"How The Gays Stole Cinema" Transcript

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I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. Did you know that there were queer characters, and not just villains, in pre Hays Code Hollywood? (Meaning the long, long ago Hollywood, for the uninitiated.)

However, there was only a brief window of time between the end of the silent film era in 1929 and the institution of the morally restrictive Hays Code in 1934. For them to exist in any real form.

But as you'll know, if you've watched... any of my other videos, filmmakers manage to sneak in queerness despite the best efforts of the morally boring conservatives of the time. They just had to be sneaky about it.

They couldn't exactly show two men kissing, but they inserted their queer sensibilities into these productions. Sensibility that became lovingly known as Camp.

The gays had always been drawn to the film industry and the divas who fed it. Though you can't make a video talking about Mommie Dearest without highlighting some of her more... unflattering qualities, Joan Crawford is indicative of this.

As one of the only actresses to survive the transition from silent films to what were referred to as "the talkies" (Get it? because moving pictures or movies and then... they added sound, so they were talking pictures...? talkies?), Joan Crawford probably became the archetype of the Hollywood movie star. And the gays loved her for it.

Because she exemplified this strong femininity. She drew a massive fandom of gay men, which, to her credit, in an era when admitting gay people could even exist, would tank your career and even get you arrested, Joan openly supported the queer people who supported her.

Granted, when it comes to gays flocking to women who act as icons, some things never change. Joan, yes. Her rival, Bette Davis. Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, and, well... all the other old school Hollywood actresses you've actually heard of. Ask Cher. The gays can keep people around.

I suppose in this era of mid-century queer discrimination, civic mistrust and institutional persecution, we needed a way to propagate our culture. Unlike other communities, queer ones are non hereditary. We are not usually born into them. Because even if gay people did manage to raise a child, there was no guarantee that the child would be queer itself.

So film was an easy way to propagate the values of our community to future generations. Legends within the community often suffered a tragically short lifespan even before the AIDS epidemic.

Having Joan Crawford epitomized poise and independence on the silver screen, in spite of not being a straight white man, offered a method of cultural continuity for us. Probably in a similar way that ancient cultures used figures of myth to propagate a cultural identity to new generations of illiterate villagers.

But how did gay people of the 20th century choose the myths that they did? There were no shortage of films out there. Of those films. Why did we gravitate towards such a select few? What was the criteria for holding these up as relics to pass down to baby queers?

With lesbians there was a bit of a different process: Writers (who were usually men) were so clueless about writing women that they often accidentally wrote two friends being so close that it crossed into Sapphic territory, for which, again, enter Joan Crawford.

But if that logic applied to straight men... why are any number of Westerns not held up by the gays? Because these cowboys often got very close and vulnerable with each other. Instead, we gravitated toward a very specific iteration of femininity in various specific films.

[James is now in black and white in some sort of library setup.]

All About Eve is a perfect place to start. Like I said, not the first queer icon movie, but one of the first you may hear referenced. A drag queen may refer to someone as an "Eve Harrington", and you may not know what that means. But what they're doing is accusing someone of putting on a pleasant face while being a backstabbing, social climbing upstart who's using more established figures to launch their own reputation. (Kind of like a gold digger. But instead of money, they seek fame and recognition.)

And she chooses to latch on to Margo Channing, played by the Betty Davis. Margot is the queen of the New York theater scene, and even in her forties is still the highest regarded stage actress in the city. Eve Harrington is a poor girl who attends every performance she can of Margo's current show. Karen Richards, Margo's best friend, and wife of the show's playwright, spies Eve on one of these nights and invites her to meet Margot in her dressing room.

Eve is introduced as an avid fan and captivates Margot with stories of her past of love, heartbreak, sorrow, and pure, unadulterated love for the theater. Margot brings Eve on as a kind of informal personal assistant, something Eve seems all too eager to do, waiting hand and foot on Margo's whims.

And it's not hard for Eve to enchant almost everyone in Margo's inner circle. Karen, her husband Lloyd, and Margot's engaged-to-be-engaged boyfriend and director Bill Samson. As far as Broadway goes, this friend group is royalty. What a coincidence that the young and sweet and entirely unassuming Eve Harrington managed to elbow her way in.

