What Ever Happened To Baby Jane Analysis

Melodrama heavily relies on flat, overly emotional characters and a plot with almost too many coincidences. The film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane is an excellent example of melodrama. The main characters’, sisters Blanche and Jane Hudson, personalities are developed immediately and do not change throughout the movie. Baby Jane was a child star in the 1910s whose career as an actress faded away in her early adulthood. Now an older woman, Jane has an unhealthy obsession with her childhood fame and cannot seem to let it go, which is perfectly reflected in her caked on makeup, and results in some sort of mental disorder. Blanche was jealous of Baby Jane as a child, but her career as an actress skyrocketed in her early adulthood as Jane’s disappeared. Though she does not obsess over her fame nearly as much as Jane, Blanche become slightly narcissistic when an old film of hers comes on the television and watches it intently, positively criticizing the director’s choices when the film was made. Due to an accident, she is now paralyzed from the waist down and heavily relies on Jane to take care of her. After the flashback, the audience takes notice of how Jane treats Blanche. It is as if Jane
The characters have little to no development and there are far too many coincidences to make this film realistic, so it becomes entertainment. The number of coincidences, all of which happen to be in Jane’s favor, aggravates the audience and intrigues them to watch more intently at the same time because they want to see what will happen to Blanche and Jane. Jane’s freakish behavior and grotesque image causes curiosity to peak and wonder “what ever happened to Baby Jane” to make her so mentally unstable. The answer to that question is simple: Jane is so obsessed with her childhood fame that it consumed all her thoughts, needs, and desires. Consequently, Baby Jane Hudson is in desperate need of psychiatric