Just as last week's episode foreshadowed, Joan's post-Oscar glow was short-lived. This week's bluntly-titled episode "Hagsploitation" finds Joan spiraling more than ever in 1964, while other characters, from Hedda Hopper to Jack Warner, are experiencing their own existential crises. Here are this week's eight standout moments.
1) Hollywood has Joan in a literal bind.
We already know that the success of Baby Jane did not translate into a wealth of great opportunities for either Bette or Joan. But it did propel a wave of what Jack Warner calls "hagsploitation" pictures, with1964's Strait-Jacket being one of the prime examples. Starring Joan as an axe-murdering mother, the movie did not get great reviews—The New York Times called it a "disgusting piece of claptrap"—but made a boatload of money thanks largely to a gimmicky promotional campaign.
That campaign sees Joan making live appearances in-character before screenings of the movie nationwide, in what Bette dubs a "cow-town carnie act" later in the episode. Having shunned the Baby Jane live tour, in which Bette appeared before audiences in character, Joan is now forced into a subpar follow-up, appearing in the auditorium with an axe and "attacking" the emcee while the audience cheers. And of course, she sneaks in a plug for Pepsi-Cola It's all fairly humiliating.
2) Joan lashes out at Mamacita.
This was probably the ugliest scene in Feud yet, which is saying something when you take into account Bette and BD's fight in Episode 2, or Pauline's directing dreams dashed in Episode 4. Mamacita goes way, way above and beyond the call of duty for Joan… speaking of which, what actually is her job title? Housekeeper? Personal assistant? Life coach? Guardian angel?
In any case, Joan is threatening to cross the line from manageable diva into outright monster. Having had no offers in nine months, she's doing the Strait-Jacket tour literally because she has no alternative, and drinking heavily to get through it. After lashing out verbally at Mamacita, she follows up by throwing a vase of flowers at her head, prompting Mamacita to vow that she will leave if Joan ever physically threatens her again—and then Joan will have no-one. This feels like some horribly sad foreshadowing.
3) The beginning of the end for Hedda.
Hedda's health is waning, and she confesses to Joan that she recently had a heart attack. She, like Jack Warner later in the episode, is confronting the fact that she's in the twilight of her years, and doing some soul-searching as a result. And, like Warner, Hedda's crisis doesn't actually prompt any self-awareness or desire to change—both end up right back in their old, morally bankrupt patterns. She begins by seemingly expressing some regret for having built an entire career on bile and vicious gossip, but ultimately feels good about her legacy, when she looks back on "the reds, the queers, and the whores" she's exposed. And Joan agrees that she's been "a bulwark" for morality. Ugh.
4) "You wear slippers to lunch!"
I'm going to use this line next time somebody has disappointed me. Harriet has a lot of reasons to be disappointed in Aldrich, but I like the specificity of this complaint.
5) Aldrich takes his revenge on Jack Warner.
This was long overdue. Warner is still trying to persuade Aldrich to direct another "hag" picture – and is annoyed that he never gets any credit for originating the "hagsploitation" label. He asserts (probably correctly) that the reason Baby Jane and its antecedents like Strait-Jacket perform so well is that people love to see their idols torn down: the formula, then, is to "take some movie queen of yore and make her suffer." The same logic, you'll note, does not apply to aging male movie stars.
Warner needs another Baby Jane to keep himself relevant for a little bit longer, and Aldrich brings it to him with What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? This is an indirect follow-up, adapted from a novel by the same author who wrote the original Baby Jane—but Aldrich is determined not to work with Bette and Joan again, while Warner will only make the picture if it's Bette and Joan again.
Aldrich relents, but there's a catch. He's finally done with being belittled by Warner, and when he goes back to him to confirm he's locked down both Bette and Joan and is going ahead with Cousin Charlotte, it's only to taunt Warner with the better offer he received from Fox. "I came here to get my balls back," is maybe a bit on-the-nose as a mic drop, but you do you, Aldrich!
6) Hal LeSueur offers a window into Joan's past.
After Joan discovers from Hedda that someone is trying to shop a video tape of her appearing in an adult movie from her past—basically the 1960s equivalent of a nude photo hack—she seems to immediately know who's responsible. The culprit, as it turns out, is her own brother Hal, because Joan's family is a real picnic. Things between the siblings don't improve much following the revelation that he's trying to milk her shameful secrets for cash. He calls her "the runt that mother didn't want," and tells her that for all her Hollywood airs and graces, "underneath you're rotten trash, like me."
It's already clear from Joan's attitude to the world ("Nobody ever supported me," etc) that there's not much love lost between her family, and we know from her dinner with Bette that there's a history of abuse, though Joan doesn't see it that way. As Joan herself becomes harder and harder to sympathize with, the appearance of Hal was a strong reminder of the environment she came from.
It's interesting that even Mamacita doesn't seem to know just how bad Joan's relationship with her family is; when Hal dies during surgery, she expects Joan to be devastated. Instead, Joan's chief concern is canceling the hush-money check she wrote him, and who can blame her?
7) The disastrous table read.
When Bette and Joan reunite for the first time on the Cousin Charlotte set, Joan tries to make nice, as it her way. But Bette understandably rejects her half-assed "I'm sorry if you were offended" apology for what happened on Oscar night, and spends the table read dryly undercutting Joan at every opportunity, despite claiming that she wants them to present a united front.
Bette has a lot of notes on the script, most of them broad plot and tone concerns, whereas Joan is nitpicking the punctuation and syntax of the script for some reason. But it's not long before the sniping turns inward: Bette uses her notes as an opportunity to diss Strait-Jacket and its tour, which Joan insists "drew a very young, hip crowd!" A photographer than appears to take shots of the table read, irritating Bette, and just like that we're back to the old dynamic of Bette mocking Joan's lack of integrity, and Joan mocking Bette's average looks.
8. Bette gives Aldrich a pep talk.
Wearing slippers to lunch notwithstanding, Harriet is finally done playing second fiddle to Aldrich's movies and their leading ladies. She wants a divorce, and he's completely blindsided by it on the eve of Cousin Charlotte starting production. Fortunately Bette's on hand to give him a pep talk, where she's basically like "This is rough, but I've done it four times, you'll survive." Susan Sarandon and Alfred Molina have nice chemistry together.
But their newfound, or rather rekindled, camaraderie leaves Joan out in the cold. When she arrives in Louisiana where the movie is filming, there's nobody at the airport to greet her, and the hotel has no record of her reservation. She's forced to ask for help from Bette, who's been there for days and is already on first name terms with the staff. Despite the clear power imbalance, Joan is, to her credit, determined to make the best of things—until she calls Aldrich's suite, and hears Bette laughing in the background.
