{"id":111951,"date":"2017-06-21T13:49:18","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T17:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111951"},"modified":"2017-06-21T15:05:39","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T19:05:39","slug":"mother-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/21\/mother-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in a still from Mommie Dearest<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe makeup job, of course, is the real star,\u201d critic Stephen Schiff wrote for the Boston Phoenix<\/em> about Mommie Dearest<\/em><\/a>, which first screened in 1981, and starred Faye Dunaway in broad Joan Crawford drag: \u201ca Frankenstein\u2019s monster that hovers perilously between faces, between personas \u2026 There\u2019s something biologically askew here: a makeup man could create that face, but human genes and chromosomes couldn\u2019t.\u201d I agree\u2014I\u2019d also guess that when he says \u201cthe makeup job,\u201d he means the mouth, Joan Crawford\u2019s outsized lips being more or less her genius loci. What Max Factor called \u201cthe smear\u201d and the general public called \u201cthe hunter\u2019s bow,\u201d a casual observer might call \u201cinhospitable\u201d or \u201chostile.\u201d The red of Crawford\u2019s lips never seems like the red of a rose or a Valentine, but the red of a wound.<\/p>\n

Treating the mouth as the sum of the mother is obvious: it\u2019s a mirror for the mother\u2019s other mouth, and a possible site of tenderness. Insensitive to any and all tenderness\u2014and hypersensitive to imperfection\u2014Faye-as-Joan is a perfect bitch and an absolutely flawless lunatic, which makes her as good at being an icon as it makes her awful at being a parent. If the Crawford mouth\u2014a red, Fontana canvas slash of a maw\u2014does\u00a0not convey the image of a mother or a woman, it may be because Joan Crawford never wanted to be either: only a big, indelible star. To be a star, you also have to be a bit of a monster, which is why \u201cthe smear\u201d resembles, variously, the scowl of a clown, the pout of a scheming drag queen, and the bloodied mouth of a bear in a wildlife photograph.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those of us who did not grow up easily, and did not live with easy mothers\u2014all those women at, in other words, the mercy of their own genetics\u2014Mommie Dearest<\/em> is a cautionary tale, in deep disguise as horror. It\u2019s also a tragedy. It is not, when one thinks hard about it, very funny. For the uninitiated, it is an adaptation of the schlocky and best-selling memoir of Christina, Joan\u2019s adopted daughter, who lived under daily threat of violence from her film-star mother in their LA manse, and who has no reserve about portraying Crawford as a villain or a bogeywoman. The sites of all this feminine-maternal drama\u2014walk-in closets, backyard swimming pools, and manicured rose gardens\u2014feel a little on the nose, but then domestic warfare rarely veers from clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Crawford, in her real life, loved the lavish and the femme<\/em>-domestic just as much as she adored her famousness, her feminal, cartoonish image. Motherhood can make a set designer out of a woman; rarely does it make her the star of her life, so that what Plath pithily called, in Lesbos<\/em>, \u201cviciousness in the kitchen!\u201d often amounts to a plea for a daughter\u2019s lax consideration. This is sometimes dealt out as an unkind word, and sometimes\u2014as with Joan, according to Cristina\u2014as a blow. \u201cThe potatoes hiss,\u201d Plath further spits. \u201cIt is all Hollywood, windowless.\u201d In the closet, also windowless and very Hollywood in scale, Joan is seen to beat her daughter with a can of scouring powder; in the pool, she beats her far less literally by cheating in a swimming race. Later, in another rage, Joan goes out in an evening gown and tears apart her garden and its perfect roses with a pair of shears, and then an axe. The scene is imbued with the never-undoable terror that comes with fucking up something fragile. Flowers are, in this respect, not unlike children.<\/p>\n

Faye Dunaway described her turn in Mommie Dearest<\/em> as \u201cKabuki,\u201d which for her meant \u201cbasically hysterical.\u201d She claimed that Crawford\u2019s spirit haunted her throughout the whole production. \u201cLate at night,\u201d she wrote afterwards, \u201cI would go home to the house we had rented in Beverly Hills, and felt Crawford in the room with me, this tragic, haunted soul just hanging around \u2026 It was as if she couldn\u2019t rest.\u201d The mother is always a specter hovering over the scene. Her absence is reverberant\u2014the more so for a daughter who begins to see herself enacting her mother\u2019s tics, noticing the mother-ghost\u2019s face in the mirror. (I write \u201cherself\u201d in place of \u201cmyself,\u201d but you knew that already.) Three or four drops of spilled oil on the countertop equal \u201coil all over the countertop.\u201d Crooked photographs unnerve to the point of discomfort. There is a line from Roger Ebert\u2019s visit to the Mommie Dearest <\/em>set, regarding Joan: \u201cShe was a very unhappy woman, I said, making it a question.\u201d The same line, I have realized since, could have been said about my mother, also making it a question. There is still no question mark required; the answer is too obvious.<\/p>\n

