I wish that that was I mean,
going back to your earlier point, Angelica like elements of
her legacy that were, you know, talked about. I get
her persona was huge. I don't think she would be
upset to know people are still discussing her persona, but like,
but that there, she was such a complex person who

(01:16:48):
I didn't know about the circumstances of her leaving as
president of the Academy. It's like, Yeah, having that sort
of recontextualized how much there was to push against and
how impossible it generally was, even for someone as influential
and persistent as Betty Davis. And I mean, to some extent,

(01:17:12):
it's because of how those narratives are shaped, which gets
us back into the content of the movie of Yeah,
I'm curious how you both feel about how aging women
and specifically aging women performers are framed, because I feel
like there's so many different ways to look at it

(01:17:33):
that I was trying to. I don't know. I've my
feelings on how Jane and Blanche their dynamic has definitely
changed over the years and I'm sure we'll continue to change,
but in terms of like the exploitation genre developing and
taking I think a lot of bad lessons away from
this movie. There are certain things that I've seen framed

(01:17:57):
in the past, and I probably would have myself framed
in the past as like just full on misogynist slop
that I have a slightly easier time with now because
we are looking at siblings, which I think sometimes women,
I mean women are very very often pitted against each
other in this absolute void where the assumption is like

(01:18:20):
women hate each other because they're in competition for men,
But that is very much not what's happening here, and
I do feel like the table is set for why
this dynamic exists, And on this viewing, it really sat
with me at the end that the twist at the
end that Blanche was angry and resentful enough of Jane

(01:18:44):
to want to kill her, and also that that being
true and that lie being at the center of their
relationship doesn't excuse how horrifically Blanche was treated by her sister,
regardless of what she believed. It's just like it's it.
I don't know. I think a far more complex dynamic
than its cultural legacy would lead you to believe.

Speaker 4 (01:19:05):
I guess I agree. I also like kind of touching
on that and building upon that. One thing I thought
was like interesting with the idea of the story and
like Betty's approach to playing Jane was that in Haxploitation
a lot like that follows a lot of times it's
women trying desperately to like reclaim or latch onto being young,

(01:19:29):
beautiful and sexually desired, like that's the thing they fear.
But Betty and her character Jane is instead like going
into childhood and like before any sort of sexual identity
would arise. And I find that like really really interesting,
as if to say, this is the only time I
felt like some sort of control over my life. And

(01:19:52):
that's like, I don't know. Something about that on a
gender level really interests me. Like the lie or the
belief that innocent childhood is the safest place a girl,
a woman could be. It's sort of like, which isn't
true because we know how heinously young girls are treated
in and out of their families, right, So it's an

(01:20:13):
interesting delusion to have a character play and it's also
I don't know, it sort of made me think weirdly
of how people talk about like womanhood as being hard
and difficult and unruly, but girlhood is what we want
to be, the state we want to be in. And
I think about how many people talk about girlhood and

(01:20:37):
like refer to themselves as girls, this sort of int
you know, like infertilization of themselves even though you know,
like I'm a thirty seven year old baby, or I
was twenty nine yesterday, but I just turned thirty two
or what, you know what I mean. And it's it's
sort of it sort of interests me how we render
like womanhood and like what kinds of womanhood is rendered,

(01:21:00):
especially in a visual medium like film. You know, I'm
thirty six now. And if there's anything I've noticed recently,
it's like we do not have a really dynamic range
of movies being made about women's midlife, the movies we
get made that are getting made about women's mid life
at this point, which US millennials are pretty much in,

(01:21:24):
like we are in you know, late thirties into our forties.

Speaker 2 (01:21:28):
On the cusp of forty, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:21:30):
And it's like I've noticed, oh, the movies we're kind
of getting that are in that range are all about
women as mothers or women and they're like not great
relationship with their husband and kind of realizing that midlife.
And I think there is totally a place for those stories.
But like I've been talking to other friends, like, is
it weird that we're actually seeing like that's the vision

(01:21:53):
of a woman's mid Like the millennial woman's mid life
is only through motherhood or her relatetionationship to men. Because
that's a little weird considering we're the generation that has
now like really staved off marriage or we're like many
of us are just not having kids, Like I don't
want kids and will not be having them, but we

(01:22:14):
don't see that represented. So it ends up adding to
this history of like what makes a woman most important
is like her either her fertility or her youth, or
her beauty or how she cares for others. But I like,
I don't know. It's very frustrating. So when I watch
a movie like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, even though

(01:22:34):
it's so sad and rough emotionally to watch, I find
it like really interesting on a level that I think
other exploitation doesn't touch, which is so layered and it's
understanding of who these women are and like how they
fit in the world and certain structural things that are
shaping them. Especially structural for Blanche is her disability. And

(01:23:00):
I just want more prickly observations of like what it
means to be a woman today, and I don't think
we're getting it, and I feel like I'm losing my
mind over it.

Speaker 3 (01:23:13):
I totally agree where there even when it's movies that
I like, often movies directed by women. Yeah, it feels
like we're very often interfacing with women who are around
our age, who we have so little in common with.
And I also don't know a lot of women going

(01:23:33):
through the same things. And then sometimes I'm like, I
think the way that I like go like coping mode.
I'm like, well, uh, it's because I live in a
city and it's less but it's like it is less
common everywhere, and I feel like.

Speaker 5 (01:23:46):
It is just like a what is it that we
see that when we do see movies about women in
their late forties into like early fifties, a lot of
it is surrounding like I want to have a kid.

Speaker 3 (01:23:58):
I actually I change my mind, I want to have
or like it's like rooted in this anxiety. Yeah, and
not just people living and doing stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:24:07):
Yeah, like women do things, Yeah, we do things like
what Yeah? Like I saw some like podcast clip I
hate when like someone someone was doing some little real
on Instagram and they were responding to some stupid podcasts
where this woman said like, like what do women do
in once they're in their mid to late thirties but

(01:24:28):
they don't have kids? Like what are they doing?

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
What are they all too? I'm like, oh, you.

Speaker 4 (01:24:33):
People like really think women who don't have kids.

Speaker 2 (01:24:36):
Are just like we just shrivel up and die.

