Mixed Emotions

What happens when Hollywood is confronted with a female figure who is no longer young but is still beautiful, who has children but is not a real mother, who works but in a profession which is not considered real work? The anxiety and reproach that there is something unaccountable about feminine qualities, that femininity in itself is so often (culturally constructed and produced as) fake, a show, mere illusion culminates in the figure of the star. This may explain the concern of Hollywood with these figures. It becomes especially precarious if the star is a mother yet not a real mother. In the 1981 Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) is just such a figure. Her character represents and displays both femininity and motherliness in a way that reveals these aspects of womanhood to be precarious constructions rather than natural givens. As in many other films which feature women who do not easily fit into established Hollywood role norms-for example, by being no longer young or beautiful and therefore deemed unworthy of representation on film-Mommie Dearest has a problem with this figure which is intensified by the conflation of motherhood with stardom, both of which to differing degrees evoke notions of authority and illusion. The illusive character of stardom is in Mommie Dearest's case used to generally undermine Mother's authority. To this end the falls back onto conventions of the woman's film and employs a genre mix of melodrama and horror: it picks up the leitmotivs of the female melodrama, in which the protagonist becomes an icon of suffering; in other elements, especially in its visual style, however, the rather reminds one of a horror film. The star again is webbed into a tight net of genre conventions which disallow any expression of autonomy and discourage any notion of Mother as an authority. The real authority here becomes the conventions of genre

Aesthetics · Art · Humanities · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media

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