B:TAS reviews: Baby-Doll

(11/26/09)

Neither Mary Dahl nor Matt Hagen can escape from their respective showbiz institutions.  In Mudslide, the latter can only attain a degree of normalcy if he conforms to the shape of an Oscar statue, and the only way he can maintain any kind of human contact is through melodramatic acting conventions.  Hagen’s is a tragic story, peppered with allusions that reinforce his identity crisis.  But Baby-Doll is purely conceptual; a woman with an aging disability that renders her typecast as a lovable little girl wishes to recreate her sitcom existence by capturing her old costars, all of whom have moved on with their lives.

Baby-Doll looks so forcedly cartoonish that even without her grating theatricality it is impossible not to mentally typecast her; it is not necessarily her disability but the design the producers have endowed her that entraps her so.  If the rest of Batman’s rogues have molded themselves into one-note existences, Baby-Doll’s fate seems more predestined.  This almost Kubrick-esque sense of conceptualization and narrative inevitability is far more suited toward a bold artistic statement than a human tragedy.  There is something cold and mechanical about how Baby-Doll plays out, and this is only reinforced by photographic parallelisms and frequency of poetic justice.

She occasionally reverts from her television persona to her more mature self, spouting off soliloquies that are pathetic and almost irreverently so given their banality and the collective “awww” from her prerecorded audience.  She lacks any real stability; clearly she possesses some adult intelligence, and yet when she reverts to her Baby-Doll act her revenge schemes become almost laughably irrational.  Indeed, how could she not have known that cousin Spunky would upstage her; aren’t actors usually required to read a script?  She cries out for attention through her performances and then attempts to evoke some falsely earned understanding through her monologues.

Whereas Mudslide’s allusions carry some thematic force—most can be viewed as both comic references and intertextual metaphors—Baby-Doll’s are no more than in-jokes.  I smile when her Gilligan’s Island themed henchman cause a standoff with the police, and Baby-Doll the sitcom draws heavily from both The Brady Bunch and Dennis the Menace, serving to make light of sitcom conventions but not much else.  The television aficionado will nod his head and move on.  The film buff will watch Mudslide and see something more artistic about the callbacks to the golden age of Hollywood.

The ending is poignant in a way.  It is the first time that Dini allows a real lamentation for her condition, no longer coming across as a cold manipulator and finally shedding his synthetic story progression for a burst of sincerity.  There still remains a disappointing exactness in the closing line, and the funhouse hall of mirrors is the most tired of psychological battlefields.  But in having Dahl reach out to Batman in an infantile cry for security, Dini knows that even the most critical of viewers will feel something for this strange, confused character.