Speaker 4 (01:24:39):
Sh Yeah. Either we're literally just in a dark room
staring at something because there's nothing to do and we
don't have any friends or hobbies, or like we're perpetually
on vacation and life is just so easy because you
don't have kids. And I'm like, do you see the economy?
Do you see how for our generation, our parents are
now fragile and dealing with health issues, Like the caretaking

(01:25:01):
stuff is something very much on my mind at you know,
at this point in my life. And I just feel
like I love films so much as a medium, but
I feel very disappointed in certain aspects of like American
film history like how much is not seen on screen,
which leads people to think like a very limited idea
of how human beings are based on pop culture, you

(01:25:25):
know what I mean, Like feels very limited, and it's
understanding of how contradictory and weird and wonderful being alive is.
I don't feel life in a lot of movies I
watched that are contemporary American movies these days.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
Totally yeah, same, yeah. And then I mean, going going
back to the women in this movie, I have very
complicated feelings about it because, on one hand, I think
you could argue that tropes about older women are present
in the sense that both of these women, for sure,
are clinging on to their quote unquote glory days, and

(01:26:02):
for both of them, their glory days are different eras
of their life. Again, for the Jane character, it's when
she was seven years old or something. For Blanche it's
when she's.

Speaker 3 (01:26:13):
Skin her early twenties. It seems like twenties or thirties.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
Yeah, And then, and this is affecting Jane in a
different way than Blanche, where Jane is like losing touch
with reality versus Blanche who seems to be just like
you know, watching her old movies that are now, like
in television syndication, kind of reminiscing about these days and

(01:26:40):
doesn't seem that interested in her life in the present.
There's also some ableism I think surrounding her character, which
we can get into.

Speaker 3 (01:26:49):
Well, yeah, that she is, she's all part of the
era that she's romanticizing. Is the last time that she
was able bodied exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:26:57):
Right, right, and we you know, we have these older
women who, by the way, the studio originally did not
want Joan Crawford and Betty Davis to play these characters
in this movie because the studio felt that those actors
were too old quote unquote They were both in their

(01:27:17):
mid fifties I believe at the time. But director Robert
Aldrich was like, this is what the story calls for,
Like I'm casting these actors, and then the studio relented.
But yeah, it's these older women clinging on to their youth,
which is a very kind of trophy and stereotypical thing.

(01:27:40):
But this is also not happening in a vacuum. There's
context for this where society values youth in women, and
so if these women have been conditioned to think that
youth is important and that's what's important about them, then
it stands to reason that they would try to cling
to that.

Speaker 3 (01:28:01):
I also feel like with their father coming up a lot,
including in the World's Most Annoying Song, like it is
telegraphed to us, And again it's like, I think that
if I also understand how I totally believe that when
this movie came out, and still now, if you're watching

(01:28:21):
this movie with your brain turned off, it's just tropes
all the way down if you're not looking for more.
But yeah, that like we're told kind of right away
and then get a little more information as the movie
goes on of like, oh, I guess the dad passed
away when they were very young, Like we don't really
get a ton of information there. But but that, especially

(01:28:42):
with Jane, that not only is it the world telling
her this, it's like her father manager telling her that
this is where your value comes from. And and then
it sounds like he dies while she's young and never
really like that validation comes from him and the world,

(01:29:03):
and so when he and the world are no longer
you know, either present or interested, like that, they're I mean,
these women are like.

Speaker 2 (01:29:10):
Left behind for sure. I mean, I think the other
surface level trope that maybe permeates deeper, maybe it doesn't.
But the jealousy between the two sisters and the two women,
where Jane is jealous of Blanche seemingly because Blanche was

(01:29:31):
able to have success as an adult and Jane didn't.
Jane got this taste of fame as a child but
couldn't cross over into being a star as an adult,
and she resents Blanche for being able to do that,
and we're to believe that Jane was so jealous of
that that that's why she runs over Blanche with the
car allegedly. Then we find out that that's not what happened.

(01:29:53):
We find out that Blanche was the one who tried
to kill Jane with the car because Blanche was upset
that Jane was making fun of her at a party.

Speaker 4 (01:30:05):
I look at that as like a breaking point because
there's an interesting like after you see the footage of
thirties Betty Davis, and like the studio head is like,
oh god, she so sucks. We need to get Blanche
to take this clause out of her contract. I think
it's like him with like an agent or some representative

(01:30:25):
for Blanche, and there's just something very interesting about how
they're like describing Jane and Blanche's relationship, which Blanche feels
like she owes something to Jane to some degree, but
she like it's clearly resentful that her sister is like
so wedded to her. And then also the studio head

(01:30:46):
makes a mention that one day that like Jane is
gonna be committed or something, so actually that actually kind
of subverts Blanche's thoughts on things. Jane has had problems
for a very very long time, but Blanche has like
almost like adopted a parental role of feeling responsible for
his sister, so that like really weirdly complicates things in

(01:31:08):
a way. And then also, like the studio ahead was
talking about Jane's drinking, like this woman's an I've been
an alcoholic for a long time. So there's like the
tropes are all like very there, but then like there's
set a skew in these certain ways that at like
a certain texture, and I think the performances are doing

(01:31:29):
enough to kind of sometimes almost contradict the gaze of
the movie, which is really interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (01:31:37):
Yeah, I think with like we were talking about earlier,
like the in less capable actors' hands, I think that
the tropes would just read me pretty one to one, yeah,
because I mean this is also a movie, you know,
And then it seems like, you know, Robert Aldrich I've
like wanted to do right by his actors in this,

(01:31:58):
but but it's a movie that's written in direct by men,
and like whenever there's a story about women that is
told in that way, you know, you have to enter
it with the like les let's see, and more often
than not we do. But but yeah, it feels like
certainly Betty and Joan is what like they're really thinking

(01:32:19):
about this because to some extent, that's like what makes
the movie interesting is that they have either lived versions
of these experiences or seen it happen to other people.
I think that this movie also has something to say.
It is not the most nuanced thing. I think it
is like it has its own tropes as well, but
about child stardom and like child's stardom out of vaudeville

(01:32:42):
into it, like a vaudeville child who sort of fails
to make the transition to film, and how that would
affect you if that is where your you know, like
where your entire sense of self is derived from. I
think we like we still see examples of that now.
It is still a huge issue, but certainly more so

(01:33:04):
in the era where you know, the kids that did
make it into the studio system were abused horrifically. So
it's I think what's I guess what's tricky about it
for me is like I think the performances, like you're saying,
Angelica do enough to not make it seem that they've
brought this fate on themselves, but I understand that there

(01:33:27):
is a very clear way to read it that way.

Speaker 4 (01:33:31):
Yeah, totally, I totally agree. I think it's the actresses
that saved this movie from feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:33:37):
Cruel to its characters, because.