The only one who thinks that the numbers aren't adding up is Margo's maid, Bertie Coonan, who's there to be a good emotional support poor and call Eve for being a fake bitch.

And soon Margot descends into a fit of assumed paranoia regarding the young Eve. She nearly breaks up with Bill. She alienates Lloyd, who specifically writes plays for her, and threatens her entire career. She's become convinced that Eve is trying to take her stardom away from her. And though it sounds paranoid, she's entirely correct.

And Eve's true motivations eventually become clear. When Eve does an interview, she says some particularly shady things directed at Margot. And so while Eve is playing her Game of Thrones, Karen begins to mend some of the tension between Margot and herself. Margot also finally accepts Bill's proposal. And the grown ups begin to get their shit together.

Eve does keep her talons gripped in Karen's husband, Lloyd, though, who's one of the most highly regarded playwrights in New York City. She's after a starring role that was written for Margot, which she feels will be her ticket to stardom. All she needs to do is find a way to push Margot out of the role.

So as one does, Eve blackmails Karen to get her husband to steal the part away from Margot and give it to her. And when the film ends, Eve Harrington, the darling pariah... celebrates her Tony win for the part she stole from Margot.

Now, exhausted in her condominium, she encounters a mild mannered young lady who absolutely idolizes her, who offers to wait on Eve hand and foot. And Eve, too caught up to notice that history is repeating itself right in front of her eyes, accepts her offer.

All About Eve is considered one of the greatest films ever made. It bags six Academy Awards out of a total of fourteen nominations, a record it still holds to this day, including Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, and Screenplay. It's also the only film in history to get four women nominated for acting roles, including one of Davis's most infamous Oscar snubs.

For additional trivia, this is also one of Marilyn Monroe's first films. A very small role, granted, but she makes an impact.

While there are comedic elements to the film (especially Margot's biting shade), this is a very highly regarded, dramatic film. And yet we can see elements of this plot being played out in modern farces that are so over the top that they can be considered beyond camp.

Hell, you might see a plotline like this showing up on a season of Real Housewives. But that isn't to say that this model of story doesn't turn heads, in a good way, even to this day: 2010's Black Swan also, more or less, followed the story of a young performer latching onto the success of an established star to catapult her own career.

So it's not like the plot itself is tainted. But it does take a very steady hand to keep the format from descending into a catfight. And All About Eve is definitely not the only diva fight story out there. Especially if you want to swap an actress for goddess, there are any number of Greek plays and myths about goddesses destroying lives over petty disagreements. And are actresses not modern day goddesses worshiped at the altar of the tabloid rack?

The gay appeal of All About Eve is likely a combination of a few things. Primarily the script, written by Joseph Mankiewicz, who wrote enough shade into the film to put Oscar Wilde to shame. Come to think of it, the film does share a number of very Wilden elements. On top of characters who spar with wit, there's a discourse on age and aging that leans toward an almost vilification of youth and those who venerate youth.

But the film would be nothing without George Saunders, and Baxter, and of course, Betty Davis, to carry the film's demand for sharp minds. Davis herself had a very substantial gay following. A staunch ally in her private life, and at times even an outspoken one, referring to gays as her friends when confronting President Ronald Reagan about his administration's inaction during the AIDS crisis.

Davis herself was in no small part responsible for helping screen acting depart from its origins of theatrical acting. Whereas in the theater, an actor would project their acting to the back of the room, actions were grand and bold, and lines were delivered clearly and methodically.

But Davis was more natural. And for this reason, whenever Davis was in a film, it was like she was acting in an entirely different movie from everyone else. She was one of the first actors to really dive into presenting a character with the kind of "naturalism" you couldn't really project on stage.

Which nothing exemplifies this more than acting opposite Joan Crawford in 1962's' Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? probably one of the most foundational films... of modern gay culture.

Parodies of this have been done over and over again, to the point where you hear the name and you hear the premise...? And you likely think it's this hagsploitation comedic camp romp, that may compare to a telenovela.

Well, you'd be partially right, because it did kick off the Hagsploitation trend that carried Crawford through her late career in Hollywood. Hagsploitation was a particular subset of horror that was built on Hollywood's disdain for older women. Where women of a certain age are portrayed as horrifying monsters simply because of their birthday. But this genre in subversive fashion accidentally gave these women some of the best roles of their later careers.

