Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
1962 · Robert Aldrich · What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch which sister stands above, which below, on the stairs. (staging)
Aldrich stages Blanche upstairs and Jane below throughout, turning the staircase into a fixed axis of threat and failed escape.
Payoff: The house's vertical geometry makes captivity visible, not just implied.
Notice how flat, frontal light exposes Jane's cracked makeup. (light)
Cinematographer Ernest Haller, who once glamorized Davis at Warners, now lights her pitilessly while Blanche keeps softer, more forgiving light.
Payoff: The camera itself performs the fall from glamour the story is about.
Listen for Jane's voice sliding from baby-talk into screaming. (sound)
Davis moves between a cooing child's register and sudden rage, making Jane's regression something you hear before you understand it.
Payoff: The voice carries the character's arrested age more than any line of dialogue.
Listen for 'I've Written a Letter to Daddy' returning. (sound)
The vaudeville song opens the film as nostalgia, then recurs when Jane rehearses it, grotesque, before a mirror.
Payoff: The gap between the song's sweetness and its later delivery measures how far Jane has curdled.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the ending reassigns blame for the old accident. (structure)
The late reveal about the car crash flips who is guilty and who deserves sympathy, recoding every earlier scene.
Payoff: The whole preceding drama is retroactively rewritten by one late fact. In the reading: falsifying-narration / powers-of-the-false. Deleuze's falsifying-narration names this: two accounts of one past both stand, truth left undecided.
Watch Jane's face in the mirror during her comeback rehearsal. (performance)
Davis, in ruined makeup, sings her childhood number to her own reflection until the coo breaks into something else entirely.
Payoff: The scene fuses the aging woman and the dead child star in one image. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze's crystal-image names a shot where present and reflected past fuse until neither is separable.
Notice what's under the lid when Jane brings Blanche's tray. (setting)
The covered serving tray recurs across the film, each reveal landing as a small, escalating cruelty.
Payoff: These objects carry the story's violence more directly than any confrontation does. In the reading: fetish (part-object). Deleuze calls such a charged object a fetish, a part-thing loaded with compulsive force.
Carry this in: Watch the mirror scene closely; the film is a decaying image confronting its own reflection.