Speaker 4 (01:33:39):
In a I think it could read as very like
mean and nasty, and like, I also think the movie,
and like how Betty plays things is smart enough to
let Jane be very nasty and unsympathetic and like the endnotes,
you can be like, this is a very broken person,
but they're also a very monstrous in their actions. Like

(01:34:04):
I don't think you're meant to like ever forgive her
so much as like take a peek behind the curtain
and understand the roots of things a little more clearly.

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):
Yeah, Well, because there's that scene toward the very beginning
of the movie, when I think it's the only moment
when we hear Blanche and Jane's mother speak. But their
mother pulls aside little Blanche and says, she says something like,
I hope you are able to forgive your father and

(01:34:37):
your sister, baby Jane, for you know, being so cruel
to you, and that you won't treat them with the
same cruelness that they have shown you. And then little
Blanche says something like, I won't forget as if like
she's going to harbor this resentment for the rest of
her life and perhaps that's what motivates her to, you know,

(01:35:00):
try to mow down her sister with the car. Am
I remembering that correctly? Is that how that?

Speaker 4 (01:35:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:35:05):
Yeah, yeah, And maybe I'm misregatt but I don't Their
mother really doesn't come up.

Speaker 4 (01:35:11):
Again, No, I thought, I don't care, very bizarre.

Speaker 3 (01:35:17):
I mean, I know that their father had this very
specific role in their life because he was running the
child's star farm, you know. And and and that slept
on conversation between Edwin Flagg and Jane. Later on, we
get a little bit more into like what what motivates
a lot of parents of child stars is that he

(01:35:39):
wanted to be on stage. He was a musician, and
Jane kind of repeats the story he told her of
like I was misunderstood my artistry. People didn't get it,
and like, you know, it is certainly reflective of things
that happen of like stage parents. I thought I was
kind of curious that the mom doesn't come up again.

Speaker 4 (01:35:58):
Because that's a very male written mistake, you know what
I mean, Like, because because I feel like the mother
should be some they have, should have some sort of
feelings for her, whether it's like they feel betrayed or
angry or like.

Speaker 2 (01:36:14):
Is there a contrast between the way their father treated
them pertectly the way their mother treated them, Like there's
there would have been something.

Speaker 4 (01:36:21):
There would have been something, And I think, like, you know,
I like love this movie for the performances and so
like for me, I feel like, yeah, if like a
woman wrote this, that mother character would also cast a
shadow over their lives for one reason or another, but
she doesn't. What's also interesting about these women is you

(01:36:43):
don't hear anything about however their romantic lives were.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
I noticed that too, Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:36:48):
And their romantic lives like for Joan Crawford, like hers
in life were very important to people's understanding of her,
and like what men she was with and with Betty.
Betty was mostly marrying men not in the industry, except
for her last husband, Gary Merrill, who was a co

(01:37:09):
star of hers in All About Eve. That's how they met.
But it's so interesting because if you read anything written
about these women, they do think they were thinking a
lot about their relationships to men and romance in general,
and like really craving romance. And I wondered that with
both Jane and Blanche, have they craved affection? Because if

(01:37:31):
you watch Blanche, the only sort of awe and affection
and care she wants is to just watch herself on screen.

Speaker 3 (01:37:39):
And I wonder how much that plays into the ablest
tropes that are present in this movie, if like, well,
she's disabled, so we're not even going to have love
and romance on the table for this character as like
a prejudice of the writer. I wasn't really clear on.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
That.

Speaker 3 (01:37:58):
And yes, in general, why doesn't Blanche want more? Is
it because of her own internalized ableism? Is it?

Speaker 4 (01:38:07):
Like what you know?

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
I think that there's a lot of different ways that
could go, I'd be curious what other people think, but
I don't know. I guess going back to the mom
for a second, I was trying to like see her
in the performances because she's not there in the text,
and it does feel like as close as she gets
to going through this is me really playing head canon.

(01:38:32):
But like I think my theory is Joan Crawford was
thinking about that mother character and that exchange at the
beginning of the movie, because for whatever this first half
or this beginning of Blanche's career, she continues to resent
Jane in that same way, but things change after this accident,

(01:38:52):
and it almost feels like that like thing her mother
said of like be kinder to Jane than she was
to you, only takes whole after she has failed to
kill her, basically, And I think that that like a
lot of Blanche's passivity comes from, you know, protracted abuse
and fear. But I also I also sort of feel
like there's a part of it that is also coming

(01:39:14):
from that line at the beginning from her mother.

Speaker 4 (01:39:18):
I agree. I think it's almost like she's been raised
to accept poor treatment and like in a way that
I think a lot of young girls are called to
just kind of take abuse and not call it that.
I do think they need they it's just really the
thing is with exploitation movies is they can be really

(01:39:42):
fascinating and really over the top, but a lot of
times I don't think the script and story itself understands
women and how like women relate to each other, and
so you have like a lot of actresses have to
almost like offset and contra predict or add in performance

(01:40:02):
like layers that aren't there in the story, you know. Yeah,
I think like they're both adding like layers to the
character that's not on the page for them. And I
definitely think the mother being such a void despite what
she said to Blanche being so integral in her psyche
kind of speaks to the fact that like the men

(01:40:23):
who made this weren't interested in women period. They were
just interested in like gawking at these like older women
who no longer had you know, people sexually desiring them
or desiring them for any reason. And so isn't that
sad because what's a woman without an audience? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:40:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:40:45):
I find it interesting that, at least as far as
my interpretation goes, a component of the exploitation element of
this movie is the way that the James Hudson character looks,
particularly her makeup, because her makeup makes her look pretty
ghoulish because it's this you know, vodvillion, very old fashion.

Speaker 3 (01:41:09):
She's like taking on the yeah, so much.

Speaker 2 (01:41:13):
Like eyeliner and mascaring and kind of stuff. But I
think that there's context for that that at least Betty
Davis as an actor brings out in her character in
the sense that she I mean, we hear this thing,
and it might be an over generalization, but we've heard
this thing right that a child star who becomes famous

(01:41:35):
tends to kind of like like their development gets a
bit arrested at the moment that they become famous. They
have difficulties sort of like maturing beyond that, And again
not true for all child stars. I'm not trying to
make a blanket statement here, but like see examples of this.

Speaker 3 (01:41:53):
I feel like, especially to the extent of like it,
what matters is your support system and how careful is
your support system being about allowing you to develop as
a person, And even a good support system doesn't necessarily
guarantee an outcome one way or another.

