The Mother of This and Every Year

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford
Image: Getty

Sunday is Mother’s Day, and time for another ritual viewing of that 1981 testament to motherhood, Mommie Dearest. 

I greatly appreciate Mommie Dearest, but Joe surpasses me in revering it with an almost religious fervor. He quotes it at will and talks about Joan and Christina as if he knows them personally. When we disagree, he asks me in his best Joan voice, “Why must everything be a contest?” If things take a dire turn, it’s “Tina, bring me the axe!”

Joe is not alone. Scores of people who appreciate the art of camp look at this film as the holy grail. It is the ultimate guilty pleasure.

And by “people who go for camp,” I am, of course, talking about the gays, who have kept what is otherwise a negligible and demonstrably bad film alive for over forty years. 

Taking herself all too seriously and completely missing the point, Mommie Dearest star Faye Dunaway has, in recent years, campaigned to distance herself from her best role. 

That’s right. Best role. Dunaway was magnificent in Chinatown. Network was fantastic. Bonnie and Clyde? A masterpiece. But none of these films equals her arch overacting in Mommie Dearest for sheer, wicked entertainment value. 

Asserts Dunaway: “[Mommie Dearest] became camp. . . it was kind of a Kabuki performance.” 

She says “camp” like that is a bad thing. Camp is precisely the reason generations of gay men quote the film line by line. Take your whining to the TV stations that coyly program Mommie Dearest every year on Mother’s Day. Tell it to the Mommie Dearest appreciation account on Instagram. Or Facebook. Or the zillions of memes. Or anyone who relishes the fun in dysfunction.

Dunaway’s performance is so iconic, so definitive that it eclipses the real Crawford, making it hard to distinguish Dunaway-as-Crawford from the real thing.

What is it about this film? On paper and in fact, Crawford should have been put in jail. There is nothing funny about the film’s ostensible theme, child abuse. 

And what is so amusing, an alien from another planet might ask, about watching this maniac decimate her rose bushes, go ballistic over wire hangers, or tackle and then try to strangle her daughter when the latter says she is “not one of her fans?” 

Surely it is because the film is so bad it’s good. And its actors, led by Dunaway, have not a freaking clue how bad it is. Only the films of John Waters seem to have any awareness of themselves as camp. Here, as in other classics of the genre, like Valley of the Dolls, Showgirls, or Plan 9 from Outer Space, the camp is unintentional. Dunaway’s participation is unwitting.

When “Joan” unironically castigates her on-screen daughter with lines like “I should have known you’d know where to find the boys and the booze,” or wallows in self-pity after LB Mayer calls her “box office poison,” we are having a laugh not at Crawford’s expense but Dunaway’s. And that is why Dunaway is embarrassed by Mommie Dearest.

Being an unwilling accomplice to camp makes her look foolish. But now, some forty years after making the film, turning her nose up from this movie instead of embracing and having a good laugh over it makes Dunaway look like a bad sport. Someone with no sense of humor. Someone like, well, Joan Crawford. 

Mommie Dearest is a canonical film, a rite of passage, and a gift that keeps on giving. If you do not share my opinion – well, don’t f&%@ with me, fellas. “This ain’t my first time at the rodeo.” 

My prediction is that Mommie Dearest will never stop resonating with anyone who loves a good laugh. The camp factor, the so-bad-it’s-good factor, and the cluelessness of its actors alchemize to give us one for the ages.

Add “mommy issues” to this delectable dish and you have something better than brunch or roses for Mother’s Day.

 

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NB: For a future installment of Vertes'Verities, I am asking readers to ask me anything! No question is off-limits. Go ahead -- you know you want to!