But as the progenitor of her Hagsploitation, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane is so much more than the genre it created. It tells the story of Baby Jane Hudson, played again by Betty Davis, and Blanche Hudson, played by the infamous Joan Crawford. (More on her later.) Formally famous sisters living in their twilight years.

The film has two sequences which we can see as prologues. In the first, we see Baby Jane at the center of a stage performing a song and dance show for a riveted crowd. Her father, her manager and songwriter, prefers to redirect attention from Jane to himself, as indicated later on in the film, where we see that all of the songs he wrote for Jane were about her daddy. Off stage, Blanche longs for her moment in the spotlight.

In the second prologue, the women are both making their way through Hollywood. A producer remarks that Jane Hudson can't act to save her life, but they're stuck casting her.

See, Blanche is their golden starlet, a talented actress who can sell tickets like none other. And she's got it in her contract that for every film she does, the studio must also cast Jane in another.

We then see a nighttime scene, where presumably one of the Hudson girls tries to murder the other by crushing her between a car and the driveway gate. The audience is led to believe that it was a resentful Jane who drove into Blanche and left her paraplegic and bed-ridden for the rest of her life.

The film itself follows the progression of these sisters in their later life. Blanche's old films have gone on to television, and Jane is none too pleased with her particular lot in life, taking care of her sister, hand and foot, every time Blanche hits a bloodcurdling buzzer.

The plot revolves around Jane learning that Blanche is trying to sell their house, with no clear indication of what Jane will do when presumably left homeless. As a severely alcoholic six year old, she plans to take up her old act again and tour with her old songs for income of her own, and independence from Blanche. It goes... about as well as you would assume.

As Blanche gets closer and closer to selling the house, Jane begins to spiral deeper... depicted almost as a slasher serial killer tormenting a wheelchair-bound sister who can do nothing to escape her situation. Jane... is terrifying.

About halfway through the film, Jane's portrayal begins to shift. Jane continuously expects people to know who she is and is a little put off when people don't recognize her.

At first, this feeds into her portrayal as a monster, this arrogant, fame-obsessed petty woman who lauds her control over Blanche as the only thing that makes her feel powerful. We see Jane, and we think that she's out of her mind. That she's entirely convinced that it's possible to relive her girlhood.

But as the film goes on... we get the feeling that she is legitimately out of her mind. And what we saw as arrogance is now depicted as a delusional mental state. She does not want to merely rekindle her youth. She seems entirely unaware that it even ended.

Having spent the entire film with her ghoulish white face and heart shaped beauty mark, we see it later on... smudged. We, the audience, finally see that this was not a directorial decision, but a component of Jane's character. Every morning she has been putting on this white face of makeup and drawing on a heart onto her cheek because she is locked in this state of existence and does not seem able to escape. This is, after all, the same makeup she would have worn under the bright lights of a stage.

In fact, she begins to regress, acting younger and younger. But there's one problem that just won't let her be young.

Just like Jane, there's a flip for Blanche, too. Early on, we see Jane's accusations that Blanche is out to stop Jane from living her life, and we agree with Blanche's denial of that because... Jane seems to be the villain. And Blanche, by contrast, is sweet and patient with everyone she interacts with.

But more and more, we see Blanche extending what control she has over Jane. The house, after all, is in her name. She controls the money. She controls Jane's drinking. And in a very nonchalant way, does like to remind Jane of that. And Blanche does, in her own way, begin to admit that maybe Jane's feelings of isolation at Blanche's insistence, aren't... completely unfounded.

What seems like a woman afraid for her life and pleading with her captor can alternately be seen as a woman who's pulling out all the stops to placate someone she's been manipulating for years.

See, as Jane descends further and further into a childlike delusion, she begins to lose sight of the consequences of her actions. As she torments Blanche, Blanche begins to remind Jane of her dependance and her attempts to escape become bolder. Jane responds in kind, detaining her, ripping the buzzer from the wall, firing Blanche's maid, tying Blanche to her bed for days on end with no food, and then murdering the kind maid when she finds Blanche tied up.

When Jane is found out by the pianist she hired for her planned upcoming career resurgence, Jane is thrown into a full meltdown. For reasons unknown, she goes to Blanche and desperately pulls her into the car to go to the beach. Jane had reminisced about the beach, that she fondly remembers rehearsing there, where people would circle around to watch her dancing.