Speaker 2 (01:42:10):
For sure, And then also considering the context of this
era where like mental health support was like barely becoming
a thing at this point. So we have all these
all this context for why Jane seems to constantly regress
into this child like immaturity with her esthetic, with her behavior,

(01:42:33):
like all this stuff, so it's contextualized. So even though
her like ghoulish appearance like contributes to this like hag aesthetic,
we know the context for it in a way that
I think other exploitation movies would just ignore or like
not pay that much attention to or not give that

(01:42:54):
much care to.

Speaker 4 (01:42:55):
Yeah, I think I'm going to actually read another past
Betty Davis like writes and this and that about like
how she came up with this makeup quote. I decided
to do my own makeup for baby Jane what I
had in mind. No professional makeup man would have dared
to put on me. One told me he was afraid

(01:43:16):
that if he did what I wanted, he might never
work again. Jane looked like many women one sees on
Hollywood Boulevard. In fact, author Henry Ferrell, who wrote the
book is based on, patterned the character of Jane after
these women. One would presume by the way they looked
that they were once actresses and were now unemployed. I

(01:43:37):
felt Jane never washed her face, just added another layer
of makeup each day, And I think that's interesting because
it also like just skirts past a sort of class
thinking of like these are women who are also doing
the same routines because that was their way of like
literally gaining money for their labor and that sort of

(01:43:58):
look they're now associated it so much, but not just
their like personal worth as a woman, but they're economic
worth as an act So there's like interesting like thinking
behind it. And I agree, like you're not seeing that
in other exploitation films, by and large, there there are
some interesting ones, but in a lot of ways they

(01:44:19):
don't do that. And I think that exploitation directly leads
into the moment in horror we're in now, which instead
of like the baby if Baby Jane being a central figure,
the baby Jane is like a villainous monster in a
lot of ways, like there's nothing more scary to modern

(01:44:41):
male horror directors than an elderly naked woman Gladys.

Speaker 3 (01:44:49):
I have dissenting opinions on Aunt Gladys. It's a cultural
figure that people aren't ready to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:44:55):
Oh from Weapons.

Speaker 3 (01:44:56):
Yeah, or at least everyone I've tried to talk to
about it, they're like, hut up, we like her. I
was like, all right, I.

Speaker 4 (01:45:01):
Had her in mind when I said that, because I
was like once, I like, you know, you actually watched
the movie. You're like, oh, we're doing this.

Speaker 3 (01:45:09):
Oh, we're doing this, and we also did it in
the first one. We did it in Barbarian as well,
and then we're like, let's do it again. Then let's
get her an oscar which is nothing against Amy Madigan,
but it's great. It's an incredible performer, an incredible performance,
but these are the parts that are available.

Speaker 4 (01:45:26):
Yeah, and there's something we need to and I don't
think anyone has like unpacked in a really good recent piece.
What the fuck is up with that? Like ye, cause
it's like this is all happening with these like look,
how terrible an elderly it's not a man an elderly
man's body. Typically it's an elderly woman's body. Why is
the figure of the crone so frightening to people? And

(01:45:50):
this is happening at the same time, we're watching celebrities
who are not even that old, like really working on
their face and then there's no zemp so it's like
this very weird miasma of not a fun shit that
we're kind of in. And it's like every time I
see a horror movie do this, I'm like, I don't
think you guys realize what thematically you open the door

(01:46:12):
to by by having an elderly woman's body be the
such a figure of fear and revulsion. It's also like,
we're disgusting because that's not what a woman is supposed
to do and look.

Speaker 3 (01:46:25):
Like yeah, and it's not. And it's it's not a
question to me of the caliber of performance, because again,
agree it's a great performance, but to my mind, the
substance getting the critical push that it did thematically immediately
followed by the huge push for we've got to award

(01:46:47):
the end Gladys like back to Beck, I have questions.

Speaker 4 (01:46:52):
It's also like I've, you know, bitch about the substance.
I like wrote a piece comparing the Substance to the
film A Different Man and how they both deal with
like dopel gangers and like how we see ourselves and
like identity found in the aesthetic and stuff like that.
I like when I watched them, like pretty almost back

(01:47:15):
to back. I was like, oh, like there's a lot
going on here, and like the thing that upsets me
about the substance and part is like once we get
to me more and Margaret Qualley are actually both awakened
in the same room. They don't talk to each other.
They like scream and then it becomes violent and then

(01:47:36):
murder happens. But something about that was so cowardly to me.
I was like, no, two characters have more to say
to each other than these women, Like why don't they say.

Speaker 2 (01:47:47):
I wish I could talk to my own self all
the time?

Speaker 4 (01:47:49):
Oh, my God, like some I wish I could like
talk to like like my inner child, or like the
part of me that, like you know, is very mean
to myself sometimes, Like imagine like actually physically be able
to interact with yourself like that. I thought it was
very telling that Coralie Fargiott could not imagine what these

(01:48:11):
women would say to each other, only like it's dovetails
directly into violence. And something about that always caught me.
And it's also not a coincidence that all these elder
like women figures and horror are not really talking to
anybody too too much. They're They're almost like these weird
little objects of spectacle that you're supposed to like always

(01:48:32):
regard at some sort of remove. You're not supposed to
like really know about who they are underneath things. They're
meant to be gawned at. They're meant to be a spectacle.
They're meant to be feared. But I'm sorry, if you're
a woman, you keep living, you're going to age. There's
no way around that. That's the thing about being a
human being in alive. I know, these whack ass tech

(01:48:55):
bros believing like uploading your freaking brain to whatever bullshit
that they hope will have singularity. Yes, I'm like, go
to Mars and die. Can you just live us alone?
But like it's just something about like that is so
fascinating to me right now, and like people just kind
of accept like, yeah, that's just the thing we're doing
in horror right now. But I'm like, no, I think

(01:49:17):
we need to unpack the misogyny of this, because it's
I think horror is in like a very interesting place
in terms of gender right now.

Speaker 3 (01:49:27):
Yeah, I agree with you, And I mean, yeah, I'm
so glad that I was like, oh, she's talking about it.
I'm glad as I know it because yeah, like I
end whatever, I like, it's a good movie all that stuff. Yeah, yeah,
but I think that it's it is interesting that a
movie like Whatever Happened to Baby Jade has the legacy

(01:49:48):
it did, had a lot of very persistent and also
understandable like this is a fundamentally misogynist movie, while in
the future glad a character that physically resembles this, Like
I would be absolutely shocked if Baby Jane wasn't on
the vision board for this character in just presentation, in

(01:50:10):
the makeup and all of that stuff in the like
you know, fake aunt form at least. But a huge
critical difference is we know something about Baby Jane, we like,
even though it is laden in tropes in certain areas,
we know her personal history. We at least are given

(01:50:31):
information to understand why she's presenting this way and not
just like a kind of voidless plot, which that is
playing on your assumed negative opinions and fear of older women,
which is that that's just like a kick back to
something that is I think we pretend we like we
like to say, has gone away because we're giving it

(01:50:53):
an award, But I don't think that that that element
of horror, it hasn't gone away, it's like changed and
gotten as technology develops. So that's that's my final word
on Aunt Gladys God damn it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:10):
Can we talk a little bit about Alvira Oh.

