Baby Jane – TOpoet

Blanche: You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair.

Jane: But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!

The wheelchair isn’t a mobility device in films it’s a plot device. Until recently it was the foreshadowing of the person in it to be pushed over a cliff, down a flight of stairs. Or the person was in it as the result of someone else’s careless actions but they seek to forgive not punish that person.

Thanks to the recent fictionalizing re-hash of the Bette David vs Joan Crawford ‘relationship’ in Feud one of the most notorious uses of the wheelchair has been brought back into the public eye. I didn’t need that refresher though. I recall the movie vividly & in particular the scene I quote above. I’ve also seen that scene re-enacted by drag queens – Jane & Blanch were at one time were in every drag make-up kit.

In viewing the Baby Jane movie recently, & thanks to Andrew Gurza having increased my awareness, I paid more attention to how Blanche’s disability was portrayed. She has the right mechanisms for getting herself in and out of her bed, into her chair & can hold herself in standing position at the window. Even in the novel she is relatively ‘spry.’ I never quite understood why her room was on the 2nd floor of a house with no elevator except as a plot point to keep her helpless. Her emotion response isn’t self-indulgent pathos but the plot does turn on her helplessness & her determined struggle to survive. Her disability drives the plot.

I recently watched an early 40’s sudser “A Life Of Her Own” that featured Lana Turner & Ray Milland. Lana gets involved with married Ray whose wife, Margaret Philips, is unable to gratify him after an accident that leaves her wheelchair bound. The wife is accepting & is willing to grant him a divorce. Lana meets the wife who turns out to be gentle, loving & her condition is the result of Ray’s drunk driving but the wife forgives him & wants to set him free of the terrible burden of looking after her. Lana says bye to both of them. If the wife had been a bitter vengeful shrew would Lana have said ‘bitch, he’s mine now.’ Disability is a plot device that underlines how heinous unmarried women are in their desperate need to land a man, any man, to complete themselves as humans.