If you watched Disaffected this week, you know I talked about this seminal line in the 1945 film noir Mildred Pierce.
“Veda, I think I’m really seeing you for the first time in my life, and you’re cheap and horrible.”
Here is the scene, one of the emotional high points of the film.
Readers will know that I have a longstanding obsession with Joan Crawford (and with depictions of her). She has been a dark muse to me, long before I understood why. Why? Because she’s a stand-in for my mother that I could play with psychologically without confronting the reality of my mother directly. My mother was not rich or famous or beautiful, but she was an example of the Crawford Cluster B archetype.
As it is for many gay men (there are reasons why so many of us do celebrity worship of dark, Cluster B women), I had also wanted to become the dark and powerful “wicked queen.” Psychologically dancing with an image of your tormentor is characterized by ambivalence. What you fear and hate is also sometimes what you want to become. This functions as a rationalization for why your tormenter became what she did, but it also rationalizes your desire to become the kind of person who scarred you and left you bereft. (To state the obvious: it’s a maladaptive psychological defense against extreme pain.)
Mildred Pierce, I suspect, was such a rationalization and such a dance for Joan Crawford, the real woman. Born Lucille LeSeur in San Antonio, Crawford was neglected and abused by her mother, a woman who would be described in those days as a slattern. She took in washing and made her money out of their tenement apartments. Crawford’s stepfather—one of many in her mother’s stable of men—probably sexually abused the girl at age 11 or 12.
Lucille LeSeur built a woman called “Joan Crawford” to defend herself against becoming her mother. Like the daughter Veda in Mildred Pierce, Crawford ran from the smell of grease and laundry soap and poverty and shame.
We now know, of course, that Joan Crawford became her mother, only with beauty and fame and money.
Mildred Pierce was how she needed to see herself. Filmed just a few years after Crawford adopted (bought) her daughter Christina, Crawford saw herself as the all-generous and all-suffering martyred mother.
If you haven’t seen Mildred Pierce, you are missing one of the finest examples of film noir, and of the women’s picture. It’s top quality. The cast is perfect, the cinematography is gorgeously hard and sharp. Crawford’s performance won her a deserved Oscar. She was not the natural talent that Bette Davis was, nor was she as versatile, but when she was good, she was grand.
Let me sketch the plot for you.
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