Speaker 4 (01:51:13):
Yes, yes, stealth the one of the most fascinating like
thorns and Jane's side, And just like again I said
this a little earlier, but there's like a racial commentary
thing the movie doesn't realize it's at all doing, because
of course they would cast a black woman in this
role and like Da Da da da, but having her

(01:51:34):
be the one who can see through Jane so clearly
speaks to something that I think I'm very aware of
as a black woman, which is you have to study
white women in order to survive, so you tend to
know them and how they're going to react better than
they do. And so that's also I think her trepidation
with saying anything is like being very aware, this is

(01:51:57):
my white employer. Yeah, like what would be the repercussions
for me professionally if I like do this. I think
she's a really really fascinating character in that way. And yeah,
that line she says to Jane about you've got to
be a grown woman like everyone else. Just like it's

(01:52:18):
kind of haunting.

Speaker 3 (01:52:19):
Yeah, I yeah, I agree. I again like the performance
from Madie Norman, who I was not familiar with, like
her sort of body of work, but she was also
a longtime professor at UCLA. She taught black theater history
at UCLA for decades and decades and like had this
very fascinating career in a longer sense as well. But

(01:52:42):
I just she's a really I feel like she brings
a lot of that subtext that you're describing out of,
Like you see her having to think about like in
the moment where it's it's so clear from she knows
things are wrong at the beginning of the movie, and
you can tell that she wants to push Jane Moore
the first time she's told actually go home, here's here's

(01:53:05):
your money. By go you could tell that like she
wants to stay but has to do the calculus of
like you know, this is my white irrational boss, and
like do I is this a battle I'm good to
choose right now?

Speaker 2 (01:53:20):
Is it not?

Speaker 3 (01:53:20):
And like it I don't know. I just I feel
like you can see her thinking so much in a
way that sells I think on the on the page
something that's just like we just need this character to
go away.

Speaker 2 (01:53:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:53:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53:33):
And then I mean there's also just the she's only
there to serve the white characters. Yeah, she's the only
on screen death we see, I believe, Yeah, the first
and only. So you know, there's those very racialized and
racist tropes present that were which were super common for

(01:53:54):
this time, especially as far as a black woman being
in a service role. Yeah, we do get characterization from her,
and you know what we were just talking about as
far as her being discerning and then having to you
know navigate like this is also her at least a
source of income. It's I couldn't tell like how frequently

(01:54:15):
she comes by or like how much.

Speaker 4 (01:54:18):
Seems like a like a few times a week, and
this is probably and I just inferred, oh, she must
be doing this for moret house families.

Speaker 2 (01:54:26):
Yeah, that's what I assumed as well. But this is
at least a source of income for her, so she
has to you know, navigate that. And but yeah, I
found her to be a fascinating character that tropes that
were very present at the time also very much apply
to her as far as her sort of significance in

(01:54:48):
the story.

Speaker 3 (01:54:49):
Yeah, and the just the lack of the complete dearth
of things we know about her outside of her relationship
to these sisters who are her employers.

Speaker 2 (01:54:59):
We know that she has a cousin.

Speaker 4 (01:55:01):
I know. I was like, she has a cousin. That's
that's it, That's all there is to her.

Speaker 3 (01:55:08):
She has a cousin who's heard a lot about these sisters. Oh,
I would see, I would see if she's fifteen minutes
late coming home, I'm calling someone exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:55:18):
Like there's a whole I would never say remake this movie,
Like there's no way to remake it in today's But
there's something very interesting about like the thought experiment of
what if I, as a woman, wrote a story like this,
How would I change the perspective of things? How would
I make like the Elvira character alive in a way. Yeah,

(01:55:43):
maybe I'll just write a novel sort of inspired by
Baby Jane.

Speaker 3 (01:55:45):
I don't know, Oh my god, you should the world
is ready or I mean, we'll find out that the
world should be.

Speaker 4 (01:55:52):
But it's like sort of fat, Like, you know, I
had an interesting conversation with a friend, uh, like maybe
like months ago, and she's more a literal she's like
a literary critic primarily. And she said something and we
had like it was a conversation about Jennifer Lawrence and
and like I was mentioning Die my Love and and

(01:56:14):
Giatolantino's like profile on Lawrence and talking to her about
her as like she's like the biggest millennial star who's
an actress, right, Like she's such a fixture. But all
I kept thinking was like, oh, that makes me sad
because it mean it like speaks to how limited portrayals
are of like women in film, that this is like

(01:56:36):
this is like the main chick. And she, you know,
my friend said something that sort of upset me, where
she was like, well, you know, like I don't have
that problem with literature because like anyone can pick up
a pen and start writing a novel, making a film
requires so much capital that just by the nature of
the industry, you're just going to have less representations of things.

(01:56:57):
And it's so dictated by capital that that fext things.
So I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about
what storytelling excites me and like what I want to
do with my own career going forward. So that's also
why I'm like, what if I write a book that's
inspired by Baby Jane and like, actually really give a
shit about these women as women, And yeah, the mother

(01:57:18):
is gonna be major in it. Because one of my
biggest rants is there's too many movies about daddy issues
and there's not enough movies about mommy issues. Because I'm like,
I see y'all in the streets, y'all have mommy issues.
Y'all need to come correct. We need more mommy issues movies.
Mommy Dearest, Mommy dearis is a major Bomby issues movie.

Speaker 3 (01:57:37):
That is. Yeah, that's I guess I want to repeat
for our listeners that like those elements to Joan Crawford
and to Betty Davis and there are I mean, I
almost want to save that for the Mommy Dearest episode
And yeah, because I honestly am not like well researched
enough in that area of their personal history to speak

(01:57:59):
to it intelligence today, But no, we are well aware.

