Motherhood as Psycho-Intertext in "Mildred Pierce"

The portrayal of motherhood in Mildred Pierce proves complex, and therefore lends itself to a variety of generic themes and influences. As a mélange of film noir, family drama, and horror, the film’s intricate stylistic influences aesthetically reinforce the complicated psychologies behind Mildred’s status as a mother. It is through this lens that Mildred Pierce takes on horror convention—and transmutes it through other intertextual approaches to the notion of motherhood. Most importantly, the psychology of motherhood herein explored lay the foundations for an intertextual social universe in which indecorous economies of bodily exchange cultivate the growth of monsters.

The film opens with some of the hallmarks of a hard-boiled detective story and film noir. Monte’s murder and Mildred’s subsequent suicide attempt immediately plunge the narrative into mysterious territory. The early dismantling of the idyllic middle-class lifestyle to which the Pierces are accustomed immediately deflates the sense that Mildred’s journey will follow a monomythic narrative convention. Indeed, the moment that Mildred slaps Veda inaugurates a tonal shift in the film: now fully immersed within Mildred’s retrospective account, the viewer is plunged into a social drama that is guided by the persistent mystery of the framing device but nevertheless interrogates the nuances of the Pierce family dynamic. The subtle undoing of logical temporal sequence signifies this thematic seizure. After slapping Veda for her insubordination, Mildred is immediately contrite; she states, “I’m sorry I did that. I’d have rather cut off my hand” (39:51). This phrasing functions doubly. Mildred at once expresses her shame for having violated her role as a proper mother—in very stark terms—and somewhat illogically denounces the act in retroactive terms. This strange use of the conditional perfect tense microrealizes a recurring theme: every act, word, or decision on Mildred’s behalf always comes too late. Soon after the fateful slap, she fibs to Veda about wanting to open her own restaurant before her voiceover reveals, “I didn’t know what to do next. But then suddenly, it hit me: Why not open a restaurant?” (40:19). As we see, at several critical moments of personal juncture, Mildred appears to be subservient to the disruptive contours of time that necessarily govern her existence. In the context of social drama, this makes narrative sense given Mildred’s gender and role as 20th century mother. Yet this forced dynamism also emblematizes the movement that Mildred must keep undergoing to keep up with the swirl of generic influences that omnisciently influence her behavior.

I hereby maintain that Mildred Pierce is a film that unabashedly leaks its filmic intertextuality into its diegetic universe. There are moments where Mildred indeed reads through her own performativity as “mother”: when told by Bert that Kay is “twice the girl” Veda will ever be, due to her dogged loyalty to her mother, Mildred responds, “Maybe that’s why I keep trying to please Veda” (46:45 – 46:53). Mildred’s understanding of her motherhood is nearly self-reflexive in her need to be externally validated through Veda’s approval (and the wealth and objects the daughter wishes to acquire). But Mildred, of course, is more than just a mother. Mildred must occupy a multiplicity of roles, for a woman of her social position who grows ever more ambitious. Yet the tragedy of her multiplicity is that she must always exhibit the mores of each (filmic?) archetype, which are often in conflict with one another.

These notions of performance and embodiment have important resonances with the conventions of the horror genre. The film’s melodramatic elements and class critiques inaugurate questions of domestic and social mobility for Mildred. Its foray into subdued psychological horror, however, both hyperextends and localizes these questions in graphic ways. The film borrows from the horror tradition in its treatment of the consequences of excessivity, and how these map onto femaleness and motherhood. The horror of losing both of your children, albeit in different ways, is terrifying enough to depict onscreen. The horror on Mildred’s face as Kay dies before here, shrouded in her private space of siphoned-off inoculation, reveals Mildred’s sense of complicity and culpability. This is later confirmed by an admission of her guilt: “She said ‘Mommy,’ and that was all. Oh, I loved her so much. Please God, don’t ever let anything happen to Veda” (57:10).

The world of Mildred Pierce is one of unending exchange, where both social and economic capital are transferred from body to body—often in exchange for bodies. It is in this sense that the film subtextually dabbles in a certain brand of “body horror.” Monte and Veda are both parasitic and perhaps their mutual compulsion to suck Mildred dry (so to speak) ultimately bonds them in a moment of inevitable (infantile?) sexual and narrative logic. They may as well be the “ravenous spiderlings” that swarm and consume the “mother’s body” and “eat her alive” (Schutt, 4). But the insatiable Veda, who seemingly lives for the express purpose of accruing wealth, is most saliently the monster of Mildred’s creation, as well as an extended appendage of herself. “Veda’s a part of me,” Mildred admits as if clutching to the last vestiges of motherhood after countless betrayals and losses that Veda herself has brought upon (1:26:25). Mildred is herein irrevocably caught up in a stale and dehumanizing system of exchange, all to impress and hold onto that which nourishes and destroys her: the monstrosity, Veda. She even gives up one-third of her business to Monte in exchange for marriage: “Sold. One Beragon” (1:35:45). The revelation of Monte and Veda’s affair truly consummates this theme of horrific melding: cloaked in shadow, their conjoined bodies at the bar seem to transform them into a singular, monstrous shape—the ossification of the financial and emotional threat they always posed for Mildred (1:45:44). This attaching of bodies visually contrasts with Mildred’s primary mode of relation to those around her: she deflects Wally’s advances; remains cold and sterile around her ex-lovers, Bert and Monte; and, most heartbreakingly, she cannot properly mourn Kay, whose suffering body to the end lied separate and apart in inoculation. Mildred is a tragically aloof figure, uninterested in or unable to engage with the monstrosities she breeds by virtue of her physical disengagement from them.

