PLAGUE DIARY 53: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Mildred Pierce (1945)
 I don’t know what that ending is about, with Joan Crawford and her first husband walking out of a giant door as the music swells, towards — what is that? The Empire State Building? It’s a happy ending alright, good triumphs, because no one could be more noble than Mildred Pierce. This was Joan Crawford’s career-saving movie, and that’s what she plays— her face, her tone of voice, her hair all say: ‘I’ve made the right choice, and after this movie I will no longer be box office poison.’ I must articulate what it is about Joan Crawford’s acting that we faggots love, because our appreciation of this movie is the key to camp and the whole gay sensibility. It’s odd that people even mention Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the same sentence. Davis was a consummate actress, Crawford was not. Davis turned down this movie, and ten years later made The Star — about a woman more movie star than actress, in other words, a woman who was Crawford personified. Sure, Davis appeared in trashy melodramas, but I suspect she turned this one down because Mildred Pierce is beyond that: it’s artistic persuasion of the highest order, a kind of aesthetic sudsing that can surmount any run-of-the-mill human objection. Mildred’s great sin is that she loves her child too much. Think about that. It would be like someone saying 'My problem is, I just can’t stop reading The Bible.' Oh really, and you expect me to judge you? But obviously you are a sainted idol, and we need to lick your feet. And Crawford (much like Lana Turner) was  able to give herself up to each and every tawdry filmic orgy of virtue, and the only entity who believed it all more firmly than her, was the audience. Crawford is beyond earnest, which is itself a huge feat, as from all accounts in real life she was nothing more than a mean, dumb, slut (that’s what Bette Davis said, not me). Here she plays to perfection the kindest woman who has ever lived, who won’t let a man touch her unless she is in love. But not only does Crawford’s performance point to her acting talent, it also points to her beauty. She would never allow her eyes ‘bug out’ the way Davis does in Juarez, she would never sacrifice her beauty for a single emotion, indeed her passion is encased by her beauty and contained by it — inside her glistening eyes, her semi-parted lips, her statuesque figure, and, of course, her impeccable poise and grace, which is not (like Dirk Bogarde in Victim) her own. Her goodness, after all, does not come from inside her; she displays it, everything is about showing. And when she acts she is clearly showing us that she is not only a good actress but a great one. No wonder she received an Academy Award. The scene where she faces off with the selfish daughter who ruins her life (Ann Blyth, an actress of Crawford’s ilk, all surface) has become camp history. I officially became a homosexual — not when I lost my gay virginity — but in 1985 while directing my play Drag Queens On Trial. Kent Staines suddenly, sans introduction, launched into a recital of the whole scene, which he claimed every gay man worth his salt knew by heart. (Veda: “You’ll never be anything but a common frump, who’s father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing!” Crawford: “Veda, I’m seeing you for the first time, and you’re cheap and horrible!”) The agony is palpable, this movie is a dry run for Rosemary’s Baby. Joan Crawford is every mother —every tender, innocent woman with the best of intentions, who, through a quirk of nature, has given birth to a monster, a devilish abortion come to fierce and perverted life — who — in Veda’s case — ends up (nightmare!) singing in tacky dance halls in skimpy dresses covered with too many flowers and too many sparkles. But of course you always love your daughter, and will always do anything for her because she is ‘blood’. This kind of rhetorical manipulation is irresistible. All mothers deep down just know that their child is somehow not worthy of their dedication, and is even in the tiniest way a monster who can never repay the debt of maternity. To see this portrayed on screen is a delicious kind of torture for mothers and daughters everywhere. And why then, do we gay men love it so? Because we too, have always been mothers and daughters in our hearts, and we have always loved not wisely but too well, and we suffer, and we work our asses off — like Mildred Pierce, being waitresses in restaurants, because that’s the only kind of job we can ever get (who was the last openly gay anchorman on CBC?). And yes, now and then, we lash out. In Mildred Pierce it is not Joan Crawford who lashes out — but her alter ego, Eve Arden. She speaks Mildred’s mind — “Veda’s convinced me alligators have the best idea, they eat their young.” (Eve is kinda butch, kinda a dyke: “I’m getting awfully tired of men talking to me man to man” she says, but you’re not sure -- maybe she does like it a whole lot). We gay men are Joan Crawford and Eve Arden - suffering quietly — only occasionally letting loose with a cutting remark — because no one will ever really love us or respect us, because we represent sexual perversion even in the era of gay marriage, just as Mildred Pierce represented a threatening feminism even in the postwar period when women were doing men’s jobs. Though Joan Crawford works her way up the ladder to own a chain of restaurants, and buys her daughter a  humungous ugly house — still her daughter betrays her. Similarly we get AIDS and plead with our parents: it’s not my fault, God made me this way, and now I’m suffering because I’m a homosexual. But still our parents spit on us, and tell us we have to die alone. Do we believe all this martyred schlocky treacle about ourselves? Of course we do, everyone does. It would be something quite different if Joan Crawford was actually a good actress, who perhaps was willing to allow Mildred some flaws, or reveal her own personal flaws through her portrayal (every great actor embarrasses us with such revelations). But then this movie would have been too upsetting; too much, too close. Joan Crawford — whose cheekbones point at her acting talent, whose every gesture underlines a sublime beauty that she constantly pretends she is not conscious of — takes us far enough away from our suffering that we can laugh it — as we cry inside — for all that is lost, all that cannot be, for all that we should not have loved, but through our courage of heart, we somehow did.