Speaker 4 (01:58:04):
Yeah, it's it's very interesting with both Joan and Betty
where it's like the daughter had complaints, you know, especially
Jones's daughter, like yes, b d Betty's daughter, like her
issues with her mother are not to the level if
she was literally beating me kind of things. But it's interesting,
like in both families, there's some children who were like

(01:58:28):
they were great to me, and then there's the one
child who was like, actually, I was like the vessel
for all their issues with things that were out of
my control because I'm a child, And I feel like
that's very accurate to the rest of life, where a
lot of times you'll see within families that there's like
a sibling who has like genuine issues with their parents.

(01:58:48):
Well then there's the other siblings who like didn't have
the same experience as they were growing up and how
it's such sensitive territory and a lot of it is
like kind of murked up by a movie like Mommy
Dearist and like making like turning what is a really harrowing,
sad experience of like parental abuse into this almost like

(01:59:12):
over the top camp extravaganza which sort of like you know,
makes the moments of abuse into like pop culture memes
like no more wire hangers and.

Speaker 2 (01:59:23):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:59:25):
Yeah, I think that this might this might be the
this this year ten, we are finally maybe going to
have to tackle Mommy Dearist, because it is a meer
that I've been avoiding for for some time. I wanted
to go back really quickly to the disability conversation in SBV,

(01:59:45):
where I mean it's I think that there's a lot
of ablest tropes that, while frustrating, we're not unsurprising to
see in a movie from nineteen sixty two. Obviously, you know,
John Crawford does not have this unnamed disability.

Speaker 2 (01:59:58):
She is not a.

Speaker 3 (01:59:59):
Wheeled here a user. I think that there are certain
moments that, uh, I mean, there's the diablest trips we've
talked about, and there's the fact that the movie really
delights and lingers on seeing Joan Crawford being violently abused
by her sister at length to the point where it's

(02:00:20):
it is both ablest and you can almost be like
they're doing this for the trailer. They're doing this to
emphasize that Betty Davis wishes she was kicking Joan Crawford,
doesn't she, you know, playing into that aspect of it.
But of course it reads as extremely able as I
did find I found from a blog called When the

(02:00:43):
Woman Screams by an unnamed author unfortunately, who reflects on
how specifically their present day dynamic did have at least
her mind something to say about how disabled people were
treated in the sixties, So I sort to read something
from their quote. In the nineteen sixties, people with disabilities

(02:01:05):
had limited protections to ensure their safety. There was no
Americans with Disabilities Act, Disabled children still did not have
the right to a public education, and the Center for
Independent Living was just getting ready to open its doors.
While the decade did see a move away from institutionalizing
people with disabilities, support services for caregivers were sporadic at best.
Like Blanche, a person with the disability that limited independent

(02:01:28):
movement had to hope that their caregiver was competent because
there was simply no oversight to ensure care standards unquote.
And it continues from there. But I think that that
is again I highly does something the movie was setting
out to do explicitly, but does speak to I think
something that we've talked about in other representations of disabled characters.

(02:01:52):
The further you go back in history, there are no
protections in place, protections that remain very flawed to this day.
And just to protect I mean, this is a separate conversation,
but when I was one of my dad's primary caregivers
leading up to when he passed. I was shocked at
how little you are like and that's in the present day,

(02:02:15):
how much it it was dependent on me to know
what I was doing and to get with the program
because the support just mostly doesn't exist and so whatever.
There's a lot going on there, but that because of
Blanche's unnamed disability for because of this accident that has
left her in as a wheelchair user, she is completely

(02:02:39):
having to because there is no law that says her
house needs to be able to be accessible for her.
It enables Jane's abuse because there were even fewer protections
and consideration of disabled people at the time. So yeah,
I appreciated that point, even though I don't think it
is when the movie is trying to draw attention to right.

Speaker 4 (02:03:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. I think the
movie does kind of like trip into accidentally more interesting
ideas than what they set out to do. You can
definitely feel like, oh, they they didn't realize they're actually
like tapping into something worth really saying about disability. It's also, like,

(02:03:22):
you know, important to keep in mind, like there's not
like many actors in Hollywood history who have dealt with
like notable physical disabilities that have had like careers, like
at the time, the only woman I can think of
who like she started as an actress and then had
an accident that eventually paralyzed her, and then she went

(02:03:46):
actually back to acting. I don't know if you've ever
heard of her, but her name was Susan Peters and
she did this really interesting noir called The Sign of
the Ram in nineteen forty eight that's legitimately about her
characters like struggle with accepting her own accident and disability
does not end well for the character, but there's something
really interesting about watching a movie dealing with that with

(02:04:08):
an actual woman who was paralyzed and like in real life,
really struggling with who am I now that this has
happened to me, and it's happened like so early in
my career. And this was like her last movie because
she just kind of was in a space where she
was like, I'm not going to get interesting roles after this.
This is like probably it, this industry is not going

(02:04:30):
to support me. And she ended up committing suicide pretty young,
very sad story, but The Sign of the Ram is
like actually a very interesting noir and speaking of aries,
that title is obviously alluding to aries people. This is
a whole podcast episode about aries women apparently.

Speaker 3 (02:04:51):
I Oh, I'm a Leah. We've got a lot of
a lot of fire in the chat.

Speaker 4 (02:04:58):
There a lot of fire in the chat. I love
I'm a Leo rising.

Speaker 2 (02:05:01):
Earth signs over here, I'm a Taurus and then double virgo.

Speaker 4 (02:05:05):
Oh I like that. Oh, I'm yeah, let's all talk
our signs. I'm an Harry's Sun, Leo rising, Virgo moon.

Speaker 3 (02:05:12):
Okay, Oh my gosh, I think I'm Leo's sun, Ari's moon,
Pisces rising.

Speaker 2 (02:05:18):
Oh, that's an interesting that's a really interesting man. Yeah,
I don't know what any of that means.

Speaker 4 (02:05:23):
I don't. I don't actually, but I'm like, all the
good things about Aris and Leo's and virgos are right
about me. All the bad things I don't believe astrology
is bullshit.

Speaker 3 (02:05:33):
It doesn't make sense, that doesn't resonate with me.

Speaker 2 (02:05:36):
The bad things they don't apply to me exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:05:40):
The closing on, I just wanted to shout this book
out and we should have her back on the show.
The past guest of the show, Kristin Lopez, just released
a really good book about the history of disability in
Hollywood called Popcorn Disabilities. I just started reading it the
other night, and it's terrific.

Speaker 2 (02:05:58):
Nice. Yes, does anyone have anything else they'd like to discuss?