Jane has a wonderful day, running around barefoot, playing catch with... other children, and joyfully getting ice cream for her and her sister while forgetting to pay. All the while, dehydrated, malnourished, and immobile Blanche cooks in the sun.

Blanche does not have much time left and urges Jane to hear a final confession. Jane childishly holds her hands to her ears, refusing to hear what Blanche has to say. What she knows is true. And what she had to reject for the last 30 years to survive.

That it was Blanche behind the wheel of the car that night. And that before the car hit Jane, she drunkenly stumbled out of the way. The accident left Blanche crippled and she crawled out from behind the wheel to make it seem like it was Jane who had tried to kill her.

And then we see the film in a different light. This was not about a jealous sister who resented the other's fame and success to the point of committing torture. This was about a woman who had been gaslit so severely that her entire psyche had collapsed. Jane was robbed of her childhood by her father and robbed of her womanhood by her sister, all the while, everyone told her that she was the monster behind everything. And so she turned herself into that monster.

Retroactively, we learn that Jane's feelings and paranoias were valid all along and that Blanche never really quit acting after all. Acting the part of the victim. Blanche had spent 30 years exploiting a fabricated guilt complex to make a loyal servant out of Jane. And as soon as she had a more pliable, willing servant, she was all too ready to completely discard her sister.

Jane, though a monster nevertheless, was a monster that Blanche had created, not entirely unlike us queer folk who are gaslit into believing we're the broken ones in a society too broken to accept us. Whose parents abandoned us, leaving us feeling unloved and unknown.

But on the California beach where Jane sits beside Blanche and remarks to her abuser:

And then the audience is left with this visceral discomfort for the next few hours.

Now, like with All About Eve, it's clear to see why it would appeal to femme-heavy queer circles. It's got all the kind of meaty, feminine things the drag queens love: outrageous personalities, women using duplicity as a weapon, old icons clinging on to past glory, pathos in excess -- which isn't a half bad definition of camp, actually. Pathos in excess.

Finding gravitas in the mundane, making an aristocracy out of the destitute, isolating this house from the rest of the world. All the politics of culture, art, and society matter less than the ability to navigate the politics of this enclosure. Because the fact of the matter is that both of these women are suffering due to their father.

Despite having a relatively small role in the film itself, he left both girls with emotional scars that would heavily influence their downfall. Because while he did manage Jane's career in her youth, he also facilitated Blanche's career in Hollywood. And while he bought the house the girls live in, there is some question as to whether he bought it with the money he made off of Jane... or off of Blanche. Make no mistake, he did make the money off of his girls.

And something that is true to queer circles: it is so tempting to climb to the top of the heap at the bottom of the barrel, even if it means stepping on other people below you to do it.

But aside from plot and themes, the film's primary draw was being able to finally watch Joan Crawford and Bette Davis act against each other. Fans flocked to it like it was the boxing match of the century. The drama around this film hovered like a miasma. When in reality, the rivalry between Crawford and Davis was played up even at the time. Before Baby Jane, their "feud" amounted to basically fighting for the same roles for the past ten years. That was it.

And when it comes to the making of drama, yes, there was a lot. In fact, as per the camp definition of making much ado about nothing, the behind the scenes antics rivaled what you'd watch in a movie. Ranging from all manner of petty things the women did to piss each other off. The studio, seeing the dailies come in, seemed to encourage this animosity among their actresses. Producers were worried that if Crawford and Davis buried the hatchet during filming, that their character's loathing of each other wouldn't be as palpable.

So, like in the film, two women were pitted against each other by men so that men could profit off of them.

But to me, the most interesting thing about the making of the film is that, yes, Joan Crawford really did pitch this idea to Warner Brothers and essentially single handedly pulled this project together. Maybe foolishly, she didn't go after a producer credit.

And honestly, if this was the kind of quality she could assemble, she could have been a trailblazer for women on the production end of Hollywood. Instead, Crawford was obsessed with being a movie star. Specifically, she wanted another Oscar, or at least a nomination. And she really thought that she could act the straight character opposite the woman losing her mind and get an Oscar nomination for being in a wheelchair for half the movie. She really thought that that was going to be enough.