Of course, Mildred’s typical antiseptic treatment of those in her social universe is necessarily the inverse of her emotional overinvestment in cultivating grounds for the monstrosities around her to grow. She spoils Veda into bankruptcy and shame and constantly tries to win her insatiable favor. Furthermore, Mildred’s tryst with Monte results in the death of Kay, as if this brief descent into desire is “responsible [...] for the horror that destroys” a part of her (Williams, 574). Monte himself, a walking manifestation of excess (“I do too much of everything,” he declares) and laziness, is a veritable parasite, leeching Mildred for her finances and then selling his share of the business without her knowledge (51:28). For each kernel of love or empathy Mildred offers, she is greeted only with the demand of more nourishment.

Unmistakably, as a product of a male-dominated environment, Mildred begins to take on some of the harsher aspects of her oppressors: she begins to drink liquor, flat; her business deals and real estate acquisitions become more perfunctory, casual, stoic exchanges. Yet Veda, too, figures into this paradigm of masculinist oppression: as the “false” child, an uncanny “object external to [her] conception,” she fits into the role of the child-monstrosity, both resembling and rejecting her mother (Huet, 86). It so follows that Mildred’s increasing masculinization thus obfuscates the binary of mother-father dynamics and reproduces “strange figures” all around her (Huet, 88). On the level of psychological horror, time is once again undone: Mildred produces the monstrosities that destroy her sense of self (namely, Veda and Monte), but only by virtue that the anxieties and social pressures that led to this production were always already in place. Within the logic of horror, the only remedy would seem to be a psychological breakdown—perhaps a moment of mother-daughter melding that would signify this obscuring of origin. Interestingly, it is Ida, the bizarro-Mildred whose spinsterly ambivalence contrasts with Mildred’s emotional overextension, who inaugurates this idea of consuming one’s children: “Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young” (1:26:48). This is the point at which the film’s underlying sense of dread—reinforced by the viewer’s knowledge of the murder plot as a narrative frame—becomes a suggestion of eerie carnal catharsis.

Class critique and binary notions of sacred versus profane also figure into the psychological horror that Mildred Pierce posits. It is no mistake that Monte and Veda’s shame over their association with Mildred, who “works for a living” and smacks of “grease,” exhibits elements of both bodily shame and class snobbishness. “Grease” is herein metonymically coded as the mire of lower-class capitalist accomplishment, in deference to the spoils of name-dropping, estate-tax leisure. But it also possesses symbolic associations with toil, sweat, and viscera—the stuff of the human form, and the very substance of biological motherhood. Here, “grease” functions as the nexus of class distinction and bodily horror in dialectic, collaborative intertext. Mildred’s internalized shame over her status as a mother, goaded along by Monte and Veda’s elitist disapproval, occupies not just one generic form. Shame over motherhood, and how to inhabit that role, is made manifest in necessary intertext. But these thematic tensions that tug apart the filmic mood—mystery to drama to outright horror—do not necessarily function outside the diegesis. Perhaps the young Veda had it right all along, as if she could begin to see the shifting generic modes the film would take on: “I love you, mother. Really, I do. But let’s not be sticky about it” (33:50).

Mildred is fluid; she bends to the will of those around her in her social universe without losing total agency over her own cohesion. However, she is also a fecund, fertile foundation, and her status as eternal mother to the monsters she breeds ensures their sticking to this breeding ground until her resources are depleted. Mildred is both a solid breeding ground and the adhesive by which Veda, Monte, and even Wally can stick to it. This dual role symbolically reinforces the multifarious generic modes Mildred must occupy in both her lived reality (dutiful wife and mother, independent businesswoman) and in the filmic universe (victim of noirish melodrama, horror-film heroine). Pulled in various directions—indeed, pulled across divergent and interpenetrating genres—Mildred’s pride and shame over her status as mother prove inextricable from each other. Upon exiting the police station with Bert, the disenchantment Mildred feels—no voiceover or dialogue will provide us any more insight—must be a frightening mix of both vindication and horror, not unlike the self-destructive “sacrifice” of the black lace-weaver spider (Schutt, 3). Mildred is at it again: giving parts of herself over, with little benefit or reprieve. Mildred Pierce thus becomes a seminal piece in a larger conversation about the horrors of mother-daughter dynamics (observed previously in the twisted psychodramatics of Coraline) and how these can often lend themselves to a nuanced mix of generic traditions.

Citations

Curtiz, M. (1945). Mildred Pierce. United States: Warner Bros. Film.

Huet, M. H. (1993.) Introduction to Monstrous Imagination, in Gelder, K. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.

Schutt, B. (2017, January 30). In Many Species, a Family Dinner Means Something Else. The New York Times. Print.