It was not, to me, as obvious when I was eight or nine years old\u2014although two things have, lately, made me think about unhappy mothers. One was watching Mommie Dearest<\/em> with my own last month; the second was reading Kate Zambreno\u2019s newest novel, Book of Mutter<\/em><\/a>, which is about trying and trying not to write about your mother\u2019s death. It is also partly about Louise Bourgeois, Chicago, Henry Darger, Roland Barthes and the JFK assassination, and is just as sad as Mommie Dearest<\/em>, and as serious and sharp as Mommie Dearest<\/em> is allegedly camp. Zambreno\u2019s mother is, or was, a housewife, and resembles\u2014or had once resembled\u2014the actress Hedy Lamarr. She is survived, Zambreno writes, by \u201ca row of Clinique lipsticks in silver cases, all shades of brownish rose, all eroded with her lips\u2019 long absence.\u201d Shortly before she dies from cancer of the lungs, her sanity begins to slip and she is institutionalized. She blames the family. \u201cI have been your slave!\u201d she screams \u201cin front of the mirrored closets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do we tend to forget that our mothers are women? It has taken Kate Zambreno thirteen years to do enough remembering, enough self-preservative forgetting, to flesh out her Book of Mutter<\/em>. The novel that results is sometimes less than kind, the way most mother-daughter bonds are sometimes less than kind. It also screams her devastation, raw and Barthes-like. \u201cThe beast,\u201d she writes. \u201cMy mother, my love.\u201d Like Crawford\u2019s monster, who fixated on the transitory and cinematic state of spotlessness, Zambreno\u2019s mother-beast maintains the cleanest lair. \u201cAll my childhood I remember my mother cleaning,\u201d she recalls. \u201cTo be a housewife, in the old mold, was to live by the rule of erasure. One day\u2019s operating around pretending that nothing occurred, no mark was made \u2026 What my mother feared the most as everything spiraled into chaos, was that she had lost control over the house, which she saw as beginning to fall into disorder, although to outside eyes it was immaculate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes my mouth opens up, and my mother\u2019s laugh jumps out, a parlor trick,\u201d Zambreno says. \u201cMy mother is in my memory this glamorous, remote, somewhat tragic woman, yet sometimes when I close my eyes I see flashes of her on her deathbed, mouth wide open like those statues of saints in ecstasy\u201d\u2014or, one presumes, like Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy<\/em>. The mother and the movie star converge in the image; so, too, the mother and the mouth. Do I remember reading, somewhere, about Andy Warhol spending two hundred thousand dollars on Crawford\u2019s lipstick tubes after she\u2019d died? The two of them were photographed together at her very last public appearance, looking perversely like mother and son. I do not know if the lipstick tubes were Clinique.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody ever said that life was fair,\u201d Faye Dunaway\u2019s Joan Crawford tells her daughter. \u201cI\u2019m bigger and faster and I\u2019m always going to beat you.\u201d Whether the screenwriter intended the double entendre on \u201cbeat you,\u201d what remains unsaid is Crawford\u2019s fear that the obverse is true\u2014that every mother ends up, sooner rather than later, being lapped by her daughter. Winning one race does not guarantee them all, which is why when Joan is seen to jog beside a moving car in order to keep in studio-ready shape, she is also whispering survive, survive, survive<\/em> to herself, an invocation. When the film was first released, it bore the tagline \u201cThe Illusion of Perfection.\u201d Later, it was changed to the far more anodyne \u201cMeet the Biggest Mother of Them All,\u201d which trades the lacerating truth of the original for a funny-facetious jab at Joan as a kind of sadistic ur<\/em>-mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother book,\u201d Zambreno dubs her Book of Mutter<\/em>\u2014and then she corrects herself: \u201cMy monster book.\u201d Mothers, as the saying goes, are people, too; people, fallible and fearful, sometimes act like beasts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Philippa Snow is a writer, living in London. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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