Speaker 4 (02:06:04):
Let female actresses be confident in an interesting way? Again,
because Betty Davis very I think we're weirdly very uncomfortable
as a culture with confident women. That's a whole other
like line of discussion. But I've started to get annoyed
because I keep coming across like people saying insert the
blank woman character is not relatable because she's too confident

(02:06:27):
and too good at what she does. I like, this
is so nerdy. But I saw this, like said about
the character jad Zia Dax from Star Trek Deep Space nine,
and it literally pissed me off so much, Like why
do I care this much about a character who existed
in the nineties? But watching you know Betty and Joan

(02:06:49):
and like knowing about their careers, and you know they
were very dynamic women who had insecurities in some areas
and not in others. But I like, I miss seeing
a like body broad who really has confidence in herself
as an artist and truly believe she has something to
bring to the world and something to say that may

(02:07:09):
not be pretty, but it is worthwhile. That is very
true to a Betty Davis for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:07:15):
Hell yeah, well the movie does pass the Bechdel test.

Speaker 4 (02:07:20):
In the most cruel, nasty way possible, because yes it is.

Speaker 3 (02:07:26):
It passes the Bechtel I want to I I, outside
of like mentions of Daddy, we're really not talking about men, yeah,
very much. We're talking about mostly negative stuff. We're talking
about two women who have a very complicated and deeply
twisted history together. And that's what we're talking about, or

(02:07:49):
I think most of, if not in the entire conversations
between Blanche and Elvira Pass. I think the only other
characters that we haven't talked about that we don't need to,
like belabor because they're not huge characters is the mother
and daughter who live next door, including b D Betty
Davis's daughter, which is very I just like, I.

Speaker 2 (02:08:12):
Love is her name be D because those are Betty
Davis's initials.

Speaker 3 (02:08:15):
HERD is Barbara I see, But but I did like
that dynamic of I think that all of those conversations
past the Bexel test, there was like one exchange between
them that I really liked. Where the daughter, I know
I did this to my mom at some point where
you know, they're watching the Joan Crawford movie and you know,
the daughter's like, oh, she's she's our neighbor. She must

(02:08:37):
be so old, she must be like a hundred and
her mom is like, actually, she's my age.

Speaker 1 (02:08:43):
And then.

Speaker 3 (02:08:45):
I know I did that to my mom, like when
I was a kid, I just that. But they're talking about,
I mean, whatever their plot function is that they're failing
to act on what is a clearly abusive dynamic next door.
But I like that their side conversations have to do
with how does the average person perceive, you know, perceives
these women, And I thought that was kind of cool too.

(02:09:07):
But yeah, I think it mostly passes the Bechdel test,
but you know, flawed metrics we discussed many times.

Speaker 2 (02:09:14):
There's basically conversations that are like here's Din Din, and
it's like, is it a dead bird again? You know, yeah,
stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (02:09:21):
People aren't doing this anyway, feeding.

Speaker 2 (02:09:23):
Me dead animals again, Well, there's a lot of meals
two dead animals. That was why I feel like my
one note about this movie is like it should have
just been one, one or three?

Speaker 4 (02:09:35):
What is this rule of two? Yeah? It is interesting
the two and then and then Jane is like, you
know what, You're just not going to eat anymore, So
you don't want the dead rat. You don't get any food.
And it's like, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (02:09:48):
Was you kind of want the horse head situation. You're like,
because the animals got a little bit bigger each time. Yeah,
you do need the rule of threes. Where's the third?

Speaker 2 (02:09:58):
Anyway? Our nipple scale where we rate the movie zero
to five nipples based on examining the movie through an
intersectional feminist lens. Oh, oh, that's a tricky one. This
is a tricky one.

Speaker 4 (02:10:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:10:16):
I almost want to differ. I almost want to not.

Speaker 3 (02:10:22):
Doing that more and more reasonly. I mean, there's just like,
there's so much going on in this movie, and I
think it is like a particularly tricky one because I
feel like if we were, if we were rating it
based on intent, that's a different number than from what
I think we are generally getting out of it.

Speaker 2 (02:10:43):
So rather than nipples, I'm gonna rate it on a
scale of life size baby Jane dolls.

Speaker 3 (02:10:53):
It's so big, it's huge.

Speaker 4 (02:10:56):
It looks heavy too.

Speaker 2 (02:10:58):
And I'm gonna give the movie four out of five
creepy Baby Jane dolls.

Speaker 3 (02:11:04):
Yeah, I'm giving it. I'm giving it five. Big bad
Baby Jane's I what a scary doll. I know that, Like,
but you know this this was just as the Barbie
was taking off, so we didn't have those smaller dolls,
and I'm glad that we decided to make the doll smaller.
That's simply too big.

Speaker 4 (02:11:24):
Yeah, it's really it's too much. It's scary. Imagine just
like you know, you wake up one day in your
bedroom and you don't like you know, your eyes are adjusting,
and that looks like something that's going to kill you.
Like that. I would be like that, you know, whenever
I would see her, I'm like, that's the kind of
doll that you know, there are goosebumps, chucky, you know, like, yeah,

(02:11:48):
we've seen these dolls are bad.

Speaker 3 (02:11:50):
I love a killer doll. I like the last the
last silly the thing that I was interested. I don't
know the moments where Jane shows I'm like, what an
interesting choice there where, Like in that scene where she's
you know, telling, oh my gosh, I keep forgetting his name.
Edwin She's telling Edwin like, oh, yeah, like I want

(02:12:13):
to do the same songs. I know that my songs
are a little dated. We'll have to update them. I
was like, what would we have updated that too? How
are we going to I would I would have loved
to hear them bring.

Speaker 2 (02:12:26):
The rock and roll remix to Daddy?

Speaker 3 (02:12:30):
Letters to Daddy? What's the nineteen sixty two interpolation of
Letters to Daddy? Someone someone figured that out for me? Please?

Speaker 4 (02:12:39):
Disturbing?

Speaker 3 (02:12:40):
Yeah, I just love that. She was like, I know,
we have to update it. I was like, of all
the things for you to know this is this is
very shrewd. It's true.

Speaker 2 (02:12:48):
Yeah, that is kind of surprising. We didn't talk about
Edwin very much, and honestly, I don't even know what
there is to say about him. We'll be like dynamic,
a dynamic with him and his mom. But you know
with that.

Speaker 3 (02:13:01):
Yeah, I guess that that is the mommy issue representation
in this movie is whatever's going on there?

Speaker 2 (02:13:06):
Yeah, he slet shames his mom. At one point, he
says something like, why do you care about a woman
shacking up with a man in a hotel room, a
strange man who she's never seen before? Isn't that how
I was conceived, like.