And no disrespect: she did have an Oscar by then. However, as a typified movie star, Joan Crawford really only ever played Joan Crawford in whatever movie she was in. That's what movie stars are for. They're cast, because their personal brand will fit in a given movie.

And that's not to say that movie stars aren't as good or valuable as character actors. Would you rather be Julia Roberts or Tilda Swinton? It's not a contest. It's just a different game.

That said, Davis did have a habit of elevating actors she was in the same room as. In instances like All About Eve, you can see the cast beginning to adopt more of Davis's signature style as the film goes on and become much more natural.

Perhaps to the benefit of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Joan Crawford wasn't a good enough actress to act through her natural narcissism. Crawford making sure that she was picture perfect for each shot, that the camera caught all her good angles. Her emphasis on beauty in spite of being a shut in who hadn't seen the sun for 20 years... All of that added an extra layer of fraudulence to the character. Joan's natural demeanor bled through and added to Blanche's fraudulent duplicity.

This is the value of a movie star. Without intending to, and perhaps without realizing it, Joan elevated an otherwise benign role. And it's because of all these nuances and subtleties that Hagsploitation became such a hit genre in the sixties. There was a clamor to cash in on the trope. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, with a budget of just under $1 million, grossed $10 million at the box office, which even by today's standards would be considered an indie success. But in the 1960s, this was a cash cow.

However, as a progenitor, it employed a massive amount of talent in front of and behind the camera. Filmmakers who wanted to innovate to bring out the thematic elements of the story. It's often the curse of repetition that people will say, "I want to do that thing" without realizing what it was that made "that thing" so impactful.

There's a reason Halloween spearheaded the slasher movie and was never superseded by the man with the knife copycats. Hagsploitation was constructed around old women being shady and even crazy. Though Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was a character study on the cognitive dissonance of long term gaslighting, the complex relationships of sisters, and constructing a narrative where truth and illusion are difficult to discern.

It all takes a very steady hand to pull that off without dipping into farce. Because you can get all the cheap thrills you need just by having women being naughty. There does need to be that element of pathos to really give something legs though, because it is in the pathos that we, the audience, can see ourselves reflected in. While there are few of us who are Blanche and/or Jane Hudsons, We can see the elements of their relationship and apply it to our own lives. And that's what happened to Baby Jane.

Of course, it seems to be a pattern that we're inherently drawn to films which depict established icons serving up something new. Old dogs learning new tricks only adds to their legend.

And from here, we turn from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford... and look toward another gay icon: Elizabeth Taylor.

...I'm sure you've heard of her.

The same year that Whatever Happened to Baby Jane premiered, the World of Theater was shookith by the premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which went on to win Tonys for best play and in the acting categories. It was also selected to win a Pulitzer Prize, though the committee struck down that decision as the play had "too much profanity".

The same year Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was first staged, the film Cleopatra also hit theaters, another entry in Elizabeth Taylor's oeuvre. Though, unfortunately, Cleopatra was a disaster. We remember it now as this kind of iconic symbol of Hollywood opulence. Taylor's personal wardrobe budget was nearly $200,000 in 1960. That's about $2 million today. Taylor herself was offered the part after a very lengthy casting process and only reluctantly agreed to do it. She highballed the studio for a contract she thought Fox would never go for, and broke a record for being the first actress to be paid $1 million for a single Hollywood movie.

There's conflicting accounts, but she may have been the first actor period to get $1,000,000 salary for a movie. Alternately, it may have been Marlon Brando for Mutiny on the Bounty. But, you know, he sucked a dick or two, so he's part of the club.

The film took nearly ten years to finish and was initially pitched as a modest $2 million historical fiction. However, production was launched during the peak of Hollywood spectacle. So the studio's take on it was that this was a fabulous time to go big or go home. That $2 million quickly got inflated to $31 million.

Anyway, artistic sensibilities shifted in the 1960s. Audiences turned away from raw spectacle and instead preferred more personal stories like The Graduate, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Cleopatra's budget was so inflated and audiences were so disinterested in spectacle that it nearly tanked 20th Century Fox. They were only saved by the Rocky Horror Picture Show. More Camp! Look it up! It's true!

