Mommie Dearest/YMMV
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Was Christina actually abused? Or was she just a bitter young woman trying to make money off her dead mother? Some in Hollywood think that the answer is somewhere in the middle. On one hand, Joan was widely known for having a temper that the public rarely saw due to her being self-aware of how it would hurt her career. On the other hand, Joan cutting her daughter out of her will pushed her over the edge towards writing the book and amplifying the severity of the abuse to epic levels.
- Several of Joan Crawford's friends, such as Myrna Loy, have argued that Joan's strictness toward her children was grossly overblown by Christina, who had real discipline issues throughout her childhood and adolescence and a poor relationship with her mother thereafter, and who wrote the book as a Take That out of resentment, justified or not.
- Joan also counts: Was she an abusive Complete Monster? Or was Joan just mentally disturbed/in desperate need of anti-psychotic medication?
- John Waters opines that, besides being a prime candidate for medication for her various mental disorders, Joan suffered greatly from the sudden rise from poverty to super-stardom, causing her to project all of her issues with being poor into her obsessive cleaning and going postal on Christina when she used poor people clothing hangers or got into Joan's ultra-expensive make-up.
- Was Christina actually abused? Or was she just a bitter young woman trying to make money off her dead mother? Some in Hollywood think that the answer is somewhere in the middle. On one hand, Joan was widely known for having a temper that the public rarely saw due to her being self-aware of how it would hurt her career. On the other hand, Joan cutting her daughter out of her will pushed her over the edge towards writing the book and amplifying the severity of the abuse to epic levels.
- Critical Dissonance: Deconstructed in that the studio realized that the film was getting positive reaction for all of the wrong reasons, and they changed the format of marketing to try and capitalize on it.
- Cult Classic
- Fan Yay
- Narm: Alot, but especially "NO WIRE HANGERS!"
- So Bad It's Good: The movie version.
- Took the Bad Film Seriously: Faye Dunaway genuinely believed she would win an Oscar for her portrayal of Crawford. She later said that she was horrified and ashamed of the end result, often saying that the director just didn't care to tone down her performance.
- The Woobie: Christina and Christopher.
- Jerkass Woobie: Joan.