Speaker 4 (02:13:20):
Oh oh why why is she?

Speaker 3 (02:13:24):
And she's and she was nothing but nice to him.
But I think it's it's implied that like he's I mean,
it is like explicitly implied that he's under her thumb,
or like she doesn't want to let go or that
like I mean again, it's like we don't. It's not
that I necessarily wanted to spend more time with that character,
but it does feel like there is at least an
attempt to have the weird parent child dynamic sort of

(02:13:48):
mirror Jane's weird parent dynamic. So it's like, I don't know,
see seeing those two in that scene, especially with that
like Devis, I don't know. Victor Wrotto was nominated for
an Oscar for this, which.

Speaker 4 (02:14:01):
They were nominating a lot. They just they still be
nominating some things, and I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, it's
not a bad performance, but it's just like, oh, okay,
maybe that one.

Speaker 3 (02:14:10):
Oh sure, it's a fine perferre. I honestly wasn't. I
hadn't seen him outside of this movie, but he was.
He died very young. He died in his early forties,
but like had a very successful career, was closeted for
most of his career. But I guess there's a chapter
about him in a book about queer Hollywood history, but

(02:14:32):
I I don't know very much about him.

Speaker 2 (02:14:34):
I wondered if his character was meant to be queer
coded in some way, in like a very nineteen sixties way,
partly because like he still lives with his mother, He still.

Speaker 4 (02:14:45):
Lives with his mom. Musician, the way he interacts with
like Jane is to like he like clearly recognizes she's delusional,
but is still willing to use her and like probably
thinks that she wants some level of effect from him.
So there's there's something there. I don't think it's like
full blown queer coded, but like knowing the actor, I

(02:15:06):
can see like that reading existing on some level.

Speaker 3 (02:15:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah, And and and that I think we
mentioned this once earlier.

Speaker 2 (02:15:14):
This movie is so dense, So back into the discussion.

Speaker 3 (02:15:19):
That, like with his character with Edwin, he is, you know,
acting dishonestly every second we see him on screen basically,
but we also do get the understanding why it's like
that he is broke, and I think that he views
these wealthy women as like well, who cares how I
treat them?

Speaker 2 (02:15:39):
They're rich?

Speaker 3 (02:15:40):
Like I think that that appears to be his emo
where he's he's like getting one over on the rich
in his estimation. But the reality is far you know,
is far more complicated. But it's like in a movie
that doesn't really deal with class very much, if like
Edwin is the little point of entry to that.

Speaker 2 (02:16:02):
Anyway, Five Baby Jane Dolls.

Speaker 4 (02:16:07):
I love it, five out of five most definitely.

Speaker 3 (02:16:10):
Well, thank you so much for returning to get into
this incredible, wonderful, weird movie with us.

Speaker 4 (02:16:19):
Oh yeah, this was a lot of fun. I like,
you know, brought my pile of books out that are
related to Betty Davis and Joan and that's not even
all of them. I was like, wow, I have a
lot of books on these women.

Speaker 3 (02:16:31):
Incredible, this was great. Oh, thank you so much. Where As,
as usual, where can we find Worri your work?

Speaker 4 (02:16:39):
As always, you can find me at New York Magazine's
site Vulture or in the pages of New York Magazine.
That is my job, and on my substack Mad Women
and Muses. I sometimes post on Blue Sky. I am
pretty active on Letterbox. It's just my name. If you're
a little nerd who wants to see what I'm watching.
You can check that out there. But yeah, that's how

(02:17:03):
you can find me. I've got a lot of work
coming out that I'm really excited about, and I've kind
of you know, I think this conversation was really wonderful
because it's really got me thinking about, you know, how
I create, what I want to do as an artist,
and like how inspired I am by like women like
this who really had gusto when it came to their

(02:17:25):
professionalism and their artistic desires.

Speaker 2 (02:17:29):
You got to write that book, I got to write.

Speaker 4 (02:17:30):
I got to move back into fiction.

Speaker 2 (02:17:32):
I miss fiction.

Speaker 4 (02:17:33):
I really do.

Speaker 2 (02:17:34):
Well. Thank you again for coming back on and please
come back anytime. Oh I'd love to truly.

Speaker 3 (02:17:39):
Yeah, I get parasocial sometimes because I was like, I
just love.

Speaker 2 (02:17:43):
Your work so much.

Speaker 3 (02:17:44):
It's so thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:17:45):
No, that means a lot. Sometimes it can be like
easy to forget that people actually like my work because
I get such weird blowback sometimes. So it just means
a lot to connect, you know, with people through the writing.

Speaker 2 (02:17:59):
Yeah, we're big fans. We cite your work on the
show often, truly all the time.

Speaker 4 (02:18:03):
Thank you. Please subscribe to my newsletter, et cetera, etcetera,
Subscribe to do your maazine, et cetera, journalism design, Please help.

Speaker 3 (02:18:11):
Us, please God please. You can find us mostly on
Instagram and of course always on our Patreon aka Matreon.
We're for five bucks a month, two bonus episodes a
month on a theme of our communities, choosing and access
to over I think two hundred back.

Speaker 2 (02:18:31):
Episodes something like that.

Speaker 3 (02:18:32):
We've been doing since twenty seventeen. And with that, Oh man,
how do we dismount from this episode?

Speaker 2 (02:18:39):
I wrote a letter to Daddy is.

Speaker 5 (02:18:44):
Address it.

Speaker 3 (02:18:47):
Spot on impression? That is perfect? Bye, fine bye. The
Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted and Pretty
Me Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 2 (02:19:01):
And Me Caitlyn Drante. The podcast is also produced by
Sophie Lichtermann.

Speaker 6 (02:19:06):
And edited by Caitlyn Durrante. Ever heard of Them? That's
me and our logo and merch and all of our
artwork in fact are designed by Jamie Loftis, Ever heard
of her?

Speaker 3 (02:19:17):
Oh My God? And our theme song, by the way,
was composed by Mike Kaplan.

Speaker 2 (02:19:22):
With vocals by Katherine Voskrasinski.

Speaker 3 (02:19:25):
Iconic and a special thanks to the one and only
Aristotle Acevedo.

Speaker 2 (02:19:30):
For more information about the podcast, please visit linktree slash
spectel Cast

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

The Bechdel Cast News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Caitlin Durante

Jamie Loftus

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Betrayal Season 5

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}What Ever Happened to Baby Jane with Angelica Jade Bastién