And getting to the point, the movie was at the time said to be the end of Elizabeth Taylor's career. Fast forward to a few short years later when a screen adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was announced. And Taylor was due to play the lead. Critics immediately scoffed. They felt that Taylor's movie star brand clashed with the content of the play and that Taylor herself was too young to convincingly play a middle aged woman.

But no, Taylor really did get on set and eat that chicken wing on camera. She relentlessly committed to Martha. It was uncanny.

It's worth noting that actors, even in films today, do not normally eat on camera. There's usually a cut before or after giving an actor a chance to spit out what's in their mouth or pretend to chew while holding a sandwich with a bite taken out of it. A problem, you know, arises if you need to do ten takes of an actor eating pizza.

The story follows George and Martha. Which, you may hear a gay describe a given couple as "a regular George and Martha". (Not a flattering remark.) George is an associate professor, and despite his clear intellect and how long he's taught at the university (and the fact that Martha is the daughter of the university president), he is locked in this lowly position for reasons [echoing, dramatic zoom into James] not yet know.

Upon returning home from a faculty function late at night, Martha tells George, tired and half drunk, that she's invited a young couple over to have a drink. George reluctantly agrees. Even before the couple arrives, George and Martha do nothing but needle each other to the point of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse. It's not particularly clear who is abusing who... though it does seem that Martha is the instigator.

When the couple arrives, Nick, a young professor of biology and his wife, Honey. George and Martha don't stop needling each other, but they begin to be more subtle about it. They verbally express their enjoyment of playing games. But it's not clear what those games are. As George and Martha load up the guests with drinks, their polite masks begin to crack, with a full argument breaking out when Martha mentions their sixteen-year-old son to Honey.

[Echoing, more dramatic zoom into James] Again, for reasons unknown.

Nick admits to George that he intends to sleep his way up the university ladder, saying that he wouldn't mind starting with Martha. To George's face. Which George just kinda takes in stride. (Which somehow makes this scene even more homoerotic than it already was.)

As the group gets drunker and looser, Nick gets flirtier with everybody but his wife. As part of their game, Martha reveals that the reason George can't get a promotion is because he admitted to the university president that he spent years in a mental institution for accidentally killing his parents. And that he would have been blacklisted from all of academia if it wasn't for Martha's insistence; for which George attacks her.

After a fatalistic argument with George, Martha takes Nick and they have wild, drunken sex (for which it's implied that Nick actually had a tough time keeping it up). Once again, leading to some speculation about who Nick had actually intended to sleep with to climb the ladder.

And as a coup de gras in the game, George... kills his and Martha's own child, to which the audience and the houseguests are confused. See, what happened is that the child never existed. George and Martha could not conceive for unclear reasons, and George permitted Martha to make a fantasy child. However, due to George's shaky reputation, a rule of this game was that nobody could ever know about this imaginary child. A rule Martha broke when, in her drunken enthusiasm she told Honey about him. Thereby giving George permission (as per the rules of the game) to kill him in a car accident.

Straight people! And people think Wanda has a weird situation with their kids...

The young couple heads home, now realizing what a tangled mess they've gotten themselves into by choosing an exciting career in academia, a field where people have too much intellectual energy without enough to actually do. And George and Martha resolved to stay together because they don't have anything else but each other.

But, like All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, there is more to this than Betty Davis, Joan Crawford, and Elizabeth Taylor dragging their gay fans into movie seats to watch this film at gunpoint about damaged heterosexuals. On top of the fact that this is 2 hours of shade and a fabulous older woman getting a studly young man in the sack, there's some back brained gay appeal here.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf primarily takes on a critique of social values, namely the performativity of social expectations. Both George and Martha are so disillusioned with their lives that they prefer to develop actual illusions to exist in. To the extent where they themselves are unaware of where the lines are drawn.

There's also a whole lot to say about who may hold the real power in this relationship. To the outside, it's a wonder why they even chose to be together! Nick certainly doesn't seem to understand it at first, and questions why Martha even chooses to keep protecting George's career. With that bargaining chip, it would seem she carries the ultimatum.

To him, she clearly hates George, and would do fine with another man. But that's where he's wrong.

Martha may serve as a protection for George's career, but George, as someone who understands the need to escape a traumatic reality, may be the only person who would allow Martha's illusions to flourish. They have this... tumultuous codependency that they both hate, and yet that they both need to function.

