Some Things Never Change

When we first meet “Baby Jane” she is the perfect ideal of innocence and youth. She is a child performer complete with the bouncy blond curls and an eerily realistic look-alike doll sold as a souvenir at her shows. Lurking backstage is her rather bland older sister Blanche, gazing on enviously as Jane basks in the attention. But once the curtain falls, Jane constantly reminds her family that big tempers can come in small packages.
Jump ahead several years and it’s Blanche’s (Joan Crawford) turn in the spotlight while Jane (Bette Davis) struggles to get an audience for her second-rate movies. But the tide turns once again when an accident involving a car and a wrought iron gate leaves Blanche paralyzed from the waist down. Her life from then on is spent confined in a wheelchair in her bedroom under the thumb of her condescending alcoholic sister.
Pale in comparison to Davis’s boisterous performance, Crawford opts for a more subtle resolve in her character’s demeanor. Quietly, she plays the frightened victim as she desperately attempts to break open the shell of her confined world.
In contrast, Jane, whose claustrophobia strikes deeper than the confines of a bedroom, becomes delusional as she attempts to summon the happiness of her childhood. Her makeup appears to have been applied with a putty knife, and her tangled white hair is twisted into frizzy ringlets, a throwback to her earlier years. Her haggard body is nearly always swathed in girlish lacey dresses. She moves about the house like a sloth in a rage, but in moments of nostalgia, she lapses back into the lightly tripping step of her glory days. She only finds pleasure in tormenting her sister.
Blanche is maddeningly passive in the face of her sister’s cruelty. As Jane sardonically forces her own anguish and claustrophobia on Blanche, Blanche keeps a level head and never loses her soft manner of speech. While Jane’s cruelty and anger toward her sister grow, Blanche develops a weak surrender but her discreet tenacity remains unscathed. Why does she wish to remain alive in a world where she is at the mercy of her sister’s cruel hand?
As Blanche becomes weaker and weaker and Jane becomes more and more unbalanced, the film careens into a tension-breaking plot twist. It is not startling, nor does it have any real effect on the sisters. They are so far gone, emotional impact is met with neutrality.
Blanche may be portrayed as good hearted, yet frail prey, but who is the real sadist here? Jane violently takes out her angst on her sister, but what is it that wears away at Jane’s brain taking her to the border of insanity? Where does Blanche find her strength as her sister loses her marbles one by one? What kept Jane from becoming a celebrity into adulthood? What kept the social butterfly locked in a cage? These are two sisters who fight fire with fire until they both burn themselves out.