Power dynamics for them are like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos with infinite marbles. They're both in it to win it, even if winning's impossible. Even if the trophy is a few seconds of emotional superiority, it's worth getting dragged through the mud.

And so because their lives are too mundane for their taste. They develop this mutually accepted environment of games. What their game seemed to be, as I said, are a temporary emotional victory, but also something deeper.

Martha is a powerful woman, and given the social climate of the 1960s, she may be betting correctly when she says she won't be able to find another relationship where she can have the kind of control that she does. But she also doesn't want some sympathetic just bend over for her. She wants an equal footing of power in a romantic dynamic. And we do see her when she is affectionate with George, at least in Taylor's performance.

But Taylor's take on Martha is that this is a woman who easily becomes bored with a clearly defined power dynamic. She would rather have her toxic battle with George than take the risk of looking for something else that would be more... healthy.

The gay appeal here is that Whatever Happened to Virginia Woolf? [confused] --Who's afraid of Baby Jane? [more confused] --There's Something About Eve, Baby-- Um--?

Gays are drawn to the eternal struggle of George and Martha because it... typifies a lot of the straight experiences that we've seen. It raises the question without answering it... Are the straight okay?

Because we see them in these relationships, these marriages, these arrangements, we see them fight, and scuffle, and rush into things, and we see them go through all because... [elongated shrug] I mean, it's not really clear. If you hate doing something... Why do you do it?

We see this weird muscle memory that straight people have around milestones. What your life should look like by a certain age, what age you have to be to get married, to buy your first house, to have kids. There's no clear rulebook that says this. And yet to this day, there are psychological expectations which, depending upon region, have specific dates.

And the straight all know them. It's like Gays knowing the lyrics to Lady Gaga's "Scheiße". Nobody asked them. Nobody said they had to know these things. And yet somehow, they all do.

Yet we tell ourselves... that we are free. George and Martha represent what we fear. The heterosexual urge to twist your own arm to be able to fit a nuclear family ideal. To make concessions of yourself and your own identity for the sake of fitting this appearance... And meanwhile, telling everyone around you that this is just how it's meant to be.

Inventing toxic games to torment your spouse, constantly pushing boundaries, redefining what the boundaries are, and making up fake rules is red herrings. All to fill that intellectual need to feel powerful.

And you take it out on your spouse because... what are they going to do? Break the codependency? Completely destroy the both of you?

Marriage offers no recourse. Your bank accounts are together. You're afraid of changing because you built your life around this other person. You're stuck. That's where you live. That's where you exist. There's way too much emotional baggage wrapped up in the other to just leave. So, why not flex the power you can and see what broken boundary's just too far? What is divorce, if not the "safe word" for suburban families?

When it comes to George and Martha, there's no way to "win" the game. But if playing the game is pushing the other one to their limit, and either forcing them to redefine their limit or give up, then giving up is losing.

And like the previous films discussed, it's very clear to see how a story like this could translate into an almost slapstick farce. As I said about steady hands^[??], there was an incredible amount of talent in this production, and there is a reason why... out of the library of gay camp, which is held up on a pedestal, these older entries approach their subject matter with much more seriousness than you would get out of a John Waters movie.

Though this list is not comprehensive, these belong to a group of progenitors which present these themes as realities. When these movies do well and resonate with audiences, there are going to be a horde of people who want to recreate these themes and emotions. And many of these imitation films were forgotten. Many simply couldn't go as hard. They were unremarkable or interchangeable and thus forgettable.

But some took the nuance and decided that if they couldn't match Elizabeth Taylor, then they would exceed her. And thus... the gays redefined what has now become known as "camp". And camp in turn redefined us.

Now we're getting into it.

Susan Sontag, in her essay "Notes on Camp", often cited as the quintessential document on camp culture remarks, an association between gaze and camp. And as she was writing in the 1960s, she was highlighting a very retroactive depiction from her upbringing. Baby Jane had only just come out when this

A fandom that upon the movie's release would hang Christina Crawford in effigy. Mommie Dearest legitimized a whole group of audiences and creators who were going to do what Dunaway did, but do it on purpose. With or without the ghost of Joan Crawford.